Note: all pagination is represented as PDF page. To change to document page, subtract two.
Defendants ROD BLAGOJEVICH and JOHN HARRIS, together with
others, attempted to use ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s authority to appoint a United States Senator
for the purpose of obtaining personal benefits for ROD BLAGOJEVICH, including, among
other things, appointment as Secretary of Health & Human Services in the President-elect’s
administration, and alternatively, a lucrative job which they schemed to induce a union to
provide to ROD BLAGOJEVICH in exchange for appointing as senator an individual whom
ROD BLAGOJEVICH and JOHN HARRIS believed to be favored by union officials and
their associates.
Page 16:
Cari was a significant fundraiser for Democratic causes and was previously the
national finance chair for Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. During his
testimony, Cari described meetings that he had with ROD BLAGOJEVICH, Chris Kelly,
Rezko, and Stuart Levine. In particular, on approximately October 29, 2003, Cari, ROD
BLAGOJEVICH, Kelly, Levine and others rode on an airplane arranged by Levine to a
fundraiser in New York being hosted by Cari on behalf of ROD BLAGOJEVICH. During
the plane ride, Cari had a conversation with ROD BLAGOJEVICH. During the
conversation, Cari and ROD BLAGOJEVICH discussed Cari’s fundraising background and
work as a national fundraiser. ROD BLAGOJEVICH discussed his interest in running for
President of the United States. During the conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH informed
Cari that it was easier for governors to solicit campaign contributions because governors had
the ability to “award contracts†and give legal work, consulting work, and investment
banking work to campaign contributors.
p. 46:
During the call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s wife can be heard in the
background telling ROD BLAGOJEVICH to tell Deputy Governor A “to hold up that
fucking Cubs shit. . . fuck them.â€Â ROD BLAGOJEVICH asked Deputy Governor A what
he thinks of his wife’s idea. Deputy Governor A stated that there is a part of what ROD
BLAGOJEVICH’s wife said that he “agree[s] with.â€Â Deputy Governor A told ROD
BLAGOJEVICH that Tribune Owner will say that he does not have anything to do with the
editorials, “but I would tell him, look, if you want to get your Cubs thing done get rid of this
Tribune.â€Â Later, ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s wife got on the phone and, during the continuing
discussion of the critical Tribune editorials, stated that Tribune Owner can “just fire†the
writers because Tribune Owner owns the Tribune. ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s wife stated that
if Tribune Owner’s papers were hurting his business, Tribune Owner would do something
about the editorial board.
p. 53:
ROD BLAGOJEVICH confirmed that
HARRIS made the point with Tribune Financial Advisor that the Tribune is advocating that
ROD BLAGOJEVICH be impeached for going around the legislature and that “is precisely
what we’re doing on Wrigley Field.â€Â HARRIS said he explained that information to Tribune
Financial Advisor. ROD BLAGOJEVICH asked whether Tribune Financial Advisor
understood that “we are not in a position where we can afford to do that if . . . the Tribune
is pushing impeachment.â€Â ROD BLAGOJEVICH asked, “they got that, right?â€Â
pp. 54-55:
ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with Sports Consultant, the president of a Chicago-area sports
consulting firm, whose remarks during the conversation indicated that he was working with
the Cubs on matters involving Wrigley Field. In that conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH
and Sports Consultant discussed the importance of getting the IFA transaction approved at
the IFA’s December 2008 or January 2009 meeting, because ROD BLAGOJEVICH was
contemplating leaving office in early January 2009 and ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s IFA
appointees would still be in place to approve the IFA deal. On December 3, 2008, ROD
BLAGOJEVICH spoke again with Sports Consultant and explained that ROD
BLAGOJEVICH had control over state funds designated for use in connection with science
and technology, and which could be used to pay for improvements at Wrigley Field. Later
that same day, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with Cubs Chairman and said that he could
make state science and technology funds available to the Cubs without having to go through
the legislature, and suggested that the Cubs come up with proposals that would allow the use
of such funds.
p. 57:
In particular, ROD BLAGOJEVICH has been intercepted
conspiring to trade the senate seat for particular positions that the President-elect has the
power to appoint (e.g. the Secretary of Health and Human Services). ROD BLAGOJEVICH
has also been intercepted conspiring to sell the Senate seat in exchange for his wife’s
placement on paid corporate boards or ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s placement at a private
foundation in a significant position with a substantial salary. ROD BLAGOJEVICH has also
been intercepted conspiring to sell the Senate seat in exchange for millions of dollars in
funding for a non-profit organization that he would start and that would employ him at a
substantial salary after he left the governorship.
p. 58:
During the conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Deputy Governor A that if he is not
going to get anything of value for the open Senate seat, then ROD BLAGOJEVICH will take
the Senate seat himself: “if . . . they’re not going to offer anything of any value, then I might
just take it.â€Â90. Later on November 3, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with Advisor A.
By this time, media reports indicated that Senate Candidate 1, an advisor to the President-
elect, was interested in the Senate seat if it became vacant, and was likely to be supported by
the President-elect. During the call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated, “unless I get something
real good for [Senate Candidate 1], shit, I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying.â€Â
p. 59:
ROD BLAGOJEVICH discussed
whether he could obtain an ambassadorship in exchange for the Senate seat.
p. 61:
On November 5, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH talked with Advisor A about
the Senate seat. During the phone call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that the President-elect
can remove somebody from a foundation and give the spot to ROD BLAGOJEVICH. In
regards to the Senate seat, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking
golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And,
and I can always use it. I can parachute me there.â€Â97. On November 6, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH talked with Spokesman. ROD
BLAGOJEVICH told Spokesman to leak to a particular columnist for the Chicago Sun-
Times, that Senate Candidate 2 is in the running for the vacant Senate seat. According to
ROD BLAGOJEVICH, by doing this, he wanted “to send a message to the [President-elect’s]
people,†but did not want it known that the message was from ROD BLAGOJEVICH.
Thereafter, ROD BLAGOJEVICH and Spokesman discussed specific language that should
be used in the Sun Times column and arguments as to why Senate Candidate 2 made sense
for the vacant Senate seat. A review of this particular Sun Times column on November 7,
2008, indicates references to the specific language and arguments regarding Senate
Candidate 2 as a potential candidate for the Senate seat, as discussed by ROD
BLAGOJEVICH and Spokesman.
p. 62:
HARRIS noted that ROD BLAGOJEVICH is interested in
taking a high-paying position with an organization called “Change to Win,†which is
connected to Service Employees International Union (“SEIUâ€Â).  HARRIS suggested that
SEIU Official make ROD BLAGOJEVICH the head of Change to Win and, in exchange, the
President-elect could help Change to Win with its legislative agenda on a national level.[note: Open source information indicates that Change to Win is an organization affiliated
with seven unions, including SEIU, and appears to be focused on having the affiliated unions
work together on matters of common interest. SEIU Official is affiliated with SEIU]
pp. 65-66
ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another
consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to “suck it
up†for two years and do nothing and give this “motherfucker [the President-elect] his
senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.â€Â ROD BLAGOJEVICH states that he will put
“[Senate Candidate 4]†in the Senate “before I just give fucking [Senate Candidate 1] a
fucking Senate seat and I don’t get anything.â€Â (Senate Candidate 4 is a Deputy Governor of
the State of Illinois). ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that he needs to find a way to take the“financial stress†off of his family and that his wife is as qualified or more qualified than
another specifically named individual to sit on corporate boards. According to ROD
BLAGOJEVICH, “the immediate challenge [is] how do we take some of the financial
pressure off of our family.â€Â Later in the phone call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that absent
getting something back, ROD BLAGOJEVICH will not pick Senate Candidate 1. HARRIS
re-stated ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s thoughts that they should ask the President-elect for
something for ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s financial security as well as maintain his political
viability. HARRIS said they could work out a three-way deal with SEIU and the President-
elect where SEIU could help the President-elect with ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s appointment
of Senate Candidate 1 to the vacant Senate seat, ROD BLAGOJEVICH would obtain a
position as the National Director of the Change to Win campaign, and SEIU would get
something favorable from the President-elect in the future.
p. 67:
Later on November 10, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH and Advisor A discussed
the open Senate seat. Among other things, ROD BLAGOJEVICH raised the issue of
whether the President-elect could help get ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s wife on “paid corporate
boards right now.â€Â Advisor A responded that he “think[s] they could†and that a “President-
elect . . . can do almost anything he sets his mind to.â€Â ROD BLAGOJEVICH states that he
will appoint “[Senate Candidate 1] . . . but if they feel like they can do this and not fucking
give me anything . . . then I’ll fucking go [Senate Candidate 5].â€Â (Senate Candidate 5 is
publicly reported to be interested in the open Senate seat). ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated
that if his wife could get on some corporate boards and “picks up another 150 grand a year
or whatever†it would help ROD BLAGOJEVICH get through the next several years as
Governor.
p. 68:
Later in the conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that if he appoints Senate
Candidate 4 to the Senate seat and, thereafter, it appears that ROD BLAGOJEVICH might
get impeached, he could “count on [Senate Candidate 4], if things got hot, to give [the Senate
seat] up and let me parachute over there.â€Â HARRIS said, “you can count on [Senate
Candidate 4] to do that.â€Â Later in the conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH said he knows
that the President-elect wants Senate Candidate 1 for the Senate seat but “they’re not willing
to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.â€Â
p. 76:
In addition, in the course of the conversations over the last month, ROD
BLAGOJEVICH has spent significant time weighing the option of appointing himself to the
open Senate seat, and has expressed a variety of reasons for doing so, including frustration
at being “stuck†as governor, a belief that he will be able to obtain greater resources if he is
indicted as a sitting Senator as opposed to a sitting governor, and a desire to remake his
image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016, avoid impeachment by the
Illinois legislature, make corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving
public office, facilitate his wife’s employment as a lobbyist, and assist in generating speaking
fees should he decide to leave public office.
UPDATE: *GATHP*
As more comes out about Tuesday’s arrest of Democrat Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, it has been learned that he was caught on tape referring to Barack Obama as a “motherf***er”.
Meh, he called his dad that, too. All kidding aside, though, this is the worst indictment of all–calling The One a Motherf***er. It proves indisputably that he’s at least half a racist.
UPDATE2: How big is this story? Go look at the Memeorandum snapshot. This will keep the Troof Brigades busy.
Oh this is all just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Since he has a D in front of his name this will only reflect on him personally and not his party, friends, or administration. Yes sir!!!11!!!!!
His defense should be that he was only soliciting sex not money from Caroline Kennedy in order for her to take the senate seat. Then this would be all about sex and thus a private matter that would in no way interfere with his job as Governor. It worked for someone else why not try it?
This is so delicious, I feel my blood sugar surging.
…for the purpose of obtaining personal benefits for ROD BLAGOJEVICH, including, among other things, appointment as Secretary of Health & Human Services in the President-elect’s administration…
“Rod Blagojevich was just some guy in my neighborhood. And I might add that he doesn’t know shit about Reinhold Niebuhr.”
He is also charged with trying to get an editorial board that didn’t agree with him fired. Hey doesn’t that sound like someone else we know???????????
His hair was taken into protective custody.
Timesonline blast from the past, March 8, 2008: Court case makes life difficult for Barack Obama. How many times will we be seeing a headline Just Like This for the next four years? Over/under, anyone?
I’m sure this is just teh workers getting involved in the political process. Give ’em a break, why dontcha?
I think something like four of the last seven governors of Illinois have been tossed into the hoosegow. Maybe a better solution would be to make the mansion in Springfield a maximum-security state pen.
Probably won’t see it much. This will be reported as having NO relationship to O!, and will be buried as much as possible. Probably will be lucky to even hear of this in 5 days. Hell go to Yahoo right now it is not the top story, 10 workers you should tip is.
Judging this mans stupidity of continuing his corruption knowing he was under investigation I’m going to wager he knows he’s cooked and he will give up any an all on Obama/Rezko business.
A sell-out TSK9? After all this time? That sounds a bit hard to believe, I think.
Top this guy will be assured a friendly prosecutor in a couple months. You really think he will plea now when he knows he can get a couple of continuences and probably a sweeter deal?
Over/under on an Obama! pardon?
And lo, when actual news strikes, the trolls are strangely silent.
They need their marching orders Techie. They all go to the hive mind over at Kos and await the talkin points and then march out en mass. Just give em time.
I can’t wait to hear how the dealing for a cabinet appointment scheme played out. Who, exactly, do you cut a deal with to get such a blessing from The One?
I especially love the Wrigley/Trib editorial board angle. I can hardly wait for all the fairness we’re gonna see when the Fairness Doctrine is reimposed.
On second thought about Blagojevich squealing and possible apologies from me to TSK9, from the criminal indictment, quoting Blago: “…and do nothing and give this “motherfucker [the President-elect] his senator? Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.”
Looks like Blago’s a little teensy bit resentful of our new Pezzident, what?
John Kass was right – he held a contest back some time ago, to replace “Land of Lincoln” on our license plates. “Illinois. Will the Defendant Please Rise” won.
Governors Kerner, Olgivie and Ryan all got the Felony hit too.
So, I wonder what the ol’ CinC in IL situation will be when I leave active duty in 2 days…
Pablo, my money’d be on Emmanuel. Sadly, Obama is likely clean, otherwise I can’t see Clinton not have using it against him in the primaries.
The rest of his Illinois entourage, however…………….
Techie @ 10:00am
I think the pardon(s) will be over the Fairness Doctrine, but under the Freedom of Choice Act in the stack o’ stuff awaiting President
-for-lifeObama’s signature.BTW: I’m working my way through the Drudge links. Smoking Gun and Breitbart mention Blago’s Political party within the first two paragraphs. Local news and Chicago Tribune? Nowhere to be found in the entire story.
Your professional journalists at work. Also, nobody with a haircut that hideous should be elected to dogcatcher.
This will help Chicago get the Olympics I think cause it’s the sort of business climate the Olympics people really like except not gay enough but they have time to gay it up by 2016 I think.
BJTexs, given that Illinois is a one-party kleptocracy, it’s to be assumed that Blago is a Democrat. It’d be redundant, like saying, “Gov. Blagojevich, a biped…”
hf, the cadre of hairdressers necessary to fix Blago’s hair might gay Chi-town up enough, yeah?
“except not gay enough but they have time to gay it up by 2016 I think.”
hf – obviously they will have to take the IOC delegates up to Broadway and Belmont in “Boystown”…
gee willikers you’ve been busy Mr. Collins. It’s like I missed a whole day of stuff already.
oh. I don’t know Chicago that well – just Michigan and adjacent streets mostly and there’s an oppressive number of sports bars there just from what I’ve seen but it might could be the company I keep there. Nothing against sports bars it’s just everywhere you go it seems.
that document is so good Grisham or Turow, who lives there, should just add a sex scene in it, find a put-upon antagonist and then sprinkle it with a solemn sounding legal-reference title, “The deal,” or “Approaching the bench” or some such.
hf – I am partial to the Irish places m’self. Luckily, I know plenty of 1st generation American, or off the boat Irish…
In the update, is Senate Candidate number 2 Jesse Jackson Jr?
and
taking a high-paying position with an organization called “Change to Win,†which is
connected to Service Employees International Union (“SEIUâ€Â).
Acorn!!! Community organizing Chicago style.
He was bargaining for presidential appointments?! This goes all the way to Obama; there’s no other alternative. P-E Hope-n-Change would have final say on those appointments, regardless of who in his staff was doing the negotiations, and in any case, he put those people on his staff.
The union and non-profit angles are interesting, too. Sounds like both of those realms need deep, deep investigation.
Why did he have to drag my Cubs into all this?
His hair is impressive, but it’s not James Traficant class.
Drudge now reports that the grand jury has issued subpoenas for all documents related to the Obama/Rezco land deal.
RELEASE THE HOUNDS!
@34 non-profit angles
Seems to be a well loved tack in those parts. Even the esteemed O! used the same.
Parsnip: Point Taken, but closer than you say.
How many Senate seats are up for appointment this year, four or so? I wonder how diligently other US DA’s are looking for horse-trading like this? NY, Alaska, Illinois and one other, another Dem seat, isn’t there?
Oh, no, my bad, Stephens lost so nevermind that one.
I wonder too… other than easier playing field….. if this is why Hillary ran to NY and did not try the coming home to serve route.
Sdferr: Delaware, where the rumor is that they will select a seat warmer to hold the seat for Biden’s son.
Why would they subpena Rezko loan documents? Really I mean that was just some guy that lived in the neighborhood.
Why are they referring to Tribune Owner? Is there anyone besides Sam Zell that could be Tribune Owner, and that would also be interested in a conversation benefiting the Cubs?
The Drudge headline should read, “For Sale…Illinois Senate Seat.”
From the post: make corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving
public office, facilitate his wife’s employment as a lobbyist, and assist in generating speaking
fees should he decide to leave public office.
And this is what EVERY senator is doing… period. This guy is just to minor league to shut up about it. He does not have that righteous stuff of the brotherhood. You have to use code words and nuance…
@43 hold the seat for Biden’s son
Jesus! Does everything have to be a narrative or NBC movie of the week? After school special?
This could be very, very bad for Sam Zell, I think.
Although certain other people it might make extremely happy.
You gotta love it, it’s a system [we’ve built] that sells itself!
BTW, I think he uses the same stylist as Stephanopoulos.
I don’t think so, BJ:
http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/images/2006/01/11/image1202860g.jpg
Let’s hurry up and put these guys in charge of the auto industry. They’re actions are made with the purest of intentions with none of the greed that runs corporations and CEO’s. For sures!!!!11!!!
Anyone else think if this had been allowed to wait, oh until after noon 20 Jan… nothing would have happened…
Oh, look! A Hare! Er, I mean, bunnies!
I’m waiting to see the lefties explain Mr. Hope-n-Change firing Fitzgerald and pardoning Blago on Jan 21.
So the appearance of the trolls means the talking points have been circulated? Nice to know that “Townhouse” is still so speedy.
I think the PUMAs are going to be assholes and elbows all over this one. Even someone in Crazy Larry’s comments has twigged to the Sam Zell factor.
Hell you put people like this in charge of 20 percent of the nations economy, ala health care, and it will just be like one neverending kickback machine.
“You lost your senate seat to Republican Joe Smith this year? No problem we have a nice position waiting for you paying 350 grand just vote us more funding before you leave office. We might even be able to slide you a cabinet post in the next Dem administration if you play ball well enough.”
What the f@ck could be the downside to that? Most of it would be freakin legal too.
Forget it Jake, its Chinatown Chicago.
Rob, surely you don’t think “talk about Blago’s bad hair” can be the talking points, do you? They haven’t worked them out yet, I don’t think. Too many other shoes to drop yet to settle on a message, though no doubt the corridors of power in the Dem party are feverish with test messaging, winnow, winnow, winnow, so to speak. The bad hair shit is just temporizing.
ChinatownYou’re too stupid to know the current health care system is already a never ending kickback machine. Guess that’s why you’re a redumblican.
parsnip: Yikes! Checkmate, you win!
Rich:
This whole “legacy” thing is getting out of hand. Let’s take Caroline Kennedy as an example. She is certainly a liberal but has always comported herself with grace, intelligence and dignity (unlike most of the male members of her family.) That having been said there are many candidates with wider and deeper credentials to be a Senator. When do we stop granting, either by vote or appointment, legislative seats based upon family names? Part of the reason Hillary will be warming the Sec. of State seat rather than the one in the Oval Office is the idea that, after a Bush legacy, many voters were tired of the whole legacy concept.
Last names shouldn’t be the most important reason people are selected to fill seats.
thor: The current system is a never ending kickback scheme largely because of Medicare.
You know, a Democrat conceived government program! Nice try, though. So the message is why not make the whole system a kickback scheme rather than just the Medicare portion?
You must be a Dimocrat or something.
Bad day, thor? You can bite my ankle.
When the press stops treating certain families as deities and starts telling the truth about them.
I rather not respond to thor on this thread. Seems to me the topic of conversation is this crooked piece of sh@t, his friends, and the selling of O!’s hardly used senate seat. I wonder if Rezko will guard this guy’s back in jail or help him pick up the soap when one of em drops it?
Yes, Mudicare, it’s never been supported or expanded by redumblicans!
About partisan hyperventilation, it decreases your ability to make rational arguments, not that you’re a redumblican or anything, nooooo.
Somehow I do not think O! voters will have any problem explaining this away. I mean if they can believe the guy sat in a racist church for 20 years and “didn’t know” then I bet they will eat up the future spin of “he had no dealings with the Governor about his vacated Senate seat”.
Like new! Never occupied for more than fifteen minutes!
Oh, and that “current system”, biter, it’s, like completely artificial. Zoom, there went the medicine nationalization bus; previous stop like twenty years ago.
FREE MARKET OBSOLESCENCE, STOOPID REPHICKLICANS!
thor’s subject-changing to one side, anyone want to speculate what the leftoid response is going to be? Me, I think the evil genius Rove has gotten pictures of Blagjovich in bed with a corpse, and is using that as leverage to get Blago to implicate Obama before Obama gets sworn in.
It gets kinda iffy after that point; possibly it’s all a scheme by the eeevil booosh to keep his deathgrip on the white house in perpetuity.
thor, you Dimocrat idiot, Republicans have been the only ones trying to slow the growth of Medicare for the last 40 years. they lacked the balls to do it, to be sure.
Dimocrats? Not so much.
Look it up, Dimocrat. Feel free to change the topic after chest pumping your statement about only corrupt hicks in rural areas voted Republican.
Oh, Mr. Pink, I’m sure they’ll be able to ignore it. Hell, they’ll probably start demonizing Fitzgerald.
But the sweet thing is, there’s no intellectually honest way to exempt Mr. Hope-n-Change from suspicion. If Blago thought he could sell the Senate seat for a presidential appointment, he had to believe that appointment was also up for sale!
Politician’s bad hair and trophy wives are timeless topics for discussion, Rob.
Remember, most Americans had no idea who ROD BLAGOJEVICH! was until today.
More importantly, most of us had never seen a shot of his hair before.
That mop is a contenda.
So on one hand this guy is supposed to be a genius, and on the other hand we are supposed to believe all the corruption, racism, and bigotry that surrounds him are all just strange coincidences that he had no clue about. Beautiful. I have a feeling following politics for the next 4 years will be like watching a slow motion trainwreck except in this instance half the country will be cheering thinking they are getting a free train ticket to DisneyLand.
Rob, what Blago thought doesn’t indict O! In one of the excerpts I’ve presented (and please pay attention, thor), he seems upset that the only thing he’ll receive for supporting candidate 1 is gratitude.
Looks like Obama cleaned a crook from his craw. Hahaha, and the redumblicans remain chirping like crickets when their little crooks are hauled off in handcuffs. Typical how the flagpin worshipers are in constant blind harpy mode.
BJT, hicks are stupid racist vermin easily corrupted, Crawfords is what I call ’em. Others the live in rural areas that are educated and don’t run meth labs, they’re normal people.
“You’re too stupid to know the current health care system is already a never ending kickback machine. Guess that’s why you’re a redumblican.”
Whereas you don’t seem bright enough to grasp that making it a government entity will not improve this fact one bit, and will likely make it worse.
Guess that’s why you’re a dumbocrat (Didja see what I did there? Didja see it? A winner is me!)
It’s a world of contradictions. Bush is a scheming genius madman who’s practically too stupid to breathe, but somehow manages to avoid accidentally shredding his fingers along with the Constitution.
Memo to blog trolls:
New word to overuse is “redumblicans”. Republikkkan’s is no longer acceptable.
Love, hope, and change,
B.O.
Dan, there’s a link on your beloved Drudge that reveals Blagafjdlswhatever calling Obama a motherfucker and such. I just point to the silliness of the redumblican harpies and their projected Dem-only corruption fantasies.
Clean ’em all out. About half of all national politicians need to get booted and our system needs to be changed. Pelosi and Reid and Bush are too dumb, and I’ve always been consistent in my bi-partisan hatred for the whole lot.
I am still wondering why they are trolling. They won, we lost, supposedly. They also voted for “hope” with a side order of “change” and we are supposed to be unified now. Didn’t they get the memo? We are not red and blue states anymore but just one big Amerikkka ready to bend over and get serviced by big daddy government.
What’s your problem, thor? I was glad to see Ted Stevens booted.
That doesn’t make you not a dumbfuck, Dan.
Just guessing, anyway.
HAHHA fucking loving it. Obama’s land deal subpoenaed. Clean ‘em all out. For the change and hopiness and unicorns.
Now won’t it be interesting to see if Governor Bouffant knows where any more bodies are buried?
I agree with Dan; in the excerpts he posted I see a presumptuous moron, not cronyism on Obama’s part. I think Fitzgerald is brilliant!
And Blago had no reason to think he could get something?
Not buying it — O! and Blago came from the same political machine. They play by the same rules. O probably kept his hands clean, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more to it.
Dan, we’ve managed to screw up thor’s corruption and dumass narrative concerning Republicans. He hasn’t figured out yet that the majority of commentators here are flaming pissed off at the Republican Party and don’t really give a rat’s ass as to thor’s vitriol about Republicans.
He’s trash talking narrative boy.
You see, in Thor’s mind even if Barack IS proven to be involved in illegal dealings, it isn’t his fault. He was doing it to take down the man, to speak truth to power, or whatever inane bullshit he can come up with.
It’s American Imperialism that done us all in y’all!
We didn’t go away. We didn’t take their victory as the repudiation of all we believe. We didn’t shut up, and that’s their ultimate goal.
Also, they’re dumber than stumps.
“our system needs to be changed.”
To what? 25-year Presidential terms? King Barry I? Anarcho-syndalist communes in which we each take a turn as a sort of executive officer of the week (but all the decisions of that officer must be ratified by a special by-weekly meeting, by a simple majority in case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority…)?
Or just more “campaign finance reform”?
Spell it out. You’re the SMRT guy, we’re the redumblicans. Spell it out.
No, I understand your suspicions, Rob, and I’ve said throughout that I had problems believing anything good could emerge from the Chicago Machine, but Blagojevich’s judgment doesn’t seem to account for much.
Revolution! Change enforced by bomb-throwing radicals who, once they achieve power, give it right the fuck back to the peeple!
I guess I ought to have mentioned The Workers in there somewhere, too. Whoever they are.
Obama is a class act who knocked the fuck out of the redumblican dumb machine. Best thing that ever happened. I’m almost to the point where I believe that the same percentage of redumblicans as dumbocrats should have their right to vote removed. They’re no better than trained effen seals.
BJT, I’m a registered independent. You know good and well I despise organized political parties, and certain religions too.
Well what is this?
“The FBI affidavit said Blagojevich had been told by an adviser “the President-elect can get ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s wife on paid corporate boards in exchange for naming the President-elect’s pick to the Senate.”
http://www.abcnews.go.com/print?id=6424985
Seems to me if someone is telling you that O! can get your damn wife a job if you do X then Senator O! had to have something to do with this.
Do they make matching orange turtleneck-sweater combos in the Federal pen?
How do you respond to those Rezco/Obama land deal supoenas, then thor?
Yeah, but that’s Blago’s advisor, yeah?
This is kinda offthread but here goes. Remember how quickly we knew Joe the Plumbers life story thru the media? I wonder how quickly we will know this guys entire tax record, child support payments, and hear how his second cousins ex-boyfriend was Joe Biden’s brother in law.
103< Yes but why would he say that if he didn’t think it would happen? It is not like an advisor, who in that situation is running back and forth between the O! camp and his own, would just say that with no insurance. He would be out of a job if he did that one.
Ha! Thor is a registered Independent. Where have I heard that sort of nonsense before?
Yeah, I am an Independent! That is why every post I make is to defend Democratic candidates. Whatever Thor, maybe you are independent, but you HAVE to admit you are always on the dumbocrats side.
Dumbocrat, I kind of like that.
Mr. Pink, some of these guys were humoring the idea of Bouffant running for President in 2016.
Oh, I don’t think anything will stick to O!, but, really, the odds he wasn’t in the loop are minuscule.
Well what is this?
“The FBI affidavit said Blagojevich had been told by an adviser “the President-elect can get ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s wife on paid corporate boards in exchange for naming the President-elect’s pick to the Senate.â€Â
and this:
Maybe Dan. You are more knowledgable about this crap more than I am so you are probably right.
BTW Thor, I can fully realize this as something that the “one” is involved with. Socialist always get rid of those closest to them first. I think most people here realize that.
and this:
With a big go ahead, but know this, Obama and his wife are both fairly educated lawyers who I don’t perceive are the type who are going to be all that open to breaking the law. You can drown your 9/11-troofer into birth certificate fables but no, you ain’t bringing down a President-elect with your goofy lies.
It’s worth relishing this gem of a quote from Blagojevich on October 25th:
“I love the people of Illinois more today than I did before,†said Blagojevich, clad in a casual-Friday black turtleneck, gray sweater and jeans. “And if it’s a case of unrequited love at this point, I’ll just have to work extra hard to get them to love me again.â€Â
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2008/oct/25/nation/chi-talk-blago-25oct25
Dan I just do not see how you can go wrong betting on the corruption of a politician.
Sad. These state political machines have tentacles everywhere, and you don’t rise without choosing the right friends, church, and mentors, and likewise playing their brand of ball.
I remember William Jefferson as a rising young star when I lived in New Orleans in the 80’s. Bright fellow. Attended Harvard Law, you know? Was extremely popular with the city’s liberal whites. Sad.
Believing is one thing Pink. Proving in court is another.
oops, sorry for the duplicate.
Dumbocrat, I kind of like that.
That’s because no one has used “Scrotumcrat” yet.
“Obama is a class act”
How? Now is the time for you to become elitist pussy thor. Oh, don’t forget your inherent racism and the whole soft bigotry of low expectations thing you’ve got going on. This nigga done got trained right like! That’s our thor in regards to Obama.
With a big go ahead, but know this, Obama and his wife are both fairly educated lawyers who I don’t perceive are the type who are going to be all that open to breaking the law.
I’m so relieved that highly-educated lawyers are so very honest. All on your impartial say-so.
Given the ruthless efficiency of the Obama team, I wonder if they knew all about this investigation. Obama’s probably laughing his ass off right now.
Nope, ya Craigain palm reader, I analyze the issues and listen to all the dumbfucks from each party. In Bush versus Gore I refused to vote for either believing both too stupid to be President. I’m money when it comes to predictions, just ask those here who witnessed me calling each party’s Presidential primary correct and then the winner of the whole thing. I’m not deluded, that’s my secret. Obama is/was the best candidate for today, I recognized it early and called it at the top of my lungs.
Don’t hate the playa.
Sounds just like any other politician, but with unicorns and a halo.
Then why Thor have I never seen you refer to a Democrat as a dumbocrat?
I demand you call Blogo a dumbocrat and mean it, or your words mean nothing to me.
Sdferr I hope I do not come across as some leftwing-whackjob dreamin of frogmarches and prosecutions. I just am airing out thoughts and opinions as they come up, not predictions. I am saying in advance all my comments on this are simple IMHO.
I am basically going to get told in the next couple days, and this is indisputable fact I do not think anyone will argue with, that O! (the sainted genius that he is) knew nothing about this. He had no attachment to it and this was just some nameless advisor or something. Now common sense tells me that this is probably bull that noone in his camp was involved in discussing a Cabinet level position, but I will get to see it said on TV countless times if I turn on the news.
Not likely. Even if he’s perfectly clean on this, the shit is splattering and he’s too close for comfort.
Obama is a class act with an incredible mind, and this country is lucky he’s the next President.
Harp and bellow brain-removed frothers, but it’s true.
Here’s another highly-educated lawyer who must therefore be completely honest:
His legal lineage was impeccable. A Yale man with a law degree from Harvard, he was a litigation powerhouse, a leader at some of the more prominent firms at the New York bar who then started a top-shelf practice of his own.
But when the lawyer, Marc S. Dreier, stepped off a flight from Canada on Sunday night, federal authorities in New York arrested him in a $100 million fraud scheme, portraying his recent undertakings as more high-stakes grifting than high-end lawyering.
In brazen and carefully choreographed scams here and in Canada, Mr. Dreier, who in 1996 founded a 250-lawyer firm that bears his name, is said to have tried to take advantage of the current financial crisis by selling phony debt to hungry hedge funds looking for deals.
Freddoso pointed this out over at the Corner:
Corruption! It’s what’s for dinner!
Not likely. Even if he’s perfectly clean on this, the shit is splattering and he’s too close for comfort.
He can be clean on this it’s just the people that are dirtier than shit on this have mouths and big fat reasons to use them now.
RoA — ignore thor. He’s a malignant personality and worth less than a dried up piece of dog crap.
Thor, SAY IT! SAY BLOGO IS A DUMBOCRAT!
I don’t think you can do it.
I’m just saying, let’s not get too Counter-Fitzy in our expectations.
Also, don’t be surprised if, in a gracious act of bipartisanship, Obama offers some agency chair to Norm Coleman, to see whether Franken can’t have his seat.
It is not the crime… its the cover-up.
Obama’s senate seat for sale on ebay
the ebay q&a
“Q: If I win can I hobnob with the Kennedys? Should I deliver in brown bag or just put it in your freezer. Thank you. Dec-09-08
A: Absolutely!”
Oh, hell no. I don’t expect O! will have anything to worry about this. He’ll fire the prosecutors, shift the FBI agents to Alaska, and do his best to keep Blago from talking. We’ll never see a perp walk for anyone in O!’s immediate circle, and in all likelihood, the news will ignore this as soon as they can get away with it.
Oh yeah the same hospital that gave O!s wife that 100 thousand dollar raise the year he won his senate seat. Yes what a huge coincidence that one is. Dan trust me I am not getting all right wing Fitmassy, I lived thru the 90’s. I know they will walk. hehe
It’s important that America correct its intellectual and economic shortcomings, and I believe that requires a move to the left and a reversal of failed right-wing policies. This country has to adjust itself and not simply mindlessly believe in failed ideas.
Ric Locke thought he knew what a free market was, indeed, enough to give me a good long lecture about them. His assumption I blew sky high. Yes, I know all about economics and capital markets and I know when they’re way out of whack. I can also spot an over-confident sloganeerer a mile away. I like Ric on a personal level, but his false assumptions are endemic. The easy-answer crowd needs to be blunted and mocked until they get reality.
The only thing persuading me on this deal is that they have all on tape.
I correctly tagged you as a bunker sheltered hick. Cry all you want. You come to PW for shelter from the real world and I deny you that. Sad, but cry anyway.
Ah yes, it is only the beginning… It’s going to be a very loooong 4 years for Thor and company. They are about to learn how fucking exhausting it is defending “their” guy from every little accusation. The irony is so delicious.
Let’s keep the ball rolling: What did Obama know about all this and when did he know it? I demand that he prove his uninvolvement!
– using the aid/ go between establishes a cut-out for O! Keeps him a little further from the splatter.
– Blobo et. al. are still really upset that a virtual noob was thrust into the big chair at the adult table without genuine due course and are both pissed off, and trying to get every little scrap they can now that the power shift has occurred in Chicago.
– Oh and with O! being a lawyer and the Rezco deal… seems to me a really good lawyer would know how to cover his and her tracks…. not that they would know to stay away from such deals.
#118 Rezko subpoena submitted in October, at least that’s how I’d explain it. Drudge, right wing hack, trying to make something of nothing.
Frankly, I’m surprised politicians offer to place each other’s spouses on boards and all, considering it’s not illegal (and most Republican and Democratic legislative wives seem to sit on boards or operate charities). Bunch of corrupt tools.
Meanwhile, [we love moral equivalence here, so let’s have it]…doesn’t that mean the governor of Alaska is connected to Alaska’s former senator turned convicted felon?
I say impeach Palin for it NOW! Every time anything happens in a state, or to someone who someone commented favorably on once, the entire state must be incinerated and every person who ever met or referenced the guilty individual must be shot…likewise with their families.
On a serious note, ever since Plame and Libby, Fitz has been my hero. Today, he’s even more of one and I hope he investigates this corruption as far as it goes, all the way to the White House if necessary. From the looks of this page and Drudge and listening to Limbaugh, it certainly sounds like he’ll have you guys riding Jane Hamshear-esque shotgun all the way.
Prediction time: when he comes to the final Robert Fisk/Ken Starr-esque conclusion that Obama had nothing to do with it, you people will keep selling Mena, Arkansas videos and attempt, again, a virtual coup. I say, good luck. Pablo needed a hobby and chasing down non-incriminating intimations and making them seem terrible will occupy him for years. “Happy”feet can attack NPR for not “being in the tank” and JD can insult anyone who can’t see the truth.
That SDN guy? Well, I’m pretty sure he’s in the woods training his rifle on a bunch of organic food growing hippies anyway. This will give him more people to hate and make his day.
Think about the place in history of those who yelled “nigger” from their outfield seats at Jackie Robinson, Log.
Enjoy your hate-filled dementia and your cheap seat.
Oh, you are a genius poet thor and just the man to lead us out of our self induced wilderness of poverty and ignorance. Run for political office man! Mel Martinez is going to retire, just think how much fun you would have (and all the great humanitarian good you could do, bonus!) in the US Senate, leading those various and sundry morons by the nose to the promised land of Obam-america! Real jollies and history making politico-poetic synthesis. Not to mention the practical ease of not having to hang out with such hopeless dolts as we prove to be, so failed we can’t ascend you’re rhetorical candies to a half-knowing-life as enlightened as your’s so clearly is. Run man. Run. I’ll contribute.
He’s a malignant personality and worth less than a dried up piece of dog crap.
I can vouch for that. I’m working on controls for a laboratory biogas gasifier for a well-known university right now. it can use dried dog crap (among other things) as feedstock. Thor’s utility might reach that level, but he’d have to croak first.
Work your controls, garbage man.
It’s the “culture of corruption” of your guys that I am concerned about, Thor. When we get done throwing the mud, your savior won’t be able to get a fart passed through congress. oh, how sweet. Your foul epithets only confirm the fact that we are already drawing blood.
After all, we learned it from you guys. *chuckle*
I thought you’d find it encouraging that you might find your niche, thorry, even if it is as desiccated feedstock. Reach for the stars, amigo.
Oh, how soon you forget Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich pulling the levers of shame for the Repubs. I don’t.
Let’s see who gets tossed into the hoosegow first, Newt, Tom or Rod. Shall we?
But everyone else will. At least enough to screw up Obama’s grand vision. Ain’t Karma a bitch?
thor characteristically misses the point: Government’s a necessary evil. Although the Socialist Democrats are thieves and frauds by nature and by any sane definition applied to their redistributing property and rights, corruption knows no party lines.
The Sun Times said Blago was frustrated at being “stuck†as governor, believed that he would be able to obtain greater resources if he was indicted not as a sitting governor, had a desire to remake his image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016, thought he’d avoid impeachment by the Illinois legislature, wanted corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving public office, sought to facilitate his wife’s employment as a lobbyist, and wanted to generate speaking fees should he decide to leave public office.
All this by way of serving the public? By honoring his oath? By protecting rights and property? Nope.
By way of becoming senator. By way of “parachuting” himself into the Senate, hence the value placed on the seat he allegedly tried to sell. Talk about seeing opportunity for what it has become.
Bite my ankle, thor.
Remove it from behind your head first.
Ha!
But…….but DOES HE OWN A TANNING BED? The public has a RIGHT to know!!
“You know good and well I despise organized political parties, and certain religions too.”
And you’re still convinced that people are the least bit impressed by your alleged intellect or what you think about anything. Knuckle dragging hick.
Already some in the media have pointed out that Obama had someone in mind to be named to his former senate seat. How closely was Obama working with Blag on this?
The Public Has A Right To Know!
Did Obama use his recent Justice Dept. briefings to warn his “friends” that Blag was about to go down, so they could cover their tracks?
What did Obama know and when did he know it? He must avoid “even the appearance” of corruption! I demand he come clean now!
So you are a Democrat!
(If they’re “organized” anything, it’s crime.)
The fun will come when one of his advisers is indicted for remembering things differently than a partisan reporter.
Politics work much, thor? Really; do they? Does the jugeared self-centric occupant of the Office of the Son of Man-Elect really fill you with the shudders of delight you insist everybody else should feel?
Bite my other ankle, little whelp of a man. To it’s ruin, when the world is filled with your kind.
Because, whelp of an ankle-biter, said office is piled high with Clintonistas. Dammit but that’s intelligent!
*Yawn.* No, it doesn’t mean that. But it might mean that Sasha is actually Malia’s daughter.
Really, people, get some fucking plausible talking points out there. You’re really disappointing me.
I’m guessing the national party hasn’t reacted yet. With no talking points from them to trickle down into the moronosphere, they’re flailing around. Quite amusing, really.
I figure they will come up with some by around say the 6 pm newscasts. Any takers?
Wiretaps: Dec. 4: Tells advisor he might “get some [money] up front, maybe’’ if he appoints a certain candidate to the seat
My Theory as to talking points:
“But … but … but … HALLIBURTON!
What, you were expecting a clever riposte?
My gut tells me they will somehow equate this with Libby in order to bring up the hated name of the evil Bush. That way most of em will be so spitting mad yelling about vague conspiracy theories that noone will even remember what they were talkin about.
PS as an aside isn’t it funny how Bush can be blamed for every economic ill in the entire country but yet O! the maginificent is blameless for everything that happens in his home freakin state.
Also sub the following as needed:
“Greedy Bankers!” “Kyoto!” “Blackwater Butchers!” “Katrina!” “Ted Stevens!” “Faux News!” “Whitetrashdumbhickmoosefart Palin!”
Wash and rinse, mix and match.
It’s all the intelligence, Pink. It oozes.
Dammit, Mr. Pink! I can’t believe I forgot Libby!
“Plame!”
There. Fixed that for you, Ron.
That silly prosecutor. But he’s still our hero!
Thorasole. Really, double sucks to be you today. Screech and call everyone names. Point at the sky, set a fire in the corner of the room if you have to.
Not just in his state, but in his party, as part of his transition.
Nah. Sucks to be thor every day.
Rob – today is a double helping of suckage. Hence the “Obama is a good man” meme. It’s hurting inside.
Thors rantings on camera would make such good fodder for an MST3K episode.
Looks like Rahm Emmanuel is going to be the spin on this one. “Rahm stepped in to expose Blago!” the headlines will read. Squeaky Clean! Everything on the UP and Up! Forward together!
So would his toting my gas, Old Texas Turkey. Or yours. Robs. Pinks, Pablo’s, BJTexs…
thor is taking a real beating here. I almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
You know … if you look at Blagos in a certain light … just right … he kinda looks like a dumb rural hick.
ROVE YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD!!!
Thor – the gollum of PW. You almost feel sorry for him when he’s catching the fish and eating it raw.
Then you want to bash its brains in and release it from it’s hideous existence.
Hmmmm….
Mebbe. But paragraph 112 of the indictment indicates they were also looking into shopping around Rahm’s seat. The Illinois Fifth Congressional District is represented by Rahm Emmanuel.
Not saying anyone in the O! team was involved, of course. But, damn, there’s a hell of a lot of smoke…
For Chicagoans, the excitement comes from guessing who is the prospective Senate replacement who indicated that he might play ball (i.e. bribe) with Blago for the Senate appointment.
Smart money is on Emil Jones, the former Illinois state senate president (who just arranged for his son to take over his seat, speaking of dynastic nepotism). My hope is Luis Gutierrez, local congressman and all-around sleazebag.
Now, if Dick Durbin was somehow involved, too? I might explode with excitement.
Many of the questions are focusing on Senate Candidate 5. The charging document states that this candidate publicly expressed an interest in being appointed to the Senate and that an associate of the candidate offered to raise Blagojevich $500,000 as part of an alleged “pay to play†arrangement.
Jesse Jackson Jr.?
Today is just the first day. New toy!
But it will be growing old when months, possibly years from now we’ll all still be unraveling who said what to whom (cast of thousands), who offered which (gift, promise, office, trinket) for what (gift, promise, office, trinket) and just as with the Armitage affair only twenty people in the country will actually have any idea what went on.
Because something else will come along and wha’d’ya know?
NEW TOY!
And just who is “Advisor A”?
(paragraph 74)
The “former” part makes it a bit tough to ID — doesn’t show up that easily in Google — but it shouldn’t be that tough.
TSK9, I don’t think so. Jackson is shrewd, if anything, and wouldn’t be that blatant. Jones, however, is an Illinois politican through and through (I’m surprised these guys don’t use Ebay to solicit bribes, they’re so blatant), and Gutierrez is a gangbanger in a suit.
I’m leaning towards “Advisor A” being Bradley Tusk, former deputy governor and currently a lobbyist working for Lehman Brothers.
Politico is speculating Emil Jones too
March 23, 2008:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3602710.ece
Breaking News: Nobody currently works for Lehman, swamp child.
TOLD YA!
The whole goddamn state is crooked as a dog’s hind leg, from top to bottom.
But they’ll never nab Da Mayor, I’m willing to bet. The Daleys have plenty of cutouts in place, guaranteed.
Teh Lehman Brothers?? ELEVENTY!!!!11!!!!
#187: Bingo! You win a prize.
Here you go Gollum. Perhaps you can enlighten them with your mad knowledge of capitalism and free markets.
http://www.lehmanbrothersestate.com/
Thorllum
mojo – let’s just say I have relatives in the county state’s attorney’s office, one of whom Knows Big People, you could say. What I hear is that the sharks are circling Daley’s doggy-paddling corpus verrrry tightly. There’s lots of leads and arrows pointing, but the definitive smoking gun hasn’t been found yet.
Of course, Daley is far shrewder than Blago, and won’t make the same dumb mistakes. Nobody’s perfect, however (and Daley could make his own creatively dumb mistake, too).
Apparently, Mjolnir doubles as a vibrating butt-plug.
Dan says Larry Craig lost his appeal today. Not universally true I say. Not when Old Texas Turkey and P-blo are still lapping on Larry’s shrivied balls can it be said that Larry doesn’t appeal to some redumblicans who still leer goo-eyed at his handsome bathroom wag.
Pablo, make sure when you live-blog Blago’s trial that you mention all the made up connections your black-helicopter brain will see.
By the way, have any of the “valerie Plame wasn’t covert” crowd apologized to Fitzgerald today? Not that you’d have to admit the truth about Plame, but after you called him a “partisan hack” engaging in a “witch hunt.” Now that he’s brought down a democratic governor from one of the most blue states in the country, maybe he ain’t so bad?
I just can’t wait to watch Rob Crawford invent all sorts of contacts between Obama, the untalented, puff of air, fake messiah who has now morphed into a criminal mastermind running a cryo-mafia state. Hannity’s already on it and, while he may be too smart for Rob and his gnome fetish, perhaps bjtxs, proof-reader of news stories for partisan affiliations extraordinaire, can break it down for him. Really, you gents are too excitable.
PS I’m listening to Hannity right now and, well, in reality, sarcasm and insults aside, he is much dumber than almost anyone on this page, but he sounds like a 14 year old boy who just found Dad’s playboy collection. He was demoralized since the election, forced to say things like “I hope the President-elect succeeds and all”. Now: he’s just so excited today! He sounds like so many of you…breathless, hopeful, excited. I had no idea there were so many Joe Biden fans here on PW
It’s quite obvious that an “anticorruption” task force with exceptional powers needs to be appointed immediately to find out how deeply the incoming administration has been corrupted by being associated with Blago and company.
We can’t have out international reputation stained by Obama’s dirty friends at this important time.
I’m sorry, Ron, but was Libby convicted for blowing Plame’s cover?
What did I invent?
Good lord, you people are desperate to make this all go away.
Teh funny thing? While I have no doubt O! knew his staffers were shopping around for deals, I doubt O! was stupid enough to talk to anyone directly. Yet the trolls are acting as if we’re all expecting indictments against O! any day.
Hell no. We’re just laughing because this is what you get when you elect a Chicago politician!
Our local thor uses it as a teething ring as well.
Even on threads commenting on a sitting governor selling a senate seat, our resident trolls prefer to bash republicans, Bush, and anything not dealing with the subject.
It was lying to a grandjury about what he told Tim Russert, wasn’t it Dan? Don’t think Plame’s status had direct to do with it.
What truther gossip is coming out of the confederate Georgia bunkers via short wave radio, Rob?
By the way thor and Ron change the party affiliation of the perpetrator of this crime and then give us your opinion. Say this was a governor in 2004 what would you think?
One bad thing about this – this pretty much seals Chicago as the site for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
The IOC must be looking at this and saying, “Now, here’s a place that knows how to pay someone off.”
HAHAHAHA!
You treated a symptom, doc. The main infection remains.
Springfield is just a subsidiary (wholly owned) of Chicago, Inc.
“The Obama indictment remains sealed, at this point anyway, over.”
“10-4 on the at-this-point, Rubber Duck, over.”
“Reminder to check your water wells for poison, can’t be too careful, over.”
“10-4, who is on helicopter watch tonight, over.”
I still think Patrick Fitzgerald is a partisan hack. He interrupted a crime in progress to keep it from progressing. Why? Isn’t that the big question? He has to be protecting a) the senate nominee or b) Barack Obama. This is like Abscam, in a way. Interrupt it early enough, and Jack, Murtha hasn’t technically done anything. Senat Candidate X and Obama are currently clean. Would they have been in another two weeks?
It’s interesting, as a side note, that Obama appointed union-stalwart Tom Daschle to HHS. Most Dems are union supporters, so it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. But that was something Blagojevich was agitating for.
NEW TOY!
Maybe thor has been mistunderstood this entire time. Maybe he is a totally genius satrist. I mean, he’s spot on, but to the point of ridiculousness. Obama and Michelle! wouldn’t break the law because they’re lawyers? Seriously? Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example?
I mean, no one could think that. It has to be some brilliant parody.
I applaud.
Say this was a governor in 2004 what would you think?
Too bad the indictment wasn’t filed about a month ago?
Mark Foley, now there’s a guy who had bad timing.
Ditto Larry Craig.
Obama didn’t know anything about this and anyway it was all part of a plan bcos hes so smart and you dumb Redubmicans are just a bunch of inbred hicks and white trash and racists! Oh, and Larry Craig’s a FAGGOT so that maens yuo rebudmliacans are al stUpd adnad i haev a hotrusssian girfflalend.
I wouldn’t say I’m hopeful about this. I am entertained. Like Mencius Moldbug said, a vote for Obama is a vote for total societal collapse. I’m going to treat it like reality TV and enjoy myself.
So, who gets voted off the island this week? I’m going to say that either Axelrod or Emmanual end up getting blamed for this and cut out of the administration, if not indicted, and with that the Fitxmas party dwindles away. Hey, the evildoers will have been brought to, um, mild public scrutiny! I have no basis in fact. Anyone else feel like guessing?
Haha. Another thor impersonator has gone off the rails again.
Note to self: all Republicans are gay.
So right there Slart, though I can’t say I miss the hinky glitches in female singers voices that seemed to be going around back in those days. Very annoying hinky glitches they became. And good riddance.
Apparently because some bribery-related legislation was about to be signed. Frankly, I have no problem with a prosecutor and the FBI taking action to stop a crime in progress.
“Comment by thor on 12/9 @ 2:56 pm #
“The Obama indictment remains sealed, at this point anyway, over.â€Â
“10-4 on the at-this-point, Rubber Duck, over.â€Â
“Reminder to check your water wells for poison, can’t be too careful, over.â€Â
“10-4, who is on helicopter watch tonight, over.—
See, nuttier than squirrel shit.
Actually, Libby got convicted because his recollection of what he told a
reporter differed from what the reporter recollected… which was different
than what the reporter recollected the first time he was asked.
Then the jury (which had at least one or two members admit afterward that
what they wanted to do was convict Bush / Rove, but Libby was the closest
they would get) had to decide which one’s faulty recollection to believe.
Libby’s Law: say nothing to cops for any reason without a lawyer and a
video camera under your lawyer’s control.
It wouldn’t be an impersonation at all if it didn’t start off the rails, and degenerate from there.
If you’re criticizing the rate of sanity loss, maybe you have a point there.
New motto:
“Democrats: Vanguard Of The Corrupt!”
Gee Ron, you got links to me saying any of that or is it just a product of your fevered (and frustrated) imaginaton?
Y’all are making my day.
Breaking News: Nobody currently works for Lehman, swamp child.
Lots of people still working there according to the link, Gollum. Seems like they need some pointers on instant bankruptcy where you dissappear, whole cloth, like a fart in the wind. You know the type that exists in the capitalistic free markety world where you reign as tortured and disfigured hobbit. Gollum.
Yes. I know. Larry Craig is a fag and I like to lick his balls. (sigh)
Double suck days are just a bitch aren’t they?
Seriously, start a fire in the living room.
“Actually, Libby got convicted because his recollection of what he told a
reporter differed from what the reporter recollected…”
That’s the evidentiary process……Al Capone was so insulated from the day-to-day
criminality that the Feds had to settle for a conviction on….tax evasion.
Allow me to repeat my bipartisan position on elected or appointed officials guilty of criminal acts which feather their political nest;
Any sentence meted out on such persons should not be min. security country club institutions, but hard-time and if there is parole or probation, the remainder of the sentence must be served in a minimum wage job. They must use ONLY public transportation, and live in Section 8 housing.
Any ill-gotten financial gains shall be disgorged and applied to the cost of incarceration.
I have NO sympathy for anyone of ANY political stripe who betray the public trust.
PUBLICLY FINANCED ELECTIONS RULE !!!!
…speaking of off the rails.
Ain’t it fun? –except I wish Dan would go in and fix that link. FireFox won’t fold it, and I’m tired of scrolling sideways.
Oh, and thor’s gonna have to refresh my memory. What I remember is a clutch of personal insults, plus a lot of blathering about market distortions caused by regulations; the latter doesn’t sound much like a “lesson in free markets” to me.
Regards,
Ric
It’s been a while since I’ve been here. Karl was right. Thor needs to go.
“PUBLICLY FINANCED ELECTIONS RULE !!!!”
From someone that voted for O! that is fuckin hilarious.
Semanticleo: I saw your name and steeled myself to listen to whatever spin and/or redirection you would put forth… and then found that I agreed with almost every word you said. (All except the last statement.) I’m searching my office for the black hole now and expect that a pixie will appear and turn my file cabinet into a unicorn.
Oh, wait, that was just a flashback. Never mind.
Geez, Louise if partisan hacks like us can’t agree on hard labor in a camp in Northern Alaska for corrupt politicians like Blago, Ted Stevens, Cunningham and Jefferson then we’ll never agree on anything. I would love to see Jefferson’s cash thawed and used to pay for the gruel served to these despicable little weasels. Put Ted Stevens in charge of running the FIOS lines because of his expertise in the intertubes.
Blago can give haircuts with pinking shears.
The lurking cockroach population suddenly swelled…..what a welcome sight.
All I know about the stock market is your boy Baracky (The Good) is gonna own most of it, whether he likes it or not.
Good luck with that. Gollum.
It’s important that America correct its intellectual and economic shortcomings, and I believe that requires a move to the left and a reversal of failed right-wing policies. This country has to adjust itself and not simply mindlessly believe in failed ideas.
Rent seeking and kickbacks are far more sophisticated.
“Advisor A” candidate Bradley Tusk once worked for Mayor Bloomberg. Oh, the gifts just keep rolling in!
(NOTE: I’m aware, thor, that Bloomberg runs with an “R” behind his name. However, he governs like a “D”, and there’s very, very little love for him among conservatives.)
#Comment by Semanticleo on 12/9 @ 3:40 pm #
Do you speak English?
And yet you said we need to move left. All those policies are failures.
“I’m searching my office for the black hole….”
I know what you mean. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Guys, guys, this is a seminal moment. Cleo actually reached out in bipartisan fashion and engaged!
Bask in the stupefying glow cuz i suspect that it won’t last long.
It’s my party and I’ll rent if I want to
Rent if I want to, rent if I want to
You would rent too-o if it happened to you
Nobody knows where my Baracky has gone
But Valerie left the same time
Why was he holding her seat
When it’s supposed to be mine?
“Cleo actually reached out in bipartisan fashion and engaged!”
BJ;
I have made that statement several times here and at JOM. You are the first to agree. It takes guts to agree with an opponent. Cheers.
Baracky’s victory has been good for cleo. She seems less angry and bitter … for now …
Cleo: I hate all of those corrupt, arrogant, pocket filling pustules with a white hot rage. I’d definitely suspend habeas corpus for them.
Ah, yes. The inevitable, mitigating shoe drops along with the degree of courage.
Ric.
Gollum p3wnd your ass on free markets and capitalism.
He then went out and bought some corporate paper spread to treasuries in a deflationary market where T-bills have since gone negative yeild. He posted his trade here a few weeks ago.
In theory (like everything else) he owns all of us “ball licking conservatives” (redumblicans in Gollumspeak). In practice? Not so much.
The time stamp defeats me. Courage remains high.
BJ;
You don’t like PFC…why?
Ethics!, Transparency!, Honesty!…
O!
The Governor was deep into the cesspool that is Chicago politics; firmly tied to O! through both the party and the like of Tony Rezko…
While none of O!s disciples and devotees will be troubled by this web of association and influence peddling; I hope that the rest of the country drinks in the reality that is the corrupt machine that O! came up and thrived in…
But, I guess that Blago is simply another csual acquaintance in his neighborhood…
PFC trades one set of potential corruption for another. It also limits the ability of interest groups to get their message out on issues that are important to them. I see it as fundamental issue of Freedom of Speech, which is why I thought McCain/Feingold was a big stinking pile of monkey crap. What was designed to limit “big money Republicans” allowed Obama to outspend McCain by a wide margin. Let the voters and the special interests, within reason and limits, fund their candidates and do their ads. It’s more in keeping with freedom and I’d prefer the government stay out of telling people who they can spend their money on and when. Let’s keep the free-for-all free for all.
I can’t imagine that Obama will be revisiting this issue anytime soon.
Rob, Bloomie is sporting an ‘I’ these days. Bought it from Linc Chaffee, what I hear.
Did the “I” come trans fat free?
Look, Rob, I believe the underpinnings of our economy need to be repaired by methods only available through government intervention. Capitalism and America are not bad, but they need to be managed correctly so as to unleash our horsepower on equal terms towards and against non-capitalist economies.
I know about markets, tactics such as how to bounce other market makers out of the way, and the oddities of the game that only persons who have actually been at the control of those phantasmic markets which the non-so-versed harp so gloriously about.
Time constrains me from detailing every detail of imperfect markets, but trust me, there ain’t no such thing as a free market.
Ric, you’re a nice guy, and I apologize for my occasional tenor, but those distortions of which I spoke found no rebuttal or explanation from you. We, America, are the hatchet in the market of trade yet we don’t use our market leverage, and that pisses me off. Your insults toward me only cover for your lack of appreciation for my distinctly capitalist vantage and views that overwhelm your more simplistic narratives. I do not indict your motive, return the favor.
Can you rename the blog “Republican Central”, Jeff? Only way I can think of to give the usual troll suspects a shred of contextual pertinence, even if only by the shadows on the insides of their brainpans.
Hi Jho, your spine called and asked that I inform you that it would like to come home for the holidays.
that was very gentlemanly thor I think. I really enjoyed reading that.
oh. I meant #256. It was a moment I will return to throughout this holiday season.
Hmmm. I was thinking what I suggested was a bit more conciliatory than, well, you shoving your mind down the great unwashed toilet of your conscience again and again, Ankle Man, but if you insist…
‘trades one form of corruption, for another….”
We need a starting point. The non-profits can still operate, but limiting the dollar amounts from individuals and Corps with transparency and equal time funding for the opposition would balance the equation. Reason most NP’s object on basic of 1st amendment is because they have the cash cow, so it becomes an argument of whether
those with more money should have more free speech. As you know, ‘free speech’ has it’s limits..(yelling ‘fire’ in crowded theater).
What with all the sudden civility, it might have been an imposter!, feets.
But not if it means missing other perpetrators. For example, what about the union bosses who were obviously leveraging for a position in the O! administration as part of the quid pro quo? Letting it go far enough to get everyone, or more than just Blagojevich and his chief of staff, would make sense unless the purpose is to protect those other people. It’s conspiracy theorist, but I think that’s what Fitzgerald is doing. He’s not protecting the citizens from the effects of the crime. I think he is protecting O! or someone else from doing something actionable.
I wonder whether anyone has asked Fitzgerald “And then what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they’re not gonna give up the fight, until one of you is dead.”
Look, Rob, I believe the underpinnings of our economy need to be repaired by methods only available through government intervention.
Explain. Because you seem to enjoy extolling the failure of the Hayek model (and its imperfect implementation by Reagan) with regard to this.
Capitalism and America are not bad, but they need to be managed correctly so as to unleash our horsepower on equal terms towards and against non-capitalist economies.
Explain. Because, to me, the second half of the sentence contradicts the first, when it is the Government doing the managing. I’ll give you a lead on this, the only way a capitalistic economy performs at par or below a non-capitalist economy is from bad government regulation INCLUDING distortive tax policy.
“Look, Rob, I believe the underpinnings of our economy need to be repaired by methods only available through government intervention.”
Nobody could be stupid enough to actually believe crap like that.
It has to be the insanity.
“they need to be managed correctly so as to unleash our horsepower on equal terms towards and against non-capitalist economies.”
[shakes head]
Pitiful, just pitiful.
Good luck with that, Tex.
Baracky is not a capitalist he is a dirty socialist building a massive propaganda machine with willing dirty socialist supplicant tools like one Rance Crain. The link prolly doesn’t work without an account so I copy muchly so you can see what sort of thinking our dirty socialist criminal Chicago street trash president is inspiring:
Ok this is your brain on dirty socialist propaganda. Any questions? I didn’t think so.
See, I’m really an independent not a Democrat or a Refucklican, and I understand more than anyone about economics and markets and money stuff like that. I bought some stocks once and they totally went up, so I know that letting government bureaucrats run the economy instead of greedy Hayekian captitlaists is going to make eeryoene totally rich, except for the really rich people who are going to pay a buttload more taxes because its wrong for them to get rich becauses they are all redubmlcicans and dont understand money as mucha s i do pluss i havve as hosttt orursiasng gruflrfiend
Sock puppet warning, it’s always about me, thor, because I have difficulties taming my urges not to be cruel.
Like a prickly thicket of poisonous sumac, I do leave a mark on the lave flowing mucus blowers. Comm’ il faut.
lave = lava
I love how O! can just say that his advisor “mispoke” and despite video taped evidence reporters and his supporters, I am sorry I repeat myself, just magically act let the matter drop. Seriously this would be hilarious if it was happening in Russia or China.
“As you know, ‘free speech’ has it’s limits..(yelling ‘fire’ in crowded theater).”
Or “VOTE FOR JOE” on a crowded street corner.
Well according to the fascists of the left, anyway.
What did Obama know and when did he know it?
I am not a crook.
#35
Comment by Rich Cox on 12/9 @ 10:30 am #
Why did he have to drag my Cubs into all this?
It can’t possibly do any harm.
I rather find thors misplaced faith in the O rather poignant considering all the friends of Blogo and Daley that the O has surrounded himself with. What a fucking stupid hick.
Major. Gov. Dan Walker was indicted as well, but I think it was after he left office.
God dammit, thor, you’re talking here to a person who used to work for James J. Ling. Later on his successors stole my father’s pension, leaving Mother to live on Social Security. I don’t have your intimate knowledge of the specific manipulations, but you are also talking to someone whose First Rule is “It ain’t that simple.” Discussing principles is not the same thing as being unaware that complications exist, and bringing up complications in a discussion of principles is almost always the tactic of the intentional obfuscator. Since you always start bringing in details (and insults) to a discussion of what’s going on, I conclude that you are intentionally covering something up.
And I’m about half amused, and half pissed off, by people invoking the Magic of Government Intervention. Who the Hell works for the Government? — people. The same kind of people who work for brokerage houses and banks, making the same sorts of decisions (or not) on the same data. There seems to have grown up in the last few
yearsdecades this picture of “The Government” as some kind of Godlike agency, as if somehow a GS rating was some kind of magical knighthood. In Her Majesty’s Wizard, a fantasy by Lawrence Watt-Evans, there’s a scene where the protagonist (a folk-singer from Pittsburgh, PA, transported there by magic) does the necessary magical vigil and is dubbed Knight — and immediately discovers that he now knows how to use a sword, ride a warhorse in battle, and do all the other things a fantasy Knight is able to do. It would seem that there are a lot of people who think that being hired by the Agency for Economic Improvement gives the new bureaucrat the same sort of magic powers, and I don’t believe it for one second. If they were smart enough, and knowledgeable enough, to do what a Government regulator is supposed to do, they would already have been hired by some financial institution at six times the salary any bureaucrat can command.The same experience has given me another insight, which I boiled down into the Game of Centralization some while ago in the Pub. No matter what the field or endeavor, you can always find some bean-counter who will assure you that it can be made better — more efficient, more effective — by centralizing control. One Big Factory, One Big Bureaucracy; it is what Ling made (and later lost) his fortune on, the concept that combining everything together under one management umbrella would solve all kinds of problems. It never works for more than a few days, and that brief period is illusory, because it takes time for the really intractable problems to rise to the top and spread themselves over the whole enterprise, where before they were at least restricted to some small part of it. And it doesn’t matter a damn whether you call the Central Authority “Government”, “Private Management”, “King”, or the “Eye of Mordor”, bringing it all together under one Command just distributes all the problems to everybody, which means that everybody’s too busy stomping alligators to worry about minor matters like irrigation and drainage. It happens every damned time, and pretending that you can solve this set of problems resulting from “too big to fail” by creating something even bigger is the mark of a fool, defined as somebody who will do the same thing over and over expecting a different result. The perceptible Universe is causal. Hitting things with hammers always breaks them, no matter how big the hammer is or how skilfully it is used.
In my own, preferred Universe, any enterprise that got beyond a certain size — at present price levels, call it a hundred million dollars capitalization — it would be broken up into competing units; the proposed CEOs of the new units would each be given a gun and introduced to one another, and if they didn’t immediately start shooting both would be disqualified. No, it probably wouldn’t work, but at least the problems would be different and a lot smaller.
I would take your professed disdain for all politicians a good deal more seriously if you hadn’t leaped upon a product of the single most corrupt administration in the United States as the Great Black Hope Who Will Solve All Our Problems. It would also make it easier to take you as given if you didn’t spend so much time sneering that losing one election discredits the losers completely and forever. There will be another round, if Barack (May His Name Be Praised Above All Names) Obama doesn’t decide to be the Second Coming of Robert Mugabe.
Regards,
Ric
I’m almost tempted to turn off TrollHammer to see thorazine’s frantic spinning.
Almost.
There you go again hating on the socialists, happy.
Come on, tell us.
How many years of your life were/are you dependent on government checks?
Socialists and Terrorists:
I joined the Army after concluding that there are some people in this world what just need killin’.
Bravo, Ric.
“Who the Hell works for the Government?  people. The same kind of people who work for brokerage houses and banks, making the same sorts of decisions (or not) on the same data.”
One difference is that the feedback is different in private enterprise and government. Your banker has customers who he is responsible to. Your IRS agent is responsible to….the government.
Bad feedback, bad results. See Union, Soviet.
And thor? He’s insane.
Obama and Michelle! wouldn’t break the law because they’re lawyers? Seriously? Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example?
Or Nixon (Duke ’37)?
Or John Dean (Georgetown ’65)?
Or John Mitchell (Fordham ’38)?
Or John Ehrlichman (Stanford ’51)?
thorazine is really smelling of desperation, isn’t he?
The man is a moron.
A complete idiot.
Did he really think that he would get away with it all?
This sort of thing is getting typical of our leaders today.
How sad.
We need to rise up and take a solid stand against government corruption because we have had enough of it!
George Vreeland Hill
BO’s a class act and really intelligent? Whoa. I must be REALLY smart and classy then.
/not two adjectives I’d use to describe him
your spine called and…
Yo thor, your integrity called and…
…
…
But then again, it couldn’t have.
Thor’s a putz, but at least he’s not alphie.
Goddmanit, Ric, you are talking to a person who used to work for James. J. Ling. Later on his successors stole my father’s pension. Hahahaha.
They didn’t actually steal it, they pushed it over to the government when they were in bankruptcy, which resulted in my father’s already laughably low pension in lieu of his 29 years of service becomung a little lower. Getting 85% of what was promised used to be the rule, don’t know if it still is. At least he got something, still does, thanks to our Socialist U.S. gov’t bailing out tits-up pension plans. Continental Emsco was bought by LTV and renamed LTV Energy. And yeah, that happened in the summers I worked for Emsco. In my 5th or 6th summer, I’ve forgotten, they even layed me off, the summer help. My resume, fattened with an impressive industrial work history, landed me a gig at Texas Instruments for the remainder of that summer. Good job there, too, union wages as well, skee!
One off examples aside, you’ve selectively misconstrued my core arguments, but I do appreciate your willingness to address more complex issues, unlike our beloved Duuuuh Squadron, who, beyond cash register work are not men/women of industrial skill or mental acumen much less curious in the least, albeit with the exception of the Italians who post here; cash register work is actually highly skilled labor for the Southern European clans, as you know.
Centralization is not a cursory evil per se. Increased size magnifies errors, true, but hold yourself to your “It ain’t that simple” premise. We compete against foreign producers who benefit from efficiency in mass production due in part to increased plant size. Many also leverage production further through state directed resources. Take the effen Japanese, for instance, and their failed foray into memory chip fabrication 20-years back. I say failure, but try and point to another of their failures in state directed manufacturing. They’ve done extremely well, and have done so all while you and too many others have oversimplified the political narratives of state managed and state directed industries. If you’ve ever driven a top line Lexus you’d have noticed the quality of its parts, the windshield, for example, comes from a one-time state subsidized manufacturer that grew from the Japanese government’s understanding of the benefits to all its industries in establishing a world class glass manufacturer 50-years ago.
And so, as we dump on our native manufacturers, duly note that they’ve never benefited from governmental backing and priority as it pertains to the national benefits of their success, not to mention direct government appropriations. You’re “never” is just but another example of why there’s never a never I’d say.
How about NASA? Problems with bureaucracy, sure. Then again they’ve lead the world in technologies necessary for space exploration. Not exactly what I’d call a failure. Not exactly what I’d call a bureaucracy conforming to your “never” theory. To single you out is somewhat unfair, and I should apologize for that since there are so many Italians here who parrot your failed “never†premise.
Americans have to understand our economy’s strengths and weaknesses, meaning, I believe, that the days when a winky-winky Mooser momma wearing a diamond encrusted flag pin, one who is utterly and entirely incapable of distinguishing any weakness, being at the helm of a national office should be over, considering the current economic gravitas anyway. You’ll note that airheaded harpies are similar in that regard, whether on the Left or Right, as they live on oversimplification and candied gumdrop pulpiteering, including Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid et al.
To change America’s manufacturing playing field to better match and better our foreign competitors will require government intervention. Repubs, like yourself, have yesterday’s slogans tattooed on your tongues. The rest of us know that those slogans mainly apply to competition within the domestic market (dated), a market that was liquidated by roll-the-dice CEOs and weak willed, spineless gov’t free-market mouseketeers who thought to compete with China meant you had to move an American manufacturing plant to China, yeah, duuuuh, as if lining up on the wrong side of the ball in football is how one wins, though it’s a helluva way to run-up the score for one side. Scoreboard, Italians!
America and Americans come first where America winning is the name of the game, which means backhanding those whimpering whelpers who actually cheer for GM and the NYT to go out of business. Stomp their overflowing drool cups. Smash the wage disparity that is at a historic high. Reestablish domestic manufacturing beginning with basic industries such as steel and glass through investment in equipment and technologies that are a step ahead of the Pollacks, et al. Fuck the free market where we’re the only ones playing in good faith. The helping hand of America should be a clenched fist pointed toward those who’d economically fuck us for a kopeck.
DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?
(fuckin’ fucktard, Jeff should boot you for nothing other than your feckless duplicitous retardation)
Where to begin? This stands out.
To change America’s manufacturing playing field to better match and better our foreign competitors will require government intervention.
The US has been losing manufacturing jobs steadily since 1976. Hmmmm. Now what government intervention happened in 1976 or thereabouts?
Yeah. More government intervention. That’s it!
Workers of the World Unite!
Rube.
We compete against foreign producers who benefit from efficiency in mass production due in part to increased plant size.
Oooh, so that is why foreign products are so cheap, they have bigger plants. Boy, I sure am glad we gots us a genuine genius like thor around to explain things like this to us.
Smash the wage disparity that is at a historic high. Reestablish domestic manufacturing beginning with basic industries such as steel and glass through investment in equipment and technologies…
Unicorns! Bunnies! PIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE!
Duuuuuh Squadron unite!
It’s Rusty’s make believe playhouse time!
Duuuuuuh, and here comes BMoe, who ain’t never seen a foreign manufacturing plant that accounts for a sizable percentage of total world output.
Duuuuuuh, I’m an American. Duuuuuh, I know a few slogans. Duuuuuh, I vote Republican. How come we got no money?
thor, I strongly suspect we are far more in agreement than not, with that fact concealed by my cursory attempts at education rather than confrontation and your tendency to unproductive invective.
A corporation is an arm of the State. Always has been, always will be — its very existence is by State fiat. It is therefore an appropriate target for State regulation in principle. The kooky versions of libertarians don’t understand that, and are appropriate subjects for derision.
The proto-Corporations were put into place in order to tax people the King didn’t rule. The King couldn’t tax Russian peasants directly — but the Company of Friends could sell them stuff at inflated prices, and the King could tax their revenue, and the result was that poor Russian peasants paid for the English aristocracy’s foibles. They continue to exist partly because progressive taxation doesn’t yield sufficient revenue; there aren’t enough rich people to pay for the Government’s excesses, but by taxing corporations you reach consumers, who do, in the mass, have enough.
Many of our institutions exist to compensate for human foibles, some explicitly, many that “just growed” and aren’t seen that way. One of those “foibles” is the fact that power seeking is an aspect of human personality that is not causally connected with the ability to wield power effectively. If you put a power structure in place, power seekers are attracted to it, and some of them will be clever enough to achieve positions of power within the structure; but there is no law of God or Man that says they will be able to manage the enterprise once in power, and my personal observation is that if there is a correlation between power-seeking and management ability the coefficient is small, and negative. The bigger, and the longer-standing, the power structure is, the more it attracts power-seekers, until power-seekers with little or no management ability occupy most of the slots and the enterprise is paralyzed. Any Government is a large and long-standing power structure. Corporations serve as an end-around on the resulting stasis. As a relatively independent power structure, somewhat insulated from the parasite-infested Government, they can and do get things done instead of being entirely self-consumed in power games.
Those conditions are violated in two ways: If the corporation itself becomes large enough and long-standing enough to be corroded by the power-seeking effect, and if it becomes tied back to the corroded parent Government. Both of those things are true of the auto industry and financial “institutions” at the moment. To suggest that any of the resulting problems will be solved by additional Government intervention — especially when the said intervention is designed to prop up the present, corroded power structure(s) — is not even risible. It is insane.
More later, if I have the time between customers.
Regards,
Ric
I think we’re reading the failures of the auto and financial industry differently. These power-seekers you speak of are the CEOs which, in measure, I agree with. An examination of our corporate formation needs to be studied and fixed. As I’ve pointed out Goldman Sachs was a partnership and it’s corporate culture remains in that partner mindset. The benefits to a partnership was that management had their personal money staked. The inverse is the dumbass power-seekers you speak of, who, by the way, are no fools. Hillary Clinton sat on WalMart’s board, did she not, and with WalMart’s advantage essentially being one of logistics and transportation what did an airhead-of-profit like Hillary bring to the table? Yes, America’s lowest highway tax for WalMart’s 18-wheelers. Wendy Graham on Enron’s board is even a far more nefarious example of corporate board criminality.
Once a power-seeker becomes a CEO he/she nominates a slate of board members for reasons of strategic government favoritism or to protect that CEO’s throne from overthrow. For years people have understood this problem but entities such as CALPERS have found very little traction within our political establishment nor with the unassuming public.
This relates to your argument thusly, Japan’s automakers were subsidized (Toyota, Nissan, Honda, etc..) but competed with one another. My call for government intervention requires that corporations compete, naturally, but that their boards are all independent of management, and even from the ranks of those the employees. Far to few of our companies have boards where the independent members have the votes to topple the CEOs. This has led to the over-compensation of upper management, and where the most replete management failures lead to $100-million golden parachutes once that CEO is thrown out.
Talk about insane. This must be corrected. Metrics must be used and ineffectual upper management must be as easily layed off as any factory worker.
Industry has moved to the third world for the same reason you don’t see factories in downtown New York or suburbia. Cheap land, cheap labor, friendly tax structures. You might have a romantic notion of how wonderful the steel and glass industry is, but I fucking grew up in the middle of it, and nobody I know wants to work in a shithole like that. Big mills and chemical plants fucking suck, no matter how modern they are. They are smelly, dangerous, soul-stripping fucking hell holes. What American industry needs to do is exploit what should be our big advantage, an educated work force, and go high tech. Unfortunately your hero Ayers and his little friends have turned our education system into a fucking joke.
The adults are conversing, BMoe, won’t you excuse us.
Fuck your high-tech, you fuckin’ moron. Dumbasses like you can’t even figure out we have less advantage in technology than in steel. Grease, ewwwww, icky! Fuckin’ pussy.
Wipe the snot from your nose and move along.
Grease, ewwwww, icky! Fuckin’ pussy.
I work construction everyday, ponce. Grease and concrete and mud are my reality. My problem is prissy little Hemingway wannabes who have all the answers if they could just figure out the questions.
Dumbasses like you can’t even figure out we have less advantage in technology than in steel.
Which is why I just said it. Idiot.
But we got rained out today, so imma go spend the afternoon hanging out in a vintage book store, looking all brooding and telling the art chicks my name is thor.
Yeah, you must work construction. Anyone who works in tech wouldn’t be dumb enough to preach your Nanny Pelosisms, soul-stripping factories, never! You won’t build a ugly refinery in my district, poo-poo gweasy!
Check and make sure your business card doesn’t read interior decorator, BMoe.
My whole family works in factories. Father, brother, uncles, cousins, grandfathers, all of them. Aluminum mills, chemical plants, coal-fired power plants. 20, 30, 40 fucking years. Marc Rich came within a couple weeks of stealing my old man’s pension after 40 fucking years doing the same shit, everyday. Yet he still defends the Democrats, like a goddamn zombie. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
Yet you’d wish us to work like $12-an-hour code Indian monkeys, because of that grease.
Hard for you to draw parallels between office cubicles and factory wage slaves, I see.
Indian code
Because that is our only options: factory worker or code monkey.
Far to few of our companies have boards where the independent members have the votes to topple the CEOs. This has led to the over-compensation of upper management, and where the most replete management failures lead to $100-million golden parachutes once that CEO is thrown out.
Explain how government intervention is going to solve this core problem? I’ll give you a lead; Fannie and Freddy.
Furthermore with regard to Autos – explain how the labor quotient fits into the picture. I’ll give you another lead on it … jobs banks.
All that is very true, thor, but orthogonal to what I’m talking about — not to mention directly contradicting some of your other stated objections.
Yeah, the Club of CEOs has become inbred and inward-looking. Forty years ago you could read Fortune magazine, and it was about new businesses and new ways of doing things; nowadays it’s a celebration of Executive Lifestyles, all about who can rack up the most bonus points for financial shenanigans and who’s got the biggest jet, between ads for resorts catering to seven-figure and above incomes.
Trouble is, the Government is as bad or worse. The presumptive regulators have become so enamored of the smell of their own shit that they will suffer no other aroma. Worse, the distance between the CEOs and the Government officials has become nil — made worse by the cult of Brightness, that assumes that being brought up in the Establishment and going to Hahvahd confers some mystic advantage as regards the ability to manage. Allowing the existing set of overeducated Yahoos to try to sort out the mess is not just setting the fox to guard the hen-house, it’s handing the bushytailed rodent the keys and a sharp hatchet.
You do yourself no credit by buying-in to the cult of aristocracy. The American experience is that the human genome throws up skill and intelligence from what elitists consider unlikely sources. The real problem with any aristocracy is that it starts believing its own bullshit. Yes, we want people who are skilled and educated to manage things — but there is a profound and basic difference between “elite” and “elitist”. The children of the privileged classes are people, with penises and vaginas, and if their shit doesn’t stink like that of the trailer trash it’s because they have so isolated themselves that they cannot visit less-fortunate countries without elaborate protection from the variety of intestinal flora found in the real world.
And you contradict yourself. On the one hand we have a politician, enmeshed in a tightly-woven political order that refers to events outside only as to how much money they can suck, and whose foray into teaching people the tips, techniques, and fine points of golden-egg hunting foundered on the unfortunate fact that the geese had long since fled the slaughter of their fellows; this individual is the Hope of Humankind, sent to solve all our problems. On the other, we have a canny politician who has exercised precisely the sort of “regulation” of business you compliment in the case of the Japanese, and she is a trailer-trash snow-nigger, unfit to wipe your boots. Your prejudices are interfering with your judgement.
Regards,
Ric
Let me give you a real world example, thor. I have some friends who have a small business supplying high perfomance auto parts in a niche market. They do a lot of their own R&D, then farm out most of the work. Some of the stuff, like headers, it is far cheaper to get done in China, and the work is satisfactory for that type of component. Stuff like heads, the Chinese just don’t have the QC to pull off, so it is done domestically. That is what I mean when I say high tech, not Silicon Valley code monkeys, but skilled labor positions that really more on just a warm body pushing the same button over and over.
Zombie Japanese banks have been force fed cheap money through government intervention for years now. How have they been able to use that capital advantage to become the premier book runners globally? Answer, they haven’t. They are still zombies.
Airbus has been able to lean on government stakeholders for direct and indirect subsidies. How many manned space flights do the europeans conduct every year. 80% of the heavy lifting and engineering know how at NASA comes from the private sector. Boeing, Lockheed, etc. The government provides the insane beureucrats who weight down the management structure. Thats it.
When was the last time Amtrak posted a profit? Or the USPS? Latter having all the advantages of the model you espouse to “CRUSH” UPS and FedEx.
Redublicans suck Larry Craig balls in 5,4,3,2 …..
Well, them sure, but don’t forget the Congress which has the power (and uses it) to change the aims of a program every few years or so (see ISS project) thus totally disrupting and in effect, wasting, any work that has already been done. Back to the drawing boards boys, re-start the budgeting process, re-figure absolutely everything and throw all that stuff you’ve already done out, it’s useless now! Oh, jolly good, cap’n, and away we go.
Your assumptions of the ever evil gov’t minion are predicated on the current and recent crop of redumblican and defruadocrats. Strange, I don’t hear the Japanese or the Germans and Finns finding it impossible to find competent government officials who understand the nationalist relationship to the success of the private sector. Don’t ask me to go along with your evil government projection or that “never” premise of yours. If they can do it so can we.
Notwithstanding our capital markets are no longer capable, in my opinion, of raising the huge piles of necessary investment dollars required to re-establish that manufacturing infrastructure our lackey CEOs so recently sold on the cheap to India, Mexico and China.
If it’s possible to rid the “power-seekers” from their CEO seats then it’s possible to remove the Pelosi-ists from the seat of power in the House. We must re-build America from the bottom up, that’s what I advocate. Too few can seat themselves in a CEO Lear Jet and piss on America mid-flight. The I’m-rich-and-you-suck (the thrust of Reaganomics, I should know) form of capitalism can’t be sustained.
Yes We Can! Hehe. We don’t have a choice, actually. Obama got it right; the middle class must be expanded or we will all sink, meaning we’ll be like Mexico or any other third-world shit hole with only a few rich and powerful.
And fuck your generalities of Hahvahd-types. We must harness the abilities of our best and brightest. Bill Gates attended Hahvahd lest you forget, some Marxist he turned out to be, eh. Our kids are smarter than shit, smarter than you and me I tell you, and we have to provide them an economy where they can earn a middle-income living even when and if they work on the plant floor. America needs to own and dominate production, not merely finance the purchase of other countries’ production. If you’d like to take note of the consequences of a finance-only consumer economy, check the Dow.
Your inferences to Sarah Palin I find problematic for her ilk is the problem. She’s lacking a clue, unless you think a happy patriotic slogan is all that’s necessary for us to re-build our economy. You’d reward stupidity while denigrating those of proven intellect. Cal-Berkeley, MIT, Harvard – there’s an awful lot of stinky hippies there with PhD’s in physics sans the winky-winky and “you-betch’a-s.” George Bush is an amazingly incompetent man as well. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re the President. The Republican parade of flag pin wearing clowns is over. The damage they’ve done to our economy might very well be beyond repair. Social mores as symbolism is a Victorian-age throwback disease built on fears and false assumptions. Good riddance, I hope.
May elitism be earned less from a winky-winky and more from accomplishment of the intellectual sort.
I’m trumping your word count, by the way, are you feeling OK?
Accomplishment of an intellectual sort gave us Sub-prime and CDOs. If further dicing a tepid idea is considered intellectual accomplishment. The more copies you make, the worse the resolution. IVY leagues gave us The Fed and Treasury of today and they are being taken to school – behind the woodshed. (BTW how are corporate to govt spreads these days?)
Bill Gates was a Harvadh drop out, Gollum. Probably what saved him from becoming a socialist.
Why should the best and brightest of our kids work on a shop floor? And aspire to be part of the middle class? Is that because its all they’ll have once the dirty socialist has had his way. Middle class is just a definition, btw. Soviet people were all middle class. HA!
, I don’t hear the Japanese or the Germans and Finns finding it impossible to find competent government officials who understand the nationalist relationship to the success of the private sector.
You just can’t make this shit up.
You’re too stupid to converse with, that’s my honest opinion.
Credit default swaps on U.S. debt are trading near 62, 52 for German sovereign debt. Know why, redumblican moron? Yeah, spreads, asshat, you’re a E-trade genius.
You’re too stupid to converse with, that’s my honest opinion.
Then leave. Go get some fucking help. Only a sociopath would behave this way, dude.
I have to steal time between customers, thor.
One thing: gold buggery, manufacturing buggery, it doesn’t matter. It’s all buggery.
Regards,
Ric
Customer comes first!
I’m off to bugger a tall American-made beer.
Regards,
thor
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Thor’s already said he wants a socialist dictator to “fix” the country. Now he’s screaming about nationalism as the fix to all our ails?
Socialist and nationalist…
No, I’m not gonna say it. I think it’s already been said. By thor.
thor reminds me most of the architects that are the bane of my existence. Pompous fucking artistes lacking any semblance of practical knowledge who are constantly designing impossible works of art when all we need is a goddamn building. Then they howl and moan and pitch fucking fits because the folks getting their hands dirty can’t bend the laws of physics to meet their vision.
Just because I am haven’t studied the economic blueprints we are currently stuck with, or the ones you are proposing, doesn’t mean I don’t know how gravity works.
It occurred to me when you described conservatives as ones who go back in history and find what works and added some nonsensical generality of proggs that that indeed is how you rationalize economics. Your over simplification wasn’t directed toward this conversation but its summarizes it nicely.
But no, as I’ve said before, you will find no answers from the past for our current failed economy. We’ve never faced today’s circumstances and no amount of dated axioms will lead us out of this Reagan/Bushian abyss, and, frankly, it’s fealty, I believe, to those same knee-jerk axioms and quick slogans that are partially to blame for getting us into this slog of indebtedness in the first place.
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Do you shake and quiver like a battery powered sex toy when you’re in the presence of a Swede or Brit?
It’s pretty obvious that you’re a crazed harpy, a piss between the ears yelping kulak. The many years of dumbing down our politics has lead to the sad state of persons such as yourself.
Why don’t you go craft a narrative whereby Obama killed Vince Foster, knucklehead.
Right, because while that gas pipeline deal she finally got done is economically worthless, the promise to “create” 5 million “green collar” jobs via presidential magic is money in the bank. O!
But no, as I’ve said before, you will find no answers from the past for our current failed economy.
So all your experience is worthless then. I can see now why thor relies mostly on vile invective, how many times has he contradicted himself in this thread?
Hi P-blo. Are you referring to the non-existent pipeline to no-where, otherwise known as Sarah Palin lie #1529?