Election 2010: Teabaggin' the Ds & Rs

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

That's only half the problem, though. I think what people didn't know is when it would end.

The only assholes who didn't were the high-on-hubris and utterly clueless fucks near the top

And the ratings agencies.



Perhaps tomorrow I will find you some data, but this is a myth. Or rather, the existence of the inflation is a myth. The perception of the inflation isn't a myth, and is itself enough to support your point.



More specific data is available.

When everybody knows it's a bubble, it's ending soon. That would have been what? Early 2006? Maybe summer 2006?

The ratings agencies were committing fraud.

I didn't say "Inflation exists." I said limited, selective forms of inflation persist. And coupled with the fact that most of that demographic was borrowing to pay for many necessities before, which is something they can't do now, even if the normal inflation in the cost of energy/cable/insurance/cell phones/gas has slowed a bit, the tiniest uptick in prices of those things still has an inflationary effect. And those things are not getting cheaper.

It is, but in very small amounts, and very little followed.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

1 I'm not a subscriber but I can read it

Sounds like you got there through the google news ladder over the pay wall. Turns out that googling Liberals Grow Up does the trick.

Also, as it turns out, my facetious summary wasn't far off, but I forgot the laughable suggestion that there is inconstistency between saying "too much government secrecy is bad" and saying uncontrolled breaches of necessary secrecy are bad.

I am most embarassed, however, that I failed to intuit that to the WSJ "grown up" foreign policy means war mongering, bellicose, pro-missile shield and anti-diplomacy. That really should have been obvious.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I didn't say "Inflation exists." I said limited, selective forms of inflation persist.

I know, and that is what I responded to.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

1 I'm not a subscriber but I can read it, and you should be a subscriber.

2 you haven't read it but feel too many people are paying attention to it? do your work underlings give you funny looks a lot?

1. This is the part I can read:

So WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is guilty of "a reckless action which jeopardizes lives." That's according to John Kerry, on this week's unauthorized release of a huge tranche of State Department cables. Confronted with a previous Wiki-avalanche, the senator took a more sanguine view: "However illegally these documents came to light," he intoned in July, "they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan."

The latest WikiLeak may ultimately amount to no more than a colossal headache for U.S. diplomats. By contrast, the previous leak exposed U.S. sources and methods on the battlefield. Yet the ...

I'm guessing the part you found compelling came later.

2. The "it" too which I think too many people are paying attention is Wikileaks. Not your WSJ piece. Reading Is Fundamental! Carry on. I do think there's some good to it (Wikileaks, not your WSJ piece), even if Assange is a funny-looking foreigner, for reasons put fairly well by Jack Shafer:

International scandals—such as the one precipitated by this week's WikiLeaks cable dump—serve us by illustrating how our governments work. Better than any civics textbook, revisionist history, political speech, bumper sticker, or five-part investigative series, an international scandal unmasks presidents and kings, military commanders and buck privates, cabinet secretaries and diplomats, corporate leaders and bankers, and arms-makers and arms-merchants as the bunglers, liars, and double-dealers they are.

The recent WikiLeaks release, for example, shows the low regard U.S. secretaries of state hold for international treaties that bar spying at the United Nations. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, systematically and serially violated those treaties to gain an incremental upper hand. And they did it in writing! That Clinton now describes Julian Assange's truth-telling an "attack" on America but excuses her cavalier approach to treaty violation tells you all you need to know about U.S. diplomacy.

As WikiLeaks proved last summer, the U.S. military lied about not keeping body counts in Iraq, even though the press asked for the information a million times. Indeed, the history of scandal in America is the history of institutions and individuals routinely surpassing our darkest assumptions of their perfidy.

Whenever scandal rears its head—Charles Rangel's financial dealings, the subprime crash, the Valerie Plame affair, Jack Abramoff and Randy Cunningham's crimes, Bernie Kerik's indiscretions, water-boarding, Ted Stevens' convictions, the presidential pardon of Marc Rich, the guilty pleas of Webster Hubbell, the Monica Lewinski thing, the Iran-contra scandal, the Iran-contra pardons, the savings-and-loan fiasco, BCCI, and so on—we're hammered by how completely base and corrupt our government really is.

We shouldn't be surprised by the recurrence of scandals, but, of course, we always are. Why is that? Is it because when scandal rips up the turf, revealing the vile creepy-crawlies thrashing and scurrying about, we're glad when authority intervenes to quickly tamp the grass back down and re-establish our pastoral innocence with bland assurances that the grubby malfeasants are mere outliers and one-offs who will be punished? Is it because our schooling has left us hopelessly naïve about how the world works? Or do we just fail to pay attention?

Information conduits like Julian Assange shock us out of that complacency. Oh, sure, he's a pompous egomaniac sporting a series of bad haircuts and grandiose tendencies. And he often acts without completely thinking through every repercussion of his actions. But if you want to dismiss him just because he's a seething jerk, there are about 2,000 journalists I'd like you to meet.

The idea of WikiLeaks is scarier than anything the organization has leaked or anything Assange has done because it restores our distrust in the institutions that control our lives. It reminds people that at any given time, a criminal dossier worth exposing is squirreled away in a database someplace in the Pentagon or at Foggy Bottom. Assange's next stop appears to be Wall Street. According to the New York Times' DealBook, WikiLeaks has targeted Bank of America Assange foreshadowed this scoop by telling Computerworld in 2009 of the five gigabytes of data he'd acquired from a B of A executive's hard drive; this month he told Forbes of an "ecosystem of corruption" he hopes to uncover. Today, he reiterated his intention to take on banks in an interview with Time.

As Assange navigates from military and diplomatic exposés to financial ones this year, his Wall Street targets won't be able to shield their incompetence and misconduct with lip music about how he has damaged national security and violated the Espionage Act of 1917 and deserves capital punishment. But I'm sure they'll invoke trade secrets, copyright, privacy, or whatever other legal window dressing they find convenient. Rather than defending their behavior, they'll imitate Clinton and assail Assange's methods and practices.

As the Economist put it yesterday, "secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy." But it "is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents."

Assange and WikiLeaks, while not perfect, have punctured the prerogative of secrecy with their recent revelations. The untold story is that while doing the United States' allies, adversaries, and enemies a favor with his leaks, he's doing the United States the biggest favor by holding it accountable. As I.F. Stone put it, "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

Sounds like you got there through the google news ladder over the pay wall. Turns out that googling Liberals Grow Up does the trick.

Also, as it turns out, my facetious summary wasn't far off, but I forgot the laughable suggestion that there is inconstistency between saying "too much government secrecy is bad" and saying uncontrolled breaches of necessary secrecy are bad.

I am most embarassed, however, that I failed to intuit that to the WSJ "grown up" foreign policy means war mongering, bellicose, pro-missile shield and anti-diplomacy. That really should have been obvious.

Is John Kerry worried that the Saudis don't agree with him that the UN is the solution to the iranistan issue?

[LessinSF]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Jack Shafer quote.

Amen, brother.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Is John Kerry worried that the Saudis don't agree with him that the UN is the solution to the iranistan issue?

I don't know, but do you think we should be taking our foreign relations cues from oppressive middle eastern autocracies who are locked in a local struggle power struggle with a Persian Shiite regime that they see as a threat to their influence?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

I don't know, but do you think we should be taking our foreign relations cues from oppressive eastern autocracies who are locked in a local struggle power struggle with a regime that they see as a threat to their influence?

of course not. that's why most of America send Kerry packing.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

of course not. that's why most of America send Kerry packing.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

how are sales of that shirt doing the last 6 months?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

how are sales of that shirt doing the last 6 months?

In purple, or in all colors?

[Hank Chinaski]

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/ad8...eatured_videos


I opened this wanting it to be funny, but it wasn't really.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Yglesias:

One remarkable aspect of the recent conservative assault on QE2 is that the conventional wisdom on the American right is now well to the right of where Milton Friedman was ten years ago. Take these remarks on Japan from 2000:

According to Mike Pence and Paul Ryan, this is left-wing lunacy. The only solution to any economic problems is tax cuts for rich people.

Tax cuts for rich people, and opposition to whatever Obama and Democrats are for.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

of course not. that's why most of America send Kerry packing.

And yet Bush, handmaiden to anyone who has oil was elected. Odd.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Adder

I don't know, but do you think we should be taking our foreign relations cues from oppressive middle eastern autocracies who are locked in a local struggle power struggle with a Persian Shiite regime that they see as a threat to their influence?

Mark Kleiman:

What could be better, from a Saudi viewpoint, than war between the U.S. and Iran? Note that the Saudis (and our other Arab quasi-friends) are willing to fight Iran to the last American. They have no interest whatever in doing anything themselves.