Newsless booms: adrift on the Ship of Fools

The data for tomorrow points to a strong open. As if 12:30AM Eastern, the Asian markets are up by 1.5-2.5%, and futures on American markets suggest an open 1.2-1.5% about last week’s close.

Why? Well, who knows? For once I agree with Cramer: the market’s movements lately make no sense. (more below the fold)

I Knew The Daily Mail Worshipped Hitler

But I didn’t know that it was behind a fake-letter scandal that was used to bring down the first Labour government in the 1920s.

“For politicians of Livingstone’s generation and ideology, the Daily Mail is, as it were, a blue rag. They call it the “Forger’s Gazette” because of the Labour-damaging fake “Zinoviev letter” in the 1920s. They refer constantly to the paper’s soft line on Hitler in the 1930s and its infamous 1934 “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” headline.” The Guardian, 25th February 2006

“Newly released documents reveal how in the 1930s its (Daily Mail’s) treacherous proprietor heaped grovelling praise on Adolf Hilter and the Nazis, sparking calls from Jewish groups and MPs for the newspaper to say sorry. Daily Mail boss Lord Rothermere, grandfather of the current chairman, described his psychotic hero as “superhuman” and suggested Britain and Germany should unite to rule the world.” The Daily Express, 2nd April 2005

No wonder why it’s called “The Forger’s Gazette”.

Understanding where the mortgage crisis work-through is today

Calculated Risk has an extremely important explanation of where we are in the real estate crisis, with the following graphic expressing the key information:

(Graphic from Calculated Risk, who got it from economist Tom Lawler)

The bottom three bars are repossessed properties owned by the US government. Notice that that has been rising, perhaps indicating that bad mortgages are being offloaded onto the government through the secondary market or perhaps simply indicating that the general default rate has been rising, or both.

Pity Washington DC

All of its major newspapers are in the hands of neocons or paleocons, and none of them have your interests at heart.

Case in point: Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, the Nixon Cabinet member who has been trying to destroy Social Security for the past two decades in the name of “fixing the deficit”, apparently now shares control of the WaPo’s newsroom with Fred Hiatt and can dump anti-SocSec and anti-Medicare pieces from his Fiscal Times propaganda rag into the Post whenever he wants:

It told readers that: “On the fiscal commission, Stern [Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union, one of members highlighted in the piece] is already looking for ways to break through the ideological camps on deficit-reduction.” In fact, individuals who are not motivated by ideology would note that the country’s projected long-term deficit problem is driven almost entirely by the broken U.S. health care system.

If per person health care costs were the same in the United States as in any other wealthy country, then the projections would show huge budget surpluses rather than deficits. It also should be possible for the people in the United States to take advantage of lower cost health care systems elsewhere even if the power of special interests like the insurance and pharmaceutical industry prevent reform here. This basic fact should feature prominently in any discussion of the long-term deficit that is not motivated by ideology. It is never mentioned in this piece.

But of course this is all part of the Southern Strategy: The corporate-religious bigot alliance to con white working-class Americans into voting for corporate tax cuts and against their own economic interests as a way to hurt people with darker skins than theirs. Once again, I bring Reagan advisor Lee Atwater back from the grave, all the way from 1981, to explain:

”You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Ni–er, ni–er, ni–er.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘ni–er’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

”And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Ni–er, ni–er.”’

This is why his fellow Republicans were and are so angry at Michael Steele, who while he tries to be a good Republican has this unfortunate habit of remembering that he is a black man, and thus is incapable of hewing to the GOP lie that the Southern Strategy was never used after Nixon’s time. It is, in fact, not only still in use today, it is the basis of all Republican and conservative actions worth dignifying with the name.

Minnesoda-6 strikes oil

Bachmann challenger Tarryl Clark is on the airwaves with this one.

Meanwhile, the Bachmann campaign is not taking this lying down. They are standing up against the world’s greatest menace: rude, adolescent-minded writers for Playboy and their hip-hop counterpart:

Michele Bachmann’s Husband To Supporters: Don’t Let Them F*** Her
Megan Carpentier | June 18, 2010, 6:35PM49

Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, issued an urgent appeal to supporters Friday: we cannot let the assaults on her virtue stand!

The Bachmanns are concerned about a concert in Minneapolis entitled “F*** Michele Bachmann,” which they apparently think is a reference to the organizers’ desire to engage in coitus with Mrs. Bachmann rather than a desire to see her out of office. To help them get over the pain and despair, they would like their supporters to send them money.

Because of course if we can silence rude people by putting conservatives in power, you will never have to look at an oil-stained pelican again.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Minnesoda news, Al Franken speaks (via John Cole):

GOP Loves BP

If it had just been John Boehner cuddling up to BP, that’d be one thing.

But as Joe Conason points out, out Republican politicians, prominent ones like Haley Barbour, Joe Barton, and (of course) Minnesota’s own talking point of blight, Michele Bachmann, who are revealing the GOP’s love for Big Oil even as it kills the Gulf Coast ecosystem and economy.

And guess what? These are people who’ve been sucking up to the teabaggers, aka the GOP base.

Friday Cat Blogging

You Should Read Max Blumenthal

And I should, too. I very nearly missed these gems:

– Guess who Glenn Beck’s best friend is right now? C’mon, guess. Yeah, I had to glue my head back on, too.

– Guess who got caught pushing a photo and lying about it? Unlike the first item, this is not exactly a surprise as they have some past record of similar hinkiness with regard to visual documentation.

– More exposure of IDF bullshit, this time about the nonexistent “terrorists” on the Mavi Marmara.

– And a piece on how even the NYT — or at least The Lede — is documenting the exposing of each piece of IDF bullpucky pertaining to their assault on the first Gaza flotilla.

Go and enjoy!

And in another widely ignored DK diary…

I make a plea for people to report fraudulent debt collection.

Because, of course, having poor people extorted for debts they don’t owe to the tune of $1B in NYC alone (from 1/06-7/08) is not important.

Can The Internet Fix Politics?

Signs point to yes. Especially if people pitch in to help.

As I said in response:

I’m still amazed at how much FDL’s managed to affect the debate on so many issues, with such comparatively minimal funding.

One of the benefits of that work is that while we may not score outright wins on some fights, the very fact of our flexing our muscles is helping us to win other fights, sometimes without having to do much at all.

For instance: From the first signs that the public option and Medicare drug purchase negotiation — in other words, the two best and most popular parts of any potential health care reform package — were going to be sacrificed to health and insurance industry lobbying in exchange for their not running $100-plus-million worth of Harry and Louise ads this election cycle, FDL was on the case. FDL documented when we were being lied to, such as with the lie that the reconciliation process wouldn’t work, even when people who should have known better (like Nate Silver) were attacking us for it — and managed to do damage to their own credibility in the process. (Of course, none of the people who were screaming at FDL and folks like Alan Grayson over this have ever bothered to apologize once it was shown that reconciliation was not only possible, but was the only way that any HCR legislation was going to get through Congress, especially once Scott Brown took Teddy’s Senate seat. But I digress.) A sellout that had been planned to be completed well before the August 2009 recess wound up taking until early this year to accomplish, and in the meantime plenty of material was put on the record demonstrating every detail thereof — right down to the fact that WellPoint VP and Baucus buddy Liz Fowler wrote the bill that would become law.

But, even as the industry lobbyists popped their champagne corks over finally killing off HCR provisions that the vast majority of Americans not only wanted, but liked a lot more than they did the WellPoint Bill, we managed to score a victory on student loan reform that came about precisely because Capitol Hill feared the message and leverage machine that FDL helped put together. That victory wouldn’t have happened if Jane and Company hadn’t committed to a fight to save the public option.

There are other victories, too. Jane Hamsher called for a primary challenge against Blanche Lincoln, and that challenge scared Lincoln so much, she was forced to back a piece of legislation that actually benefited people besides the corporate donors who have given her so many millions over the years. (Of course, now that she’s won the primary, she’s trying to sabotage that legislation, but that’s going to be a bit harder to pull off.) By working with libertarians, FDL got the Audit the Fed bill passed, 96-0.

And of course, there’s the fact that people who write for FDL — people like Marcy Wheeler, Michael Whitney, Spencer Ackerman, and of course Jane herself — get invited to appear on national TV or are quoted by the national press on a weekly, almost daily basis. FDL is affecting the discourse and keeping the Overton Windows from being shoved any further to the right — and all on a budget that wouldn’t sustain a typical right-wing think tank’s monthly payroll.

If you like what FDL’s been doing — and I should disclose that I have a very small role in it, nothing as stellar as what Jane and Marcy and the rest have been doing — please consider dropping a few shekels in their cup, or spreading the word in whatever way you can. And thanks for reading!