Friday Funnies: Earthquake Edition

    Unfortunately,  the earthquake in Washington did not shake our elected idiots into action on jobs.

  Earthquake Tweets:

@JenKirkman Michele Bachmann is readying her speech to ease the fears of everyone regarding today's earthquake in Washington State.
@TheTweetOfGod There was just a 5.8 earthquake in Washington. Obama wanted it to be 3.4, but the Republicans wanted 5.8, so he compromised.
@ApocalypseHow Holy Crap - something moved in Washington DC?!?!?

@ModeledBehavior: "More and more scientists are questioning whether that was a real quake. It is a theory that's out there."

David Letterman: The earthquake was so strong that the Tea Party shifted to the center."

"President Obama is enjoying the fun and sun in Martha’s Vineyard. It’s really sad when your SPF factor is higher than your approval rating."
"On the bright side, I didn’t have to shake my morning martini."

"Today Mitt Romney announced he’s building a $12-million beach house in California. There’s a man who can read the mood of the country."

David Letterman's "Top Ten Things Overheard During The East Coast Earthquake"
10. "That was the scariest two seconds of my life!"
9. "It's lootin' time"
8. "Hey, you forgot your champagne"
7. "5.9 earthquake, it would have been a 6.2 if it had a better lead-in"
6. "These new Taco Bell chalupas are rockin' my world"
5. "My hiccups are gone"
4. "Wheeeeee"
3. "Call FEMEMA, the Federal Extremely Minor Emergency Management Agency"
2. "Darn, right in the middle of laser eye surgery"
1. "Kirstie, stop with the jumping jacks!"

 

Technorati Tags: Political Humor,Politics,David Letterman,Michele Bachmann,Current Events,Barack Obama,Washington,DC,Jokes

Ben Stein utterly CLOBBERS Bill O'Reilly on the idea that taxing the rich hurts the economy

Original Article  by  MinistryOfTruth on Tue Aug 23, 2011

Since when the hell did Ben Stein come out as a bleeding heart liberal who thinks the Billionaires can easily afford higher taxes?

Usually Ben Stein is on the side of the super rich when it comes to the last, oh, I don't know, 40 something years, but this time he decided to understand facts and recent history. Stein roundly delivered a thorough whooping to Bill O'Reilly's utter nonsense that if we make the rich pay tax rates that were fine under Reagan all hell will break loose today. Ben Stein delivers a scalding rebuke that would make a hard core liberal jump for joy, because it is full of facts and stuff.

Watch:

Remember, raising taxes on the rich is class warfare, but raising taxes on the poor is making sure that everyone pays their fair share, and corporations are people too my friend but you can't raise their taxes either. With ideologically consistency like this, who needs pathological liars?

Transcript and more:

Hat tip to John Amato at CrooksandLiars.com for the transcript and apt commentary.

    Bill O'Reilly started his program off with his Talking Points Memo attacking Obama's vacation. See, Liberals were upset that George Bush took over 1000 vacation days were just as wrong headed as conservatives who say that Obama's 26 days off are more than Bush's downtime. He's the king of keeping it real.

     Bill did his usual propaganda, blaming all our deficit problems on Obama and says he's glad the President is on vacation. His real point of TPM (and mission in life) is to cut our social safety nets and to spread his anti-tax increase on the rich dogma. He's outraged at the idea we should raise taxes on the right-wing job producers because that's a job killer in every economic time and Warren Buffett is out of his mind in Margaritaville for saying we need to raise taxes on the wealthy. (He really said Margaritaville) Anyway, Fox News stock "market gurus" Ben Stein (Ferris Bueller's Day Off) and Wayne Rogers (M.A.S.H) joined him to discuss Bill's brilliance. However, Stein didn't play the game and he's usually on board with the whole taxing thing.

   O'Reilly: Alright Mr. Stein, you know, you know that everything I said in the memo was true, correct?

    Stein: Absolutely not, I would say that almost every part of it is wrong except for the fact that it's better he's on vacation because he works terribly hard and he deserves a vacation...

   Not only are you dead wrong, BillO, but Obama deserves his vacation because he's been working his ass off cleaning up the mess Republicans made when the economy crashed and the deficit soared under Bush. Whatever Ben Stein is drinking, I'll have one of those.

   As a note, I love how Bill assumes you totally agree with his narrative, and if you don't he takes it as a sin, as if not agreeing entirely that every word Bill speaks is truth makes you a bad guy, because he loves a no spin conversation where it's Obama's fault and taxing millionaires like Bill O'Reilly is crazy talk. Right.
   And what kind of debate is this? Where are the differing opinions, other than Ben, who usually wouldn't come to his senses like this and mention inconvenient truths that screw up Bill O'Reilly's narrative. Seriously, it's an economic debate between a movie star, a corporate CEO, and a tv pundit, which gives you a wide array of opinions between millionaires and millionaires, only one of whom has any record of actually being educated in any way on economics, and even then that record is usually wrong, not withstanding this instance. We might as well discuss how to slaughter cattle with three men who know nothing more on the subject other than how to cook a steak, but I digress.

More from the transcript . . .

   O'Reilly: You get more money the better the economy is

    Stein: Absolutely.

    O'Reilly: If you take (meaning taxes from millionaires) then you're helping the recession. You're feeding the flames of it.

    Stein: That's not true.

    O'Reilly: Sure it is

    Stein: There's no correlation, I'm going to call you Mr. O'Reilly. There's no correlation Mr. O'Reilly, between tax rates on millionaires and people above that level (billionaires) and the growth of the economy... We had the highest growth in capitol and productivity and in the economy in general in the 40's, 50's and 60's when we had much higher taxes then..(Bill: yea, but they were inaudible ) Higher taxes don't correlate with inaudible growth...

    I don't know what happened to Ben Stein this morning, though I surmise that The Ghost of Christmas past visited him a few months too early, but he is dead right, for once. Taxing the rich does not make a recession worse, anyone who understands American history can point to the 50's and show that is not true. Rather, I am coming to the point of view that the only thing that tax cuts for the rich creates is higher income inequality between the rich and the poor, budget deficits due to lost revenue, and excess capital for the rich which they will use to bribe politicians and speculate on Wall Street. Remember when Reagan raised taxes? I don't remember ever meeting a Republican that would admit that Reagan raised taxes, but he did. I am coming to the opinion that the ONLY way to bring jobs back, based on the last decade of evidence, is to raise taxes on the rich.

    And Bill O'Reilly's idea that there are only 237,000 millionaires left in America, and boo hoo for them, well cry me a fucking river for the millionaires, and Bill O's claim that the economy under Obama has been unfair to the super rich and "battered them around", well, I don't want to hear from millionaires about how bad they suffer.

   This weekend I had a conversation with a teabagger who overheard me bad mouthing Fox News. He proceeded to blame Obama for his taxes going up and the deficit and high unemployment while saying Bush did a good job. He hated socialism, "that bitch Pelosi" and the Big Lie of "Global Warming", and it was like listening to Fox News being broadcasted out of a human skull. Honestly, it creeped me the hell out, and it reinforced my opinion that watching Fox News is like long term subliminal messages, a sort of hypnotoad that makes you believe whatever stupid shit the billionaires want you to think, and then, when you blame the poor, the government and every minority including women for all the problems of the world, that is when Republicans Fox told you to elect will rob you blind and blame someone else. Simply put, if I wanted to destroy America's political system by rendering a large portion of it's population delusional with lies and propaganda, I don't think I could do it without an organization like Fox News.

   So cheers to Ben Stein, for standing up to Bill O'Reilly and offering some truth. I am not sure if I will ever get the chance to offer cheers to Ben Stein, but this time, he deserves it.

Technorati Tags: Ben Stein,Bill O'Reilly,Fox News,Tax Cuts,Current Events,Politics

Obama’s Administration Attempting A Financial Crimes Cover Up…

   …which not be a shocker to any of you who keep up with Obama and his White House cohorts which aspire to be the best Wall Street ,bought and paid for, Republicans in the United States.

    So, to help his Wall Street Crime bosses, the Obama crime clan are pressuring the New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman to bow down and except the  “ slap on the risk “ fine that the administration has been pushing for some time. I should note that the NY AG is not the only one who thinks that the deal that Obama wants to pull off is a sham. A few other state AG’s also have a problem with it.

   A Sunday New York Times article titled "Attorney General of N.Y. Is Said to Face Pressure on Bank Foreclosure Deal," states:

Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices, according to people briefed on discussions about the deal.

In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade the attorney general to support the settlement, said the people briefed on the talks.

Mr. Schneiderman and top prosecutors in some other states have objected to the proposed settlement with major banks, saying it would restrict their ability to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing in a variety of areas, including the bundling of loans in mortgage securities.

  I would say that the hindrance of further investigations and/or prosecutions of these criminals is what Obama is all about. I wonder what Obama’s percentage of the bailouts came to?  Change we can believe in  has  turned to the change in our pockets is all that we will get while Obama and the rest of the Republicans continue to fuck you and I over…..and over….and over….

    This is of course happening after new revelations about the SEC clearly breaking the law by destroying records of up to 18,000 investigations of wrongdoing by Wall Street firms since the early 1990s, as reported by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone Magazine, in the article titled "Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?" 

For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.      Rolling Stone Article

   What are the odds that those crooks at the SEC will be prosecuted for destroying evidence? You’ll see Jesus return before that happens.

Technorati Tags: Wall Street,Barack Obama,White House,SEC,Bank Bailouts,Eric T. Schneiderman,Matt Taibbi

No Jobs Creation From Boehner

Joan McCarter   Mon Aug 22, 2011    

Read his lips: "No new jobs."

Republicans are ready to fight to stop job creation, Ezra Klein learns when he asks Speaker John Boehner's office about efforts to create a jobs super committee.

I ran Larson’s proposal by House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) office on Friday afternoon, and it was immediately shot down. The response: Deficit reduction will spur job creation and, therefore, the supercommittee does not need to take on an additional mission.

“As every economist and every rating agency has made clear, getting our deficit under control is the first step to help get our economy growing again and to create jobs,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for Boehner. “Without knowing the specifics of this proposal, my concern would be this is some sort of new window-dressing for the same tired old, discredited Washington stimulus spending proposals.”

Klein then says, "Whether it wins enough Republican support to become part of the supercommittee’s work remains a pretty big unknown." Which isn't the larger point Larson and Congressional Democrats are making, which is to "call [Republicans'] bluff" on job creation and put them in the position of refusing to act on the issue that voters overwhelmingly say is most important to them.

Boehner's spokesman couldn't have made it any clearer. The Republicans will fight against putting people back to work. The Democrats' job is to make them have that fight.

Originally posted to Joan McCarter on Mon Aug 22, 2011

Also republished by Daily Kos.

Technorati Tags: John Boehner,Deficits,Jobs,The Economy,Debt Ceiling,Current Events,Politics