Today we take a quick peek at the state of Journalism. Yes, we have to.

alicublog read The Washington Journal so we wouldn't have to.

Driftglass wondered what John Derbyshire has been up to since leaving the NRO. Oh, my.

Badtux the Snarky Penguin tells us about the joy of capitalism and that it has nothing to do with the big banks.

Bonus Track: Little Bang Theory proves to us it is spring. Thanks, we needed that!

Round-up by Tengrain of Mock, Paper, Scissors who also blogs at Dependable Renegade. Send tips to: mbru@crooksandliars.com

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Credit: Blue Gal

Grover Norquist as "The Dictator." Open Thread below....

Man, this song's so good. What are some of your soul favorites?

Soul Sister
	Price: $0.99 (As of 05/15/12 05:38 pm details)

Most observers are missing the point. When CEO Jamie Dimon announced that JPMorgan Chase had incurred at least $2 billion in losses from risky, unsecured, derivatives-types trading, it uncovered the scandal of our time once and for all.

The Chase disaster gives us a much-needed glimpse into our corrupt political system, its Wall Street paymasters, and the media voices that allow people like Dimon to escape scrutiny.

The JPMorgan Chase story is also the story behind the financial crisis that has thrown millions of people out of work. It's the story behind our ever-growing wealth inequity. It's the story behind Washington's inability to prosecute criminal bankers, regulate reckless ones, and propose the economic solutions the rest of us urgently need.

Predictably, the pundits who aid and abet people like Jamie Dimon are dismissing this story's importance, pointing out that $2 billion (it could become much more) pales against the $19 billion in profit Chase reported last year.

But it was potentially $2 billion earned through crime. And more importantly, this story isn't just about Chase's errors and crimes. It's much bigger than that.

Besides, $19 billion in a single year? That's a big part of the story, too.

The Case Against Chase, its CEO, and its accomplices is too big to cover all at once. Here are the aspects of this under-reported story we plan to address in the days and weeks to come.

The Firm

Depending on the day and the measurement used, JPMorgan Chase is now the largest or second-largest bank in the world. Its Japan operation alone has been cited by that nation's regulators as a systemic risk because of its size.

If Chase began to collapse because of risky betting, the government would be forced to step in again.

Jamie Dimon knows that. It's a lot easier to gamble when you know somebody else will be forced to bail you out if you lose too much.

Chase, like the other mega-banks, has systematically engaged in criminal activity for years. At the same time, it has used its vast wealth to corrupt our political and regulatory systems. And it has been aided and abetted by willing collaborators in the media, every step of the way. It gave up nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees to settle one case alone—that of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County, Alabama.

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I know this isn't the kind of thing we normally cover at C&L, but I thought it was something everyone should see. This is just plain crazy. To allow these kids with multiple concussions to keep playing sports is like playing Russian roulette. The article doesn't mention that the effect of concussions is cumulative—you don't "bounce back." The parents who allow them to play again are derelict in their duty, and so are the schools for assuming that kind of liability on behalf of the already-stressed players.

More importantly, these head injuries are not just a personal problem. They will place a lifelong and costly strain on medical resources, and make it very difficult for these children to be productive adults:

Outwardly, they seem like any other teens, wearing tight, low-rise jeans, black eyeliner, and fluorescent nail polish. But at an age when most kids are obsessing over the newest Twilight movie or who's going to the prom, Casey and her friends commiserate about migraines, memory loss, and problems keeping up in school. They can't tolerate the lights and noise of amusement parks, dances, or movies.

"It's overwhelming. An entire life changed," said Allison Kasacavage, a freshman at Downingtown East High School, sounding wearier than most 15-year-olds. She said she had suffered five concussions, three from soccer, starting at age 12.

After getting elbowed in the head, knocked unconscious, and taking too many headers and colliding with another girl in three separate games over 18 months, "I knew I was done with soccer," she said. "I couldn't go back."

The issue of chronic head injuries for big-name, highly paid pro football and hockey players has been in the headlines recently, punctuated by worries of a link to this month's suicide of former NFL superstar Junior Seau. But what several experts have described as a public-health crisis among young female athletes has been flying under the radar.

According to a study of high school soccer players in the Journal of Athletic Training, girls sustained reported concussions 68 percent more often than boys did. Girls soccer trailed only football when it came to the total number of concussions among young athletes, according to the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

As experts labor to understand the reasons for this, they are alarmed at what they see as lax or inadequate rules and poor judgment in letting girls like Casey and her friends back on the field so soon after a serious head injury.

"It was shocking in this day and age to see that kids are playing with overt symptoms after multiple concussions and recent blows to the head," said Philip Schatz, a professor at St. Joseph's University and an expert in head injuries who learned of the cluster of cases in Downingtown after it was reported last week on NBC's Rock Center With Brian Williams.

Schatz noted that most school soccer programs have concussion protocols that require athletes to leave a game, take off a week or longer, and get an independent medical evaluation. Thirty-three states, including New Jersey, have laws mandating concussion education for coaches, but that doesn't always apply to travel and rec programs.

"If you were talking about adults and mild heart attacks, only one would require a complete change in lifestyle," Schatz said. "Here we are subjecting our children to multiple traumatic brain injuries and not changing their behavior."

Ron Paul has announced he is ending his campaign ...kinda. He's going to stop spending money on primaries, which is a little like Kim Kardashian announcing she's going to stop spending all that time thinking about organic chemistry. It's a switch, but only kinda sorta.

And we KNOW, Ron Paul people. It's all because Ron Paul is not just a candidate, he's an idea. Or a movement. Or whatever, he's certainly never going to be President of the United States. But he will persist.

The animating force behind Ron Paul's endurance has never been campaign spending, it is indeed an idea. A really shitty idea, promoted by Right Wingers as a free market utopia without the horrible burdens of stable currency or child labor laws.

The originator of this idea is occasionally enthusiastically embraced by conservatives as providing a consistent philosophical basis for shitty policy. Her name is Ayn Rand, and people like Paul Ryan just love, love, love her ... until they remember that she hates their religion and thinks it's silly. Then the walk back begins.

But having introduced Rand in the upper hierarchy of the Republican Party, she may not be so easy to dismiss. The ghost—or zombie, if you will—of Ayn Rand lingers in the Republican party, a reminder that it is a party with deep divisions—and policy based on ideas that don't just contradict each other, but are downright willing to fight it out in a back alley at night.

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I'm not sure what's gotten into Chris Matthews' drinking water lately, but we're seeing him be a bit harsher with Republicans who come on his show and just try to spew their talking points unchallenged. Matthews and Rep. Barney Frank grilled right wing bigot Tony Perkins last week over his stance on homosexuality and gay marriage, and this Monday, Matthews got a bit tougher with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers with her playing the role as GOP apologist for her party's continued attacks on women than we saw during his last interview with her.

He challenged her support of the Republican version of the Violence Against Women Act and it was nice to see him end an interview by telling her that her views are going to be pretty hard to swallow with the voters in her district, instead of praising her as one of the new, "great leaders" in her party as he did when she was blaming Democrats for creating "all this war on women stuff" during his interview with her a couple of months ago.

Matthews' other guest was Rep. Gwen Moore, who we posted about here, who is a sponsor of the Democrats' version of the bill, and who laid out very plainly why there should be protections extended to same sex couples, Native Americans and immigrants no matter what their legal status as long as they're cooperating with authorities. I think Moore made a pretty compelling case for why the law should be extended to all of these groups during this segment.

McMorris Rodgers on the other hand, kept attempting to take the debate back to the fact that there are no federal laws legalizing same-sex couples. I was happy to hear Matthews' response to that which was a similar one I might have made myself if asked and basically summed up with this statement when McMorris Rodgers tried to call those protections "a side issue."

MATTHEWS: Well, they`re not side issues if you`re getting beat up by your partner. That`s not a side issue, it`s your life.

Thank you Chris Matthews. I was happy to see him take her on and call her out for the fact that they don't want to protect women against violence because heaven forbid those protections might include groups they want to discriminate against. The GOP has entrenched itself to the point where they are so anti-gay rights and anti-immigrant that they'd rather tank an entire bill that protects women than heaven forbid vote for something which includes those groups and protections for any of them as well. And that in spite of, as Rep. Moore noted, the fact that those recommendations for those protections were made by those in law enforcement, the DOJ and the FBI.

I find it sad and disheartening to listen to the likes of McMorris Rodgers make excuses for her party being on the wrong side of bigotry, sexism, hatred and allowing for violence to escape prosecution if you believe the person the act was committed against is a second class citizen.

I know I should not be surprised by the fact that we've got women willing to make embarrassments of our sex by being willing to vote for issues that harm women as McMorris has done, but it doesn't make me any less disgusted with her ilk. She is doing as much damage to women making strides towards equal rights and protections under the law as hate monger Rush Limbaugh. She's actually worse, because she does it under the guise of pretending most women don't care if other women are abused and giving those claims credence in our corporate media.

Transcript below the fold.

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Televangelist Pat Robertson may think Mormonism is a cult, but he has given his most vocal endorsement of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney yet because "you don't have Jesus running."

Robertson began Monday's edition of CBN's The 700 Club by highlighting Romney's commencement address to Liberty University, a Christian school founded by Baptist Minister Jerry Falwell.

"His opposition to gay marriage scored big points with this audience," CBN's Terry Meeuwsen noted.

"Looks like the people who were worried about his Mormonism, that crowd is diminishing somewhat," Robertson agreed. "The question is if you have two candidates, you don't have Jesus running against somebody else. You have Obama running against Romney."

Although Robertson has called Romney "an outstanding Christian," he had previously declined the to offer an endorsement of the Republican candidate, who a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. CBN's website lists Mormonism as an example of a "cult," arguing that "the Mormons are far from the truth."

Earlier this year, Robertson came to the conclusion that Romney would not "interject the Mormon religion into the way he governs."

An endorsement of the current Christian White House resident is apparently out of the questions because the TV preacher worries that President Barack Obama may secretly be a Muslim.

"I don’t know if he was trained in a madrassa, one of those Muslim schools, but nevertheless that is his inclination," Robertson said in 2011.

But Robertson's endorsement may not even matter because earlier this year, the televangelist revealed that God had already told him who the next president would be -- and it's a secret.

“I think He showed me the next president, but I’m not supposed to talk about that,” Robertson explained. “So I’ll leave you in the dark — probably just as well — I think I’ll know who it will be.”

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Former Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino on Monday said that President Barack Obama only ended the "charade" that he did not support same sex marriage because his campaign wanted to use "crass politics" to divert attention from the economy.

Over the weekend, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat charged that "the Obama White House has consistently sought to change the subject from the unemployment rate to contraception, or immigration, or now even gay marriage."

"Obama is currently running for re-election as an opponent of sexism, homophobia and social reaction in all its forms," Douthat wrote, arguing that Obama should instead be focusing on "how Mitt Romney wants to take away your retirement security to pay for tax cuts for the rich."

Perino on Monday called Douthat a "fantastic columnist" with "keen insight."

"All of these things the campaign has come up with on the Democrat side have lasted sometimes 48 hours, sometimes a full two weeks-- you think of the contraception controversy -- but then there's another one, one on top of the other," she explained. "But still, the most important thing to every voter is the economy. So they might on the Democrat side -- they might win the little skirmishes, but what you want is to win the war."

Fox News co-host Brian Kilmeade wondered if Romney's gains in a recent survey by conservative polling organization Rasmussen could be attributed to Obama's support for same sex marriage.

"The people who support same sex marriage were probably going to vote for President Obama anyway because they knew that there was a charade," Perino replied. "There's very few people who are undecided at this point." (A recent AP-GfK poll found that about a quarter of voters were undecided or could be persuaded to change their minds.)

"The crass politics of the left – and, in particular, you see it right through that gay marriage announcement last week," she continued. "Even though it meant a lot to a lot of people, but then 90 minutes later the fundraising appeal. Within 24 hours, suggesting Mitt Romney is backwards on equality, when President Obama had the same position 24 hours before."

"This is exceedingly political, and people see it, they notice it and I think they’re thinking, 'Do we want four more years of that, or do we need to change direction on the economy.'"

(h/t: Mediaite)

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Ah yes... if we're going to have a discussion about President Obama and his recent announcement that he's "evolved" on the issue of gay marriage, who better to bring on than someone who's had a long history of anti-LGBT bigotry like Pat Buchanan? That's exactly what we got this Monday when Buchanan appeared on Megyn Kelly's show on Fox News, America Live.

Although I can't say some of the other networks are doing much better since I can't seem to get his fellow bigots Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, Ralph Reed or Bishop Harry Jackson, among others, off of my television screen either. It wouldn't bother me so much to have them on if they were actually being challenged on their views, but as Media Matters noted in their post from Sunday, with the exception of Chris Matthews, that generally has not been the case.

Here's now Fox Insider portrayed the interview above: Pat Buchanan: Joe Biden ‘Dragged Barack Obama Out of the Closet’:

Pat Buchanan, who ran against former President George H. W. Bush in 1992 in the GOP primary, joined Megyn Kelly on America Live to talk about possible backlash the president could face.

Buchanan disagrees that President Obama’s public support will help him, saying, “I think that Joe Biden basically dragged Barack Obama out of the closet.” He continued, “I think the president has put his presidency at risk because this is an emotional, cultural, moral issue. And when folks go to the polls the overwhelmingly majority already in 30 states have imposed a ban on homosexual marriage.”

Megyn Kelly recalled Fox News contributor Sally Kohn saying that the vote in North Carolina to ban gay marriage shouldn’t be taken as an indicator of anything because the number of people who turned up to vote was very small. Buchanan responded, “How does that guest of yours explain how it was for example in California in 2008 where Barack Obama was winning in one of the largest margins in history. 52 percent of Californians voted to ban gay marriage, a majority of Hispanics, and 70 percent of African Americans.” [...]

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