November 12, 2010
Who would've thought...
...that Chimpy would plagiarize other legitimate authors for his stupid book?
<Via Huffington>
When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn't getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises "gripping, never-before-heard detail" about the former president's key decisions, offering to bring readers "aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America's most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq," and other undisclosed and weighty locations.
Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial "decision points" of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush's character: He's too lazy to write his own memoir.
Tiabbi: Courts helping banks thrash homeowners
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.
They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
Finish reading article - Matt Tiabbi - Rolling Stone
Little Feat live in Germany - before the invention of Autotune
Gawd I miss these guys. RIP Lowell George and Ritchie Hayward.
Filmed at the Grugahalle in Essen, Germany in 1977, just a few days before the recording of their legendary live album Waiting For Columbus.
Historic Compromise Reached
'Extend all tax cuts, let Obama's term expire
In a stunning display of bipartisanship, President Obama and the Republican Leadership have reached an historic compromise, agreeing to extend indefinitely the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest Americans, but allowing the President’s term to expire prematurely, sometime in mid-2011.
Mr. Obama hailed this agreement as an example of “how the two parties can meet in the middle and respond to the needs of the electorate — and without even having to spend taxpayer funds on a slurpee for Mitch McConnell, or a Merlot for Speaker-to-be Boehner.”
The President further emphasized that he had still “stood on principle, by not handing the ‘keys’ back to the Republicans,” but that he would instead “serve as their ‘designated driver,’ by personally driving the car back into the ditch. Since the GOP is now the party of Bachmann and Palin,” Mr. Obama added, “just think of it as Driving Miss Crazy.”
In a stunning display of bipartisanship, President Obama and the Republican Leadership have reached an historic compromise, agreeing to extend indefinitely the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest Americans, but allowing the President’s term to expire prematurely, sometime in mid-2011.
Mr. Obama hailed this agreement as an example of “how the two parties can meet in the middle and respond to the needs of the electorate — and without even having to spend taxpayer funds on a slurpee for Mitch McConnell, or a Merlot for Speaker-to-be Boehner.”
The President further emphasized that he had still “stood on principle, by not handing the ‘keys’ back to the Republicans,” but that he would instead “serve as their ‘designated driver,’ by personally driving the car back into the ditch. Since the GOP is now the party of Bachmann and Palin,” Mr. Obama added, “just think of it as Driving Miss Crazy.”
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