Music For Today

Danny O'Keefe's Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues:

Gettin' It Done - 2

This one's as big as they get.  And while it's a little silly to play "yeah-but-what-If", I think there're 2 things we can be pretty sure of.  First, without the Stimulus Package we're lyin' in pieces on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.  And second, we'd be miles ahead of where we are now if Obama'd gotten just the tiniest bit of help from the Repubs in congress.

2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.

It's something of a stretch - but not much...

Is That You, Geraldo?

WTF is up with Geraldo Rivera?  "He's been off script for days" (Addicting Info), this time taking down the ever-execrable Eric Bolling on the Benghazi lie.



Eventually you have to realize you've been avoiding eye contact with the guy in the mirror(?)  Dunno - feels encouraging tho'; and not just to think that maybe Geraldo's career at DumFux News is about to be scuttled.

Willard Off Air Oops

This all happened off the air - which is the only time this guy says what he means and lets himself behave like the truly entitled aristocratic dick that he is.

At about the 3-minute mark, Romney says he made a political calculation about his stance on abortion.



He's fakin' it - the guy has no soul and no honor.

hat tip = Addicting Info

I ♥ Wonkette

Just good old-fashioned scary shit is all it is.

The Wonkette:

Republican painter-artist Jon McNaughton has come out with a new painting! You know, in case there was too much subtlety in his painting of Obama presiding over a terror-wracked deathscape Sharialand populated by Nidal Hassan and unemployed brown people.

This one’s called “The Runaway Slave,” and that torch means he’s voting for Romney. “Runaway” is a reference to his escape from the plantation of government dependency, and “Slave” is a reference to him, you know, being black.

Gettin' It Done - 3

It's big and complex and some of it is being used by Big Financial to make it harder for the smaller players to compete, which of course makes it easier for the big guys to capture more of the market (but that's another rant).

3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.

So "reform" in this  case is a relative and somewhat dubious term, but still, we got something out of it: Consumer Credit Protection, Reinforcement/Restructuring of Sarbanes-Oxley, Some restriction on banks investing in private equity instruments, etc.  It's not everything I think we should have in place, but it's something.

Now if the Repubs on Capitol Hill could manage not to stand in the way, it might do us some real good.

Sandy Toons

You had to know these were on their way.

Leadership

Yeah, OK - Obama has an unfair advantage because he's the Prez and Willard's a silver-spoon legacy puke who apparently doesn't recognize canned food when he sees it, or can't imagine people actually eating that stuff - "why don't they just take a little vacation for a week or so while the service people clean up?"

Leadership

Jag off douchery

Pulling Back The Veil

Maybe Sandy will provide a small glimmer of hope that more of us will see the GOP's rhetoric for the bullshit it is.

From a post on Matt Taibbi's blog at Rolling Stone yesterday.

But everyone lives off the government teat to some degree – even (one might even say especially) the very rich who have been the core supporters of both the Bush presidency and Romney's campaign. Many are industrial leaders who would revolt tomorrow if their giant free R&D program known as the federal military budget were to be scaled back even a few percentage points. Mitt's buddies on Wall Street would cry without their bailouts and dozens of lucrative little-known subsidies (like the preposterous ability of certain banks to act as middlemen in transactions when the government lends money to itself).

Today's Pix

That Tax Cut Thing

Don't like the message?  Make it disappear and then slam the messenger.

Addicting Info:

On September 14th, the Congressional Research Service published their long anticipated study on the correlation between the tax rates and economic growth from 1945 to today. If you go to their website today, however, the report is mysteriously missing.

Before it vanished, the New York Times downloaded a copy, which they now offer on their website. When you read the report, the reason for the pull might be as simple as what the report discovered.

It Keeps Me Awake

If it's a clean process, Obama wins in a possibly epic landslide (on the electoral side anyway), but the pretext is being put in place now that makes it "feasible" for Willard to "pull the upset".

Wonkette:

As Doktor Zoom explainered with an assist from Harper’s, the GOPpies are ready and able to steal every precinct that doesn’t count paper ballots by hand. As Your Editrix explained a week or whatever ago, one of only six voting machine vendors is owned by former Bain employees. (The others, per Dok’s Harper’s article, are pretty much all owned by the Koch Brothers and run by actual felons, except for the ones that are owned by Tagg Romney.) And as some former NSA analyst explained (but we didn’t post on it, because “depressed”), the way they steal your votes is by siphoning them from the largest precincts.

I hate this shit.

Gettin' It Done - 4

I seem to remember something coming from the pie holes of the NeoCons about how the US military leaving Iraq would mean the whole place turns into a giant puddle of shit - as if it wasn't a giant puddle of shit because we were there in the first fuckin' place, but hey, what's a giant puddle of shit between friends?  We are friends again, right?

4. Ended the War in Iraq: Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.

Evolutionary Quickie

I wish this guy's presentation was a bit more engaging, but at least his explanations are (almost) always easy to follow.

Interesting

Ok - it's Bloomberg and all, but there's a lot of "bidness guys" who understand the basics of the science and they know it's real etc, but who still feel trapped in the closet.  Maybe this gives them a way out.  It's a start anyway.