Why should we allow a country to become “Islamist” just because of the irresponsibility of its own people? We ought to support the Turkish military should it decide, yet again, to dismiss that country’s democratically-elected government.
This one goes out to all the secretaries and janitors at AIG who have been adversely affected by short-sighted taxpayer anger.
UPDATE: It’s a miracle! An early March miracle! Celebrity singers from around the country have banded together to record this charity single for the poor besmirched AIG employees!
We are the world, AIG! We can get them those bonuses if we all come together and SING!
There comes a time
When we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people on Wall Street who can’t afford their blow
And it’s time to lend them money for a call girl,
Don’t make these folks go Galt!
We can’t go on
Pretneding day by day
That $80,000 is a lot of money
We are all a part of
God’s great big family
And the truth, you know cash is all we need
We’re AIG
We are the traders
We are the ones who insure derivatives
So let’s start taking
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own hides
It’s true we’ll make a better day
But just for AIG!
UPDATE II: Just a reminder, guys, that our tip jar is working again! 50% of all proceeds will go toward the Help AIG Traders Get Their Bonuses Fund.
My wife Terry and I breathed a huge sigh of relief when our son finally moved out of our basement, put his PS3, his TV, his 50 boxes of comic books and his sleeping bag in a U-Haul and moved to DC. At his age, it was about time. Heck, even if he were going to DC to gay marry that Tucker feller, that would have been an improvement, notwithstanding our views on gay stuff. Terry really needed to get down there and clean that basement up. There’s only so much you can do by spraying a can of Glade down the stairwell every so often. Also, it turns out, judging from what we found down there, that we could have been millionaires by now if we had invested in the folks who make Vaseline. Anywho, wouldn’t you know it but he was hardly in DC for a week before he walked in front of a galldurned SUV and got himself all bashed up. Terry and I aren’t sure whether he still has keys to the house but we’ve changed the locks, you know, just in case. I personally thought DC was five pounds of crap in a one-pound bag but, you know, we’re still forever grateful to everyone in DC for finally taking that load off our hands.
*Not an actual photo of Treacher’s father, but a completely reliable computer-generated portrait based on a sophisticated algorithm that predicts what the father of an unmarried forty-something lard-assed conservative blogger, comic book aficionado and comment section troll from Indiana would probably look like.
Anyone who has read Liar’s Poker or any number of insider accounts of major Wall Street firms knows that the big problem with the banksters isn’t merely that they’re greedy. Rather, it’s that they’re spoiled, entitled pricks who absolutely refuse to own up to their own personal failings. This attitude can be seen in these amazing transcripts where AIG traders lash out at the very taxpayers who saved their pitiful asses from being tossed out on the street:
The employees said that the corporate leaders who had driven the firm into the ground were already gone from the company. Those who had remained behind to help clean up the mess and repay the taxpayer bailout were due their compensation, they told Pasciucco.
“You made a commitment to us, and we made a commitment to you. And for anybody to look beyond that, as the politics and the media are at the moment, is missing the point,” said an employee. “You can’t expect us to just roll over and ignore that commitment because there is a bunch of immoral bigots that intend us to do something different. It’s not going to happen.”
Another was even more irate, lashing out at the public for scapegoating AIG employees. “To be honest with you, I really hope it blows up. I think the U.S. taxpayer deserves to lose a trillion dollars over this thing for the way they have behaved.”
And then he turned on politicians who had joined the anti-AIG posse. “They only care about the next election, just like we only care about the next bonus. Well, none of them cares about the country, none of us cares about the institution,” he said, adding: “They really don’t care, and I really don’t care. And frankly, if a trillion dollars gets lost, fine.”
The AIG retention bonuses have rankled many in the public because the company has received a federal rescue package of about $180 billion in loans, stock investments and other commitments from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. Closing down AIG Financial Products’ trading portfolio has been vital to stemming further losses and repaying the public money.
My general reaction: Just quit, you assholes. Try taking around your résumés to other firms if you’re so convinced in your own inflated sense of self-worth. But this is just a guess — when you go in for an interview with another company, having five years’ experience of selling credit default swaps in AIG’s Financial Products division isn’t going to help you get a job. Shit, I wouldn’t hire you to vacuum my rugs or take out my garbage. Because in the end I don’t think that you guys possess any real skills that are useful outside of your own little bubble world.
In light of Al ‘Jon Swift’ Weisel’s departure for the great blogroll in the sky, I’m thinking it’d be nice to honor him with a post dedicated to something he was so good about — drawing attention to smaller bloggers who deserve far more notice than they generally get.*
Use the comment thread to link bloggers you read who don’t get as much traffic as they ought to … perhaps because they serve a niche audience, don’t post with the frequency of the freaks who populate the ‘A-list’, toil away without the first-mover advantage enjoyed by the established set, or simply have that sort of genius that remains less than fully appreciated.
Speaking for myself, I must admit that as I’ve grown longer in tooth on these here Internets, I’ve become a creature of habits (most of them bad, the rest unmentionable) … and one of them is a laziness that has set in, where on 99 out of 100 days I click through the same 10 or so big blogs to catch the general gist of what’s going on, rather then explore the nooks and crannies of the ‘Tubes like I used to do.
That’s pretty fucking lame. Blows major goats, I’d venture to say. Anyway, go check out the The House of Substance, for starters. He’s funny as hell. Put your faves in comments.
*And just as importantly, giving others a pat on the back when they said a good thing or made a good funny. We don’t do that nearly enough ’round here. Granted, it’s part of the comedy ethos that you’re mostly always moving on to the next joke instead of stopping to acknowledge the successes of others … it’s sort of unhip to offer praise instead of another stab at teh funny. But the thing about being generous with praise and not just one-upmanship is that it makes the recipient of said praise feel really, really good … because somebody else got it, and liked it and would be happy to hear more.
A wonderfully trenchant and biting satirical voice has left us. The great blogger Jon Swift – Al Weisel – has died. All of his many fans here and throughout the blogosphere will be mourning his loss.
Why on earth CNN continues to wheel out Erick Erickson, the three-chinned pundit with a Pa Kettle accent and a mind as sharp as a Velveeta wedge, continues to elude me, particularly after Erickson’s let-them-eat-dirt comments about the unemployed last night on AC360. Erick claimed that the only people who would have been benefited by the extension of jobless benefits were “the ones who are going to be able to collect unemployment benefits for some more instead of going out to look for a job.”
But the best part was this little gem from Erickson:
You know, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the states that pay the least amount of unemployment benefits over time have the lowest unemployment and when we keep subsidizing the behavior, the behavior continues.
This is not the first time that Erick has used this line of reasoning. Back when he was on the city council of Copperhead Junction, Georgia, the townfolk became alarmed one year at a sudden increase in snake bites in their little town and, as councilman Erick had the most book-learning of anyone in the town, they asked him to figure out a solution. So Erik did a little research, or rather he asked Effie at the town library to do some research for him, and she discovered an amazing statistic: places with the least number of people treated for snake bites had less snakes than places with more people treated for snake bites. The very next day Erick introduced a resolution, which the town council immediately passed, to forbid treating snake bite victims since the statistics showed that would lower the number of snakes in the town. Several funerals later, the townspeople urged that the law be repealed, but Erick stuck to his guns. “Listen, y’all, if you let people get treated for snake bites, then everybody all over town is going to be running out and trying to get bitten by a snake.”
I would call Erick retarded but it would be unduly insulting to the Palin family.
Professor Althouse, obviously an avid reader of Sadly, No!, didn’t like my latest post on her and says that we* are “prudes … who freak out about drinking, who think that lifting one glass depicts degeneracy.” Er, no, Ann, the Sadly, No! crew drinks — usually to excess — but somehow we have always managed to avoid turning a video camera on ourselves after drinking countless shots of tequila and then posting the results on YouTube. We’re not dinging Ann because she’s a messy lush; we’re dinging her for being a clueless lush who doesn’t realize that what her students are doing with their laptops during her lectures on the doctrine of first sale is watching her swill down box wine on YouTube.
Sadly, No! crew members also don’t do drunk blogging (well, not usually anyway), which is indeed the only possible explanation for the title of the Ann’s latest post:
“So everyone [S,N Editor’s note — “everyone” appears to be limited to the InstaGlenn] has pretty much agreed that I was right yesterday when I said the ‘moderation’ language about Obama’s alcohol consumption was just boilerplate.”
Apparently the initial version of Ann’s post, where she played doctor and speculated that Obama must have been downing five or six King Cobras every evening, has been tossed down the memory Merlot hole.
Althouse groupie and Tucker Carlson lackey Jim Treacher comes to Ann’s defense in the comments section to Ann’s “prude” post and says this about TBogg* and me:
Is there enough booze in the world to get those guys laid?
Sadly, no.
This would be the chick-magnet that is Jim Treacher:
My guess is that, from the looks of him, Treacher’s last successful sexual liaison was a spot of unwelcomed frottage with a possibly-female passenger on a crowded Metro train.
*TBogg garners the more sophisticated epithet of “killjoy.” (And I swear I wrote these last two posts on Ann before I saw either of the estimable TBogg’s twoposts on the same subjects, proof of which is that both of his posts are way funnier than mine.)
Erik Erikson hasn’t spent a nanosecond working on the Hill but apparently a high-school viewing of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has turned him into a self-proclaimed maven on the fine points of Senate procedural rules. So here we have Erik chidingRoll Call for not fully understanding the proper use of the term “filibuster.”
Roll Call is dumbing down the Jim Bunning story in the Senate, calling what he is doing a filibuster. … What Bunning is doing is merely objecting to a unanimous consent request. The Democrats could very easily vote on the pending matter instead of trying to get 100% of the vote
There are many reasons to be dismissive of Erik’s knowledge of these matters above and beyond the fact that a former country lawyer and city councilman from Copperhead Junction, Georgia, is probably not a good go-to guy on matters involving the U.S. Senate’s rules. Another excellent reason is that almost exactly twenty-four hours earlier, Erik was displaying his mad parliamentarian skillz and himself calling Bunning’s action a “filibuster.”
The point of supporting Rand Paul was driven home to me last Thursday night as Senator Bunning launched a one man filibuster against the Democrats.
What’s up with Erik’s 24-hour switcheroo? I’m putting my money on this: between the time Erik called Bunning’s shenanigans a filibuster and then later called it a non-filibuster one of the third-string posters on Red State, somebody called Hogan, said that anybody who called Bunning’s action a filibuster was a “freaking idiot.”
I have to admit that, whoever this Hogan guy is, he now has the honor of being the only person to ever post anything on Red State that is actually true: Erik is indeed a freaking idiot.
This horrific tale of a guy who cut off his own toes while fleeing from the Nazis demonstrates why the Norse won nine gold medals at this year’s Olympics.
On a serious note, anyone who has read “Lords of Chaos” knows how hardcore the Norse are. Their metalheads weren’t like the candy-assed metalheads in other countries who “rebel” by painting their fingernails black. No, these guys would torch churches, promote fascism and go on murder sprees. Now that’s hardcore, bitches!
I guess my point is that if I had to make a list of people I wouldn’t want to piss off, the Norse would be at the top along with Afghans (yeah, I know: gulp).
