What costume shall the poor girl wear?

Humorless libruls just don’t get foreclosure mill humor:

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posted a YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.

A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both. My source told me that not every Baum department used the party to make fun of the troubled homeowners they made their living suing. But some clearly did. The adjective she’d used when she sent them to me — “appalling” — struck me as exactly right.

Check out the pictures at the link above. And be glad that Nocera doesn’t say it’s all the libruls’ fault for not confirming Robert Bork.

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Sometimes you have to admit defeat

I tried to write a proper analysis of Peggy Noonan’s latest emission. I labored through her evocation of a red and white and purple-prosed America that I suspect only ever existed in Peggy’s wildest gin-dreams:

...The things that divide us are not new, yet there’s a sense now that the glue that held us together for more than two centuries has thinned and cracked with age. That it was allowed to thin and crack, that the modern era wore it out.

What was the glue? A love of country based on a shared knowledge of how and why it began; a broad feeling among our citizens that there was something providential in our beginnings; a gratitude that left us with a sense that we should comport ourselves in a way unlike the other nations of the world, that more was expected of us, and not unjustly—”To whom much is given much is expected”; a general understanding that we were something new in history, a nation founded on ideals and aspirations—liberty, equality—and not mere grunting tribal wants. We were from Europe but would not be European: No formal class structure here, no limits, from the time you touched ground all roads would lead forward. You would be treated not as your father was but as you deserved.

I chuckled at the bit where she called Obama a negative, self-obsessed, divisive hater of the rich:

Where is the president in all this? He doesn’t seem to be as worried about his country’s continuance as his own. He’s out campaigning and talking of our problems, but he seems oddly oblivious to or detached from America’s deeper fears. And so he feels free to exploit divisions. It’s all the rich versus the rest, and there are a lot more of the latter.

then was entirely discombobulated when Peggy became seemed briefly coherent*:

Specifically it is the story of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage insurers, and how their politically connected CEOs, especially Fannie’s Franklin Raines and James Johnson, took actions that tanked the American economy and walked away rich. It began in the early 1990s, in the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration, with the help of an entrenched Congress that wanted only two things: to receive campaign contributions and to be re-elected.

The story is a scandal, and the book should be the bible of Occupy Wall Street. But they seem as incapable of seeing government as part of the problem as Republicans seem of seeing business as part of the problem.

but then realized it was all an excuse to insert her tongue slowly into Paul Ryan, and then wiggle it around a bit, tickling the little hairs with the tip the way he likes:

Which gets us to Rep. Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don’t think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them. Conservatives naturally like him—they agree with him—but liberals and journalists inclined to disagree with him take him seriously and treat him with respect.

My brain didn’t really start to hurt until the end, where I discovered that Paul Ryan thinks the rich and politicians are evil too:

“Why have we extended an endless supply of taxpayer credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instead of demanding that their government guarantee be wound down and their taxpayer subsidies ended?” Why are tax dollars being wasted on bankrupt, politically connected solar energy firms like Solyndra? “Why is Washington wasting your money on entrenched agribusiness?”

Rather than raise taxes on individuals, we should “lower the amount of government spending the wealthy now receive.” The “true sources of inequity in this country,” he continued, are “corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless.” The real class warfare that threatens us is “a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society.”

although apparently it’s not negative, divisive or rich-hatey when he says it.

I tried to read the whole thing again, and pick it apart in detail for your delectation. And frankly, I just gave up. I’m neither sober enough, nor drunk enough, to care.

So, in lieu of that, I bring you my new favorite biscuits (cookies, for those of you not of Blighty born):

Who doesn’t like a nice fruity cock or two with their morning tea?

Feel free to treat this as your open thread, although if someone could take the time to make fun of both Peggy and Ryan for me, I’d be ever so grateful.

Now where did I leave those biscuits?

* ETA: Yes, I admit that Peggy is only coherent here for a particular value of coherent, namely “not very”. As commenter geg6 noted “To blame everything on Freddie and Fannie, as she does in the paragraph you highlight, is not coherent. It is the babbling of every Teabagging, conspiracy nut, Grover Norquist knob gobbling asshole on the right.” At least Peggy got all the words in the right order. That must count for something. ▲

In Soviet Illinois, company tax you

In Illinois, several companies are now being allowed to pocket their employees’ state income tax, as an enticement to convince the companies to stay in Illinois. Amazing (via).

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Celebrity hot tub

Our Galtian overlords: pretty fucking far from inventing a perpetual motion machine.

Reed Hastings was soaking in a hot tub with a friend last month when he shared a secret: his company, Netflix, was about to announce a plan to divide its movie rental service into two — one offering streaming movies over the Internet, the other offering old-fashioned DVDs in the mail.

“That is awful,” the friend, who was also a Netflix subscriber, told him under a starry sky in the Bay Area, according to Mr. Hastings. “I don’t want to deal with two accounts.”

Mr. Hastings ignored the warning, believing that chief executives should generally discount what their friends say.

He has since regretted it. Subscribers revolted and many dropped the service. The plan further tarnished a once widely respected Internet service that had already been wounded by an unpopular price increase in the summer. Mr. Hastings was forced to reverse the planned split — but not the price increase — three weeks later and apologized.

On Monday, the company revealed the damage that had been done. It told investors that it ended the third quarter of the year with 800,000 fewer subscribers in the United States than in the previous quarter, its first decline in years. The stock plummeted more than 25 percent in after-hours trading.

Give that man a tax break. And, please, Obama, start listening to the job creators.

If I were on that board of directors, I would fire that stupid fuck so fast it would make your head spin.

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Really should be back in school

I can’t get away from the Steve Jobs articles that dominate the front pages of all the news sites I go to, so I read one. This made me laugh:

In the case of Obama, Jobs refused to meet with the president unless Obama called him personally to ask for the meeting. When the pair finally met, Jobs comes across like a version of Montgomery Burns on The Simpsons, suggesting, among other things, that the U.S. should be more like China when it came to regulating (or not regulating) companies as they built factories, that the president should get rid of teachers’ unions, and that schools should stay in session until 6 p.m. and operate 11 months out of the year.

What a country this would be if the Galtians had complete control instead of only 80% control.

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Do Randroids dream of robotic sheep?

No, they dream of recessions:

Here’s a pretty remarkable interview with independent stock and forex trader Alessio Rastani on the BBC this morning, in which he’s either being perfectly candid about how traders are viewing the Eurozone crisis, or he’s just trolling. Anyway, he’s a sociopath.

He says that the euro’s collapse is inevitable and that the “savings of millions of people are going to vanish,” within the next year, and there’s not much that governments can do about it — not that he cares one way or the other:

“For most traders we don’t really care about having a fixed economy, having a fixed situation, our job is to make money from it,” he said. “Personally, I’ve been dreaming of this moment for three years. I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession.”

It’s all in the game, I know. But future generations will question the wisdom of worshipping these guys as job-creating geniuses. If there are future generations.

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Why are tech people so often glibertarians?

I’m watching “Ace In The Hole” on AMC, awesome, best line so far “When the history of this sun-baked Siberia is written, these shameful words will live in infamy—‘No chopped chicken livers!’”

So I’m too distracted for a real post, but there’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately: why are tech people usually glibertarians? Some of my best friends are tech people but they bust out the most ridiculous Reason-type nonsense all the time. Why?

When I say tech person, I mean the kind of person who asks you why you didn’t just type “grep -7582 -pql” instead of writing that ten line Python script. You know what I mean.

Update. Bonus: footage of Obama someone calling some idiot (Peter Schiff is his name) a “laughable libertarian”. EDIT: Somebody from Demos told me “our president called him a laughable libertarian” and sent me the clip, I couldn’t get it to play on my slow internet connection and jumped the gun, thinking it was Obama, not the president of Demos. Damn!

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Love it or leave it

This made me laugh:

In a sign of his frustration at the investigations into his alleged crimes and misdemeanours, Silvio Berlusconi vowed in July to leave Italy, which he described as a “shitty country” that “sickened” him.

Not so dissimilar from all the great American patriots who vowed to move to Costa Rica if their marginal rate went up a few points.

(via)

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Open thread

This one goes out to ABL, John, and all the front-pagers who have gone Galt.

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Sittin’ in a bar, nibblin’ tipplin’ a jar in Jackson

I see from Kthug that the Jackson Hole economics symposium is coming up soon. Aspen, Davos, Jackson Hole…how are they different and how are they the same? Are there other things like this? I can’t keep it all straight.

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It sure beats Riker’s

This has been in the works for a while, but the Manhattan District Attorney is about to drop charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. If the witness isn’t credible, the witness isn’t credible, that’s how the justice system is supposed to work. But get ready for another round of “how could this lying nobody ruin such a great man’s reputation”.

What I find most strange about the Village reaction is that Strauss-Kahn did have sexual relations with that woman (prosecutors have physical evidence) yet he’s a VSP in good standing whereas when Bill Clinton had a clearly consensual relationship with a woman who never accused him of assault, that was proof that Clinton was white trash scum who deserved to be removed from office and possibly put in jail.

Update. From Sally Quinn, I shit you not (it’s real):

And we were standing there getting some shrimp or something together, and all of a sudden both of us went, `Ah!’ And we turned around and looked, and there was Strom standing between us with one hand on my mother’s behind and one hand on mine and just smiling and beaming and just feeling so pleased with himself. And, of course, my mother, who’s very Southern, just the way Strom is and from Savannah, Georgia—we’re both from Savannah—Mother said, `Oh, Strom, you old devil,’ you know. And we just thought it was the cutest thing, and we told everybody about it, that wicked old Strom Thurmond.

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Hello? Hello? Is this blog on?

I’ve had a nap, a bath, eight martinis, four lines of blow, two joints and my arse fondled by Marcus Bachmann, and my post from five hours ago is STILL at the top of the page.

Does no one else care that there is important political analysis to be written?

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Warren Buffet Is Shrill

In a few concise paragraphs, he demolishes the Galtian nonsense:

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

The whole thing is worth a read, because it discusses all the simple facts that are consistently skipped when raising taxes is discussed, including payroll tax. And his plan can be expressed in two simple sentences:

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

Every Democrat running for federal office should pull out their sharpie and write that on their hand.

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God, guns, and Galt

I’ve been watching Rick Perry on YouTube this afternoon, and I’m getting a real Dead Zone vibe, like he could be the guy who finally puts an end to everything once and for all.

On a more rational level, he indeed seems like a bad caricature of George W. Bush (as others have suggested), and that ought to translate into general election poison. I know he’s supposed to have a lot of baggage, and that could doom him, as could establishment Republican opposition to his candidacy, but other than that, he seems like he should whip Romney. He can talk Jeebus and he can talk teahad, and he’s a lot smoother than Bachmann.

With gay-bashing on its way out, he’s got the new bit three of Republican politics: God, guns, and Galt.

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The luckiest people of all

You are all anti-Mormon bigots for even reading this:

“Corporations are people, my friend,” Romney said, when a heckler called for raising their taxes. “Of course they are. Everything corporations earn eventually go to people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings.”

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