Phil Collins - I Don't Care Anymore

I've been hanging out with my 3 year-old niece this week, awaiting the birth of her new baby brother or sister. While the little one remains stubbornly coy about meeting his or her family, I've had the chance to observe my niece and her friends on various playdates and it occurred to me that the Beltway Bubble is a lot like dealing with a toddler: they crave structure and consistency, yet think they are the center of the universe. They are afraid of change, strangers and threats to the power structure as they understand it, although paradoxically they tend to be enthralled with whomever is louder than they are. When anything happens that they feel jeopardizes their protected little world, they melt down. They act out. And they generally make life miserable for all the adults just trying to get things done.

So all this sturm und drang about the "professional left" and the dismissal of attempts at real change is all about the Beltway status quo doing their best toddler-esque meltdown in the face of the unfamiliar. It's also why it's just the same people week after week on these Sunday shows. New voices, different points of view are threatening.

And frankly, I tend to want to say to these Beltway types the same thing I do with my niece: I know this isn't the way you're used to things, but I don't care any more. Don't get me wrong, I say it lovingly and acknowledge her discomfort. But I know what's best and I'm not about to alter that to make comfortable someone who shouldn't be in charge in the first place. Yes, I'm different than my sister in my approach to parenting, but once she got past the initial shock of a different way, my niece has responded positively to this new environment. And so it is the way with the Beltway denizens. We just need an adult in charge who is comfortable enough to assert him/herself and weather the inevitable tantrums. Both the child and the country would be better for it.

ABC's "This Week" - Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.; former Gov. Jon Corzine, D-N.J.; Laura D'Andrea Tyson, member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board; Martin Regalia, chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine; Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa.; Ed Gillespie, former Republican Party chairman.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Gen. David Petraeus, top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Howard Fineman, Norah O'Donnell, Kelly O'Donnell, John Heilemann. Topics: Will Barack Obama's Luck in His Weak GOP Opposition Hold for 2012? What Investigations Would Top the GOP's List if it Won Control of the House This Fall?

CNN's "State of the Union" - Reps. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Peter King, R-N.Y., and Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - So just how troubled IS the U.S. economy? And what can fix it? Fareed asks Jeffrey Sachs, the man the NY Times has called "the most important Economist in the World". And Sachs has answers. Then, it's been a scorcher of a summer in the U.S., one-third of Pakistan is under water, fires burn across Russia and Europe is flooding. What is going on? A panel of climate experts, including Jeffrey Sachs, who is also the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, discuss whether global warming is upon us and what we should -- or shouldn't -- do about it.

"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Jack Reed, D-R.I.; Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

Great ad. I was wondering when the Dems were going to go on the offensive with this Club For Growth wingnut weasel, because Sestak will need all the help he can get against this bozo:

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee launched its first television advertisement of the general election today, introducing former Wall Street derivatives trader and Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey to Pennsylvania voters.

Millionaire Pat Toomey did “pioneering work” with derivatives as a freewheeling Wall Street trader in the 1980s, even praising derivatives as an “enormous good.” After leaving Wall Street, Toomey moved to Washington, where as a Congressman he wrote legislation to weaken oversight of Wall Street, which contributed to the meltdown of our economy. Now, as a Senate candidate, Toomey advocates for the same freewheeling, reckless policies that led to economic collapse, all while taking in more than $1.6 million in campaign contributions from Wall Street and other financial special interests.

“Democrats are not going to let former Wall Street derivatives trader Pat Toomey get away with failing to mention his decades of service to Wall Street,” said DSCC National Press Secretary Deirdre Murphy. “Pennsylvania voters should know that Toomey has fought for Wall Street his entire life, first as a freewheeling derivatives trader, then as a Congressman writing legislation to weaken oversight of Wall Street, and finally as president of the Wall Street-backed Club for Growth. As a Senate candidate, Toomey might be right for Wall Street but he’s flat out wrong for Pennsylvania families.”

Video Clip of the Day

Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson goes Zell Miller on Bill Maher!

Video

Mr Simpson from Wyoming gets a little hot under the collar while being interviewed by Bill Maher.

I think part of his meltdown was that he misunderstood what was going on in the studio.

When it comes to the Wall Street meltdown, just about every financial institution out there is a villain. Then there's Washington Mutual, who may have rewritten the definition of villain by their conduct in the subprime mortgage madness of the past decade.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is beginning hearings today on Washington Mutual's lending practices to make a record on the behaviors that led to Wall Street's meltdown in 2008. Based on what I've read so far, it promises to be explosive.

Levin:

Washington Mutual built a conveyor belt that dumped toxic mortgage assets into the financial system like a polluter dumping poison into a river,” said Levin. “Using a toxic mix of high risk lending, lax controls, and destructive compensation policies, Washington Mutual flooded the market with shoddy loans and securities that went bad. Examining how Washington Mutual operated, and what its insiders were saying to each other, begins to open a window into the troubling mortgage lending and securitization practices that took our economy over a cliff.

Here are some of the revelations you can expect to hear:

• WaMu intentionally lured borrowers qualified for prime mortgages into subprime mortgages, then bundled those with the riskier loans to "spread the risk."
• Over half of the loans made were obtained with fraudulent information.
• The WaMu culture emphasized revenue and production over all else, including prudent lending practices, rewarding employees with trips to Hawaii and the Caribbean for high production.
• Loans were marketed and sold by mortgage brokers who were not employed by WaMu. After funding the loans, WaMu chose the ones most likely to default for packaging as securities to be sold on Wall Street.
• When Washington Mutual executives were made aware of the danger in 2006, their only concern was for how it would make them look, rather than the damage it could do to the financial structure of the country as a whole.

If Washington Mutual were unique, we could listen to these hearings, call for prosecution of those executives who should have been more prudent and banker-like in their dealings and move on. But it wasn't unique. Countrywide Mortgage engaged in similar practices, as did other large banks and lenders across the country, while the rug was pulled out from under the middle class.

I expect the subcommittee hearings to reveal a story of greed, power, privilege and unparalleled arrogance. Senator Levin is carefully making the case for sound financial reform with a consumer protection agency at the center of it.

LA Times:

Levin said the findings showed the need for a new consumer financial protection agency, which Obama has proposed as part of his regulatory overhaul, to stop lenders from preying on borrowers. "The bottom line is that WaMu had poor policies, poor controls, inadequate oversight of its loans [and] turned out toxic mortgages that sunk the bank, devastated homeowners and polluted the financial system like a poison," Levin said. "This was a Main Street bank that got taken in by these Wall Street profits."

Stay tuned. I know I will.

Connecting.the.Dots: Bedtime for Bonzo Bankers

Sadly, No! Ruh Roh, Breitbart's boy reporter has race issues and Andy's having a twitter meltdown. It's Liberal Media Coverage!

Newsifact: Two propaganda outlets censor Obama

A plain blog about politics: Textbook

Economist's View: Inequality and "Guard Labor"

Calitics: Carlyfornia

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Judd Gregg just had a meltdown on MSNBC that came out of nowhere. He's been attacking everything Obama, almost from the minute he turned down a Cabinet post offer from the White House, but his performance today was really weird. The conversation was about spending and, as usual, Gregg was acting like the incredible deficit freak that he is.

Melissa Francis is a CNBC talker who believes just like he does, and for some reason he mistook her for a dirty f*&king hippy and claimed she was setting him up as a man who wants to cut all spending on education. In fact, the only thing people like him and Ron Paul believe will work for America is to cut all government spending and federal programs and then just give tax cuts to the rich.

Then, Contessa Brewer brought up the fact that many economists think that when FDR became a deficit hawk so soon after expanding spending that he helped stop the country's economic growth. She asked him if he thought money from education should be cut, he went off and called them liars.

Gregg: First off, nobody is saying no money for schools, what an absurd statement to make. And what a dishonest statement to make. On its face you're being fundamentally dishonest when you make that type of statement.

Brewer: Senator, you're going to be asked to cut certain programs from government if you're on the Senate banking committee. Which programs -- just tell us -- would you cut?

--

Gregg: And then it gets misrepresented by people like yourself who say they are going to, if you do any of this stuff you're going to end up not funding education. I mean that statement alone is the most irresponsible statement I've heard from a reporter probably in a month.

Brewer: It wasn't a statement, it was a question.

Gregg deliberately misconstrued what they said, and the conversation went downhill from there. Gregg acted like a typical conservative bully around women, and if they were both men he would not have tried to call them liars. Meanwhile, Contessa ended the interview very professionally. He owes Brewer and Francis an apology for his behavior.

And Digby explains why the question about cutting education is based in reality.

I'll let Gregg's tantrum stand on it's own. But I would just point out that it's not absurd in the least to ask if Republicans would cut education. Indeed, it's absurd to suggest otherwise:

President Ronald Reagan promised during the 1980 presidential election to eliminate the Department of Education as a cabinet post,[1] but he was not able to do so with a Democratic House of Representatives. In the 1982 State of the Union Address, he pledged:

“

The budget plan I submit to you on Feb. 8 will realize major savings by dismantling the Department of Education.[2]

”

Throughout the 1980s, the abolition of the Department of Education was a part of the Republican Party platform, but the administration of President George H. W. Bush declined to implement this idea.

So, not only was Brewer right to ask whether Gregg planned to cut education as part of a deficit reduction plan, there has been a very longstanding belief among conservatives that they should not be funding education at all.

If there was anyone at fault for spreading misinformation and lies on television it's Gregg with his irresponsible deficit fearmongering and Hooverite prescriptions for the economy. God help us if he and his ilk actually get their way.

And you can't help but scratch your head when you think that a year ago, when everyone knew that the economy was in deep trouble and would need a lot of stimulus, the administration actually named this guy to be Commerce Secretary, a department which Gregg had voted to eliminate as well. That tells you a lot about their judgment at the time.

Digby wrote up the full transcript:

Continue reading »

Really, doesn't this whole thing have the feel of a show trial? "Let the people have their moment and then we can get back to business as usual." I figure, if this is what they're actually admitting, God only knows what else they were up to:

WASHINGTON — Goldman Sachs' chief acknowledged Wednesday that the investment bank engaged in "improper" behavior in 2006 and 2007 when it made huge bets on a housing downturn while peddling as safe more than $40 billion in securities backed by risky U.S. home loans.

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's chairman and chief executive, made the surprising concession at the opening hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a 10-member panel that Congress created to investigate and lay out for the public the causes of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Blankfein and senior officers of three other of the nation's most prominent banks told the panel that serious flaws in their risk models and business practices contributed to Wall Street's meltdown and the massive taxpayer bailouts that followed. The commission also heard testimony that the banks and quasi-government mortgage giant Fannie Mae recklessly took on as much as 95 times more risk than they could cover, and that Wall Street excels "at pulling the wool over the eyes of the American people."

Blankfein faced the toughest questioning.

Commission Chairman Phil Angelides, a former California state treasurer, warned Blankfein that he'd be "brutally honest" in his questioning. He asked why Goldman thought it was necessary to take out protection against investment-grade mortgage securities it was selling by purchasing insurance-like contracts known as credit-default swaps. Angelides likened it to selling a car with knowledge it had faulty brakes and then taking out an insurance policy on the buyer.

"I do think the behavior is improper, and we regret . . . the consequence that people have lost money in it," Blankfein told Angelides.

I don't want Blankfein's feigned regret. I want him to have to live the rest of his life eating ramen noodles and living in a cardboard box on the street, just like the people who lost their life savings have to do.

Until Wednesday, Goldman had insisted that it was merely managing its risks when it placed "hedges," in the form of wagers against the housing market, various venues including in secret offshore deals, with insurance giant American International Group and on a private London exchange.

In November, McClatchy reported exclusively that Goldman failed to tell investors about its contrary bets while selling $39 billion in risky mortgage securities it had issued, and another $18 billion in similar bonds issued by other firms. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress are investigating Goldman's swap dealings, said knowledgeable people who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

While conceding that its contrary bets were improper, Blankfein said that in most cases Goldman took those positions to offset bets it had underwritten for clients seeking to wager on a housing downturn.

Paul Krugman today gives an impassioned refresher on how deregulation of the banking industry led to the Great Depression, notes the Republicans' complete denial of the need for present-day regulation:

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform, Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Let’s hope so. For one thing is clear: if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it.

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Bill O'Reilly is such a narcissist that he didn't bother discussing President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech -- which was one of the most newsworthy items of the day yesterday -- until the second half of his show. Nope, first on his list of priorities was to rant and rave about a fictional TV show that dared to have a character who openly called out O'Reilly and his conservative colleagues for the hatemongering nativists they really are.

That's all it takes to set off patented BillO Rampage. 'Law and Order' is just out of control for O'Reilly, and the show's creator, Dick Wolf, is his target.

L&O: Garrison, Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, all of them. They are like a cancer spreading ignorance and hate. They have convinced folks that immigrants are the problem, not corporations that failed to pay a living wage, or a broken health care system.

O'Reilly: That is defamatory.

Bill, this is not reality. Then again, Bill believes George C. Scott's portrayal of Patton was real too. BillO then proceeds to play a few select clips from 2005 and earlier where he actually sounded (albeit ever so briefly) like he was defending poor illegal immigrants on his show. Sorry Bill, we know better, and so does Geraldo Rivera. I guess he forgot this meltdown between the two over BillO's vilification of illegals in the country.

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Here's a flashback from Apr 04, 2007:

GERALDO: "Cool your jets! It has nothing to do with illegal aliens...it has to do with drunk driving! Don't obscure a tragedy to make a cheap political point. It is a cheap political point and you know it!!"

As Silent Patriot noted, Bill did the same thing with the tragic Bronx fire just the month before. He just loves exploiting these isolated incidents to, as Geraldo says, to make "cheap political points."

Back then, Oliver Willis pointed out: "A young girl was tragically killed by a drunk driver. But this was not enough for O'Reilly. Instead, because the criminal was an illegal alien he added this incident to his ongoing crusade against the brown people. Luckily Geraldo was on the show and he - to his credit - called out O'Reilly's xenophobia for exactly what it was. This drove Bill O'Reilly insane. I was almost certain he was going to reach across the table and hit Geraldo."

Ah, but really, he's a nice guy now. Really.

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Do ya think? Not only did Anita Dunn take a really strong stand for President Obama over the Roger Ailes run FOX Noise Propaganda Network, she also called out the conservative-teabagger movement in its entirety.

Dunn: A week ago many conservative commentators had been rejoicing in the fact, celebrating in the fact that the United States didn't get the Olympics, one week later they seem to be somewhat bitter at the fact that an American President was awarded the Nobel peace prize. So I think people will draw their own conclusions abut the reflexive negativity on the part of some commentators regardless of what happens...

Dunn held back no punches and stated fact. That's nice to see.

Howard Kurtz was pretty comical with his questions, but he was trying to provide some pushback, I guess.

KURTZ: You were quoted this week in Time Magazine as saying of Fox News, it's opinion journalism masquerading as news. What do you mean, "masquerading"?

See what I mean? But he did have to ask that.

DUNN: Well, you know, Howie, I think if we went back a year ago to the fall of 2008, to the campaign, that, you know, it was a time that this country was in two wars, that we'd had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election, what you would have seen would have been that the biggest story, the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and something called Acorn, when the reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.

Yep, that sums up FOX Noise. Then she delivered the knockout punch.

Think Progress writes:

Last month, President Obama appeared on five Sunday morning talk shows, including Univision’s Al Punto. He rejected Fox, however. Dunn revealed this morning that Obama did not appear on Fox because of its reflexive, partisan opposition to Obama. Obama will go on Fox in the future, Dunn said, but when he goes on, “he’s going on to debate the opposition.”

And then after Kurtz asked her if the president would go on FOX ever again, she said this too:

Dunn: That when he goes on FOX, he understands he's not going on, it really isn't a news network at this point, he's going to debate the opposition and that's fine.

The opposition, I loved that.

Howard asked someone from FOX to appear on Reliable Sources, but they refused and instead issued their usual statement. They'd rather have BillO speak to his audience than have anybody debate the facts -- especially, of course, on another network. FOX gives their usual argument that while they do have news, people really rely on their opinion programs. That's stunning really. MSNBC has their lefty hosts too, but during the day, you'll hear all the news and not MSNBC's opinion version of the news.

Kurtz did his best to find a few reporters that he thought weren't corrupted by Ailes so he mentioned Major Garrett. Do you think he's fair...Please say he's fair...Oh please oh please oh please. And Anita then calmly explained why they didn't go on Chris Wallace. Good for her.

And I told Major quite honestly that we had told Chris Wallace that having fact-checked an administration guest on his show -- something I've never seen a Sunday show do. And, Howie, you can show me examples of where Sunday shows have fact-checked previous weeks' guests, and I'd be happy to see those. We asked Chris, for an example, where he had done that to anybody besides somebody from the administration in the year 2009. And we're still waiting to hear from him.

She didn't stop there.

Dunn: Let's be realistic here, Howie. They are widely viewed as, you know, a part of the Republican Party. Take their talking points, put them on the air. Take their opposition research, put them on the air, and that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network they way CNN is.

Kurtz did his best to try and get her to differentiate between the Beck's show and their little news nuggets, and she wouldn't back down. Where's the John Ensign coverage? she asks Howie. Hmmm, you won't see it much -- if at all -- on FOX. And that's only one example out of thousands.