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Monthly Archives: March 2013

Good Friday Night Music

I’m a strong believer in traditions, at least when they serve my purposes, and here at CTBlue we now have a tradition of posting this video on Good Fridays. I am adhering to this tradition for a number of reasons, chief of which being that it spares me from having to overtax my brain by […]

Defending Fat Tony

Wow. If you do this sort of thing long enough, you find yourself doing all kinds of crazy things. If you’d told me I would ever rise to defend Injustice Scalia, I’d have thought you were crazy, but here I go. I was reading this firedoglake post and was struck by a quote attributed to […]

A prognostication revisited

Pundits, be they pros like David Brooks, or amateurs like yours truly, are in the business of making predictions. It is therefore only fair that they should be held strictly accountable for those predictions. I’m no exception, particularly when I’m proven right yet again. A mere month and a half ago I wrote this in […]

JPMorgan can’t be bothered with trivialities

Believe it or not I am slowly, and hopefully surely, making my way through the Senate Banking Committee’s report on the JPMorgan “Whale” fiasco. I have to pass a quote along. Here’s the context: JPMorgan, for a time, hid it’s mounting losses by changing the way it valued the investments in which it was trading. […]

Nothing to see here

Matt Stoller writes: Earlier this week, the House Ag Committee marked up some bills deregulating derivatives. I don’t think they were expecting anyone to really notice, but there was a bunch of press on what they did. The next step in the legislative process is for the House Financial Services Committee to look at the […]

Friday Night Music

A week or so ago I realized that I did not have A Whiter Shade of Pale either in my CD collection or on iTunes, and I set out to correct this massive oversight. I’ve done so, but in the process I learned a lot about this venerable song. First, I found out that the […]

Something completely different

Sometimes, a bloggers life is not a happy one. On those days, becoming more frequent of late, that I have trouble bestirring myself to comment on the sad state of the world, I feel a vague sense of guilt, as if I have some obligation to satisfy the reading requirements of what is a largely […]

Grifters extraordinaire

I just love reading stuff like this: In August 2008, as the right wing of the Republican Party grew increasingly disenchanted with the party’s direction, the men from Russo, Marsh and Associates sensed opportunity: They created a political action committee, Our Country Deserves Better, and in time launched the Tea Party Express. Russo, Marsh—an established […]

Too good to last (probably)

Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge in California ruled in a decision released Friday. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing so-called NSLs across the board, in a stunning defeat for the Obama administration’s […]

Sarah, the gift that keeps on giving

Sarah Palin has raised the art of grifting to a new high, and we lefties couldn’t be happier: These days, many of Palin’s Facebook posts are about her family’s latest exploits; her scorching political missives seem fewer and farther between. Her political action committee, Sarah PAC, collected about $5 million during the 2012 election cycle, […]