Trillions lost, Krugman gives in to lame pun

A world gone Madoff...

Here's the money (ha) paragraph:

At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics, in a nicely bipartisan way. From Bush administration officials like Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who looked the other way as evidence of financial fraud mounted, to Democrats who still haven’t closed the outrageous tax loophole that benefits executives at hedge funds and private equity firms (hello, Senator Schumer), politicians have walked when money talked.

Pigs more equal

I'm going on record. I'm against the Paulson bailout bill. (Yeah, big whoop!)

I don't care if Chuck Schumer is for it. He's been fooled before - anyone remember Michael Mukasey?

I've read the thin tissue of legalism that the bill frames. This bill won't fix the problem because it's not targeted at the problem. In fact, it's not targeted at anything. It's a $700 billion giveaway. To whom? That's not even stated, but given that the Bushists are in charge, it won't be spent to help you and me.

So what should the cowardly Congressional Democrats do? Pass a bill that includes reforms and oversight and dare Duhbya to veto it. But they're soft-headed dopes with no appetite for combat, even with the least popular President in recent memory.

Yeah, this is why American dominance is doomed. The smart people are chickenshit.

Nothing is ever Duhbya's responsibility

Congress did it, yeah, that's the ticket. The recess-uh-slowdown is their fault. Yeah.

Charles Schumer was an amoral idiot on Mukasey, but this is pretty good:

“While the president is standing idly by, proposing irrelevant solutions to a national and international crisis,” he added, “Shell and BP announced record profits for the first quarter in 2008. Whose side is the president on?”

Orwellian bullshit

Mukasey says he can't investigate something that John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales excused in memos that transparently excused criminal behavior because they were written on Department of Justice letterhead.

I mean, seriously, I'm reading The Count of Monte Cristo, and there's nothing in its persecution of Edmond Dantès that is so abusively unjust.

Chuck Schumer must be sooo proud.

No law, only power

When you buy a pig in a poke, this is what you get. Banal bullshit delivered with a smile.

Yet there is no one in the Senate who will cast aside loyalty to colleagues' vacations to say, "Here I stand. I can do no other." We get a little from Dodd, a little from Feingold, a little from Boxer, a little from Kennedy, but no one addresses the fundamental corruption of our political system.

The Constitution and the rule of law that were hallmarks of the old order have vanished under the Orwellian onslaught of the Bushists. Chuck Schumer must be so proud.

Idiot deal-makers

Can we Democrats stop trying to make deals with those who refuse to show any good faith? Like the T1000, Duhbya can't be bargained with, he doesn't feel pity, and he will not stop.

Letter to Chuck Schumer

Sen. Schumer,

You have given your assent to torture when your moral and legal duty was to oppose it. Opposition to waterboarding need not be paramount; it is still well below the minimum standard for any law enforcement officer, much less the highest in the land.

When the International Criminal Court asserts its jurisdiction ex post facto against the Bush administration, as the Allies did at Nuremberg, you'll be in the dock, too. I'm sorry to say that you'll deserve it, and it breaks my heart. But you've given your consent to continued crimes against humanity, and that stain requires punishment.

Next year's fast on Yom Kippur cannot atone for this, but on that holy day you should remember what you could have done on this day.

What right have I, a Gentile, to hector you about your faith? You let me worry about the mote in my eye.

--LL

Update: This would have been better with a citation from Jewish scripture, not the mote-beam story from Matthew. Sorry!

Truth in headlines

CNN shows this link and has all day. What Chuck Schumer actually said was:

[T]hey're trying to meet us part of the way in choosing someone who by reputation and in his career has shown fidelity to rule of law above conservative politics...

Nothing about the nomination being above politics, this is about the nominee. Further, CNN lets pass without comment the context - that the Bushists have put their radical conservative politics above the rule of law.