YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS VIDEO

(h/t Wonkette)

Glenn Beck makes an ass of himself...

THIS MAY AFFECT ONLY A FEW WINGERS...

(h/t Atrios)

but Roubini has appeared on FAUX News, so it's worth quoting.

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells review a few books on the Great Recession in the NYRB and cite "Dr. Doom":

Roubini and Mihm, by contrast, get it right:

The huge growth in the subprime market was primarily underwritten not by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but by private mortgage lenders like Countrywide. Moreover, the Community Reinvestment Act long predates the housing bubble…. Overblown claims that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac single-handedly caused the subprime crisis are just plain wrong.

Krugman and Wells add:

Meanwhile, few of the institutions engaged in subprime lending—such as Countrywide Financial—were commercial banks subject to the Community Reinvestment Act.

A LITTLE LATE...

but at least the SEC is going to look into these odd trading patterns.

SEC probes "quote stuffing" practices: Schapiro
By Jonathan Spicer and Herbert Lash
Tue Sep 7, 2010 2:13pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. regulators are probing certain practices around "quote stuffing," where large numbers of rapid-fire stock orders are placed and canceled almost immediately, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said on Tuesday.

The SEC has undertaken a review of the structure of markets, which has changed dramatically over the years. Schapiro said many investors have complained to the SEC about U.S. market structure. "We must listen closely," she said.

YAY!!! WE'RE NUMBER...UM...

NINE.

Money Can Buy Happiness

by The Associated Press
September 7, 2010

They say money can't buy happiness. They're wrong.

At least up to a point.

People's emotional well-being — happiness — increases along with their income up to about $75,000, researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Deaton and Daniel Kahneman reviewed surveys of 450,000 Americans conducted in 2008 and 2009 for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index that included questions on people's day-to-day happiness and their overall life satisfaction.

Happiness got better as income rose but the effect leveled out at $75,000, Deaton said. On the other hand, their overall sense of success or well-being continued to rise as their earnings grew beyond that point.

Comparing their life-satisfaction results with those of other countries, the researchers said the United States ranked ninth after the Scandinavian countries, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and New Zealand.

YEAH, KELLER IS JUST ANOTHER WANNABE MULLAH

But he does make the correct call from the viewpoint of evangelical theology:

"It's not designed to be a place where we preach against Islam, although we will preach against Islam and Mormonism and any other false religion."

The snipe at Mormonism wouldn't be at all important if one Mormon wasn't so much in the national spotlight: Glenn Beck. Beck himself isn't any more tolerant than Keller, so I don't shed any tears when Fundies denounce his religion.

The important underlying issue is how intolerant conservatives are, religious or otherwise.

HERE'S AN OBVIOUS QUESTION...

Why wasn't this done a year ago?

Obama Offers a Transit Plan to Create Jobs

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
Published: September 6, 2010
NY Times

Mr. Obama used a speech at a union gathering on Labor Day, the traditional start of the campaign season, to outline his plan. It calls for a quick infusion of $50 billion in government spending that White House officials said could spur job growth as early as next year — if Congress approves.

JOHN HINDERAKER HASN'T GOTTEN ANY BETTER

He was called "Ass Rocket" for many good reasons, such as this one. He now decides that Gen. Petraeus shouldn't have said that burning the Koran may endanger our troops and makes this lame comparison:

Still, is it not highly problematic when a senior military officer warns American citizens against exercising their undoubted First Amendment rights? This situation is different from the Koran-down-the-toilet story. We criticized news outlets at the time for endangering American troops, but that was mostly because the story was false. Presumably we can all agree that newspapers and magazines should not circulate false reports that endanger our troops. But what about accurate stories of Americans exercising their constitutional right to criticize Islam by burning Korans?

First of all, 1st Amendment rights are only marginally affected by truth or falsity and even then only where malice can be shown. Second, wingnuts attacked anyone who wrote or said things weren't peachy in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hinderaker himself attacked reports that we were killing civilians in Afghanistan.

"WORLD OUTREACH"???

The Dove (?) World Outreach Center plans to burn Korans on Sept. 11th and the reaction from the Muslim world is predictable:

Indonesians protest U.S. church's plan to burn Quran
September 6th, 2010
01:39 PM ET

Jakarta, Indonesia - Thousands of Indonesians gathered Sunday outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta to protest a Florida church's plan to burn copies of the Quran.

These Fundies didn't think about the possible consequences to our troops:

Petraeus: Burn a Quran Day 'Could Endanger Troops'
'Burn a Quran Day' Sparks Protests in Afghanistan
By MARTHA RADDATZ
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 6, 2010

A Florida pastor's plan to burn Qurans at his church on Sept. 11 ignited a protest today by hundreds of Afghans, who burned American flags and shouted "Death to America," and drew a comment from the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan that the preacher could be increasing the threat to his troops.

Gen. David Petraeus said he is outraged by the pastor's decision to burn the Quran, which he said could "endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort here."

Former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Jack Keane, an adviser to Petraeus, called it "outrageous" and "insulting to Muslims."

"It's also insulting to our soldiers in terms of what they stand for and what their commitment is to this country and to the Muslims in this country," Keane told ABC News.

SOMEBODY BETTER ASK THE PROGRAMMERS ABOUT THIS

The people at NANEX have been examining the May 6, 2010 "Flash Crash" very closely and to my untutored mind have discovered that program trading has run amok. Here's one example of many:

7,500 quotes in ONE second
(click on for larger image)

I CERTAINLY WANT ALL THE BAGGER'S CANDIDATES DEFEATED

but there's no point fighting a battle that's already been lost in Utah and Alaska:

(The candidates the Tea Party helped nominate in Utah, Mike Lee, and Alaska, Joe Miller, are considered all but certain to win — even in a year when uncertainty is the rule.)

RADIO TIDBITS

KNST, the main local wingnut station, airs a gun nut show on Saturday evening:

Armed American Radio Network (AAR) is the official radio program of The United States Concealed Carry Association. AAR broadcasts LIVE every Sunday evening for THREE SOLID HOURS from 8 till 11 PM ET from the Intelligent Talk 920 WGKA studios in Atlanta, Georgia and is syndicated nationally by Salem Radio Networks.

Yesterday during the show, I heard a promo done by Bill Bennett and that reminded me of how interconnected the Noise Machine is: both Slots and AAR are syndicated by Salem Radio Network.

I DON'T FOLLOW LOCAL POLITICS MUCH...

so I was glad to learn this:

In the Eighth Congressional District in Arizona, for instance, a seat held comfortably by Republicans until 2006, Democrats had worried that their incumbent, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, would lose. They rejoiced when the Tea Party candidate, Jesse Kelly, beat Jonathan Paton, who had been backed by Republicans in Washington.

MORE ON FUNDIE POLITICS

Early this morning, I decided to "eavesdrop" on KGMS, one of the local Fundie stations, and I was surprised to hear World Nut Daily's Joseph Farah talking. He was a guest on "Issues in Education" and was claiming that the Baggers are doing God's Work. Here's a screen shot:


The Summer Quarter newsletter of IIE parrots the BS on wingnut radio:

America faces a new culture war.

This is not the culture war of the 1990’s over porn, gays, guns and abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between free enterprise, capitalism and socialism, communism, and redistribution – that will make ALL of us permanently poorer.

WILL 2010 BE A REPEAT OF 2004?

You may recall that The Architect managed to pull off a win by getting the Fundies to the polls:

Evangelicals Say They Led Charge For the GOP

By Alan Cooperman and Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, November 8, 2004; Page A01

In dozens of interviews since the election, grass-roots activists in Ohio, Michigan and Florida credited President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, with setting a clear goal that became a mantra among conservatives: To win, Bush had to draw 4 million more evangelicals to the polls than he did in 2000. But they also described a mobilization of evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics that took off under its own power.

I recall reading over a year ago that Newt Gingrich began sucking up to the Religious Right and Glenn Beck's blasphemous DC rally is another indication that the conservatives will be trying to energize the Fundies. The latest bit of evidence comes from Mr. Moral Michael Medved:

Right-wing radio host Michael Medved insisted this week that if the Christian God were a registered voter in the United States, "[He] would cast his all-important ballot for Republicans." And if Medved thinks so, it must be true, right?

I THINK SAM NEEDS TO LISTEN TO MORE WINGNUT RADIO

In a NYT op-ed about religion and politics, Sam Tanenhaus writes this:

But the insurgency led by Mr. Beck and others has little to do with the 60s, which were, for one thing, years of great prosperity — with high employment and federal budget surpluses.

Beck alone has attacked the 60s repeatedly and has gone out of his way to disparage "hippies," just as other social- and neo- conservatives have done for years.

"FOLLOW THE MONEY"

Wingers always hunt for "jihadist" or "communist" sources of funding for efforts they disapprove of but they don't like to receive the same scrutiny. From a POLITICO article that did some digging into wingnut money sources, there are two examples:

ONE

“If I were a Democrat, I would be ashamed of what Pelosi said and embarrassed by it,” said David Horowitz, the former-leftist-turned-conservative, whose David Horowitz Freedom Center has steered nearly $1 million over the past three years to Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch group, one of the leading opponents of the lower Manhattan mosque plan.

Horowitz bristled when asked about the source of those funds, asserting the media’s time would be better spent delving into the recent refusal by Park51’s developers to rule out accepting contributions from Saudi Arabia and Iran to help pay for the $100 million project, which would be located blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood.

TWO

The White House-allied Center for American Progress last week suggested in a blog post that the registration of the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero’s website to a well-funded hawkish think tank indicated that defense contractors and deep-pocketed conservative donors were bankrolling the mosque opposition.

The think tank, the Center for Security Policy, which also produced an ominous Web ad opposing the mosque for the ground zero coalition, had a $4 million budget in 2008 (the last year for which it has filed tax returns).

Its chief operating officer, Christine Brim, declined to discuss her group’s donors or its support for the coalition but, in a blog post, criticized POLITICO for asking about funding for both mosque supporters and opponents — which she said “implied a moral equivalency between ‘both sides.’”

BREITBART, LIKE PALIN, IS TERRIFIED OF CREAMPUFF KATIE

Movement conservativism should be renamed "gutless punk" conservativism.

Breitbart touts his 'war with mainstream media' during Texas tea party speech
By Aman Batheja | The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Posted on Friday, September 3, 2010

MESQUITE — Conservative blogger and activist Andrew Breitbart told a North Texas Tea Party crowd Thursday night that the biggest enemies of conservatives are not President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

"It's George Stephanopoulos. It's Diane Sawyer. It's Charlie Gibson, and, my God, it's Katie Couric," Breitbart said. "They are the problem."

CRACKS IN FRACTURES

I don't considered movement conservativism to be a coherent political philosophy so I realize that it can cover up, ignore or deny almost any narrative contradiction as I have noted before:

ANOTHER NARRATIVE CONTRADICTION

Aug 18, 2010

On one hand, wingers claim Pres. Obama is destroying America, on the other, he's always on vacation, playing golf or fundraising.

http://radamisto.blogspot.com/

clipped from Google - 9/2010

ANOTHER NARRATIVE CONTRADICTION

Jun 04, 2010

Not too long ago, wingers claimed that the Federal government COULDN'T create jobs and now they are whining that mostly government jobs were created last month.

http://radamisto.blogspot.com/

clipped from Google - 9/2010

ANOTHER GOP NARRATIVE COLLAPSES

Apr 19, 2010

You may recall that in the run-up to health care reform, the wingers repeatedly claimed that anyone in America could get health care. Now, they are whining about an imminent shortage of primary care physicians because so many more ...

http://radamisto.blogspot.com/

clipped from Google - 9/2010

TONS OF NARRATIVE CONTRADICTIONS

Feb 05, 2010

IF we liberals had our own version of the GOP Noise Machine, we could do a lot of damage during the next week. First, we have the clash between St. Sarah and El Rushbo over "political correctness" and we could use that to bury that ...

http://radamisto.blogspot.com/

I'm not jaded, however, because I can still be surprised at statements like Erick Erickson, who says that however bad Christine O'Donnell is, and he admits that she's pretty bad, she's still better than Mike Castle. So much for the "character" issue, right?

Erickson did prepare me for this post from someone well outside the Overton Window, Dan Riehl:

NRO has learned nothing over the years. They seek to be some Right-side equivalent of a mainstream media.

MORE ON FREDO'S TAX CUTS

I noted below that revenue from personal Federal income taxes didn't regain its 2000 level until 2006. For corporate income taxes, revenues only exceeded 2000 in 2005.

NOTE: Amounts are in constant FY 2000 dollars

SOURCE

THIS DIDN'T TAKE LONG

Memeorandum is already listing Beck's new site.

ANOTHER OLD CONSERVATIVE WHITE GUY

Dick Armey was born on July 7, 1940, so he's 70 years old and that puts him in good company with all the other conservative fossils like Pat Boone and David Horowitz.

IT'S GETTING NASTY IN DELAWARE

Supporters of Bagger favorite Christine O'Donnell produced a short video in which her GOP opponent, Mike Castle, is accused of cheating on his wife with another man! Un-Riehl World View blames this on leftists but Ace of Spades correctly points the finger at O'Donnell.

CHRISTINE O'DONNELL, THE BAGGERS' CHOICE

Both Sean Hannity and Mark Levin are promoting her because (in my terms) she's a true conservative freakshow.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR THE FUNDIES

Religious barbarians just can't seem to get a break these days.

God did not create the universe, says Hawking
By Michael Holden

LONDON | Thu Sep 2, 2010 9:08am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - God did not create the universe and the "Big Bang" was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.

In "The Grand Design," co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.

THE CASINO CONS DON'T LIKE THE HUCKSTER

Fats Limbaugh attacked Mike Huckabee because Huck dared to criticize the MOTU on Wall Street and now Ann Coulter seems to join the attack:

"There's only one true Christian liberal in the country and that's Mike Huckabee."

DAVID WEIGEL IS STILL TERRIFIC

He found this tidbit from Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on Glenn Beck:

You know, [Beck's Mormonism] actually comes out at times in his conversations such as when he talks about Native Americans and their language being rooted in ancient Biblical Hebrew. You know, there are a lot of Christians who listen to that and go "well that sounds interesting." Well, it's not interesting; it's wrong. It's right out of the Book of Mormon.

HARD TIMES IN ARIZONA

Medicaid services have been curtailed because of state budget problems. Here's the list:

Due to Arizona's huge budget problems and more people being added to the Medicaid Program, after 10/1/2010, Health Choice Arizona under the direction of the AHCCCS Administration, will no longer pay for certain medical care for anyone who is 21 years old or older.

The medical services that will no longer be covered are:

• Most dental care
• Bone anchored hearing aids and cochlea!' implants
• Insulin pumps
• Percussive vests
• Orthotics
• Visits to a podiatrist
• Pancreas transplants (except when pancreas transplant and a kidney transplant are done at the same time)
• Lung transplants
• Allogeneic unrelated hematopoietic cell transplants
• Heart transplants for non-ischemic cardiomyopathy
• Liver transplants for persons with hepatitis C
• Visits to the doctor when you have no specific complaint and are not being treated for any symptoms (well exams)
• Microprocessor-controlled lower limbs and joints for lower limbs

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PREACHER BECK

Today on his radio show, Beck claimed that God wants us to have a small Federal government.

THIS IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT

At Ft. Bliss yesterday, Pres. Obama said the Iraq War had made America more secure:

I’m going to make a speech to the nation tonight. It’s not going to be a victory lap. It’s not going to be self-congratulatory. There’s still a lot of work that we’ve got to do to make sure that Iraq is an effective partner with us. But the fact of the matter is that because of the extraordinary service that all of you have done, and so many people here at Fort Bliss have done, Iraq has an opportunity to create a better future for itself, and America is more secure.

UPDATE: The neo-cons now seem to love Pres. Obama:

Barack the neocon
Last Updated: 1:29 AM, September 1, 2010
Posted: 12:19 AM, September 1, 2010
John Podhoretz

WHAT THE WINGERS WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT GERMANY

They are currently pointing to Germany as an economic model for the US because the rubes don't know that Germany has a much larger welfare state than the U.S.:

A generous social welfare system provides for universal medical care, unemployment compensation, and other social needs.

[SNIP]

Reforms launched by the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (1998-2005), deemed necessary to address chronically high unemployment and low average growth, contributed to strong growth in 2006 and 2007 and falling unemployment, which in 2008 reached a new post-reunification low of 7.8%. These advances, as well as a government-subsidized, reduced working hour scheme, helped account for the relatively modest increase in unemployment during Germany's 2008-2009 recession--the deepest since World War II.

ANOTHER LIE BY BECK

(h/t Raw Story)

At his theo-fascist rally, Beck told the crowd that "I held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington." but according to a National Archives spokesperson Susan Cooper, Beck never held the actual document:

But Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper insists that Beck didn't lay a finger on any precious documents, much less George Washington’s inaugural address. That would be a major violation of policy. "Those kinds of treasures are only handled by specially trained archival staff," she explains. Cooper acknowledges that someone at the archives did show the document to Beck, but that was the extent of it. Regarding Beck's claim that he held the document, Cooper says that seeing such documents for the first time can be a very emotional experience. "I'm certain it was a figure of speech," she says.

TONY BLAIR ON DARTH CHENEY

William "The Bloody" Kristol wanted an American empire and then-VP Cheney was eager to comply according to Tony Blair:

While Bush was persuaded of the merits of pursuing a further U.N. resolution over Iraq and the benefits of assembling a coalition ahead of an invasion, Blair says former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney was "unremittingly hard line."

"He thought that the world had to be made anew, and that after September 11, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power," he writes.