Tough week trying to pick the worst from among the many, many wrongs this week:
⢠Congress passes a budget that defangs Dodd-Frank: Citibank got Congress to let the big banks place their risky derivatives business back under the protection of taxpayer-paid insurance. So we get to shoulder the losses when the next big bank failure comes. The Congress attached it to the CRomnibus spending bill that the president wonât veto. We can dig through the couch cushions for spare change to bail out the banks next time. Simon Johnson said it best:
Give enough clever people the wrong incentives and they will destroy anything.
⢠Congress also lowered funding for the EPA, and stuck in a provision that allows private funding of national conventions. They were previously publicly funded.
⢠Some detail on âwe tortured some folksâ became public with the publishing of the CIA Lite torture report. If that wasnât wrong enough, many pols and pundits just gave up, and said torture was useful and necessary. One right thing was John McCainâs speech on the floor of the Senate debunking torture as a means of getting information.
⢠There was more wrong-headed messaging about the Ferguson/Garner cases. But there was also many âdie-inâ demonstrations around the country along with the usual finger-pointing about the demonstratorsâ reactions, both peaceful and not-so-peaceful.
Dick Cheney continued his spirited defense of the indefensible:
CIA Director Brennan insisted on calling torture “Enhanced Interrogation”:
Passing of the torch brings irony to the Senate:
Some see the âshoot firstâ mentality as a feature, not a bug in the system:
Some see Xmas as their favorite time of the year:
Some see Xmas as a giant pain:
I first read the National Review in the mid 60s. At the time, conservatives may have been wrong, but their statements of facts were genuine. They were also content to lose elections. To win, they have had to stop being honest and to instead craft nonsense – sadly, they can sell it to white bigots and to the white working class in general. Don’t know how this happened but it did. For example on torture – what few facts may be garnered cannot be trusted when you get them – yet conservative line up on the side of torture.. Or on race and police, yes police are often angry white bigots (my uncle was a cop in Brooklyn and he as an angry a bigot as they came. also a drunk.
Funny about conservatives. America is the shining city on a hill until they decide that we are a proto-fascist, militarist state. Thus the defense of torture.