From time to time, I””ll get into a debate with a right-winger about whether Sarah Palin is actually stupid or if liberals are just hopelessly biased against her. They claim this bias comes from the fact that liberals are scared of her electability, her charm, her looks, her femininity, her Christianity, her ability connect to the common man and her overall wonderfulness. So, the theory is that we have all collectively decided that she is the best Republican candidate in some secret liberal meeting and are conspiring against her because we are afraid of how brilliant and electable she really is.

Now, there are a couple of problems with this theory. There are no opinion leaders on the left with Rush Limbaugh-like authority who can command all other progressives to think the same thing and use the same arguments against one person. In other words, we all think she is stupid because she is in fact stupid, not because some liberal cabal told us to think that.

How come we don””t call Newt Gingrich stupid? Or Dick Cheney or Kay Bailey Hutchinson or Elizabeth Dole or Dennis Hastert? And the list goes on and on of heinous and deplorable right-wingers who are not stupid. We don””t make those charges against those people, because as much as we might not agree with them or like them, we know that they are not dullards. They””re all clever in their own way. Mitt Romney is greasy, Michael Steele is a clown and Tom DeLay is dirty, but we don””t go after their mental acuity like we do with Sarah Palin because they””re not as dumb as her (not even Steele).

So, finally we get to the evidence. I thought I””d just do it here and be done with it. Then I can just point people to this post from now on and end this senseless argument.

Now, there are a million examples of this, but I thought I””d go with three knockout punches here. In the first video, we have the classic Bush Doctrine answer, where she does not know the basic foreign policy of the Republican president at the time. How could she possibly be running for vice president and not know this? The only thing more unconscionable is the sad excuses her supporters make for this terribly botched answer.

In the second video, we have a largely overlooked example of her pathetic lack of foreign policy knowledge. She has no idea what Hamas is or what they have to do with the Gaza Strip. If your next door neighbor or plumber doesn””t know this, that”’’s fine, but they weren””t running for Vice President of the United States. This should be game set and match for anyone, especially self-respecting conservatives, thinking of supporting her. This is when you have to walk away embarrassed.

But remarkably, they didn””t slink away embarrassed after this answer, so we have the latest example of her buffoonery. In this interview with Bill O””Reilly, he asks her if she is smart enough to be president. Her answer has to be seen to be believed. Don””t get me wrong, just because you see it won””t mean you””ll understand it. So, I put a transcript of her answer below so that you can try to decipher it in your spare time.

Bill O””Reilly: Let me be very bold and fresh again, do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?

Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the uhm, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I””m not saying that that has to be me.

Can anyone really be biased enough to think that was a smart answer? The great irony is that he asked her if she”’’s smart enough to be president and she gave what might be her dumbest answer yet. That answer was so bad it almost made George W. Bush look smart. Can anyone in good conscience defend that answer and say with a straight face that she should be this country”’’s leader?

If you say yes, then there is no sense in talking to one another anymore because we are not operating in the same reality, or planet. We””ll never be able to agree on anything if we can””t agree that was just about as incomprehensible and stupid an answer as you can possibly come up with. And that settles the debate, because you either live in the reality based world and realize she is obviously not qualified, or in the immortal words of Stephen Colbert you believe that “reality has a well-known liberal bias” and she would make a great president.

Source: Cenk Uygur
Host of The Young Turks
Huffington Post

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FACT CHECK: Palin’’s book goes rogue on some facts
By CALVIN WOODWARD (Associated Press Writer)

WASHINGTON - Sarah Palin’’s new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven”t become any truer over time.

Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer’’s dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.

Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush - a package she seemed to support at the time.

A look at some of her statements in “Going Rogue,” obtained by The Associated Press in advance of its release Tuesday:

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PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking “only” for reasonably priced rooms and not “often” going for the “high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.

THE FACTS: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City’’s Central Park for a five-hour women’’s leadership conference in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000. Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter. The governor billed her state more than $20,000 for her children’’s travel, including to events where they had not been invited, and in some cases later amended expense reports to specify that they had been on official business.

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PALIN: Boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations, mostly from first-time givers, and turned back large checks from big donors if her campaign perceived a conflict of interest.

THE FACTS: Of the roughly $1.3 million she raised for her primary and general election campaigns for governor, more than half came from people and political action committees giving at least $500, according to an AP analysis of her campaign finance reports. The maximum that individual donors could give was $1,000; $2,000 for a PAC.

Of the rest, about $76,000 came from Republican Party committees.

She accepted $1,000 each from a state senator and his wife in the weeks after the two Republican lawmakers” offices were raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into a powerful Alaska oilfield services company. After AP reported those donations during the presidential campaign, she said she would give a comparative sum to charity after the general election in 2010, a date set by state election laws.

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PALIN: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama. She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, “you”ll have to be brave enough to fail.”

THE FACTS: Palin is blurring the lines between Obama’’s stimulus plan - a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts - and the federal bailout that Republican presidential candidate John McCain voted for and President George W. Bush signed.

Palin’’s views on bailouts appeared to evolve as McCain’’s vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said “taxpayers cannot be looked to as the bailout, as the solution, to the problems on Wall Street.” A week later, she said “ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy.”

During the vice presidential debate in October, Palin praised McCain for being “instrumental in bringing folks together” to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said “it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in.”

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PALIN: Says Ronald Reagan faced an even worse recession than the one that appears to be ending now, and “showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all.”

THE FACTS: The estate tax, which some call the death tax, was not repealed under Reagan and capital gains taxes are lower now than when Reagan was president.

Economists overwhelmingly say the current recession is far worse. The recession Reagan faced lasted for 16 months; this one is in its 23rd month. The recession of the early 1980s did not have a financial meltdown. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent, worse than the October 2009 high of 10.2 percent, but the jobless rate is still expected to climb.

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PALIN: She says her team overseeing the development of a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process that allowed any company to compete for the right to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48.

THE FACTS: Palin characterized the pipeline deal the same way before an AP investigation found her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited a company with ties to her administration, TransCanada Corp. Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders during the process, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.

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PALIN: Criticizes an aide to her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, for a conflict of interest because the aide represented the state in negotiations over a gas pipeline and then left to work as a handsomely paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil. Palin asserts her administration ended all such arrangements, shoving a wedge in the revolving door between special interests and the state capital.

THE FACTS: Palin ignores her own “revolving door” issue in office; the leader of her own pipeline team was a former lobbyist for a subsidiary of TransCanada, the company that ended up winning the rights to build the pipeline.

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PALIN: Writes about a city councilman in Wasilla, Alaska, who owned a garbage truck company and tried to push through an ordinance requiring residents of new subdivisions to pay for trash removal instead of taking it to the dump for free - this to illustrate conflicts of interest she stood against as a public servant.

THE FACTS: As Wasilla mayor, Palin pressed for a special zoning exception so she could sell her family’’s $327,000 house, then did not keep a promise to remove a potential fire hazard on the property.

She asked the city council to loosen rules for snow machine races when she and her husband owned a snow machine store, and cast a tie-breaking vote to exempt taxes on aircraft when her father-in-law owned one. But she stepped away from the table in 1997 when the council considered a grant for the Iron Dog snow machine race in which her husband competes.

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PALIN: Says Obama has admitted that the climate change policy he seeks will cause people’’s electricity bills to “skyrocket.”

THE FACTS: She correctly quotes a comment attributed to Obama in January 2008, when he told San Francisco Chronicle editors that under his cap-and-trade climate proposal, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” as utilities are forced to retrofit coal burning power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Obama has argued since then that climate legislation can blunt the cost to consumers. Democratic legislation now before Congress calls for a variety of measures aimed at mitigating consumer costs. Several studies predict average household costs probably would be $100 to $145 a year.

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PALIN: Welcomes last year’’s Supreme Court decision deciding punitive damages for victims of the nation’’s largest oil spill tragedy, the Exxon Valdez disaster, stating it had taken 20 years to achieve victory. As governor, she says, she”d had the state argue in favor of the victims, and she says the court’’s ruling went “in favor of the people.” Finally, she writes, Alaskans could recover some of their losses.

THE FACTS: That response is at odds with her reaction at the time to the ruling, which resolved the long-running case by reducing punitive damages for victims to $500 million from $2.5 billion. Environmentalists and plaintiffs” lawyers decried the ruling as a slap at the victims and Palin herself said she was “extremely disappointed.” She said the justices had gutted a jury decision favoring higher damage awards, the Anchorage Daily News reported. “It’’s tragic that so many Alaska fishermen and their families have had their lives put on hold waiting for this decision,” she said, noting many had died “while waiting for justice.”

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PALIN: Describing her resistance to federal stimulus money, Palin describes Alaska as a practical, libertarian haven of independent Americans who don”t want “help” from government busybodies.

THE FACTS: Alaska is also one of the states most dependent on federal subsidies, receiving much more assistance from Washington than it pays in federal taxes. A study for the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found that in 2005, the state received $1.84 for every dollar it sent to Washington.

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PALIN: Says she tried to talk about national security and energy independence in her interview with Vogue magazine but the interviewer wanted her to pivot from hydropower to high fashion.

THE FACTS are somewhat in dispute. Vogue contributing editor Rebecca Johnson said Palin did not go on about hydropower. “She just kept talking about drilling for oil.”

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PALIN: “Was it ambition? I didn”t think so. Ambition drives; purpose beckons.” Throughout the book, Palin cites altruistic reasons for running for office, and for leaving early as Alaska governor.

THE FACTS: Few politicians own up to wanting high office for the power and prestige of it, and in this respect, Palin fits the conventional mold. But “Going Rogue” has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto, the requisite autobiography of the future candidate.

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AP writers Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin D. Pritchard, Garance Burke, Dan Joling and Lewis Shaine contributed to this report.

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On the day that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, news of  members of the  Southeast Broward Republican Club, including a South Florida Republican, Candidate Robert Lowry, are shooting at targets that appeared to be gunmen with traditional Arab head scarves.  Robert Lowry took it further and was shooting at a target with the initials of the Democratic congresswoman he is trying to unseat. He initially told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that shooting at a target with the letters “DWS” — a not-so-veiled reference to Democratic U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was a “mistake”.

The condemnation by Republicans he faced Friday was swift and largely ungracious, much like a week earlier, when Republicans reacted with glee after the United States lost its bid to host the 2016 Olympics.

Rush Limbaugh, was predictably outraged, calling the award “a greater embarrassment” than losing the Olympics. Said Republican Chairman Michael Steele in a fundraising letter: “The Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control.”

“Whether it”’’s celebrating the nation”’’s loss of the Olympics, or attacking the recognition of American leadership today, Republicans time and again are proving that they””re putting politics ahead of patriotism,” said Hari Sevugan, a Democratic Party spokesman.

Republicans, aka “The Party of No”, are fast proving themselves to be engaged in full-fledged America bashing.

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Texas Gov. Rick Perry fired up an anti-tax “tea party” Wednesday with his stance against the federal government and for states”” rights as some in his U.S. flag-waving audience shouted, “Secede!”

This is good news actually.  Dont let the door hit ya.

Am I the only one who upon reading that the governor of Texas has now referred to the possibility of seceding from the union as one of  “a lot of different scenarios”, wondered why the good people of Texas hadnt thought of that before the 2000 election. On a more serious note, this latest GOP tactic seems, at first, more surreal than offensive. Texas, of course, will not secede from the US. The threat of secession is not a realistic one but it suggests that the fabric of our democracy may be woven far less tightly than we would like to think.

Extreme partisan rancor is never pretty, but in a democracy like ours probably far more common and unavoidable than we would like to think. Dressing up in revolutionary war costumes, calling for the overthrow of the government and waving teabags at the behest of wealthy right wing funders is, while a little pathetic and strange, well within the realm of constitutionally protected behavior and may even play a somewhat constructive role in our democracy. The notion that Obama is a socialist because he wants a minor tax increase for a tiny fraction of Americans and would prefer to spend our treasure on helping people rather than on conducting wars of dubious origin or intention is more than a little strange, but if a small minority of people want to assert it, that is again well within their rights.

Floating the idea of secession over this, even in a somewhat tongue in cheek manner, is a very different story. The history of secession in the US is not a pretty one. It was tried once and the seceding states were brought back into the union, but the cost was high as the country was torn apart by what was, at that time, one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

The issues dividing Republicans and Democrats today are relatively mild, mainstream partisan issues, obviously not at all comparable to those which divided our country on the eve of the Civil War. Democrats and Republicans are fighting over a few percentage points in the tax rate for the richest Americans, increased domestic spending, and greater environmental, financial and other regulation. This is, frankly, ordinary and not all that interesting partisan fare which, in many respects, was not too different during the administrations of Roosevelt, Reagan, Clinton or many other presidents. That is why these threats and rhetoric are so concerning. Nobody really threatens secession over a mild increase in the tax rate or over a spending plan. Nobody really calls for revolution because the government is trying to spend too much on infrastructure.

Why then are Republicans willing to talk about revolution, secession and other ideas that would destabilize our country and our democracy. One hopes that most of this can be simply chalked up to a party that is weak, defeated, directionless and out of ideas, but it may not be that simple. Perhaps the demonstrators and, more significantly their leaders, feel that for some existential, and undoubtedly irrational, reason the Obama presidency is a profound threat to their worldview, values and vision of the US. If that is the case we can only hope that these people remain on the margins. This is likely to occur as Obamas worldview, values and vision not only reflect those of a huge plurality of Americans, but will likely to continue to become more, not less, accepted over time.

The teabag protests and calls for secession and revolution followed a few days after a Homeland Security report outlined the threat posed by right wing extremists. This report, which, given that the second worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by right wing extremists, may be something of an elucidation of the obvious, was met by predictable protests in many conservative corners. However, those on the far right cant have it both ways, calling for revolution and secession on the one hand, while protesting a report raising concerns about right wing extremist violence on the other.

Undoubtedly, many will argue that the words of Governor Perry should not be taken seriously because they were said in the excitement of a rally and were certainly meant to be hyperbolic. This is not convincing because public officials understand that words and statements matter. That is why elected officials are constantly making speeches, talking to reporters and sending out emails.

Governor Perry threat was in many ways the political equivalent of a childs threat to take his marbles and go home if he does not win a dispute. While it is easy and comforting to think that Perry cannot take his marbles and go home because he has already lost his, the failure of any GOP leaders to criticize his statement or remind Perry and his party that we are one union and a governor should not allude to secession lightly suggests that the problem is worse than that and may not be going away anytime soon.

Sharing Tea Bags with Right Wing Extremists

One of the very bizarre accusations overheard at the tea bag protests Wednesday was that President Obama is somehow a “fascist.” At the same time, and often in the same protest, he was also accused of being a “communist.”

Of course its ideologically impossible to be both, in the same way its impossible to be both informed and a FOX & Friends host, but then again Im expecting too much logic and message coherence from people who spent all of Wednesday protesting against socialism and wealth redistribution while gathered in publicly funded — dare I say “socialized” — parks and town squares.

But back to that “fascist” accusation. Im not convinced that tea baggers like Michelle Malkin understand that fascism is, in fact, a form of right wing extremism. Because for the last 24 hours or so, Malkin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the usual band of apoplectic brainiacs appear to have been vigorously defending “right wing extremism” after having previously accused the president of being on the same flank of the ideological spectrum.

Yeah, I know. It doesnt make sense.

Rewind to Tuesday morning: a Homeland Security report covering potential threats from “right wing extremist” groups, including militias, white supremacists and neo-Nazis, was obtained by talk show host Roger Hedgecock. And, predictably, the gang who cant seem to decipher basic high school level social studies concepts, kneejerked into one of their paranoid tantrums — insisting that the report was entirely about them.

Almost right away, the far-right blogs and FOX News Channel were set ablaze with reports that the Obama administration was targeting conservatives with a massive surveillance operation. But here’’s the thing: the DHS report wasnt about conservatives. The word “conservatives” doesnt appear anywhere in the report. It was all about radical domestic terrorist groups who happen to subscribe to outlandish ideologies well beyond the mainstream of political discourse. Notwithstanding this very clear distinction, Malkin and the broader wingnutosphere lost their collective shpadoinkle and insisted the DHS was targeting the mainstream tea baggers.

Now, when this story first broke, I was at a bit of loss as to how to accurately interpret the rights wildly conspiratorial, victimized reaction. Either Malkin and Beck were just as confused and incoherent as always, and, in their loud noises anti-government rage, they were inadvertently coupling themselves with right wing extremists. Or they not-so-subtly admitted that there isnt much difference between a garden variety conservative, a garden variety wingnut and a garden variety right wing extremist — that theyre all basically militant racists who are plotting to blow up federal buildings. I dont know.

Theres one thing we know for sure, however: they”re definitely freaked out about the governments post-9/11 intelligence apparatus — the very same bureaucracy they actively and vocally cheerlead throughout the Bush years. Malkin, in particular, was one of the most outspoken and cheerleadery endorsers of allowing unchecked executive power via the vice presidents office, the NSA, the CIA and the military, while encouraging these agencies to use any means necessary to smoke out the evildoers. This included illegal wiretapping, rendition, suspension of habeas rights and every awful provision found within the USA PATRIOT Act.

Yet in light of this DHS report, Malkin seems to believe that the government might be spying on people. Her people. “Right wing extremists.”

So theyre suddenly worried about privacy are they? Whatever happened to Rush Limbaughs maxim: “Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead!” Or Senator Big John Cornyns words of wisdom: “None of your civil liberties matter much after youre dead.”

Glenn Greenwald wrote on Tuesday:

When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, its going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. Thats its nature.

Its like that classic SNL sketch from 1988 with Tom Hanks as Mr. Short Term Memory. Hanks is at a restaurant and orders his favorite meal: poached salmon. He takes a bite of his fish then, forgetting he took a bite, shouts, “Ah! Theres something in my mouth! Theres something in my mouth!” The wingnuts begged and fear-mongered for this gigantic overreaching surveillance state and now theyre suddenly alarmed that it’’s covering terrorists other than brown-skinned foreigners with funny hats?

That could be the clincher, though. The far-right outrage might have something to do with skin color.

In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Centers Intelligence Project reported that as many as 60 domestic, white right wing terrorist attacks were thwarted by law enforcement in the ten year span following the Oklahoma City bombing which, by the way, was also perpetrated by an American right wing extremist with boy-next-door white skin.

The plots, all foiled by law enforcement, reportedly included violent plans by antigovernment militia groups, racist skinhead organizations, and Ku Klux Klan members to use various types of chemical bombs and other weapons.

Nice. More examples of right wing extremists. Extremists who are evidently being coupled by Malkin with the broader conservative movement. I hasten to note here that Im not citing these examples for the same reason Malkin and wingnutty websites such as Religion of Peace like to highlight Islamic terrorist attacks: as an ongoing feargasm intended to incite more wars and cultural intolerance. Im merely presenting evidence that, yes, right wing terrorists do exist. Sorry, Malkin. There are also left wing terrorists, by the way, and they were the subject of their own DHS report issued back in January, according to the Washington Times.

The point being that terrorist attacks can be orchestrated by anyone — not just brown religious zealots. (I cant believe I actually have to write that.)

Whether intentional or not, the talkers and bloggers who appear to be driving the post-Bush crazy train, have, intentionally or not, opened up the conservative tent to some pretty unsavory and dangerous characters. And in light of what happened in Pittsburgh, are they really so sure that deliberately conflating conservatism with the radical, violent end of the ideological spectrum is such a wise strategy? Beck and the others were so shocked and disturbed that their rhetoric was being partly blamed for Pittsburgh. But that was last week. This week, they definitely seem to be sharing their tea bags with the psychotics. And such behavior can cause a serious infection. Political infection. Is what I meant.

Source: Huffington Post

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When it comes to Chicago politics, you just can”t make this stuff up.

There, in the midst of Roland “We are the Senator” Burris” self-inflicted travail last week, rose the mighty Eddie Burke. Before a standing-room-only crowd at the City Club, Burke reminded us that Machine politicians still see themselves in mythic terms.

The 14th Ward alderman’’s defense of poor Roland began with a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends,” intoned Burke.

He thinks in terms of friends and enemies. By any standard, he has a boatload of friends, given the eye-popping $6,497,465 donated to his multiple political funds for an aldermanic seat that seldom sees a meaningful challenge. And he has been brilliant about playing the enemy card to justify the taxpayer-subsidized, 24-hour-a-day police bodyguard detail that drives him around and holds his coat.

But I digress.

If putting Burris in the proximity of King wasn”t a crazy enough reach, Burke threw in a comparison to Cardinal Joseph Bernardin for good measure as another example of a great man challenged by false accusations.

Wasn”t it just last month that Rod Blagojevich put himself in the same sentence with King, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela?

What are these guys smoking?

As for the senator himself, here’’s a man who is roundly ridiculed for his pomposity and yet still refers to himself in the papal plural; isn”t embarrassed about etching everything but his grade point average into his mausoleum, and once actually said that someday Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln,” might come to be known as the “Land of Burris.” Read the rest of this entry »

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If it weren”t for the much larger scandal involving Bernard Madoff, the fraud allegations against Allen Stanford might have gotten even more attention. After all, only in comparison to the alleged $50 billion Madoff Ponzi scheme does an alleged $8 billion scam pale.

But then again, were it not for Madoff, perhaps there would be no Stanford story. It took the shocking Madoff saga to light a fire under the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That’’s a sad comment because, like Madoff, Stanford also sent out clear signals that something was potentially amiss. The Texas financier sold certificates of deposit and other “safe” investments with unusually high interest rates and implausibly steady returns. He based his bank in the largely unregulated island of Antigua in the Caribbean. His auditor was a small, obscure firm, not the type typically retained by a far-flung banking empire.

After failing to spot Madoff, even though a Boston investigator named Harry Markopolos repeatedly brought his improbable feats to regulators” attention, the most that can be said of Tuesday’’s SEC accusations against Stanford is: What took so long?

The accounting scandals earlier this decade at companies such as Enron and WorldCom alone should have been enough to get the SEC to look into the high-flying world of hedge funds and exotic banking firms.

Looking back at those earlier scandals, one has to wonder what people like Enron’’s Ken Lay and WorldCom’’s Bernard Ebbers were thinking. Skyrocketing corporate salaries meant they never really needed to commit fraud to attain great wealth; they just needed to commit executive compensation.

A similar question might be asked now of Madoff and Stanford, if indeed the allegations against them are true. Why did they put their liberty in jeopardy when they could have gotten rich like Wall Street bankers — by putting the world economy in jeopardy?

For investors, the Madoff and Stanford cases carry the same lesson: If an investment seems too good to be true, in all likelihood it is. And for regulators, the lesson is that financial scams teeming with red flags need to be snuffed out in their infancy, before they mature into multibillion-dollar debacles that ruin many lives.

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You know, you”ve got to love the Republicans if for nothing other than the entertainment value. Let me preface the heart of this article by telling you where the Republicans are in the scheme of things. They are no longer the majority on Capitol Hill. They do not occupy the White House either. They lost the 2008 election on all fronts, not because Sarah Palin is a fool and John McCain is a mean-spirited hothead, but because the American people had absolutely no faith in their ability to get the country out of the economic mess it’’s in (especially if left to a fool and a mean-spirited hothead). We know they can get us into an economic mess because, well, here we are! Getting us out of one, however, is another thing entirely. The Republicans also lost because the American people have had just about enough of their mean-spirited, partisan attitude that, frankly, has been amply on display in the early days of the Obama presidency. To be honest, the American public are sick to death of Republicans whining about partisanship. We really don”t care if you have any input in legislation, or running the country. You had your chance, screwed it up and were ousted by the American people.

So what is it that the Republicans don”t get about what the American people want? How many different ways do they need to be told something? I thought being voted out of power in such a decisive fashion might help them get it, but apparently it didn’t. Maybe there is something to this theory that the Republican Party is the party of non-thinkers. Their media mouthpiece is, after all, Rush Limbaugh – a moronic blowhard who hides behind a microphone and says he hopes Barack Obama “fails.” Now, it seems to me that if Obama fails, America fails. It’s hard for me to label anyone wishing that as being either ‘patriotic’ or a thinking man, but that’s what Rush and the GOP want you to believe. Where were the Republicans to tell Rush Limbaugh that he did not speak for them? They were missing in action, because Limbaugh does indeed speak for them. As it turns out, that was just the passive-aggressive part of the program. The GOP wasn’t done yet. Read the rest of this entry »

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The wife of the renegade financier Bernard Madoff withdrew $15.5m (£10.8m) from an account at a Madoff-linked brokerage firm in the days running up to her husband’’s arrest, it emerged today tonight.

Court documents filed by financial regulators in Massachusetts prompt fresh questions about the actions of Ruth Madoff, an occasional author who once co-wrote a kosher cookery book, Great Chefs of America Cook Kosher.

According to records of wire transfers obtained by Massachusetts” secretary of state, Mrs Madoff withdrew the money from Cohmad Securities, a firm co-owned by her husband which shared premises and had close commercial ties with Madoff Securities.

The transfers show that she took out $5.5m on 25 November followed by $10m on 10 December – the day her husband turned himself in to the authorities and allegedly confessed to fiddling investors out of $50bn.

Massachusetts” secretary of state, William Galvin, described Cohmad and Madoff Securities as “so intertwined that they could be viewed as a common enterprise”.

Clients have said that Cohmad acted as little more than a go-between, channelling their money into Madoff’’s core investment empire. Galvin is trying to revoke Cohmad’’s securities licence and has accused the firm of refusing to co-operate with an investigation into its finances. Read the rest of this entry »

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The historical record of far-right ridiculousness has been well-documented here and throughout the blogosphere.

Who can forget Michelle Malkin’’s inspired cheerleader skit? Or when Rush Limbaugh mocked a guy’’s Parkinson’’s Disease tremors. What about John Boehner’’s public sobbing jags? Pat Robertson insisting he could leg-press 2,000 pounds. Sarah Palin’’s turkey geeker photo op. George W. Bush telling us that Iraq is a “peeance freeance.” Remember when Bill O”Reilly shouted down the son of a 9/11 victim? Already, we”re talking about a mélange of weirdness and upside-down logic suitable for the ages, and that’’s all prior to January 20, 2009.

But I don”t think we ever anticipated that the presidency of Barack Obama would, among other things, send the far-right into a freakazoid display of shockingly deranged conniptions and outright crazy talk — their manic hyperdrive engines, fueled by Rush Limbaugh’’s gesticulating arm flab, blasting them out of their political Mos Eisley cantina scene and expelling them a thousand parsecs beyond the zero barrier of insanity.

Too much?

Just to be clear, I”m not talking about the lies or distortions or their utter lack of credibility (zero cred) on broad-ranging issues like, you know, foreign policy and the economy. What we have here is the equivalent level of chaos as, say, the first group therapy scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’’s Nest. In other words: a total berserker meltdown.

Seriously, have you ever seen the Republicans more twisted and kerfuffled than they are today? Movie metaphors aside, I”ve been hard pressed to find greater examples of insanity from the far-right than have been exhibited in the past week alone. Here we have a Republican Party that’’s been discredited and bloodied, and yet in the face of an enormously popular president who is confounding conventional wisdom while building a working consensus among American voters, the Republicans appear to be reflexively coughing up the most intellectually violent chunks of hooey on record. Read the rest of this entry »

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