Have you tried turning it off and on again?
“Facebook” – mistermix (Balloon Juice)
Response from Zuckerburg: “I got mine, fuck you.”
Matt Taibbi gets at what the real issue here is: there is the Public Wall Street available to everyday investors like you and me, and then there is the Real Wall Street available to a select group of banks and investors.
See, the purpose of the Public Wall Street is to extract as much money from suckers as possible. These are your penny slots. Little old ladies with rolls of change popping in coins and pulling a lever, hoping for triple 7s.
Then there’s the Real Wall Street. These are the high stakes poker games that take place in back rooms where the buy in is $25 million plus. Think Casino Royale from “Casino Royale”. This is where the real money is made, where markets are moved, and where a cabal of international financiers plot and scheme to take every last dime for themselves and their friends.
“That’s OK, because the ground looks soft from up here.” – Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)
Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Would stimulus spending in the form of tax breaks, unemployment benefits, and not cutting federal spending to the bone not be demonized as socialism gone rampant?
To be, or not to be? That is the question.
Perchance, to dream? Ay, there’s the rub.
“David Cameron, Europe’s Latest Scapegoat” – Heather Horn (The Atlantic)
I have to give Europe a ton of credit. They gave austerity a shot, and figured out pretty quickly that austerity was killing their countries, so they’ve started throwing out all the leaders pushing austerity. This country gave the Democrats two years of single party rule before going right back to the same group of thieves and butchers that got us in to this mess to begin with.
“How Governor Rick Scott is preventing eligible US Citizens from voting in Florida” – Judd Legum (ThinkProgress)
If you can’t beat ’em, disenfranchise ’em. The only people in this country committing wide-scale voter fraud are GOP-led state governments, illegally disenfranchising millions of voters.
“Why conservatives keep beefing with the military” – Heather Hurlburt (Democracy Arsenal)
It’s because it’s not about the United States’ ability to respond to threats, both foreign and domestic, anymore. We spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined. No one has the level of technology we do. We can turn the world to glass a hundred times over.
It’s about funding the F-22 Raptor, a plane no one asked for to respond to a threat that doesn’t exist, built in 48 different states to keep 96 Senators from killing it, even after the Pentagon begged to let it die.
It’s about weekend warrior Congressmen who never served a day in uniform and believe that the only way to maintain America’s World’s Biggest Dick status is to shock and awe some brown folks every now and then just to show the rest of the world who’s boss.
It’s about building a fleet of new super-carriers when no one else has more than a handful.
It’s about missile defense, a program our allies hate, that doesn’t work, and is justified by a “threat” from North Korea, who has yet to successfully launch a rocket into space, much less an ICBM.
“Plutocracy democracy” – Cliff Schecter (Al-Jazeera)
Joe Ricketts is going to spend $10 million to beat the President. That’s 200,000 $50 donations. Sheldon Addelson gave Newt Gingrich another $1o million. Foster Friess gave Rick Santorum another couple million. The Koch Brothers have pledged $60 million to defeat Obama.
Our government is being bought and sold by a cadre of millionaires and billionaires.
“Breaking ranks: the sidelining of two conservative giants” – Paul Rosenberg (Al-Jazeera)
This may be one of the more damning critiques of the Village Media I’ve read in quite a while.
The two most quoted men in Washington acknowledge that the GOP is the problem, and no one will talk to them. Sunday morning darlings become radioactive after speaking the truth.
These aren’t liberal giants like Krugman, or even especially liberal writers like Ezra Klein, Charles P. Pierce, etc. These are center and center-right moderates that no one will touch, because they dared point out that one of our political parties is no longer wearing clothes.
