j_b

the thug's argument about "whining" is always a clincher. Moron.

I guess it does explain why regressives who have been pushing for upward wealth transfer for the last 30 years appear so pissed all the time?

Yeah right, it's such a good idea to not recognize and debunk the Kool-Aid peddled by the spinmeisters.

Huh? You must have forgotten cold war propaganda when variety of promotional displays was regularly portrayed as the ultimate index of 'liberty'

~24 hours after the publication of the above piece, Google News lists a grand total of 6 articles discussing "Waterfall TALF" this morning. Nothing to see here, move along ...

Anybody finds it odd that people posturing as anti-establishment types like Paul (and Billcoe) end up regurgitating the same neoliberal drivel that Reaganites and the corporate media have been spewing for 30 years?

as if the last 30 years, and several other periods also punctuated by market collapses, hadn't already amply shown that unfettered capitalism a la Ron Paul is anything but sustainable.

meanwhile among the top .1% (watch your blood pressure while reading this one) The Real Housewives of Wall Street: Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs? America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy. Most Americans know about that budget. What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology. Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous." But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches. Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley's investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income. [..]

If only Danville had promised IKEA more tax breaks, they'd pay their employees a living wage [/snark]

Anybody following the back and forth at the guardian between Monbiot and others about the health effects of nuclear radiations, in particular at Chernobyl? Check it out if you have time to read through ~a half dozen articles: nuclear

You better call your pal Bill to defend you, vacuous jackass.

how would you know where I was, retard?

I doubt Democrats didn't know they would need people power after the election to force change. Telling voters their job was done and sending them home was IMO a conscious decision to take the street out of the equation. At the same time Obama told people to make him do it, his new chief of staff told the base to stfu and let the grown up get to work as if their triangulating had any chance of winning Blue dogs over to the progressive cause. For example, tea party demos at town hall meeting during that fateful summer should have been dwarfed by progressive protests but Dems were too concerned keeping their corporate sponsors happy by holding the single payer option off the table.

I had no great illusions but I am surprised by how blatant was his shift to the right considering the lofty, very progressive rhetoric of the campaign. So blatant that I don't think he can expect much of the dem base to campaign for him in 2012, but GOPers have no real incentive to take the presidency away from him. After, the crash of 2008, it'd have been difficult for a Republican in the white house to prevent serious financial reform, to give a blank check to corporations and the wealthy, etc as easily as it happened. It's becoming a real possibility that regressives reach their goal of taking back all that was gained during the New Deal.

Unfortunately I don't believe that anything happening at that level of the political food chain is haphazard: they know what it takes to win. I am even starting to wonder whether the market crash occurring just before the 08 election was entirely per chance.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/11/965457/-Language-is-a-Virus

That is a profoundly ignorant statement in my opinion. You'd better learn about the condition of the elderly before the existence of social security. Geezers are a political pain in the ass throughout the western world because they are manipulated by the corporate media but many aren't wealthy at all.

If they did, one could not tell the difference with your typical Republicans

Yeah right, like he pre-emptively coopted the GOPer's tax cuts for the rich reform by giving them everything they wanted. Just watch him take a hack at Medicare and Social Security next to preempt the tea party extremists.

It's impossible to tell the diff between a troll and a Bush dead-ender.

it's nothing compared to voting for Bush then claiming that Obama is a socialist. That is legit retarded. Obama led a very deceptive campaign, probably among the most deceptive ever.

Another fan of Republican Healthcare: "If you get sick, die quickly" aren't you ashamed of yourself?

Changing opinion about wars of aggression because it has become too expensive for your pocket book doesn't confer anybody ethical high ground. Moreover, to assess the sincerity of such conversion, we'll have to wait for at least one presidential cycle.

That's a damn shame but it should be no surprise to anyone who reads my posts. I must say that although he didn't get us out of Iraq, he didn't get us into Iraq. Bush and his supporters (including you) got us into Iraq, if you care to remember for a minute.

"We were at the edge of the cliff. Now we've taken a giant step forward." "In the end, we have gotten from President Obama what we feared from Senator McCain: an expanded war in Afghanistan, an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, sharp cuts in spending for communities and programs for the poor, a continuation of Guantanamo and military tribunals, unchecked bankers' pay and bonuses, and enough loopholes to reduce corporate taxes to less than 2 percent of GDP this year, despite a boom in corporate profits." Jeffrey Sachs Economist and Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University