No return to certain parts of the Clinton era, please.

For articles on Obama's next Cabinet try the CabinetNewsLadder They are pretty complete.

Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary? Uh, not unless he answers a GREAT deal of questions? Josh Marshall sums it up more concisely

And I don't think that I linked in this excellent article on precisely how much ppl like Greenspan and Rubin and their adherence to Ayn Randian had to do with the economic meltdown Hint: They refused to regulate derivatives cause they thought that the bankers would regulate themselves. (Pause for loud and long LOLS) I especially love this part:

The article goes on to account how, in 1997, Greenspan got into a spat with the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She wanted to regulate derivatives; he didn't. Greenspan joined forces with Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy, Lawrence Summers, to resist her plan.

“Greenspan told Brooksley that she essentially didn’t know what she was doing and she’d cause a financial crisis,” said Michael Greenberger, who was a senior director at the commission. “Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street.”

“All of the forces in the system were arrayed against it,” [Rubin] said. “The industry certainly didn’t want any increase in these requirements. There was no potential for mobilizing public opinion.”

Yes, that's right, there's bonus sexism in this tale.

Quite. See, if you are a woman, and you don't play tennis and lunch with the guys, your educated, common-sensical opinion doesn't count. And Rubin? That was one of the dumbest excuses I'd EVER heard. The industry doesn't want to regulate itself, so, lets not? Really?

Greenspan has publicly admitted that this idea of human nature is BS. As to whether he's apologized to Ms. Brookesly? That's unknown. Rubin's thoughts on the matter haven't been recorded either.

Thanks giandujakiss ! As a matter of fact, I'll be stealing another omnibus of articles from you, an update on the financial crisis: How incompetent is Secretary Paulson? The depths cannot be plumbed My fav part of this?

over at AIG:

The American International Group is rapidly running through $123 billion in emergency lending provided by the Federal Reserve, raising questions about how a company claiming to be solvent in September could have developed such a big hole by October. Some analysts say at least part of the shortfall must have been there all along, hidden by irregular accounting.

Mr. Vickery and other analysts are examining the company’s disclosures for clues that the cushion was threadbare and that company officials knew they had major losses months before the bailout.

Tantalizing support for this argument comes from what appears to have been a behind-the-scenes clash at the company over how to value some of its derivatives contracts. An accountant brought in by the company because of an earlier scandal was pushed to the sidelines on this issue, and the company’s outside auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, warned of a material weakness months before the government bailout.

The internal auditor resigned and is now in seclusion, according to a former colleague.

Let's pause here. The internal auditor is in. Seclusion.

These accounting questions are of interest not only because taxpayers are footing the bill at A.I.G. but also because the post-mortems may point to a fundamental flaw in the Fed bailout: the money is buoying an insurer — and its trading partners — whose cash needs could easily exceed the existing government backstop if the housing sector continues to deteriorate.

Indeed. May we live in interesting times.

On a more upbeat note, however, giandujakiss links to good things coming down the economic pipeline from the Dems Yeah!

The more you know...No on 8 was REALLY fucking incompetent.

Dan Savage and Anderw Sullivan are having a hissy fit over Prop 8 passing. It was ALL Black America's fault, you see. Never mind that as sparkymonster pointed out:

California is 43.1% white, 35.9% latino or hispanic, and 6.7% black (source). So even if every single black and latino person in the state voted Yes on 8, that doesn't actually equal the 52% who voted for it. And since people of color are not the borg, you know how Prop. 8 passed? White people voted for it. True story!

Never mind that the exit poll they are citing got it dead wrong, they thought it would be DEFEATED, and that raises serious questions as to the accuracy of the whole business. Hell Nate Silver was sending around The ten top reasons you should ignore exit polling and the very first fucking thing was that:

1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

All that's bad enough. But you know what? No on 8? Was fucking incompetent. Like I said before, THEY. DIDN'T ASK. FOR. THEIR. VOTES.

Marital Discord: Why Prop 8 Won

Obama indeed does not favor gay marriage, as he said during the primary, but he also came out emphatically against Prop 8, as a late TV ad by the No on 8 campaign emphasized. Mainstream outlets like the LA Times meticulously countered the other lies as well, but too little, too late. They had taken root in many communities of color, and once lodged, proved difficult to dislodge.

This was always the intent of the Yes on 8 campaign. For years, the California Christian right apparatus, long hampered by their nativism and racism, had been unable to make inroads into the state's brown, yellow and black populations--a demographic goldmine in a state that is more than 50 percent minority and growing. Prop 8 may prove their gold rush. From the very beginning they bought up ad space in Chinese, black, Spanish and Korean media; they hosted massive rallies for ethnic Christians. The Sunday before election day, I went to Los Angeles City Hall for the most celebratory, most diverse rally I have ever attended; it was organized by Yes on 8 Chinese advocates.

But it's only in an organizing vacuum that bald lies and racial pandering find room to thrive. Gay activists, by most accounts, were simply outmaneuvered. Andrea Shorter, a black lesbian volunteer for the No on 8 campaign, told me that the outreach to the African-American community began in earnest a week ago. "What's happened is that there's been an outcry from communities of color, including African-American communities, who say, 'Include us!' Now there's a GOTV strategy, but for some it seems last minute," she said in an interview before the election. Another No on 8 activist, Karin Wang, told me at the City Hall rally that when Asian Pacific Islander groups went to buy ads in Chinese and Korean newspapers, they were informed that the Yes on 8 had been renting space for weeks.

Funny that. ladyjax has more

(no subject)

Rachel Maddow interviews Cory Brooker, mayor of Newark.

A Republican Says It Better Than I Ever Could

1. People are not afraid of Socialism, it is an acceptable political outcome.

Well, be honest. The voters have long supported socialism. This country was dominated for 50 years by the New Deal coalition, remember? The Reagan and Gingrich revolutions were never against the New Deal. They were against the Great Society. Thus, people have never opposed socialism for themselves. People have for decades wanted free public schools, grants to go to college, retirements, medical care, money to keep their businesses and farms afloat, etc. So in other words, Americans supported the socialism that benefitted [sic] them and people like them. They just opposed it for the other guy. The Great Society was easy pickings, because it went to a small segment of society that, let's face it, most people didn't like anyway.

...

But the GOP never even seriously tried to cut off the spigot of the huge amounts of money going to "real Americans." By contrast, the GOP actually gave away more money to their constituents than the Democrats ever dreamed of giving to their inner city base. Remember when Democrats were pointing out that "red state America" was a net economic drain while "blue state America" paid more taxes than they spent? It was 100% true, yet the next GOPer who stood up before his "real American" constituents of suburbanites and middle Americans and told them that they needed to get off welfare and stand on their own two feet would be the first. No, that was a message for the folks in Barack Obama's inner city, not the Iowans whose economic boom the past few years has been totally due to the government funded ethanol industry.MORE

The "Center right country" and "no mandate" BULLSHIT Myth.

Think Progress also brings us this video, pointing out many of the numbskulls who are advancing this argument.

This is why I don't watch television. Because practically everytime I turn it on, some pundit is spouting partisan Republican rhetoric as fact, and like as not, some numbskull Democrat is stabbing progressivism and the idea of liberalism in the back as well.

First things first. When people like Robert Novak start talking about how Obama doesn't have a mandate? Go thou to Think Progress and refresh yourself on his hypocrisy...

Right-wing pundit Robert Novak climbed aboard the bandwagon, writing today that neither the large Democratic gains nor Obama’s sweeping popular and electoral vote margins were proof of a mandate:

The first Democratic Electoral College landslide in decades did not result in a tight race for control of Congress. […]
[Obama] may have opened the door to enactment of the long-deferred liberal agenda, but he neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.

Novak dismissed Democratic congressional gains, noting that they “fell several votes short of the 60-vote filibuster-proof Senate.” However, in 2004 — as President Bush crowed about his “political capital” — Novak didn’t hesitate to agree that Bush’s comparatively narrow victory was proof of a conservative mandate, in a CNN interview just days after the election:

Q: Bob Novak, is 51 percent of the vote really a mandate?
NOVAK: Of course it is. It’s a 3.5 million vote margin. But the people who are saying that it isn’t a mandate are the same people who were predicting that John Kerry would win. … So the people who say there’s not a mandate want the president, now that he’s won, to say, Oh, we’re going to accept the liberalism that the — that the voters rejected. But Mark, this is a conservative country, and it showed it on last Tuesday. [11/06/04]

As of now, Obama’s popular vote margin stands at 7,401,289 — more than twice Bush’s 2004 vote margin — and Obama has netted 63 more electoral votes than Bush in 2004. In his column, Novak dismissed the Democratic Senate gains this year, even though they have netted five seats for a total of 56, with three more seats potentially up for grabs. By contrast, the conservatives’ so-called 2004 “mandate” netted only four new seats for a total of 55.

( More ammunition needed? )

HEH HEH HEH HEH

North Carolina is OURS.

Change.gov is now online

Change.gov provides resources to better understand the transition process and the decisions being made as part of it. It also offers an opportunity to be heard about the challenges our country faces and your ideas for tackling them. The Obama Administration will reflect an essential lesson from the success of the Obama campaign: that people united around a common purpose can achieve great things...

got that? we the people have a voice after all. go use it!


I can see! Everything is sharp! No more fuzzy looking street signs. No more squinting! Glasses rock!

Dad's music

A Whiter Shade of Pale-Procol Harum

Simon & Garfunkel play Sound Of Silence

Simon & Garfunkel - Scarborough Fair

From the department of False Equivalencies

In today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd reveals (as always) standard Beltway thinking by writing that Barack Obama "has the chance to make the White House pristine again" -- somethings, she says, we haven't had for 16 years:

But the monuments have lost their luminescence in recent years.
How could the White House be classy when the Clintons were turning it into Motel 1600 for fund-raising, when Bill Clinton was using it for trysts with an intern and when he plunked a seven-seat hot tub with two Moto-Massager jets on the lawn?
How could the White House be inspiring when W. and Cheney were inside making torture and domestic spying legal, fooling Americans by cooking up warped evidence for war and scheming how to further enrich their buddies in the oil and gas industry? . . . .
How can the National Archives, home of the Constitution, be as momentous if the president and vice president spend their days redacting the Constitution?

These things are not equal. They're not even comparable. But in her desperation to establish false equivalencies -- the central article of faith in the modern journalist's religion -- Dowd argues that Clinton dirtied the White House by having oral sex and liking hot tubs and, likewise, George Bush also dirtied it by destroying the Constitution, torturing people, invading and destroying another country based on false pretenses and spying on American citizens (and, just by the way, Bush and Cheney weren't "making torture and domestic spying legal"; they were doing those things in violation of the law).
The stain Bill Clinton left on Monica Lewinsky's dress isn't remotely comparable to the stain George Bush and Dick Cheney have left on the Constitution, our political values and our national image -- to say nothing of the indelible bloodstains on their hands. But for so long, Beltway journalists have treated those things as though they're equal; more accurately, they were -- and remain -- far more offended by the former than the latter. To this day, David Broder still insists that Bill Clinton should have been forced to resign over the sex he had with Monica Lewinsky, whereas nothing that George Bush did merits removal from office or even resignation, and especially not criminal investigation and prosecution (holding lawbreaking Bush officials accountable is to commit the ultimate Beltway sin of "criminalizing our politics").MORE

This pic of John Barrowman? KILLS ME.

OUT 100


Photographed by Lee Jenkins in London

Klaus Wowereit mayor of Berlin and his partner Jörn Kubicki who attend official events as a couple

Gay celebrity boyfriends

More Gay Celebrity boyfriends

The Pride Flag flew at halfmast with a black flag over it in San Franciso today.

Via: Daily Kos

GAHHHHHHHH

WHAT in the fucking HELL has LJ done to my fucking profile page!!!!!!! Its completely disgusting, DAMMIT! And the fucl do they mean user feedback isn't the only important factor? Without users, what the hell would they think this would be? I am a paying customer, dammit and I am sick of this shit. Tell them to stop fucking around with this shit please!!

In which ppl get hoist by their own petards

I've been writing about the racial divide on gay rights and HIV since 1990; there has not been much progress since. And there are still some gay black leaders whose refusal to accept that gays have a huge problem with the African-American population has impeded efforts to foment change.

Andrew Sullivan.

Funny that. Cause I'm sure that there are many minority leaders who would retort that there many LGBT leaders who refuse to accept that their racism and stupidity is splintering the LGBT movement, and this is leading to heartbreaking results for one and all. Now ever since BI read Nate Silver's reasons why exit polls tend to be inaccurate, I have stopped trusting them. But I am getting very tired of several white liberal gay bloggers talking a bag of BS today. So I am about ready to hit someone in the head repeatedly with the number crunched result of their own exit poll as teased out by biascut Lets pretend no POC had not voted in this election at all Take a good look at the results:

Arizona
The ban on gay marriage would still have passed with 55% of the vote.

Arkansas
The ban on gay couples adopting would still have passed with 58% of the vote.

California
Prop 8 would have been defeated by only a small margin of 51% to 49%.

Colorado
There is currently no exit poll data on race, but 51% of Colorado voters voted to end Affirmative Action. According to the most recent census estimate, Colorado is 90% white.

Florida
The ban on gay marriage would still have passed with 60% of the vote.

Nebraska
There is currently no exit poll data on race, but 58% of Nebraskans voted to end Affirmative Action. According to the most recent census estimate, Nebraska is 91.5% white

( Read more.. )