This should be fun, but pretty much everything the Jane Hamshers of the Left says here is spot-on.
Jane Says
This post is in: Election 2012, Excellent Links, Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You
This post is in: Election 2012, Excellent Links, Show Me On the Doll Where Rahm Touched You
This should be fun, but pretty much everything the Jane Hamshers of the Left says here is spot-on.
Comments are closed.
handy
she’s going with Sergio
NonyNony
I love it when you troll your own blog Cole.
This thread should be fun.
Yevgraf
People are basing their speculative punditry on tweets from Erin Fucking BURNETT??!? For God’s sakes, that woman was put on this earth to do one thing – put a fresh, cheerleader face to mindless, conventional wisdom punditry designed to support the MsOTU class.
DBrown
I think this only rates thirty-fourth on the “To worry about” list – even the debt ceiling is only at three on that list. Of course, with the waiting game, it has been climbing and will reach #1 come Aug. 1st.
askew
You couldn’t pay me to click on a FDL link. So, has Jane figured out a way to bilk money out of naive progressives/increase her media bookings over the debt ceiling fight yet? Because $$ and fame is all that woman cares about.
kd bart
Cole , stop treating her like a ragdoll.
taylormattd
You’re just trying to get her to exclude you from the “stupidest motherfuckers on the planet” club.
aisce
grifters gotta grift…wait, what?
sorry, i was running on balloon juice autopilot there for a moment.
i for one welcome our ratings agency overlords.
jl
Mark Thoma has a good post on the credit agencies today, with a link to an analysis of the impact of Wall St. funding on their work (which I have not had time to read yet).
See Krugman ‘s NYT blog for repeated hammering on point that for the national bond market of huge economy (edit: a search of the blog for ‘Japan’ would probably bring up most of them), in a zero lower bound macroeconomic scenario, a downgrade will probably mean very little to our ability to borrow at relatively low interest rates. Krugman’s example is Japan, which went through a downgrade in the early 2000s.
A downgrade would be painful for state and local finance, but because of legal and bond insurance issues.
People and companies and countries trading in the bond markets all over the world do macroeconomic analysis of market conditions every day as part of their jobs. Why would they pay attention to a credit agency with a poor track record and no particularly outstanding skills at macroeconomic analysis (which is key for countries that have their own currencies).
Edit: Mark Thoma’s blog is ‘Economist’s View’ for ‘out of it’ people who do not read economics blogs every single day.
JPL
I would rather see pictures of Tunch’s litter box than read what Jane has to say.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
askew
Unlike here where we get bombed with right-wing ads.
jl
@10 We could have both. But Cole can’t even fix the Reply button, so don’t get your hopes up.
@11 I’m getting hockey equipment ads all over. Better than hair growth tonics and pay day loans I used to get. I guess I my blog ad profile is getting more respectable.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Just who do the credit rating agencies think they are- Jane Hamsher?
PeakVT
Fitch did basically the same thing in the week leading up to the vote in Italy on an austerity package (which passed).
The ratings agencies have become the oligarchy’s enforcers.
Yevgraf
OT, but this was just plain creepy, and indicative of a movement which has gone unhinged.
ruemara
Is it ok not to care? Because I don’t. I can agree with the woman’s principles, but as a former FDL supporter, I can still think she’s nothing but a media whoring grifter. So she’s right, whatever.
Jax6655
Devastating to Obama?
Perspective . . . how does that work?
eemom
Jiminy Christmas Cole, you must REALLY be bored to pull a cheap stunt like this.
The semi-non-batshit Blue Texan wrote that, not his
dominatrixboss.comrade scott's agenda of rage
No click throughs from moi.
I for one would think Calamity Jane would applaud anything that will take the President down a notch so Michelle Bachmann can be elected the first woman prezdint.
Wouldn’t that be peachy.
Rest assured, this is all about having a talking point for press releases to ensure another appearance on the teevee.
FlipYrWhig
I agree that the ratings agencies are malevolent, corrupt, and should not have the power to influence policymaking as directly as the buzz suggests they do. I hate that banking, “the markets,” and “the economy” have become synonymous. Big Bank appears to be irked that Big Crazy is horning in on its hostage-taking action.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Yevgraf
Peak wingnut?
jl
In other news, I heard reports on the radio news today that show the fearful symmetry is breaking a little bit. But it is gotcha garbage, not really informative. Sort of like
“The honey badgers say they give a shit. But records show prominent honey badgers killed half their food last year by chewing the heads off of live mice. Only one honey badger returned our calls and said most of the mice went to its kids”
Anyway substitute ‘House GOPper’ for ‘honey badger’, and ‘received big government funded project for their district’ for ‘chewing head off of live mouse’, and ‘good for the district’ for ‘kids’, and you got the picture.
No analogy between honey badgers and House GOPper implied (I don’t want insulted honey badgers on my ass, because they just don’t care! Honey badger is mad, it don’t give a shit).
FlipYrWhig
Paging Tod Browning…
Davis X. Machina
@Jax6655: Consider the source(s).
Confirmation bias, how does that work?
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
eemom
What gets me is that I’ve been dropping a few bombs on them lately and I get “Hi Raven, how ya been” and stuff. There was one unhinged attack on Obama and I wrote that the posters was a loudmouth idiot and marionfromsavvanah said “Thank you”!
JGabriel
Jane may be right. I don’t know.
I tend to think Krugman is likely right when he says the ratings agencies don’t really matter.
That said, it’s really not a theory I want to see tested. Actual default, of course, is a huge problem — and if it happens, it’ll be hard to separate the effects of downgrade from default anyway.
However, Jane is right that S&P’s selective disclosures, and manipulation of downgrade threats to its own advantage, are a dangerous game for the economy, the political process, and, quite possibly, S&P itself.
.
Donut
It’s no accident that Reid offered up the plan that Wall St. likes, is it? I doubt it.
Anyway, I kinda just glanced at the FDL skrrrreeeeee! thingy there. Last I checked S&P is not actually an issuer nor trader of debt, so I’m not sure how illegal or underhanded his sharing a preference with anyone actually is. I’m not at all saying I think the allegation is no big deal, per se. But dunno if he is actually colluding with others in this action to do an illegal act.
danimal
I’ve read Redstate and FDL in the same day.
Call me Colebot.
Jane’s right, btw.
Martin
Ahem.
jwb
danimal: “I’ve read Redstate and FDL in the same day.” BJ’s high Broderism at work.
shortstop
Cole is simply trying to calm our nerves with the distraction of an endless, repetitive, pointless but comfortingly familiar thread fight. Y’all can phone this one in, you’ve done it so many times.
cleek
jh;dr
Bruce S
Also, Robert Reich on S&P –
http://robertreich.org/post/8099560686
I love the folks here who are so constricted and self-righteous they refuse to click-on or read what is actually a quite insightful and “right-on” Hamsher column.
Then I’m supposed to take them seriously when they pontificate on the absolute evil and “nothing but grifting” of….uh…someone whose commentary they refuse to read. Not a Hamsher fan nor a follower of FireDogLake, but I know who looks like the idiot in that binary slice of the strident, know-it-all blogosphere. Hell, I’d read a Pat Buchanan column if someone I knew and respected told me it was interesting or useful (and during the Iraq war, quite a few of his columns actually were.)
Han's Big Snark Solo
I wonder if she has a quota of non-insane things she has to produce and she is trying to fill it.
She’s still an asshole.
Martin
@Donut:
From the link:
And I believe that is correct. One of the things that they were trying to address was that S&P, etc. were saying different things to different groups with respect to ratings. By requiring that everything be public, there’d be a possibility for investors to detect such activity.
different church-lady
Blind squirrel, nut, all that all that.
Okay, I got nothin’…
Violet
What does the market know that we don’t? It’s been consistently down for the last three days, but only in double digits. Now all of a sudden it’s down 160.
Jennifer
@ 15 Yevgraf
Sounds like we’ll be in Lord of the Flies territory by Saturday at the latest.
El Tiburon
But but but Grover Grover Grover and racist racist racist and Greenwald Greenwald!!!!1!
Also too harpy harpy harpy and Grover Grover Grover.
Finally, Grover.
And Greenwald.
And scene.
MattR
@Martin: You need to check the wall behind you. Something just flew over your head. :)
(EDIT: In case you need a hint)
NonyNony
@Donut
No, since Reid is a conservative Democrat and the Senate is chock-full of conservative Democrats, and Reid has to have a plan that gets to a 60 vote threshold meaning that he has to drag a number of Republicans along with him, I’m sure that it’s not an accident that he’s turned in a plan that Wall Street likes.
The end game for the conservative wing of the Democratic Party is finally bearing fruit. They’ve been working for decades to prove to big business that they’re the better party for business than the GOP. The Democrats are positioned to be the party of Big Business for the 21st century.
Another step in the post-CRA realignment of the country. It’s interesting watching the Democratic Party morph into the pre-Depression era Republican Party. It would be more interesting if the Republican Party didn’t seem like it was morphing into something as ugly as it has been.
ETA: That last paragraph is harsher on current Democrats than I mean it to be. “Morphing into a pre-Depression era Republican Party with a better voting record on Civil Rights” would be more accurate.
Yevgraf
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Far, far right nutcases attacking far right nutcases who parry and riposte. It feels like the moment may have finally arrived.
El Cid
I dunno. Maybe it would be better to have Standard & Poors run the nation. Or at least be the precedent to have capital rule directly.
Wouldn’t it be a lot more honest to have big finance and their big business partners running the country openly, and stop all this obfuscation of purchasing candidates and parties so indirectly?
And, don’t all my humble reg’lar fellow Amurkans say stuff like the government should be run more like a business?
Well, how else to make the government run more like a business than to have an actual corporation actually run it?
That their orders would be implemented by an elected body is simply a technical detail.
(Astoundingly, I am physically capable of discussing the points of the linked piece without imagining I’m now contributing to the Maoist-Naxalite-anti-Obama insurgency.)
Ash Can
To be honest, having been out of the financial business myself for years and no longer keeping up with its inside baseball, I have no idea who, if anyone, in the business is still listening to the ratings agencies, or which ones, or how closely. I’d love to hear some feedback from folks here in the know.
catclub
Yevgraf @ 15
Didn’t someone else post about the TP and rest of GOP ending by going after each other with machetes?
OzoneR
I agree with the wench
Though I need to say this
I’m sure that’s because Jane’s ad company wants to do that.
Jax6655
Davis X. Machina @27
Yep.
And she had to throw that bit in there, even though it had nothing at all to do with the point of the article — S&P’s behavior which really was about the Republicans and Boehner’s bill.
OK. Plus my first and probably last FDL pageview.
Jax6655
Davis X. Machina @27
Yep.
And she had to throw that bit in there, even though it had nothing at all to do with the point of the article — S&P’s behavior which really was about the Republicans and Boehner’s bill.
OK. Plus my first and probably last FDL pageview.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Yevgraf #13:
Ah, so the Red Guard imposed Self-Criticism sessions have now begun. I suggest that the protectors of our nation’s valuable cultural properties might want to start digging holes in the back lawn so they can bury stuff in a hurry should the need arise.
eemom
Can’t you people READ? I told you, Mistress Jane didn’t write that. Sheesh.
@ Raven
the old-timers over there still luvs ya, dude. Even Eunuch-In-Chief RBG can’t bring himself to ban you.
jl
@49
“our nation’s valuable cultural properties might want to start digging holes in the back lawn so they can bury stuff”
Please remember to wrap your plasma screens before they go into the ground.
Martin
@MattR:
Shit, how could I have missed that. Totally my generation too.
I fail.
El Tiburon
ZING!
POW!
SMACK!
Oh, yeah, that ad company. The one that works to get teatards elected while stabbing dems in the back. THAT ad company. Yes, I do remember it well. Yeah, that smear kind of fizzled like a Sarah Palin documentary. But nice try.
pragmatism
jane says she’s never been in love. she don’t know what it is. she only knows when grover fucking norquist wants her.
my hamster derangement syndrome has manifested itself by me channeling stewie griffin. i have been yelling “Vile woman!” for the past 5 minutes.
eemom
@ Flip
Like. Stealing.
slag
@cleek:
OK. Now that was funny!
JGabriel
@Violet:
Nothing. They’ve been in denial about the possibility of default, and it’s starting to catch up to them.
Also, even 160 points isn’t that big a drop when the market is over 12,000. If investors sell off, they don’t have any good alternative instruments to re-invest in: it’s not like T-Bills are currently any safer than stocks.
.
shortstop
Standard and Poor’s Should Not Be Able to Play Kingmaker in the 2012 Election
By: Jane Hamsher Wednesday July 27, 2011 9:28 am (insert photo of Jane Hamsher)
j low
El Cid @ 43- The savings would come in not having to pay
Congressthe middle man.eemom
@58
Oh. Well, the FIRST time I clicked the link, it went to a feed of the Blue Texan piece. So I am neither teh stoopid nor teh crazy.
But I know how you creamed your pants posting that, so enjoy.
Just Some Fuckhead
@shortstop:
Ha.
Good one.
Yevgraf
There’s always the ol’ standby – they can go into the big paper oil glut and drive the price up further, since there’s no incentive to buy into companies tht own land and buildings, employ people or make things.
Just Some Fuckhead
@eemom:
Nope, just loudly wrong twice in a row.
ETA: Followed by belligerence.
Larryb
@37 violet
Nate Silver had a pretty good entry the other day on this: Basically, the panic level goes up logarithmically as we approach the deadline. According to his analysis we didn’t hit the inflection point until today.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
eemom
I miss the Flamethrower!
Yevgraf
This little event conveys all the serene calm, earnest seriousness and polite discourse of a Jamaican political campaign.
And if that’s how they act toward each other, what are their plans for us soc!ialistical libruls?
shortstop
Perhaps John changed the link to the Blue Texan piece between the time Yevgraf commented on the specific content of the Hamsher piece at #3 and when you weighed in at #18, then changed it back again just to fuck with your head.
Quadruple down?
shortstop
Martin:
You have to learn to forgive yourself. You have to.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
eemom
Write it off as browser fail and ignore the bait.
eemom
@ 63
hi there, fuckie. Tell me, do you spend your ENTIRE life waiting to chime in when someone else insults me?
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
she get mad
and she start to cry
she takes a swing but
she can’t hit
she knows,
they all want her to go
but that’s ok man
she don’t like them anyway
eemom
@ Raven
meh, Norskie was mean to me when I had the meltdown over there.
Did Hamsher even drive HIM away?
OK Kiddo is the one I miss. A real gentleman, he.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
or
jane’s getting serious
Just Some Fuckhead
@eemom:
You think being corrected is insulting? You may want to schedule a meeting with a therapist.
taylormattd
More importantly, the fucking Mariners look to be breaking their seventeen (17) game losing streak. God.
phil
Yeah it would be terrible…
Obama would have no reason not to open investigations on how the rating industry does business, with arrests coming just in time for the 2012 elections.
eemom
@ 74
I guess that would be a yes.
Just Some Fuckhead
@phil:
That’s a knee slapper.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
[ANN]
Fear of Firedoglake / Jane Hamsher / Progressive Policy / Glenn Greenwald / Digby Downer / Facts and Logic Aromatherapy Workshop
Balloonbagger Vouchers Accepted!
Stay tuned for details.
.
.
jsfox
Jane would have a point, still trying to remember when Jane ever had a point, If S&Ps opinion about Reid v Boehner’s plan wasn’t reported in a lot of places so no big secret here. And next maybe she shouldn’t depend on Politico or reporting on the subject at all. Since S&P is denying rather strongly they are endorsing one plan over the other. Now would I take their denial with a grain of salt? Absolutely.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110726-717276.html
I guess the larger point why is anyone listening or taking seriously anything Jane rants about.
burnspbesq
@BruceS:
Remind me again why I should take Hamsher’s opinions on arcane securities law issues at face value?
September
She’s still a fucking grifter and raging drunk. #Fixed
4jkb4ia
That’s a topic that’s right in Jane’s
wheelhousesweet spot, although she is somewhat late to this particular party. Konczal on how rating agencies don’t know how to do public debt was a good statement of the case.@Martin: I didn’t get it either.
Donut
@ Martin
Thanks for the correction.
MomSense
What was up with the Geithner bit? I hope he met with S&P to urge them not to downgrade and I hope he meets with as many agencies, creditors, etc as he can and continues to.
Pat
@jsfox
Jane and Glenn are popular with the media and liberals precisely because they’re among the painfully few high-profile pundits on the left who will openly criticize Obama’s rightward stance. Attribute it to their greed and opportunism if that helps you rationalize away all of the President’s broken promises and failure to lead, but the larger point you should seriously consider is why a growing number of 2008 Obama voters are starting to agree with them and not you.
Bruce S
As far as substance is concerned, the column was as good as most of the better blog post here tend to be – certainly better targeted and more substantive than the “Lawrence O’Donnell said..” series here. And the point was far from “arcane” (others here have pointed out that S&P is covered by disclosure laws in the financial reform bill.)
But hey, it was Cole’s link. I’m not your daddy. And FWIW I’ve never linked to FireDogLake in my life – they’re not on my personal radar and not terribly important to my pressing concerns. So you’re welcome to deal with your Hamsher issues on your own dime – or berate Cole if you think that this link was a waste of your precious time, even as you’re posting comments in this thread. I don’t get it.
Bruce S
Lest we forget…
(L)ast fall, via the New York Times reporting of the Crisis Inquiry hearings, we learned this:
D. Keith Johnson, a former president of Clayton Holdings, a company that analyzed mortgage pools for the Wall Street firms that sold them, told the commission on Thursday that almost half the mortgages Clayton sampled from the beginning of 2006 through June 2007 failed to meet crucial quality benchmarks that banks had promised to investors.
Yet, Clayton found, Wall Street was placing many of the troubled loans into bundles known as mortgage securities.
Mr. Johnson said he took this data to officials at Standard & Poor’s, Fitch Ratings and to the executive team at Moody’s Investors Service.
“We went to the ratings agencies and said, ‘Wouldn’t this information be great for you to have as you assign tranche levels of risk?’ ” Mr. Johnson testified last week. But none of the agencies took him up on his offer, he said, indicating that it was against their business interests to be too critical of Wall Street.
rea
I don’t approve of S&P mixing business and politics. The legal argument in the linked post, however, seems to depend on S&P being an “issuer” of securities. I don’t think a rating agency qualifies as an “issuer” of the securities it rates, as a matter of common sense.
jaleh
Robert Reich:
“Put another way: If Standard & Poor’s had been doing the job it was supposed to be doing between 2000 and 2008, the federal budget wouldn’t be in a crisis — and Standard & Poor’s wouldn’t be threatening the United States with a downgrade if we didn’t come up with a credible plan for lopping $4 trillion off it.
So why has Standard & Poor’s decided now’s the time to crack down on the federal budget — when it gave free passes to Wall Street’s risky securities and George W. Bush’s giant tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby contributing to the very crisis its now demanding be addressed?
Could it have anything to do with the fact that the Street pays Standard & Poor’s bills?”
jake the snake
@FlipYrWhig
I saw what you did there.
sukabi
The ratings agencies have become the oligarchy’s enforcers.
yep, all you have to do is take a look at how they ‘rated’ the CDS / CDOs and the resultant market bubble and spectacular crash , and take a look at who exactly benefited from their market manipulations… and the situation hasn’t changed in the least in the last 2+ years…
sukabi
there’s another solution that’s not been considered…. since the Fed likes to print trillions of $$ and secretly hands bundles of cash out to foreign banks, why not have the Fed ‘find’ enough cash to magically pay down the debt…
cynickal
I was hoping for more than just 2 minutes of hate.
The BJers must be running low on haterade.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
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@79 Uncle Clarence Thomas
Free smelling salts.
.
.
Tom65
Blind squirrel, acorn, etc. Fuck Jane, I ain’t clicking that link.
FuzzyWuzzy
Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, one of us, one of us.
Anne Laurie
Seems quite sensible to me…
Just Some Fuckhead
@Anne Laurie:
Yeah, but she was mean to Obama so grumble grumble
Danny
All my rage @ this trolling just as surely as if John had donated 10K$ bucks to the Koch bros just to see how we’d all react. Fuck you John. Don’t give the bitch a platform, whatever she’s on about. Don’t give her clicks.
Made me reply, 1/10.
Danny
AL @ 98:
Stealth PUMA, going strong.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Danny:
Just replying so I can find this comment again.
Danny
@102
Glad you liked it, Fuckhead. Wan’t to see me do it once more, for your amusement?