Fact-esque

Coleman and the GOP Ripsnortin Never-Give-Up Legal Tango

The absurd - and superlengthy - legal battle Norm Coleman (author of the forthcoming giant true-crime teevee series My Wife Is a Bagman) fought to prevent Al Franken from taking his Senate seat was a terrible idea in every possible way. Which naturally means it's about to become the Wingnut Standard of Pissy Behavior whenever they lose an election. Which is going to be happening a lot more often given their lemming-like dive off the cliffs of political sanity.

Like Sarahcuda's quitting, legal challenges to hopeless election losses are beginning to spread through the wingnut universe like diarrhea through a herd of goats. First up, NY23 Loserman Doug Hoffman, who lost by several thousand votes to Dem Bill Owens after Sarah the Terminator stuck her nose in, wanted a recount. He got it and mere hours later was forced to admit he couldn't possibly win. But Never Say Die Doug had Norm's example shining before his eyes like a beacon of stardust shimmering in the glow of a steel furnace and was therefore begging for money to help him mount a legal challenge when he gave up for the second time. Now there's a question of what to do with the money he collected.

Hoffman sent a letter to supporters last week seeking money for a legal challenge of the outcome. The Federal Election Commission said recount funds are legal, but the contributions would have to meet campaign finance limits, and if the money isn't used for a recount it would have to be refunded.

A spokesman for Hoffman said the campaign didn't know whether it had received any funds or would be returning any money.

That last sentence is a doozy. He doesn't know if they got any money and anyway he hasn't decided, law be damned, whether he's going to give it back. Maybe they'll go ahead with the legal challenge a la Coleman and tie Owens up for months. That would be a blow to the Dems, right? Coleman proved it works. Course Dougie will look like an arrogant, mean little shithead but since when did far right loonies worry about stuff like that?

Friday Palin: Book, Schmook, It's About Cuda's Commonsense Conservative Party (Updated)

Well, the predictable orgy around Lynn Vincent's autobiography of Sarahcuda has begun, shot out of Oprah's cannon and into a vat of oatmeal gravy. Newsday noticed that Oprah's main concern seemed to be...herself (go figure) and that Teh Cuda never even mentioned the guy who made her a STAR.

[S]he...came across as a whiner at times  - as an ingrate, and mean-spirited, as someone who declined or refused to give John McCain so much as a nod of appreciation, barely even acknowledging him.  How would that have hurt her?  Just a "I'd really like to thank him for the tremendous opportunity..etc. etc." But nothing - or at least nothing generous. It felt feckless, mean-spirited. (But that's what the book is about in some parts, so...)

    Let's go through the interview:


  Oprah asks if she was "snubbed" when Oprah declined to have her on.

  Palin: "...it didn't even register." In other words, she had bigger things to worry about than whether O wanted to have her on the show or not.

Well, maybe it didn't register with Sarahcuda who had, after all, major wardrobe decisions hanging fire at the time, but it sure registered with the Big O who was downright testy about it. McCain, otoh, may be thanking his lucky moonz that she ignored him.

A Little Test

OK, class. Let's see if you've been paying attention. How does this -

Just two days before the New York Fed paid A.I.G.’s partners 100 cents on the dollar to tear up their contracts with the insurance giant, one bank volunteered to take a modest haircut — but it never got the chance.

UBS, of Switzerland, alone offered to give a break to the New York Fed in the negotiations last November over how to keep A.I.G. from toppling and taking other banks down with it. It would have accepted 98 cents on the dollar.

But UBS’s good-faith gesture was quickly drowned out by Goldman Sachs and the top French bank regulator. They argued, with others, that it would be improper and perhaps even criminal to force A.I.G.’s trading partners to bear losses outside of bankruptcy court.

The banks and the regulator were confident that the New York Fed was not willing to push A.I.G. into bankruptcy, because earlier in the fall the New York Fed had stepped in with $85 billion to prop up the insurer.

The New York Fed, led then by Timothy F. Geithner, who is now the Treasury secretary, therefore had little leverage in the negotiations, according to a post-mortem of what has emerged as the most inflammatory episode in the rescue of A.I.G.

- connect to this?

GMAC Financial Services, the former lending arm of General Motors, replaced its chief executive on Monday as it negotiates for another round of bailout financing from the federal government.

The company’s directors appointed Michael A. Carpenter, a former Citigroup executive and current GMAC director, to succeed Alvaro de Molina, who had run the company since April 2008. Mr. Carpenter said the board believed that he would be more appropriate as chief executive than Mr. de Molina, who resigned at the board’s request.

(emphasis added as a hint)

Extra points if you can predict the effect of either set of facts.

Friday Palin: The Magic of Facebook Cuda Is So Bogus It's Awesome! The Talking Cuda Doll, Not So Much

There is no longer any doubt that Sarah Palin comes alive on Facebook, able to express herself so much more better than she can when she rambles on verbally to insufficiently genuflecting liberal weenies and left-wing intellectuals like, say, Katie Couric, or even her own hand-picked, carefully vetted, supporters. The difference between the two is so extreme that there can be only one legitimate explanation: magic Facebook pixie dust.

Remember in last week's episode when Teh Sarah was going to give a secret speech that nobody was going to be allowed to copy down and use against her? Well, some people suggested that somebody would and, actually, somebody did. Politico, that she let them in there because they always been friendly but then they went and stabbed her in the B-A-C-K when she wasn't looking and then printed it in their stoopid little paper or whatever it is, and boy are they in T-R-O-U-B-L-E!

Cause it seems the Cuda had just the teensiest bit of trouble making any, um, sense and going off her speech and talking about stuff being "bogus" and "awesome" and it was just like when that cheerleader who ran for Miss Universe or something was asked what she would do to end hunger and she said the govt should "take all the poor people to McDonald's" only Sarah was all about the trickery about the dollar coin that, like, nobody has even hardly seen yet but it was awesome bogus just the same because they insulted god by not putting him in the top place as we all know he oughta be because god's really the president and the US is, like, the Holy Land only with Dairy Queens.

So Now That They've Saved The Rich, We're Next, Right? Ummm...

There's almost $300M in TARP money that hasn't been disbursed yet. You know, the tiny part that was supposed to go directly to job creation and the business lending Wall Street continues to show no interest in. We've been waiting months, since before Obama was elected, expecting that that mnoney would be released momentarily since it only took a few days for the govt cough up Wall Street's $3T worth. But here we are, a year later, and despite Wall Street's ideal "jobless recovery" hasn't exactly worked, we still haven't seen squat for anybody except bankers.

Now, FDL's David Dayen notes that according to the WSJ, Obama may dump the job-creating thing and use our money to make the bankers happy in a different way - by reducing the debt.

Directed Economies & the Wall Street Shell Game

I don't want to seem too much like a broken record, going over and over the same grooves and playing the same song until My Funny Valentine sounds like Little Lambsy-Divey but I do think we need to understand, deeply and completely, what's happened to our economy and our society over 30 years of uninterrupted conservative rule (yes, I include Clinton for his NAFTA pimping and other pro-business "Third Way" agenda). Knowing what mistakes were made and by whom and why they were allowed by people who should have known better is the only way to know what needs to be done so it won't happen again.

As it happens, today I read two posts by two widely different writers who have been putting the pieces together in an effort to make sense of the puzzle. Between them I think some hard truth is beginning to emerge, and a clearer picture of just how far we've come from what used to be "American business".

US Corpo's to Employees: "You Lose"

We've commented before on the arrogance Corporate America has developed in the 30 years it took to build a fascist, oligarchic US. They can do anything they want and there's no one to stop them. Not even reality stops them. Their near-destruction of the world economy through blind avarice has taught them nothing. Saving their asses has only taught them that they can go right ahead and do what they were doing before. masaccio notes at FDL (via Norwegianity) that their self-righteous pomposity has reached the point where their trade associations - PR and political arms which are supposed, among other things, to guard their industry's public image - felt that it wasn't at all dangerous to take out a full-page ad in the NYT extolling their own virtues and putting employees and workers in their appointed place. Under corporate heels.

Why Does Sen Tom Coburn (R-OK) Hate the Troops?

Tom Coburn, who ran on the platform that there were lesbians in lavatories all over Oklahoma and when asked couldn't explain why that was relevant to the Senate race, turns out to be the one who's been blocking veterans' benefits bills for months. (Via Norwegianity)

One of the Senate’s most vociferous opponents of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has been Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who called the stimulus “the worst act of generational theft in our nation’s history.” Today, The Marine Corp Times revealed exactly how far Coburn was willing to go to undermine ARRA. It turns out Coburn has been the senator who has placed holds on several veterans benefits bills because he wanted to divert money from unspent ARRA funds on them.

When one of the several groups of veterans' advocates - the American Legion, fer dawg's sake - finally got a meeting with him to find out why he was blocking the bills and plead with him to stop, they got the expected reaction. Basically, "Fuck off".

Steve Robertson, the legislative director for the veterans advocacy group The American Legion, met with Coburn’s staff about the holds on the bills and came away disappointed with their refusal to budge on the issue. “For a lot of family caregivers, delay is costing them their jobs and their savings. It’s having a big impact,” Robertson told the press. “They made it clear that Sen. Coburn sees this as using his rights as a senator to place a hold on a bill…I agree with that, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense to hold up a bill that would do a lot of good things for veterans that has cleared a committee and is ready for a vote.”

(emphasis added)

No, it doesn't make any sense at all...unless you've been paying attention to the votes of Congressional Pubs all through the Bush Years, votes which consistently cut the budget of the VA, of war supplies (when they didn't come from Cheney's Halliburton, which got paid double for everything), of troop transportation (the Pubs made combat troops pay their own way home from the war zone), etc etc etc. There's been a pattern of Republicans voting to short-change the troops for years. There's nothing new about this except the excuse.

So...why do Republicans hate the troops? And why don't the troops know about it?

Friday Palin: The Secret Speech

With a book tour right around the corner that will open up on the hardly-noticable Oprah, and in the wake of Teh Cuda's major victory in NY, you'd think Our Sar would be lapping up the publicity with a spoon Bush-style - sort of "Bring it on, sucka!" only in Palin-speak. But you would, I'm afraid, be wrong. Apparently Sarah wants to keep the whole thang a deep dark secret.

Former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Sarah Palin will be speaking at an event hosted by the group Wisconsin Right to Life this evening.

It is a closed event – which generally means no press. Amid apparent worries that the ex-governor's words will be aired publicly despite that restriction, however, Wisconsin Right to Life and/or Palin's handlers are taking the notion of "closed" to a whole new level.

Check out this list of prohibited items at the event, which was spotted by CBS News Political Director Steve Chaggaris. All bags, by the way, "will be searched":

•No cell phones
•No recording devices
•No video or still cameras
•No laptops
•No photos or recording allowed
•No literature distribution
•No posters or banners
•No strollers or car seats
•No carry-in food or beverages

No kidding. I suppose anyone seen carrying a notebook will be shot on sight.

With Obama's Help, the Corpo's Move In On the Internet

Net neutrality is still an issue BUT if the corporations control everything on the net, isn't whether or not you can get to it kind of moot?

The Obama Admin has just completed a TOP SECRET copyright treaty that reeks of fascism - govt making rules based on what's best for their corporate owners. Corey Doctorow at Boing Boing is very concerned. So am I. (Via Avedon Carol)