Sarah Palin:

She touched on climate change, saying that her skepticism has been proven by several recent controversies and that money shouldn't be spent on "pie-in-the-sky, snake-oil ideas."

The vocal opponent of health care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.

"We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada," she said. "And I think now, isn't that ironic."

Yes, ironic that you rail against affordable health care for U.S. citizens and against the evils of socialized medicine, while you and your family steal services from the socialized medicine services in a neighboring country.  Her use of the word "hustle" is apt.  What lack of self-awareness could even lead this awful person to share her little grift publicly?  And she was nearly the vice president of the United States of America.  Ho. Lee. Shit.

I just finished watching the above video, and I started to look at the scene: scratched-in graphiti'd walls, shredded, dirty, disgusting couch, but the really priceless, too-good-to-be-contrived elements are:

1. array of comic books, in insipid fan layout, with the top one being Tom & Jerry
2. girl is playing with her pet rat.  Occasionally the rat sits peacefully on the coffee table, near the Tom & Jerry comic book, scratching its fleas
3. to the left of the guy is a plant of the species cannabis sativa
4. he has a large tattoo involving little wood sprites.

No one could ever intentionally put this scene together if they tried.  Christopher Guest would weep at its beauty.

Matt Taiibi explains again how the Bank Bailout merely reinforced the perverse incentives that got the global economy into its current catastrophe.  I liked the summation:

Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they've been scammed. They call it the "True Believer Syndrome." That's sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn't so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn't matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn't going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it's also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.

That's why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. "The most valuable part of the bailout," says Rep. Sherman, "was the implicit guarantee that they're Too Big to Fail." Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures. And what should really freak everyone out is the fact that Wall Street immediately started skimming off its own rescue money. If the bailouts validated anew the crooked psychology of the bubble, the recent profit and bonus numbers show that the same psychology is back, thriving, and looking for new disasters to create.

The most charitable characterization of Barack Obama's buy-in to this perversity is that he is a True Believer, that throwing good money after bad will somehow allow us to smoothly transition to a sane economic model.  But, in fact, all he and his ex-Goldman bots have done is throw the U.S. Treasury onto the all-consuming fires of the Wall St. greed monsters.  As long as this cohort (Geithner, Blankfein, Dimon, et. al.) is empowered with taxpayer resources, we the people will not see real economic prosperity again.

More chronicles from Southern culture:

[Georgia State Representative Daniel Stout's] campaign Web site touts his conservative, pro-family bona fides. “I believe Paulding County wants someone who will stand strong for the conservative principles we’ve always believed in … lower taxes, limited government, personal responsibility, and valuing Life from the womb until natural death,” he says.

But, as the writer Tom Crawford of Capitol Impact noted this week, Stout “has been compelled to address a personal incident from 10 years ago: he had an affair with his first wife’s mother while his first wife was pregnant with their daughter. Stout and his first wife subsequently divorced.”

Your wife is pregnant, so you start fooling around with her mother.  While this is all known to voters, run for office in Georgia; you get elected. 

"Strong conservative principles we've always believed in."  Ga hilk.

The Magna Carta (Great Charter of Freedoms) was written 795 years ago, and the Charter of Liberties, 115 years before that.  Together, they represented a breakthrough in the shared belief that human beings are born with certain inalienable rights, and that those who wield power over others are constrained by laws that embody these ideals.  In short, humans agreed that the will of the law stood higher than that of any emperor, king or president.  Over the last millenium, the codification of these ideas has defended countless millions of human beings from exploitation, abuse and murder.

Fast forward to the year 2010, and one can see that a cancer is spreading through human society that threatens to undo what is perhaps humanity's greatest single accomplishment.  Patients Zero and One in this growing pandemic are just your garden-variety government lawyers, who go by the names of John Yoo and Jay Bybee.  They were tasked by their bosses, our modern monsters Dick Cheney and George Bush, to write clever memos that essentially negate the basic principles of the Magna Carta and the hundreds, if not thousands, of laws that have been written based on it.  Essentially, these memos act as permission slips to the Executive to perform any otherwise illegal act, including torture and murder, as long as the Executive says it believes these otherwise illegal acts are "necessary."

It is not surprising to me that such an infinite feedback loop between monsters and their lawyers could come to pass.  After all, voters have been electing megalomaniacal mental midgets for a very long time, who always seem to think "they know best."  Even after resigning in disgrace, Richard Nixon freely admitted that he believed that "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal."  I believe that Nixon sincerely believed these words.  What better example would be needed than this to automatically disprove the very idea?

Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer said on Friday night that it would be impossible to prosecute Cheney or others who authorized torture, because they did so based on legal opinions from their lawyers.  As a matter of current law, I have no basis to disagree with Spitzer.  But what I can say is that this is precisely the problem.  We have a president and an attorney general who are merely continuing the policies of the previous administration, and have repeatedly blocked attempts to hold them legally accountable for torture, indefinite detention without trial, and illegal eavesdropping on innocent citizens. To them, this would be "looking backward."  Newsflash: "accountability for past wrongs" is semantically identical to "looking backward."  (Oh, how easily we are manipulated by language.)

And I'm sure that, like Richard Nixon, Barack Obama thinks he "knows best."

It would appear that Americans only know how to fight for their right to party, and are resigned to live with a profound loss of civil rights, until such time as it interferes with their access to Doritos, Fox News or porn.

Then, look out.

By the way, here is a fascinating and apt comparison between the anti-human-rights disease carriers in American and their doppelgangers in the Mideast.  Ta-Nehisi Coates is an amazing and insightful writer, I might add.

I flew to San Francisco for a conference about eight years ago, and standing at the hotel's concierge desk was this man, indignantly complaining about something or other, sprinkled with "Don't you know who I am?" protestations.  Clearly his cheeks needed kissing, and he wasn't going to take no for an answer.  This fellow was Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.  Today I learned that he's not only a whiny rich guy with more ego than courtesy, it appears that he is also an adulterer, of a similar stripe to Tiger Woods and classic Southern pretty boy John Edwards.

Why is it that very successful men often turn out to be such narcissistic pigs?  Is it inconceivable that, having achieved professional and material heights, you could just be grateful for your success and kind to the people around you, especially your own damn spouses?

From Balkinization:

Instead, Margolis argues that, judging by (among other things) a review of D.C. bar rules, the standard for attorney misconduct is set pretty damn low, and is only violated by lawyers who (here I put it colloquially) are the scum of the earth. Lawyers barely above the scum of the earth are therefore excused. Margolis concludes that Yoo and Bybee exercised poor judgment and made bad legal arguments. But lawyers often make arguments that are bad or even laughably bad, and this by itself does not violate the very low standard set by rules of professional responsibility. These rules are set up by jurisdictions to weed out the worst offenders, leaving the rest of the legal profession to make entirely stupid, disingenuous and asinine arguments that normal people with functioning moral consciences would not make. That is to say, rules of professional misconduct are aimed at weeding out sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems; they do not guarantee that lawyers will do right by their clients, or, in this case, by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. In effect, by setting the standard of conduct so low, rules of professional conduct effectively work to protect all those lawyers out there whose moral standing is just a hair's breadth above your average mass murderer. This is how the American legal profession simultaneously polices and takes care of its own. (emphasis mine)

I once engaged a D.C. lawyer to pursue my interests. After running up a $12,000 bill for doing absolutely nothing, I discovered that this lawyer's firm had a longstanding representation of one of my adverse parties. I took it to the D.C. Bar as a glaring conflict of interest, only to see them berate me, let alone examine the case. It was an eye-opening experience that, while the Bar's stated mission is to protect the integrity of the legal profession, their true goal is merely to protect the members of the profession from the rabble who catch them in wrongdoing. If you have been wronged and need a corporate lawyer to fight a corporation, nine times out of ten you have already lost.

Wow:

Making jokes about domestic terrorist attacks. Those conservatives sure are funny, aren't they?

The phoniest cover story for robbing the holders of common stock and the people who create actual value. A little vignette about the lizards at Lazard:

What should have been a profitable quarter a Lazard Ltd. turned into a surprising loss due to the investment bank paying its people big bonuses.

The firm doled out $616 million in compensation and benefits to about 2,300 employees last quarter, or more than triple the amount handed out in the same period in 2008. It was a consequence, Lazard said, of a decision to pay more bonuses in cash and accelerate some deferred cash awards from a prior year. But so great was the firm’s generosity that compensation costs overwhelmed quarterly revenues and resulted in a net loss of about $55 million for the fourth quarter. The charges also almost wiped out full-year profits.

From watertiger:

Très impressive, no? Seems the average bonus at Lazard was a measly $565,000. Pshaw, that’s chicken scratch! You have to hand it to this country – where else is “talent” defined as rapaciousness and greed?

Someone needs to remind Lazard’s board of directors that the company was taken public in 2005, and that they have a whole host of presumably angry shareholders to explain this grotesque loss to. And gentlemen, this hardly qualifies as an “explanation”:

“[Our compensation policies] should enhance our competitiveness and drive shareholder value,” Mr. Jacobs said, in a prepared statement. “Our goal is to grow annual compensation expense at a slower rate than revenues.”

Get the fuck outta here! It’s the company’s goal to ensure that it takes in more than it pays out? What kind of crazy accounting practice is that?

I've seen bloated, grotesque thieves like this up close before. They are the flesh-eating Ebola virus of our economic system.