Tuh-weet! Palin lectures media on credibility

By GottaLaff

Who better than BaldFace McSpewLies to lecture the media on credibility:


The media expert has spoken. In fact, Half-Gov McHypocrite never stopped speaking, ever. Oh, except when the media asked her to, repeatedly, during Election 2008.

Hey LameScream McEthicless: Want 2 earn some credibility? U hammered the "lame stream" media 4 doing their job in '08, but ignored them when they revealed you to be a complete nitwit. Change that.

H/t: EmeraldKnight76

Frank Rich: Two Cheers for Rod Blagojevich

By GottaLaff

Barry Blitt

Frank Rich:

What went down in the Land of Lincoln is just the reductio ad absurdum of an American era where both entitlement and corruption have been the calling cards of power. Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald. [...]

Bush had arrived in Washington vowing to inaugurate a new, post-Clinton era of “personal responsibility” in which “people are accountable for their actions.” Eight years later he holds himself accountable for nothing. [...]

[W]hile some perpetrators of fraud at Enron would ultimately pay a price, any lessons from its demise, including a need for safeguards, were promptly forgotten by one and all in the power centers of both federal and corporate governance. [...]

Despite Bush’s post-Enron call for “a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community,” the exact opposite has happened in the six years since. [...]

It’s a sad snapshot of our century’s establishment that Rubin has been an economic adviser to Barack Obama and Gramm to John McCain. And that both captains of finance remain unapologetic, unaccountable and still at their banks, which have each lost more than 70 percent of their shareholders’ value this year and have collectively announced more than 90,000 layoffs so far.

The Times calls its chilling investigative series on the financial failures “The Reckoning,” but the reckoning is largely for the rest of us — taxpayers, shareholders, the countless laid-off employees — not the corporate and political leaders who led us into the quagmire. It’s a replay of the Iraq equation: the troops, the Iraqi people and American taxpayers have borne the harshest costs while Bush and company retire to their McMansions. [...]

After a while they all start to sound like O. J. Simpson, who when at last held accountable for some of his behavior told a Las Vegas judge this month, “In no way did I mean to hurt anybody.” Or perhaps they are channeling Donald Rumsfeld, whose famous excuse for his failure to secure post-invasion Iraq, “Stuff happens,” could be the epitaph of our age.

Our next president, like his predecessor, is promising “a new era of responsibility and accountability.” We must hope he means it. Meanwhile, we have the governor he leaves behind in Illinois to serve as our national whipping boy, the one betrayer of the public trust who could actually end up paying for his behavior. The surveillance tapes of Blagojevich are so fabulous it seems a tragedy we don’t have similar audio records of the bigger fish who have wrecked the country. But in these hard times we’ll take what we can get.

Getting to know Sarah Louise Palin

By GottaLaff

Via Think Progress:

On the Wonk Room, Ben Furnas reports that, ironically, Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R) financial portfolio is managed by none other than financial giant Smith Barney, which helped finance Enron Corp. The “reform-minded” Palin has now signed up to vouch for McCain’s Norquist agenda of $300 billion in tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

What a find she is.

Obama: Close the Enron loophole

By GottaLaff

According to Randi Rhodes, all Congress has to do is put back the words "and energy" into the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. That's all it would take to fix it. So, who can we call on to help us do that?

Obama campaign's said today that he plans to ease the impact of rising gas prices by cracking down on excessive energy speculation through closing the so-called “Enron Loophole.”

And who can't we call on? One guess.

Hmmm. What would happen if we dumped all that Enron Loopholiness?

On the other hand, in a single step tomorrow, Congress and George Bush could create an overnight drop in oil prices of between 25 and 50 percent. This is according to testimony before a Senate Committee two weeks ago by Michael Greenberger, the former director of Trading & Markets for the Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC), the government board that oversees commodities markets.

GREENBERGER: Yes, overnight that will bring down the price of crude oil to get at least a 25 percent drop in the cost of oil and a corresponding drop in the cost of gasoline. Some people estimate 50 percent.

On the conference call were New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, economic policy director Jason Furman, and energy adviser Elgie Holstein, who was chief of staff at the Department of Energy during the Clinton Administration:

Corzine said the "Enron loophole” Gramm had added to the bill took exchanges and derivative oil contracts out of supervisory oversight and had been a problem in electricity markets in California a few years ago. He said it was unlikely Gramm would push back against his own amendment.