Sadly, No!

Dear conservatives, neoconservatives, Sensible Liberals, and other assorted self-interested bastards who are currently running this country into the ground to satisfy your bottomless avarice:

Aren’t you tired of liberals like Brad standing in your way, pissing and moaning every time you try to find a new way to gouge every last farthing out of the last pocket of the last starving orphan in this country? Wouldn’t your life be easier if all these people with their so-called “consciences”, whatever they are, would just stop raining on your parade? Just think – without guys like Brad around, assholes like you could build a monorail in every town in America, and no one would stop you! Why, you could reduce every single American over the age of ten to a permanent state of debt peonage, and turn the whole country into your own personal plantation! You wouldn’t have to bother with any of this annoying “voting” nonsense anymore; nothing would stand in your way of total financial domination of the country.

Here’s a really easy solution I’ve found for you guys to make your financial destruction of the charming little people in this country who think they have “rights” just a bit quicker for y’all. No need to thank me – and I won’t even claim the idea as intellectual property. Use it as you see fit.

Just buy us out! It’s as simple as that. When you think about the money you’re about to make on the bailout package that Comrade Paulson has arranged for you guys, I’m sure you’ll see that even after you’ve paid off each and every one of us, you’ll still be coming out way ahead.

Here’s the deal: Offer each of us four to five times our annual salary in a lump-sum, nontaxable payment. In exchange, we agree to move to Canada and never again set foot in your own private little preserve that the rest of the world used to call “America”. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know I’d take the offer in a heartbeat.

Once all of us have left the country, there will be nothing left to stop you, and you can roll over the “free market” in this country like the corpulent beached whales you are.

Who’s with me?

Above: Comrade Paulson imagines the joys awaiting him in an America with no Brads.

I just called my Congressman and urged him to give Big Hank Paulson the finger on his insane $700 billion to buy worthless assets. I strongly urge you to do the same. Some of the general points I made include:

• The administration is essentially arguing that the treasury secretary should have unchecked power to buy up garbage assets without any congressional oversight. This is completely unacceptable.

• The panicked way this administration is pushing Congress to enact this godawful rescue plan is akin to how it bullied Congress into voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Do not let yourselves be bullied.

• Given the bang-up job this administration has done in rebuilding both Iraq and the Gulf Coast, do you really want to give them $700 billion to play with? Could you please step back and think before you vote?

• If these Wall Street a-holes are going to be unloading their shitty debt onto us, I want them under an iron fist of regulatory power. In particular, I want the CEOs of all participating firms to have their salaries and benefits slashed as punishment for making us pay to keep their sorry asses out of the local homeless shelter.

This is a very big deal, peeps. While it may not have the immediacy of opposing the Iraq war, it will have very serious consequences to our financial futures if it passes as proposed. You can find your congressman by entering in your zip code here.

William Greider ably lays out the stakes:

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: Dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses — many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public — all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics — exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

And that’s really what it comes down to.

If Obama agrees to this nonsense, I will not vote for him — it’s as simple as that. In fact, I will not support any Democrat who gets on board with this. They will have lost any goddamn credibility as even semi-responsible stewards of my tax dollars. Of all the shit sandwiches that Bush has force-fed us for the last eight years — from the Iraq war to the disastrous response to Katrina to deficits fueled by tax cuts to rich people — this may be the stinkiest and slimiest one yet. Bush is asking us to fork over $700 billion to purchase worthless assets just so his Wall Street friends won’t have to own up to the miserable decisions they’ve made over the past two decades.

Make no mistake, this massive bailout will slow economic growth for years to come and it will make financing much more important and worthwhile projects incredibly difficult. It will put us further in debt with China and will make us less competitive in the global economy. It will give the treasury secretary vast new powers with absolutely no checks and balances. Christ, even some of the dim bulbs at the National Review understand this:

I’m not an economist, and I wouldn’t pretend to be one, but just as an observer of Washington, and as someone who has worked on the Hill and at the White House, it is simply apparent from this draft that this program will get completely out of control very quickly. It gives the Secretary of the Treasury essentially unlimited power to use $700 billion to make purchases the scope of which is defined very loosely and vaguely.

If there was ever a time to stand athwart history and yell “EAT ME!!!” it’s now. Democrats, give Bush the finger on this bailout plan or you’ll completely lose my support. And then I’m going to start busting out the damn pitchforks and torches.

The Democrats Did It

• We agree with Investors’ Business Daily, which says that the reason for the current financial crisis is that the Community Reinvestment Act passed by the Democrats forced banks to lend money to a bunch of shiftless darkies who couldn’t repay their loans.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Shorter Response: A study of CRA loans shows:

• CRA loans constituted only 23% of all loans and 9.2% of high-cost loans.
• CRA loans were twice as likely to be retained in the originating bank’s portfolio than loans made by other institutions.
• CRA loans were less likely to be foreclosed upon than other loans.

Jesus Christ:

U.S. Stock Markets Soar on Financial Rescue Plan

The government’s financial rescue plan continued to spur a immense Wall Street rally today as investors rushed back to the market.

After shooting up more than 400 points at the opening bell, The Dow Jones industrial average was up more than 370 points, a 3.4 percent gain, by 2:30 p.m. That is on top of a 400-point gain late yesterday after news of a government program began to emerge and could bring the market to break-even for the week. The technology-heavy Nasdaq was up 2.5 percent and Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 3.7 percent.

Global markets also traded up on the news. European markets rose on the order of 5 to 9 percent, while Asian markets overnight added anywhere from 4 to 9 percent.

In what amounts to a further restructuring of the financial market, the government said it would take on the bad debts of troubled financial firms, prop up money-market mutual funds and temporarily ban short selling of financial stocks. After watching the demise of Lehman Brothers, the quick sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America and a $85 billion loan to salvage American International Group, investors appeared more confident that the government intervention could have a lasting impact.

“It’s a massive relief rally on the back of the comprehensive plan,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist for Merk Investment. “If you have hundreds of millions of mortgage-backed securities on your books that you cannot value — much less sell — you can now unload them to the U.S. government.”

In other words: the stock market is rallying because stupid rich people won’t have to suffer any consequences for the shitty investments they’ve made over the past decade.

It’s times like these where I start getting pitchfork-and-torches angry. Make no mistake, this bailout plan will have a massive opportunity cost. National health care just became that much more difficult because we’re going to be spending $1 trillion to bail out a bunch of irresponsible Wall Street assholes. The sheer amount of shit that the American taxpayer is about to devour cannot be calculated. Our choice boil down to:

• Borrowing a crapload more money from the Chinese and adding God knows how much to our national debt.

• Paying significantly higher taxes and getting precisely nothing in return except for the knowledge that rich people won’t feel bad about themselves.

It’s time to bring back the pillory stocks, my friends. I want Bush, Paulson, Cox, Bernanke and the heads of AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Fannie and Freddie locked up for years on end so that we may hurl vegetables and feces at them to our hearts’ content. Because hey, if we’re going to be sacrificing our Social Security and our health insurance to save the Wizards of Wall Street, we might as well get *something* out of the deal.

UPDATE: It’s a cold day in hell when I agree with Larry Kudlow:

The decision by SEC Chairman Chris Cox to ban short selling is a terrible idea. It is an encroachment on free-market principles. In extreme, the absence of short sellers would inflate stock market upturns, probably into bubbles. Short sellers keep the market honest. I know many in the short-selling community and most of them really do their homework. They are skeptical about puff pieces on companies and they are properly cynical about corporate press releases.

If anything, we should be thanking the short sellers for calling bullshit on a lot of these financial institutions. Now the SOBs will feel free to invest billions more into shit sandwiches and tell us how awesome they taste.

Goddammit I’m pissed.

Ol’ Perfesser:

Why do hurricanes that hit Texas get so much less attention than hurricanes that hit New Orleans?

Ike should be getting more attention. That it’s not, maybe has something to do with stuff like this:

Covering the hurricane’s aftermath brought additional challenges. Literally adding insult to injury, Galveston’s mayor, Lyda Ann Thomas, “on Monday ordered all city employees not to talk to news reporters. She did not say when that order would be lifted,” according to an article by the Daily News’s Rhiannon Meyers …

But don’t bother the Ol’ Perfesser with details. He’s more interested in the meta narrative:

UPDATE: Another reader emails: ‘If you want to discuss lack of coverage, wasn’t the hurricane that hit New Orleans the same hurricane that nearly wiped the Mississippi gulf coast off the map?” Yes. Why did New Orleans get so much more attention? Is it because the media wanted to paint the Bush Administration as racially insensitive, or is New Orleans just the only place they could find on a map?

As a native San Franciscan, this touches on a detail that’s always bothered me. Why did the media focus so much on the devastion to the city from the 1906 earthquake and fire, and not pay as much attention to damage in lightly populated outlying areas where orders of magnitude less people were killed or made homeless? Why, the press of the time didn’t even say much at all about the actual epicenter of the Great Quake! In the context of Katrina, is Muscle Shoals the Mussel Rock of modern media failure?

Heh. Indeed. Read the whole thing.

OK, so I just had a dream where Barack Obama said something along the lines of “We shouldn’t be feeding Coca-Cola to our kids for breakfast in our public schools” and the wingnutosphere went into a full freak-out mode. Confederate Yankee, Ace and Jules Crittenden each conducted scientific “studies” purporting to show that Coke was too the most healthy drink ever concocted (basically, they amounted to Mr. Yankee snorting a whole two-liter bottle of Coke through his nostrils and writing “I ain’t dead yet, Obammy! Whatcher fancy books say ’bout that!”). Michelle Malkin linked to them and added a “snort” and then said, “Hey Barry, stop telling our kids to drink your fancy arugula juice!” The Ole Perfesser “heh-indeeded” like crazy and said something like, “Well, I’m not sure whether Coke is healthy for you or not, but Obama will regret insulting the millions of Coke-drinking Americans. Heh!” And then by the next day, Howie Kurtz had devoted his entire Media Notes column to covering “Soda Gate.”

And you know what the goddamn saddest part about this dream was?

Right after waking up, I went online to see if it had actually happened.

I need to stop reading right-wing blogs.

Just think how much more awful this economic tailspin would be if social security had been privatized by Bush and McCain a couple years back. We’d have our retirement fund in the shitter along with Lehman Brothers right about now.

Luckily, Nancy Pelosi and the Dems led the Congressional charge in kiboshing that insanity back in 2005. Go ahead and make mention of that little fact on the campaign trail, Obama. You too, Biden.

The media is dutifully reporting that Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was hacked by some malicious third party. The wingnutosphere has dutifully transmogrified the /b/tards into a partisan liberal affinity group, if not an official arm of the Obama campaign apparatus.

Thing is, we still don’t know much about who spread Palin’s Yahoo login and password around the Intertubes. And would it be entirely tinfoil-hatted to wonder a little bit about the convenience of Palin being victimized yet again, even as economic turmoil threatens to move the national narrative away from spunky, disrespected moose hunters to, you know, important stuff?

Or whether a governor whose email correspondence has been subpoenaed as part of an ongoing abuse-of-power investigation might benefit from some serious media fog being blown over said email correspondence?

To be fair, there’s probably no other way for the mainstream press to report this thing at the moment, other than to take the third-party hacker story at face value. And really, /b/tards being /b/tards isn’t exactly an implausible explanation for L’Affaire Lulz. At least the Em-Ess-Em doesn’t seem to be taking the wingnut bait to label Anoymous as a ‘liberal’ enterprise.

Still, you’ve got to wonder if more is going on here. There’s certainly the whiff of a Rovian gambit here.

ABOVE: Sherlock “Jim” Hoft

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Sherlock Hoft, aka “The Gateway Pundit,” has broken out his detective cap, toy pipe and junior gumshoe magnifying glass and applied his super sleuthing skills to tracking down the malefactors who hacked Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account. And guess who he’s discovered behind it? The scary Negro, that’s who!

Quoting one of the geniuses at RightPundits, who is playing Watson to Hoft’s Holmes, Hoft has this to say:

According to an internet security expert located in San Francisco, Gabriel Ramuglia, the Palin email hackers were careless and left a digital trail. That trail leads directly to a server site in Chicago which happens to be the city where all of Obama’s men plot their daily moves.

Now before you say “big fucking deal, Chicago’s a big city,” let me remind you that Obama had Bill Ayers slip LSD into the Chicago municipal water supply, which turned everyone in Chicago into an Obamazombie, each of whom acts only according to instructions that they receive from Obama HQ. So if something happens in Chicago, Obama did it.

Sherlock Hoft and his trusty assistants at RightPundit clearly think that the hackers were in Chicago, but if you read the enitre interview with Ramuglia and not the portion that Hoft cites you’ll quickly see that either Hoft is functionally illiterate or he has turned his magnifying glass backwards. The missing part of the interview is bolded below:

Ramuglia got into the proxy business a few years ago, after schools began blocking access to an online game site he used to co-own. Pretty soon, people began using the proxy service to access YouTube, Gmail, MySpace, and dozens of other sites that are routinely blocked by IT departments.

To prevent abuse of the service – such as the occasional bomb threat or other illegal act that’s been known to happen – Ramuglia logs each user’s IP address, along with the time and web destination. …

The information at the moment is on a server at a Chicago colocation site owned by FDC Servers.

Yep. That’s right. The proxy service’s servers were in Chicago; the hackers could have been anywhere in the world where an Internet connection was available which is, you know, kinda the whole point of the Internet.

Coming up next: Sherlock Hoft proves that Obama personally engineered the stock market crash because Lehman Brothers has an office in the Chicago Loop.