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The last refuge is a crowded place, but where’s Barack?

Newt Gingrich left his first wife while she had cancer, even going so far as to go to her hospital room to talk about divorce terms, with which he promptly failed to abide. That was all to clear the decks for wife number two, who he later ditched for his present spouse, who was giving him blow jobs in his office while he was impeaching Bill Clinton for getting blow jobs in his office.

What made him do it?

Patriotism:

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” said Gingrich. “And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them.”

This makes sense, and who am I to argue? Presumably we can measure a man’s (the applicability of this to women is, as always, subject to doubt) patriotism by the extent of his off the reservation sexual escapades. Alas, by that measure, we Democrats must once again be perceived as far less patriotic than the Republicans. Sure, we had Bill Clinton, whose reputation for patriotism must now surely go up, in light of Newt’s statement, but his sexual escapades are overshadowed by Newt himself, who easily matched Bill in the adultery department, but with an added dollop of hypocrisy to add to the stew. The Republicans can top every Eliot Spitzer with a David Vitter, a man so patriotic, so passionate about his country, that he had to add a bit of fancy dressing to his whoring. And let’s not forget patriots Mark Foley and Larry Craig, who served their country by having sex with children and other men respectively. Why, some Republicans are so patriotic that they have sex with the beasts of the field. There’s not a Democrat in the country patriot enough to top that.

But, lets forget about the patriots. What we need to worry about are the America hating politicians who aren’t screwing on the side. You know who I’m talking about: Barack Obama.

We’ve all had our suspicions. It sure looks like he’s a Kenyan born Muslim socialist, despite an annoying lack of evidence. But we do have evidence, in fact a massive amount of it, that he’s disturbingly monogamous, proof positive that he doesn’t feel passionately about this country. He’s the president. He must have to work way harder that a mere Congressman. If being president isn’t enough to work him into a passion for his country – if he isn’t reaching for the nearest intern or seeking solace in the nearest airport mens room – then he really must hate America.


A grand, taxpayer funded scam

Huffington Post features an article about Ashford University, a for-profit “educational institution” with a quaint 5 building campus into which, through the miracle of private enterprise, the internet, and a massive dollop of fraud, its owners manage to cram approximately 76,000 students. The entire article is well worth reading, but for the lazy, I’ll condense it by presenting the business plan:

Buy a failing small college, along with its accreditation, which is good for 10 years, no questions asked by the government or the accrediting agency. Use pictures of the campus for marketing, but conduct 99.9% your “courses” on-line. Induce gullible potential students trying to improve their lives into borrowing money from the federal government to take your worthless course offerings. Keep your fish on the line for the four weeks that are required in order to allow you to keep the course proceeds, then cut them loose.

What a scam. It essentially amounts to borrowing massive amount of money from the government that only someone else is legally liable to repay. Who cares that the poor suckers will incur a debt for which they get no value, and which, thanks to punitive bankruptcy laws, they can’t even discharge. After all, what could be more despicable than someone who defaults on a student loan? Of course, when the day arrives, as the day surely must, when Ashford University feels the need to file for bankruptcy, no law will prevent it from doing so, nor will the criminals behind this scheme be forced to disgorge a penny of the money they have stolen from their hapless “students”.

Our Republican overlords work themselves into high dudgeon at the thought of public workers making a decent living, thereby somehow imposing a crushing burden on the middle class. How many Republicans will get incensed about the waste, fraud and abuse involved in for-profit “educational institutions” sucking at one of the many public teats reserved for corporations only?


Another right wing meme exploded

The right has never had any particular penchant for telling the truth, particularly when it gets in the way of a good storyline that justifies screwing the middle class or poor. So, it’s no surprise that the latest right wing meme-that state worker pensions are driving states into bankruptcy-is basically a lie. Dean Baker (though I am an avid Baker fan, I came to this via Balloon Juice) has written an extensive analysis of the situation, and shows that the problem was not created by grasping teachers, or even, to any significant degree, by underfunding. No, the culprits are the usual suspects: the Wall Street Crime Syndicate that destroyed the economy. But even after their work had been done, the situation is hardly dire, except in the fevered imaginations of the right and the serious people within the Beltway. This is the last paragraph from his executive summary:

In sum, most states face pension shortfalls that are manageable, especially if the stock market does not face another sudden reversal. The major reason that shortfalls exist at all was the downturn in the stock market following the collapse of the housing bubble, not inadequate contributions to pension funds.

You can read the whole thing here (pdf).

This unfolding episode gives us a bit of a peek into an alternate universe in which Social Security was privatized in-let us say, 2001. At this moment, millions of people would have lost huge chunks of the only retirement plan in which they had any stake. Instead of accepting the blame for ruining these people’s lives, or blaming the “investment advisers” that would have descended on millions of unsophisticated investors to relieve them of their money, or blaming the Wall Street criminals for torpedoing the economy, the right would be blaming the people that it had forced into a system they lacked the time or knowledge to understand, just as they are blaming the state workers for having the nerve to think they are entitled to the pensions for which they contracted.

We are, by the way, currently experiencing something like that alternate reality. Almost anyone with a 401k will tell you they lost big bucks in 2008, and few of us are back to where we were at that point, never mind ahead. The only reason that situation is not a major issue, other than the willingness of the average American to allow him or herself to get screwed by Wall Street, is that everyone who is looking at a smaller 401k retirement nest egg is at least assured (for the moment) of a social security benefit that is not dependent on the willingness of Wall Street to leave some scraps for the rest of us.


Obama flunks Negotiation 101

This is all you need to read to understand why the Republicans have been running the country for the past two years. Obama on the budget issue:

“My administration has already put forward specific cuts that meet congressional Republicans halfway. And I’m prepared to do more,” said Obama.

Yep. Start by “meeting them half way” and then tell them you are prepared to cave even more. That’s a truly effective negotiating technique. In similar circumstances, Clinton made them look like idiots. I won’t characterize the way Republicans have made Obama look.

Addendum: I suppose it will be argued by some that Obama is scoring political points by making himself look good in contrast to the Republicans. He may be. He certainly looks like a lock to win the election in 2012, despite his failure to deal effectively with the economy. But his success and our success are two different things. If the best Democratic strategy is to win every other election by allowing the Republicans, in alternate election cycles, to get everything they want and, in the process, reminding the short memoried public why they voted them out the last time, with the Democrats getting nothing while they’re in the majority, then electoral success gains us nothing but odd election cycles in which the Republican takeover of Washington is somewhat slowed. Obama is already more of a Republican than Bill Clinton ever was, and we are going to have 5 more years of him meeting the Republicans half way, with that halfway point constantly shifting in a rightward direction. That’s success we can’t believe in.


Good Idea

Something for Jepsen to consider:

“Guilford County [North Carolina] Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen wants an investigation into a service used by major mortgage companies who may have made false statements to avoid fees that cost the county $1.3 million in lost revenue.

He wants to sue for the money At first blush, the legal theory seems to make sense. When you or I convey an interest in real property, it is not valid unless properly recorded, with fees paid. Banks, being laws unto themselves, apparently thought they could avoid all that. A class action approach on behalf of all the towns would appear to make sense. They could certainly use the money, and what better source could be found?

I am, by the way, one of the few lawyers out there who has gotten a judgment against MERS. It’s a long story, but I successfully defended a foreclosure and got the judge to order MERS to pay my fees. It’s a shadowy company, actually. It took us forever to figure out where they were incorporated, etc., so that we could collect. I’ve never been good about going after money, but at the time we had an associate who took such things as a personal challenge. She collected every dime.

Sixteen days and counting

We all know, ” for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty“, and we can now all rejoice that those 28 days have now blessedly departed. Tis true, the snows have not yet fully melted, and we’ve had trouble stringing two sunny days together, not to mention two days above freezing, but small signs of hope have appeared to give us faith that our February bred depression will soon be over. A few days ago, our yard played host to a convention of many hundreds of migrating blackbirds, who chattered among themselves as loudly and nonsensically as a Republican convention of similar size might do. Today, as you can see below, these daffodils, these happy few, this band of brothers, pushed their heads through the frozen soil to announce to the world that better days lie ahead, that we have not “clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast” for naught, and we will soon have sunshine, baseball, and barbecues, though, alas, we will still have Republicans.

Friday Night Music

This shows how behind the times I am. I had never heard of Corrine Bailey Rae before I saw her perform with Herbie Hancock at the White House. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t at the White House. I was in front of my Ipad, watching the PBS app. This is from an event honoring Paul McCartney for winning the Gershwin award, so it was an evening of McCartney authored songs, tailor made for a geezer like me.

Anyway, I thought this performance was great, and I’ve meant to put it up for weeks, but one thing and another, what with rebellions in Wisconsin, et. al., I’ve had to put it off.

Corrine Bailey Rae and Herbie Hancock performing Blackbird:


Having it both ways with the unions

This is the second time I’ve read that Malloy claims that he won in November because of the unions, and that the race was as close as it was because of the unions. It’s a clever formulation. Sure, the unions helped push him to victory by busting their asses, but they only needed to bust their asses because of the resentment so many voters felt toward those very unions. Or toward state workers. Or toward people who weren’t them making money, or getting benefits. Or something.

I can buy into the first assertion: he wouldn’t have won without the unions busting their asses. But is there any empirical support for the latter half of his assertion? Malloy’s was the only state wide race that was at all close. Are we to believe that anti-union resentment was focused on the governor’s race, to the exclusion of the other races? Which of the other Democrats was anti-union? Is there any hard evidence that anyone motivated by anti-union animus, as opposed to a generalized sense of misdirected tea party style grievance, would have voted for Malloy but for his support for the unions, or their support for him? My general sense, though I could be seriously misinformed, is that anti-union people, particularly people who make their decisions based on anti-union animus, tend to be hard core Republicans, who wouldn’t vote for Democrats under any circumstances.

Maybe there is polling that supports Malloy’s assertion, but I’m guessing this is something he simply came up with in order to justify his partial (he’s no Scott Walker, and I’m not implying that he is) demonization of state workers. Sure, he says, you helped me, but I’m going to have to stick it to you, and by the way, it’s really your fault.

But, of course, it’s not their fault, or only in a very small way. It’s not their fault that the state chose not to adequately fund their pensions. It’s not their fault that the right wing has been able to spread the myth that they are overpaid, particularly given the typical refusal of Democratic politicians to refute that myth. Maybe it’s their fault for failing to protest that inadequate funding or for not demanding more than lip service from people like Malloy, but those failings didn’t likely lose Malloy many votes.

As Jonathan Pelto has been pointing out on his blog, Malloy seems to be setting up these workers to be the scapegoats when his budgetary “fuzzy math” gets exposed. Blaming the unions for the close election, when, given the margins the other Democrats got, he maybe should be blaming himself, looks to be part of that scapegoating process.


A proud record

Great article at The Big Picture about McKinsey & Co, the firm for which Rajat Gupta worked. Gupta, was recently sued by the SEC for insider trading.

It’s the classic modern success story. Massive success through massive failure.

McKinsey is a global consulting company, which has managed to make huge amounts of money while achieving the following:

• Advocating side pockets and off balance sheet accounting to Enron, it became known as “the firm that built Enron” (Guardian, BusinessWeek)

• Argued that NY was losing Derivative business to London, and should more aggressively pursue derivative underwriting (Investment Dealers’ Digest)

• General Electric lost over $1 billion after following McKinsey’s advice in 2007 — just before the financial crisis hit. (The Ledger)

• Advising AT&T (Bell Labs invented cellphones) that there wasn’t much future to mobile phones (WaPo)

• Allstate reduced legitimate Auto claims payouts in a McK&Co strategem (Bloomberg, CNN NLB)

• Swissair went into bankruptcy after implementing a McKinsey strategy (BusinessWeek)

• British railway company Railtrack was advised to “reduce spending on infrastructure” — leading to a number of fatal accidents, and a subsequent collapse of Railtrack. (Property Week, the Independent)

It’s rather obvious that these folks shouldn’t be sued. With a sterling record of failure like that, they should be put in charge of the U.S. economy.


Untitled

At the beginning of the year I posted a number of (mostly political) predictions, among which was this one:

The Ipad will be updated, and I will find a reason why I absolutely need one, but Lon Seidman will get one first.

Well, the Ipad 2 was announced today. I was disappointed to hear that the only improvement over the Ipad I have now is faster processor speed and two cameras I will never use. On the other hand, how can I resist the attraction of increased processor speed and two cameras I’ll never use? I’m being torn apart here. This was, after all, one of only two prediction I made in which I have any ability to influence the actual outcome. It may be my only chance to get one right1 .

As I see it I have three choices:

1. Buy the new Ipad as soon as I decently can, and enjoy the benefits of increased processor speed, two cameras I won’t use, and the satisfaction of knowing that I correctly predicted the future.

2. Wait for the already rumored IPad 3, which is probably coming this September. If the rumors are correct, then I still have the chance of making my prediction come true, and I’ll get an Ipad with faster processor speed, two cameras I won’t use, and some additional features I don’t need, but, for some weird reason, want anyway.

3. Wait to see what Lon thinks, and I hereby invite him to give us his take on the new Ipad, available on February 11th, assuming he’s not going with option two.

On the other hand, if I really want to help Obama stimulate the economy, I could go with options one and two, but that risks a nasty divorce.


  1. Not quite true. I have already finished all the Doctor Whos, unless you count the “Classic” series.?