brainiac conspiracy

Because America is a Wanker Center-Right Nation

Nobody could have possibly predicted this, either.

---Vitelius

Another Lovely Parting Gift

From the Gang That Couldn't Govern Straight. Nobody could have predicted our current financial meltdown . . . only, they did. Seven years ago:

The FBI was aware for years of "pervasive and growing" fraud in the mortgage industry that eventually contributed to America's financial meltdown, but did not take definitive action to stop it.

"It is clear that we had good intelligence on the mortgage-fraud schemes, the corrupt attorneys, the corrupt appraisers, the insider schemes," said a recently retired, high FBI official. Another retired top FBI official confirmed that such intelligence went back to 2002.

Sooooo . . . why the bureau's inaction?

Both retired FBI officials asserted that the Bush administration was thoroughly briefed on the mortgage fraud crisis and its potential to cascade out of control with devastating financial consequences, but made the decision not to give back to the FBI the agents it needed to address the problem. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, about 2,400 agents were reassigned to counterterrorism duties . . . That administration policy, the P-I reported, resulted in a dramatic plunge in FBI criminal investigations and referrals for prosecution. And recent data from Syracuse University researchers shows the problem has worsened.

Okay, what about the regulatory agencies?

The SEC . . . did not show an interest in working with the FBI on the problem, either. And it didn't begin responding to pervasive financial corruption until after the economy collapsed.

"The regulators are the ones embedded in the banks," the first retired FBI official said. "They would be able to see it if they were looking. They were the first line of defense in detecting it."

SEC officials declined to comment.

Hmmmm. Summing up:

High FBI and Bush administration officials knew a potentially devastating problem was on the horizon and failed to stop it.

"It was a sleight of hand because the public thought the administration was resourcing counterterrorism when in fact they were forcing cannibalization of the criminal program," the retired FBI official said. "Now the chickens have come home to roost."

Is there anything this gang didn't fuck up completely over the last eight years? Just think about it---most of what we are enduring now---the mass layoffs, the epidemic of foreclosures---could have been prevented. That is, if someone in the White House actually gave a rat's ass about the problem, or about the safety of the Republic in general. Then again, that's how they treated national security policy before September 11th, so it is all of a piece, now, isn't it?

When the annals of this decade are written definitively, I have little doubt that it will go down as the most singularly corrupt, venal, incompetent and lawless period in our history as a Republic. The Gilded Age is looking more and more like a basement bingo racket by comparison.

---Vitelius

Dickhead of the Day

This is really not about politics. Because he says so.

Hey, the Baron's always up for a good stock tip. How about some financials?

---Vitelius

Profound Insight of The Day: Bonus Mardi Gras Edition

Who would've ever guessed that a Republican presidential aspirant would be a lying sack of shit?

---Vitelius

Random Thought of The Day

With the speech, the budget, the health care plan, and the Iraq withdrawal plan all having been rolled out like clockwork in the last 48 hours, how long do you think we'll have to wait before we read this headline in an MSM pub:

Obama Maps Out Ambitious Agenda,
Runs Risk of Overreaching, Backlash

My guess is, we'll see such an "analysis" by Sunday. Yours?

---Vitelius

Can We Get a Newsprint Stimulus, Mr. President?

Why oh why did I choose Dead Treeology as a career? Besides the fact that it's fun, I mean.

---Vitelius

Change We Can Definitely Believe In

This doesn't exactly solve the problem, but it prevents another one from happening.

Update: Oh, and this one, too. Not too bad for a day's work.

---Vitelius

Pot & Kettle, Together Again

At least the Voice of America is on familiar ground today.

---Vitelius

"Why is He Not in Jail?"

Indeed. The GOP would have done better having this woman on TV last night instead of Mr. Rogers, or Mr. Burns, or whoever the heck he was.

---Vitelius

Maybe a Picture of a Briar PatchWould Have Worked Better

Some things are so funny, I forget to laugh.

---Vitelius

Snark of the Day

Courtesy of Nate at 538:

If it sounds like Jindal is targeting his speech to a roomful of fourth-graders, that's because he is. They might be the next people to actually vote for Republicans again.

---Vitelius

Who Knew Tinkerbell was a Republican?

I wish I could levitate from Disneyland to Vegas, too.

---Vitelius

The (Non) State of The Union

I was going to post an incisively trenchant blog today about The Speech, but in the end, what could I say? It rocked, obviously, but after a bit of reflection, I realized it was basically just a spiffed-up stump speech, similar to what we might've heard a year ago in Iowa or New Hampshire, with policy particulars updated to reflect the changes in the political landscape since then. It had the same uplifting tone, the same eloquence of phrase, and the same balancing of themes---government as unifier coupled with the caveat of personal responsibility.

But what was most impactful, I thought, was the speech's unabashedly (dare I say?) partisan tone---for if the last 30 days have taught Obama anything, it's the fact that the art of electioneering doesn't lose its relevance once the election is over and one is sworn into office. Down-and-dirty trench warfare to win the war of public opinion is an integral, everyday part of the process of getting legislation passed, not merely an electoral ritual that happens every four years; in that sense, a President's re-election campaign begins the very moment he's sworn into office. The big difference, for now, is in the respective parties' aims and outreaches---for while Republicans seem to be largely campaigning for the hearts and minds of the Washington newsmedia and their talk-show auxiliaries, Obama is going directly over the heads of the Chatterers-at-Large and straight to the voters. At that, he has become a master of form over the past 12 months, and last night's address was his best, and perhaps most transformative, stumper yet. A lot of the usual wingdings are freaking out over it today, and all I can say is, life is good.

However, I'd be remiss if I didn't call Obama to task on "We do not torture." If this is to be established beyond any degree of uncertainty, he needs to prove the point conclusively; one, by shutting down Bagram, and two, by seeing to it that some people at Gitmo are hauled up before a court of military justice. Eric Holder may not have seen any prisoner abuse when he was there, but frankly, that doesn't mean squat anymore. If there is any lesson to be learned from the last seven years, it's that places like Gitmo and Bagram were intentionally created as sadist funhouses for angry young men to kick Arab ass. Shut them down now. Not next week or next month---now. If we have any evidence connecting detainees to terror plots, put them on the next C-130 and house them in any brig that's got empty cells until they can be transferred to the custody of the Justice Department. If not, let them go. By now, it's really that simple.

That said, it was a form of slow torture having to watch the guy who came on the TV after Obama, wasn't it?

---Vitelius

Random Thought of the Night

Wasn't it cool to see Joe sitting alongside Nancy at The Speech and no more Dick in sight? More in the morning.

---Vitelius

Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . .

It ain't over 'til it's over . . . and judging by the looks of it, it ain't over yet.

---Vitelius

Profound Insight of The Day: Titans of Industry Edition

Cost-cutting makes for a genuinely crappy business model.

---Vitelius

Mysterious Adolescent Traumas Explained

Guess I shouldn’t have spent so much time listening to X-Ray Spex in my formative years.

---Vitelius

Unforgivable, Plain & Simple

I don't know about you, but I am really, really, really starting to get seriously pissed off over shit like this coming from an Obama Administration.

President Obama, regardless of your motives, no matter how noble your intentions, this is what you are defending, whether you want to acknowledge it or not:

Nazar Chaman Gul, an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. "Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me," he said.

When the kicking started, Gul said, he'd cry out, "I am not a terrorist," then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years.

According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government . . .

Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida's 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida.

Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten regularly. Of the 41 former Bagram detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, 28 said that guards or interrogators had assaulted them. Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantanamo Bay.

Because President Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after American guards beat them.

Much has been written of Obama's potential to reshape America's image for the better throughout the Muslim world. Maybe that will come to pass eventually, but no matter how many TV interviews you grant Al-Arabiyah, they will all be so much bright-colored bunting obscuring a mirror streaked with the blood and sinew of innocent people who were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time; and who were subjected to obscene torments because their captors knew they could get away with it. This is what the Nazis did, this is what the Soviets did, and the Stasi and the Khmer Rouge and the Chilean Secret Police. And this is what the Bushies did too, at Bagram and at Guantanamo and God knows wherever else. Perhaps the scale was much smaller at Bagram and at Gitmo than in those other places and times, but the affect on our morality as a people was no less cancerous and no less corrosive. And there can be no steps taken toward healing these self-inflicted wounds to our national psyche, toward restoring our rightful position among the league of civilized nations, and toward making amends to the victims of our abuses, until the policies that enabled the extraction of torture and the wholesale violation of human rights are not only rescinded, but abolished by law and denounced for all time.

In other words, you cannot decry the use of torture while simultaneously arguing for indefinite detentions and the withholding of habeas corpus. The former is the inevitable byproduct of the latter.

Bagram and Guantanamo are one and inseperable. Close one, close them both. Anything less is morally unforgivable at this point. Mister President, are you listening?

Update: And closer to home, this crap ain't makin' my day any easier, either. WTF?!?

---Vitelius

The Thing Hockey Mom That Wouldn't Leave

Somebody get Rush and Hannity on the phone---the Moose Whisperer wants to bring back the Fairness Doctrine!

This is for the sake of our democracy that there is fairness in this other branch of government, if you will, called the media . . . It is foreign to me the way some in the mainstream media are thinking.

It only gets more shameless.

There have been lies told, there have been reputations trashed, there have been children that have been harmed.

Reputations trashed? Yes, there certainly were. Children harmed? Okay, whose decision was it to trot out your kids to center ice at a Fliers game? If this is a thinly veiled slap at Andrew Sullivan, then who still refuses to release her medical records to this day? Who decided to hand off her infant son to be like passed around like a hot potato at last summer's convention speech?

Republicans: The party of personal responsiblity . . .

And lies? You betcha, many, many were told. Thankfully, Andy has archived them all so you don't have to. Some people really do not know when to go away, huh?

---Vitelius

Sunday Night Devotional

Because we all need a little Chill Music these days.

---Vitelius