New York Observer: "EXCLUSIVE: New York Mag’s Boy Genius Investor Made It All Up"

TYT: CEO Pay Is A Massive Scam, This Chart Proves It

Spoiler Alert

Re:Chelsea Clinton: Did peoples' spin-detectors suddenly short out?

Who read the article about Chelsea Clinton? No, not the NY Daily News article that's spawned at least two threads in GD and probably more elsewhere?

I mean the other one, the Fast Company article that the Daily News piece cherry-picked from and spun.

Because in that article, the line about "not caring about money" was in the context of not being obsessed with nothing but money . Of not being another "grab everything and squeeze" type like Mitt Romney or the Kochs.

Even the bit about "I just work harder..." is in the context of overcoming the assumption that she's a well-connected do-nothing getting a ride on family connections, a la a certain scion of the Bush clan who loses fights with pretzels. It's not an example of Mitt-wit self- back-patting.

Really, don't people click through to sources when there's some obvious spin going on? Especially from an article from a tabloid newspaper?

I'm hardly a fan of the Clintons and the neoliberal economics their policies have been steeped in, but Jeez, people, use your heads. The Daily News piece may not be the Soviet-grade quote-extraction that the isolating of "You didn't build that" was, but it bears a strong family resemblance.

I, for one, remember who Romney chose for foreign policy advisors

McCain too, for that matter.

They were dominated by the same gaggle of chickenhawk neocons who:
1) were caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviets
2) dismissed bin Laden as a guy in a tent
3) had an ongoing pet project to clear out all the old Soviet allies in the MidEast (plus Iran) and replace them with... something else
4) seized (with gusto) the opportunity to use the aftermath of 911 to launch Pet Project Item Number 1: removing Saddam Hussein, and cooked up false pretenses for doing so
5) "Planned" the invasion and occupation of Iraq with an entire string of assumptions, any one of which would derail their vision of how smoothly it would go -- and didn't have a "plan B" when for the infinity-minus-oneth time in military history things didn't work out quite as planned.
6) suffered absolutely no consequences for botching the entire operation, costing thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands injured and maimed.
7) When making said "plans" they joked "Anyone can go to Baghdad, Real Men go to Tehran!", and they've been hankering to start Pet Project Item Number 3 or 4 (depending on how you count overthrowing Ghaddafi and Assad), attacking Iran.

They're big on tough talk, but as to their actual track record, they're long on blood but very, very short on results, and batting zero on seeing problems or major developments before they arrive.

So, when conservatives ask when will Obama be apologizing to Romney for dismissing Mitt's "Cold War" thinking, I have to ask: You wanted to put the "on to Tehran!" crowd back in the driver's seat. How "tough" do you think President Romney (or McCain) would be able to be about Ukraine since by now our forces would be tied up in Iran?

The reason Thomas was put on the SC was...

...NOT because he was the most qualified jurist. He wasn't.
...NOT because he was the most qualified black jurist. He wasn't.
...NOT because he was the most qualified black conservative jurist. He wasn't.

He was the most qualified black conservative with reliable but obfuscatable views on abortion & other subjects, and was young enough that he'd stay on the court for decades.

The Democratic senators were initially ready to give him a pass, since 1) they didn't look forward to another SC nomination battle, and 2) initially the black community was receptive to Thomas -- not enthusiastic, but not inclined to oppose -- and a fight against him wouldn't be well received.

At the time I thought Thomas should have been voted down just because of his lackluster record and ignoring conflict of interest (Thomas failed to recuse himself in a case involving the Ralston Purina company, where his political mentor Sen. John Danforth owned millions in stock and had brothers on the board of directors. Thomas' decision in favor of Purina directly benefited his pals).

Black opinion didn't shift until later in the process, after Thurgood Marshall made his "a black snake is still a snake" comment. The senators were finally forced to take a harder line when the harassment charges leaked out, and giving Thomas a pass would piss off another Democratic constituency: women fighting workplace harassment.

But all that happened too late: by that point conservatives were ginned up in support and the rest of the establishment didn't want another high-profile fight, so the Thomas hearings were kept to a he-said-she-said with Anita Hill (Angela Wright was shunted off to the side), giving the senators their excuse to just put it behind them.

So here we are, a quarter-century later, and he's still a lackluster jurist who ignores conflicts of interest, and is a reliable conservative operative in the courts.

Bill O'Reilly Complains About Americans Being 'Self-Absorbed and Ignorant'

via Crooks and Liars:

Progressivity of the income tax was eliminated for high incomes under Reagan...

...and has not been restored since.

After adjusting for inflation, before the Kennedy-era tax cuts typically over half the brackets (sometimes well over half) affected incomes over $250,000, with about 40% affecting incomes above $500,000. Inflation eroded those levels (the brackets were not indexed for inflation) until the late 70s, when the top bracket dipped those into the single digits. Reagan's tax cuts cut even those further, eliminating brackets starting at over 500K entirely. And by the end of his term, the top bracket kicked in at roughly the median income, not anything that could be considered high (BushI went back on his "read my lips" line because these were unsustainably low).

To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, it seems progressivity is for little people.





In case you're wondering why I picked 1942 as a start date, it's purely for readability, thanks to my graphics skills or lack thereof. I need to figure out how to pull off skipping some intervals, because some of those inflation-adjusted brackets reach higher. Much higher:

The Hunting of the President (2004)

Stop me if you've heard this: A Democrat running for and then elected president who doesn't fit the Conservative Movement's favored "weak on crime and defense, tax and spend liberal" narrative, so they ignore reality and invent their own narrative -- that he's a radical leftist who wants to usher in a police state (and his wife! What a harpy!)

They push that out through billionaire-funded conservative media and foundations, and press investigation after investigation -- both inside and outside of the government.

The 2004 fiim, based on the 2001 book.

You're joking, right? Vince Foster, "wag the dog", travelgate,...

...the "Clinton $400 haircut delays air travelers" "scandal", even Whitewater itself. And that's not getting into the fringier ones like the "Clinton body count", the allegations that he was in on drug smuggling through the Mena airfield, "The Clinton Chronicles", etc. etc. etc.

They counted as a "Clinton scandal" China's upgrades to its nuclear arsenal using secrets they had obtained during Reagan & Bush's terms.

No axe-grinding rumor promulgated by old White Citizens Council guys (his enemies in Arkansas politics) went unexamined for use nationally.

From "renounced his citizenship" to "trashed the White House" they threw ball after ball of elephant dung at him hoping some would stick, and what didn't stick would pile up around him so they could point to the cloud of steam rising from it and say "y'know, where there's smoke..."

Clinton's personal peccadilloes finally gave them something they could latch onto legally, but it didn't happen out of the blue. It was the constant stream of "scandals" that were either pure bullshit or blown-up petty stuff (and of which Republicans partake just as freely) fanned by conservative news media that painted Bill (and Hillary) as radical-leftist Al Capones that just had to be taken down, even if all you could get on him was tax evasion.

To claim that "No trumped up scandals made out of nothing" about Clinton is just mind-bogglingly ignorant.