Flail

While his television ads may be bringing up his polling in his "home state" of Michigan, and Rick Santorum's eruptions of religiosity and stupidity may be making a difference as well, Willard Mitt Romney has had to spend three times what he raised in January just to keep afloat. Crazy, crazy amounts of money, spent both by his own campaign and his "independent" PAC:

Financial reports filed Monday with the Federal Election Commission indicate that Romney's campaign spent $19 million in January -- nearly three times as much as it raised -- as the former Massachusetts governor defeated Newt Gingrich in New Hampshire, lost to him in South Carolina and then topped him in Florida.

Restore Our Future, meanwhile, raised $6.6 million and spent $13.5 million, mostly on ads attacking Gingrich that helped Romney win the Florida primary. By the end of January, Romney's campaign had $7.7 million on hand and the pro-Romney PAC had $16.3 million.

And it's not even close to General Election time yet. The Obama campaign must be loving this.

Why the need to spend so much? It's not the brilliant competitive field -- it's the candidate. Over the past few days this video, of Romney speaking at a campaign event in Michigan, has become the emblem of the flailing candidate, utterly adrift, unable to summon authenticity, speaking in what appears to be a panic:

The trees are the right height...not just the Great Lakes but the inland lakes...I love car, I love American cars...WTF, Willard?

If you want to do some local pandering, you need to be prepped with the names of local restaurants, local products, local anything specific. Normally there's front people to do this but the better candidates don't fake it, they actually know. The fact is, Romney hasn't lived in Michigan for more than half a century, but he's trying to rely on biography yet again to score points...total disconnect from any kind of reality -- or vision.

Look, at a human level, I might feel sorry for Mitt that he has to actually compete and could quite possibly still lose his so-called "home state" to Rick the Theocrat. But I just can't feel sorry for a candidate who has consistently lied through his teeth in smearing President Obama ever since his campaign began.

He's a wealthy man, so no pity there, and he's smart enough (on paper) that he should know better. He should have studied up on Presidential leadership, not rightwing talking points. He should have taken a chance by leading on issues his party might not be in sync with him on, and shown real intelligence and grit.

Instead, he reaps the whirlwind. Just keep spending, Mitt. Your combined $32.5 million spend in January did more to boost the economy than anything your GOP Congressional party-mates have done in four years.

Of Course He Isn't

Mitty Mitt Mitt. What's to be done with you? The day after you win the Florida GOP Presidential Primary, you remind everybody why you should never be allowed in the Oval Office:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there,” Romney told CNN. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Host Soledad O’Brien pointed out that the very poor are probably struggling too.

“The challenge right now — we will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor,” Romney responded, after repeating that he would fix any holes in the safety net. “And there’s no question it’s not good being poor and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor . . . My focus is on middle income Americans ... we have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it. but we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.”

I love Soledad's incredulity bordering on outright contempt, if not for his callousness then for his impolitic messaging. While I agree that it is unfair to take the quote out of context -- although it is something the Romney campaign does to President Obama unapologetically in ads itself -- the actual context is pretty dreadful, tin-eared and reveals a candidate without the Big Picture of American society today.

On one hand, it's easy to take as Freudian slip that Romney doesn't care about the "very poor," but is he essentially saying there's always going to be a permanent underclass in this country that will never move out of social welfare programs?

Or is he even aware what it means to be "very poor" and how many families in America are below or near the poverty line -- per Wikipedia, "Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75."

Or is he making a false distinction, since employment uncertainty has grown among those "middle income Americans" thanks to layoffs like those experienced by Bain Capital-managed companies?

And where does he get the 90-95% for those "middle income Americans?" Is that what he believes, or just a pander since his wealthy, almost all now from investments, has branded him Mr. 1%?

And where does he get off even citing class differences when he's ready to excoriate Obama for "class warfare" every time the President suggests that millionaires and billionaires should pay more than a 15% capital gains tax? Class division works when you need to pander, right Mitt?

And that pander, is it actually an attempt to separate out the "middle income Americans" from the "very poor" since he's given up in trying to get votes from the "very poor" and, in fact, may benefit from his Republican Party's work suppressing those votes?

And is there some sort of missing class here? I don't mean "the very rich," I wonder about the just plain "poor." Is that a different category than the "very poor?"

And why is the GOP always trying to cut programs for the "very poor" if Mitt says it's important not only that we have safety net (Ronald Reagan's term, originally, as he cut it), but that he'll vaguely "fix it" where it isn't working?

If so, what is his analysis of the state of the safety net...and what proposals, if any, does Mitt have to fix it? The only proposals he's shown thus far benefit the rich he claims not to worry about.

And, finally, did he just admit that the Democratic Party actually does care about the poor, f'real?

To the three remaining GOP Presidential wannabes: Stay in the race. This runner stumbles. Badly and often enough and egregiously enough that his Party is questioning his ability to take on President Obama in the Fall. Some are even saying this Election Cycle is a wash, time to start strategizing for 2016.

Per the TPM video below...the concession stand is having trouble keeping enough popcorn in stock to enjoy the GOP 2012 Presidential Election show.

Willard

Willard Mitt Romney beat back Newt Gingrich in Florida by outspending him 5:1, hiring a new debate coach, repeating his "God Bless America" speech ad nauseum and, of course, by incessant bold-faced lying regarding the President.

Willard bought his Republican Presidential Primary win in Florida with $15,000,000 in ads (between his campaign and his SuperPAC). He spent, roughly, $21 per voter. What interesting is that 92% of all the ads for this race were negative -- and only 0.1% were pro-Romney:

The bulk of the ads were run by Mr. Romney and his PAC, Restore Our Future, which spent a combined $15.4 million on television and radio advertising in Florida. That compares with $3.7 million for Mr. Gingrich and his allies, according to an analysis by a Republican media strategist not working for either candidate.

The tone and content of the commercials were almost as lopsided. Of all the spots that ran in Florida for the last week, 68 percent were attacks on Mr. Gingrich, Kantar Media found. Only 9 percent were favorable toward him.

Ads assailing Mr. Romney accounted for 23 percent of the political commercials that were broadcast. Yet less than 0.1 percent were pro-Romney, Kantar found. That sliver of a figure was because of one ad the Romney campaign broadcast in Spanish, which featured Mr. Romney’s son praising his father’s leadership abilities.

That's right, the only pro-Romney ad wasn't even broadcast in the English language.

So what's Willard's "positive" vision for America?:

And I'm going to stand and defend capitalism across this country, throughout this campaign. I know we're going to get hit hard from President Obama, but we're going to stuff it down his throat and point out it is capitalism and freedom that makes America strong.

"Stuff it down his throat." You kiss your wife with those lips, Willard? I mean, unless you're a dyed-in-wool Obama hater, what's to like about this guy?:

When Romney ran for the presidential nomination and lost in 2008, the share of Americans who saw him positively never topped 30 percent. By last month, that number had dropped to 24 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Romney took a beating last week in South Carolina over his business career at Bain Capital and his taxes -- and so did his image among voters. A Washington Post poll released Tuesday, three days after Romney lost the South Carolina primary, found a 17 percentage-point drop over two weeks among independent voters who viewed Romney favorably.

That's right, Willard Mitt Romney. The more you see him, the less you like him.

Can I Get a Mitt-ness?

Another week, another GOP Presidential Debate. And I use that term, "Presidential," loosely. The big news from the debate as well as the past week is the Romney campaign heading into freak-out mode as Newt Gingrich has taken virtually all the Herman Cain support and emerged as the frontrunner -- the last "Not Romney" standing and the one who looks like he's going to win unless something big happens quick.

The base doesn't love Mitt, and the more he panders the less attractive he seems overall. He not only sent out all the surrogates to bash Newt last week (not hard -- he was a disaster as Speaker of the House and those who served under him are all telling that tale), he's even stooped so low as to enlist the satanic Ann Coulter as a surrogate. Time to draw a pentagram on the floor, Mitt, light a candle in the middle and call forth Beelzebub.

The moment that sparked a million tweets in last night's debate was Mitt getting so fed up with Rick Perry quoting his book back to him that he offered a $10,000 bet to settle the matter. Because he's one with the American Middle Class, and we all put $10k on the table when someone says something we don't like. It went like this:

As one YouTube commenter notes:

fyi, a $10,000 bet amounts to .00005 of romney's net worth. so if you had a net worth of $400,000, that would amount to a 20 dollar bet.

So now Gingrich has landslide leads in GOP polls for two early Primary states, South Carolina and Florida, and is chipping away at Mitt's firewall, New Hampshire. And the upshot of all these debates, poll shifts and Republican exposure:

Turning to the general election, President Obama’s standing has improved in Florida, always a key presidential battleground state.

Forty-six percent of registered voters in the state approve of his job, which is up five points since October.

In hypothetical match-ups, the president leads Romney by seven points (48 to 41 percent) and Gingrich by 12 points (51 to 39 percent).

In South Carolina -- a reliable Republican state in presidential contests -- Obama’s approval rating stands at 44 percent, and he holds narrow leads over Romney (45 to 42 percent) and Gingrich (46 to 42 percent).

That's right: if the election were held today, President Barack Hussein Obama beats both Willard Mitt Romney and Newton Leroy Gingrich in that bastion of the Confederacy, South Carolina.

Maybe in his second term he'll really be able to hit the gas for this great country.

OWS Changes the Conversation

The payroll tax cut used to be a Republican idea, but now that President Obama is for it, they're against extending it. That is, until Occupy Wall Street made clear the division between the 1% and the 99%:

If Republicans block the measure, as expected, Democrats would paint them as the party of the rich.

Trying to get ahead of the game, McConnell proclaimed Republican support for the payroll tax cut extension and told reporters his party would soon propose its own ideas for covering the cost of the tax cut.

"The Democrats put them in a box," said Andrew Taylor, a North Carolina State University political science professor. "I think many Republicans realized this is a bad side of the argument to be on."

Thanks to the protesters, there's media buzz highlighting the GOP's behavior and allegiances. It's common knowledge now, nothing anyone can obfuscate with rhetoric. And you know #OWS matters when the new GOP frontrunner, Newt Gingrich, calls on President Obama to repudiate the movement and its message of wealth inequality.

As Robert Reich tells us, the Basic Bargain holding our society together and creating growth in the 20th Century has been torn apart by greed and must be restored:

For most of the last century, the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling.

That basic bargain created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages.

...

The latest data on corporate profits and wages show we haven't learned the essential lesson of the two big economic crashes of the last 75 years: When the economy becomes too lopsided -- disproportionately benefiting corporate owners and top executives rather than average workers -- it tips over.

In other words, we're in trouble because the basic bargain has been broken.

...

Corporations don't need more money. They have so much money right now they don't even know what to do with all of it. They're even buying back their own shares of stock. This is a bonanza for CEOs whose pay is tied to stock prices and it increases the wealth of other shareholders. But it doesn't create a single new job and it doesn't raise the wages of a single employee.

Nor do the wealthiest Americans need more money. The top 1 percent is already taking in more than 20 percent of total income -- the highest since the 1920s.

American businesses, including small-business owners, have no incentive to create new jobs because consumers (whose spending accounts for about 70 percent of the American economy) aren't spending enough. Consumers' after-tax incomes dropped in the second and third quarters of the year, the first back-to-back drops since 2009.

The Dems are proposing to pay for the payroll tax cut with a surtax on millionaires -- affecting 0.2% of the U.S. population.

I hesitate to ask what 1%-favoring counterproposal GOP will come up with themselves.

Thank the Good Lord

My role model will return:

AMC, Lionsgate Close To Deal With Matt Weiner For 'Mad Men'

The negotiations, I believe for the final two seasons (leaving us where, say, with Nixon getting elected in 1968? New Year's Eve 1969/1970?), took a long time, so we probably won't see new episodes until into the Fall at the the earliest. It'd be interesting to see Don Draper competing head-to-head with all the fall big network shows, as it's always been the summer up until now.

But he's back. The only bummer is that it'll be more than 39 weeks since we last saw a new episode -- closer to 52.

If The Tea Partiers Had Any Brains...

...they'd be with the people taking over the Bank of America branch in DC today:



Join National People's Action and Make Wall Street Pay.

Moore in Madison

Michael Moore makes sense of the situation once again:

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

Once again the question must be asked: Why have no bankers gone to jail?

So instead of taxing the plutocratic 400, we impoverish those who teach our children every day?

America needs to get its head screw on straight again.

The Bailout Worked

GM posts its first profit since 2004, rewards workers with some smart profit sharing:

General Motors, which nearly collapsed from the weight of its debts two years ago before reorganizing in a government-sponsored bankruptcy, said Thursday that it earned $4.7 billion in 2010, the most in more than a decade.

It was the first profitable year since 2004 for G.M., which became publicly traded in November, ending a streak of losses totaling about $90 billion.

In addition, G.M. said 45,000 union workers would receive profit-sharing checks averaging $4,300, the most in the company’s history.

Hopefully they are running their business smarter all the way up and down the line.

Oh, and thank you, President Obama.

Baggin' with the Stars

I'm not a fan of this show, so it's somewhat hilarious to me that their money-grubbing decision to enter the Palin Family Enterprise may backfire bigtime:

At first, having Bristol Palin participate in 'Dancing With The Stars' seemed like a brilliant idea. Just like Kate Gosselin before her, casting an admittedly bad dancer who was shrouded in controversy has raked in big ratings and tons of press. But now the joke is on the show's producers, as they fear Bristol is actually going to win this thing.

"This will be a disaster for the show if Bristol wins," one TV insider tells me. "Any creditability the show had will be over. It will go from being a dancing competition to a popularity competition where whoever has the most rabid fan base will always win no matter how little talent they have."

Plus:

"Another problem the producers foresee is that after Bristol wins no one in Hollywood will ever want to be on the show again," a well-placed ABC source tells me. "Why would a real star want to compete and lose against someone like [former U.S. Senate candidate] Christine O'Donnell or Levi Johnston."

Bonus:

A friend of one of the judges tells me Bristol has made a fool out of all of them. It's now painfully obvious that the judge's scores and opinions mean nothing.

I'm sick of hearing people say that Palin is winning because people identify with her failings. This is the exact opposite of what Conservatives claim to believe, that it's all a meritocracy and we shouldn't be dumbing down classrooms to make it nicey-nice for the less talented. No, this is massive Tea Party drone voting, making their political point, whether or not they're using computerized means to generate "legitimate" email addresses and flood they system. Does anyone, anywhere, honestly doubt this is all about Sarah?

I'm starting to think that Palin's world and that of her drones is an even more self-aggrieved subset of the Glenn Beck audience, your true talent is, ostensibly, your adherence to the Sarah-approved ideology, no matter have provisional or acausal the selection. Because the apparatchik reason isn't even what it's all about; the only ideology that matters is that which reinforces the vanity production of Sarah Palin that is her politelebrity career.

And this is where Sarah Palin is, for once, a true pioneer. Her grifter roots are clearly Amy Semple McPherson, Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy but no one has ever done what she's doing before in world political history, mainly because there wasn't a mass media quite like this one before. With so many outlets, so much hunger for content, this rapacious time of widening rich-poor gaps as our corporate feudalistic solidifies for what may be centuries, with so many buyers out there, mass media networks of books, cable, digital, social, Sarah Palin has engineered the very first political campaign where the networks have paid candidate for the honor of creating their long-form campaign commercials and giving them huge hours of airtime, frosted with dominating amounts of free publicity

TLC has given Palin her biggest TV deal, paying her production company to make the shows, with their staged scenes and obvious cutaways, semiotics gone haywire in the ultimately lumpen service or reinforcing Palin's brand messaging and image, endlessly tiresome, endlessly smug, endlessly mean high school girl in the big leagues.

The Obama Family and the Democratic Party had better start adapting immediately. If you think this is polarized nation now, just wait until we're watching entirely separate television shows.

Wait, we already are:



I don't care how serious a candidate, politician or statesman you are. You have to at least acknowledge that this new evolution of bullshit is the most significant since Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy bested Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon in the first nationally televised Presidential debate.

One can only hope that, thanks to some combination of narcissistic ambition and aggrieved venality, just as Nixon ultimately lost control of his brand image Palin and her family will lose control of theirs. I mean, even the type of vile use of "gay" and "faggot" as a vicious insult by a teenager, the type of language parents are generally held responsible for teaching their children is wrong, hasn't led to a single admonition of Sarah Palin's mothering skills. Is this the kind of language Mama Grizzlies teach their little grizzlies? Grrr.

The fact is that Palin is media ascendant. There's a rule in Hollywood that you're only a superstar for three years, then the public moves on. You can still be in the firmament, even at your peak earning, but the audience for and against you is already formed, and you're not dominating their fantasy lives anymore.

So can we date Palin's superstardom from when she spoke at the 2008 Republican National Convention? I think maybe from when her book came out last year, her first purely commercial endeavor (and a huge success -- her big step-up that caused her to ditch her elected office about halfway into her commitment). If that's the case, she'll peak next year, and start fading in 2012, just in time for the GOP Primaries.

But is the answer more ominous. Is the TLC show where she really starts, taking over the airwaves? Even on Fox, she's not in control, and you can see the short-circuits behind her eyes, her hard little smile growing tight or tipping downwards when O'Reilly catches her out as is his sport.

This is the playing field now. The killing field. The battleground. This is where political war is now being waged. Politicians on the Left may develop a different flavor, maybe one that doesn't seem so constructed, really candid and unedited as Obama can be in ways she never will. The key is to leverage your celebrity as a brand that attracts curious, interested and engagement-starved viewers. If you're not already a politelebrity you need to become one, and if you already are then you need to exploit it with speed and savvy to get control of your image and blast away with your messaging.

This will also become a new discipline in political consulting. I recommend the talent agencies getting their Blue and Red political teams on and integrated with production and network sales. I even mean Below the Line crew. Control everything.

It's post-1984. 1984 has nothing on this. Orwell meets McLuhan. Makes you want to burn the whole mother****ing thing down.

Vote Bristol.

Brinksmanship, Please

I sense this decoupling of the tax cut for everyone from the tax cut just for the rich (they get their first $250k/year exempted with the general cut just like everybody else) is a threshold issue for core Dems, or should I say the kind of old loyal and new potentially loyal Democrats that Obama and Kaine forgot to market to this past election.

Here's what America's Republican Party leadership is planning:

The Republicans' top tax guy in the House threatened in the clearest possible terms today that he and the rest of the GOP would vote to block any tax cut for the middle class during the lame duck session unless tax cuts for the wealthy are extended for the same period of time.

In a policy speech at the business-friendly Tax Council today, incoming Ways and Means Committee chairman David Camp called the Democratic plan for tax cuts -- a permanent tax cut extension for all income up to $200,000, and a temporary extension for income above that level -- "a terrible idea and a total nonstarter."

"We would be foolish to fall for it," Camp said.

Of course not -- don't fall for helping all Americans when you can disproportionately help those billionaire Lords who fund your think tanks and your campaigns, your millionaire Dukes and your close-call wannabees. You know, the Top 2%. Instead of everyone.

They're even scared of meeting en masse with President Obama again, getting more time for preparation lest they endure another Baltimore:

The roots of the partisan standoff that led to the postponement of the bipartisan White House summit scheduled for Thursday date back to January, when President Barack Obama crashed a GOP meeting in Baltimore to deliver a humiliating rebuke of House Republicans.

Obama’s last-minute decision to address the House GOP retreat – and the one-sided televised presidential lecture many Republicans decried as a political ambush – has left a lingering distrust of Obama invitations and a wariness about accommodating every scheduling request emanating from the West Wing, aides tell POLITICO.

....

Stung by the Baltimore fiasco, Republican leaders carefully stage-managed a televised health care summit at Blair House in February, helping to choreograph every conceivable detail, from the order of speakers to the precise configuration of the horseshoe table occupied by Obama and Congressional leaders. Wary of what they perceive to be potential traps when it comes to appearing with Obama, that kind of precautionary behavior is likely to continue.

Which he kicked their asses in anyway. I say let them prepare, but more such meetings, please.

The GOP sense fold. Please don't reward them with it, Obama and even you most Blue Dog Dems. Not when you have a chance to win the Lame Duck session and slightly redeem yourselves.

Show me something.

Next

If the Dems want to win the next one, they have to start documenting the plutocratic legislative moves that will begin in the House in January from Day One, tie it to Citizens United, and not miss a beat. The foxes are coming back to the hen house.

Just like the GOTP built to this night step-by-step, beginning with the de-legitimization of the President via birther protests, Hitler mustaches and racist smears, to the point of brainwashing the willing and weak-minded alike, so must the Dems start immediately to battle this new beast, who's first act will be continuing the horrific tax cuts for the rich that fueled the current deficit they claim to be against.

Other than that, expect President Obama's popularity to rise as the new House overreaches. Expect various Tea Partiers to disgrace themselves in public scandal. But also expect that the corporate cash flood that fueled their win, including the millions given by Fox News to support the very candidates they claim to cover "Fair & Balanced" to grow. And possibly dominate for the rest of the American Experiment.

Other than that, I can only offer these musical words of wisdom from The Only Band That Matters, or maybe just the last one that really did:

I've been beat up, I've been thrown Out
But I'm not down, No I'm not down
I've been shown up, but I've grown up
And I'm not down, No I'm not down

Amen, bros.

Good as (Acapulco) Gold

Over on Andrew Sullivan's blog, they're comparing the price of marijuana to the price of gold. Fun stuff, including:

Pot retails for about $300 an ounce IN CALIFORNIA. West Coast pot (I'm from Eugene, Oregon - whaddup!) is famous throughout not just the US but the world. If I take an ounce of medical grade pot, put it in my trunk, and drive it to Texas or the East Coast, I could charge $500 or $600 for the ounce and sell it in hours.

Most useful, this handy chart compares the price of weed across the continental U.S.:



Once again, as Jim Morrison once said, "The West is the best."

And Canada looks pretty green.

13

Corruption is an equal opportunity employer. For example, Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-NY):

The House ethics committee on Thursday laid out 13 charges of ethical violations committed by Representative Charles B. Rangel, accusing him of a pattern of “indifference and disregard” for the law and the rules of the House.

...

In the 40-page report, the committee said it substantiated the major charges that had been hanging over Mr. Rangel for two years: that he improperly used his office to solicit donations for a school to be named in his honor; failed to pay taxes on and report rental income from his Dominican villa; filed incomplete financial disclosure forms; and improperly accepted from a Manhattan developer rent-stabilized apartments, one of which he used as a campaign office.

But while those alleged infractions had been widely reported, the committee unearthed new details about Mr. Rangel’s conduct. The committee said Mr. Rangel not only reached out to corporate executives seeking contributions to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College, but he also personally sought donations from registered lobbyists whose corporations had business before Congress. In some cases, Mr. Rangel asked for contributions of as much as $30 million from businesses with issues before the Ways and Means Committee, of which he was the chairman until March.

Then there's heavy Republican donors (in the million$), the billionaire Wyly Bros:

Famed Dallas billionaire investors Sam and Charles Wyly made $550 million in undisclosed profits through 13 years of insider trading in the shares of companies on whose boards they served, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit filed Thursday.

In a 78-page complaint filed in a Manhattan federal court in New York, the SEC said the Wylys held and traded tens of millions of securities in the companies and "defrauded the investing public" by misrepresenting the Wylys' ownership and trading of those shares.

"The apparatus of the fraud was an elaborate sham system of trusts and subsidiary companies located in the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands ... created by and at the direction of the Wylys," the SEC complaint stated.

Using this offshore system, the Wylys were able to sell stock worth more than $750 million in four public companies where they served as corporate directors. They also committed an insider trading violation at one of the companies that resulted in an unlawful gain of over $31.7 million, according to the complaint.

Coincidentally, the number thirteen figures in both stories. For Rep. Rangel, that's thirteen charges of ethical violations. For the Wylys, thirteen years of insider trading.

Thirteen for good luck.

Who Wants to Help the Rich Get Richer?

The plain fact is that the disparity of wealth in America is higher than it has ever been in history, per Robert Reich:

Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.

Each of America's two biggest economic crashes occurred in the year immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008. This is no mere coincidence. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class can boost its purchasing power is to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn't pay their bills, and banks couldn't collect.

So who's on the side of the middle class? Not Sen. Mike Pence (R-IN):

"Republicans, me included, have supported numerous extensions of unemployment benefits and we're anxious to do so again," the Indiana Republican told interviewer Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday." "The deficit this year is a trillion dollars for the second year in a row ... The American people have had it with runaway federal spending, deficits and debt, and they want to see men and women in Washington, D.C. make the hard choices."

After all, Pence is making his Party's hard choices like this:

"The reality is that as you study -- when President Kennedy cut marginal tax rates, when Ronald Reagan cut marginal tax rates, when President Bush imposed those tax cuts, they actually generated economic growth, they expand the economy, they expand tax revenue," Pence said. "The point is we've got to get this economy moving again and we can't go back to the tax-and-spend policies of the Democrats or the tax-cut-and-spend policies of the prior administration."

Study? As in studying the catastrophic failure of Bush's tax cuts on the rich?

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) explained on Wallace's show last week that "you do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."

And the GOP didn't, hence our current deficit.

Maybe "maver-ick" Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has feelings for those other than, say, rich military contractors?

On the issue of unemployment benefits, of course we Republicans in the Senate under the leadership of Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl who’s doing a fantastic job, we want to extend unemployment benefits, but we want them paid for, because there are so many things that the Democrats lard onto it, whether it be for hiring new teachers or other programs, so they keep adding onto it to force us to vote yes.

Those darn teachers! That's pork to McCain, money better spent elsewhere:

I would tell the corporations which are very important, like Intel and Raytheon and others in our state, we’ll cut the corporate tax rates so that you won’t have to send jobs overseas. We’ll continue… I’ll continue to support the military and our bases and the men and women who are there and the thousands of employees, including our people over in Mesa that make the Apache helicopter and down at Raytheon that make these wonderful missiles and Intel that’s doing such a great job in employing so many people that I’ve supported for so many years.

No wonder McCain wants open-ended military commitments across the board. Otherwise, too much of that military funding would go not for "wonderful missiles" (oxymoron?) but for keeping schools like those here in SoCal from slashing teachers and loading up classrooms.

I guess you need that military money to keep those corporate leaders' kids in private school.

You know, with the lower class sizes.

Buying Her Way In

Boss Palin.

Slick and Slicker

60 Minutes serves up actual broadcast journalism:

1. This was the second attempt to drill a well in about the same spot. The first well had to be abandoned because the well had been drilled too fast (under pressure from BP to bring the well in quickly). Result: the rock fractured, causing loss of control of pressure in the well. Twenty-five million bucks down the drain, said BP to the crew. So they had to try again, in a rock formation known to be problematic.

2. Early on while drilling the second well (the one that eventually blew up) an accident damaged part of the blowout preventer (BOP). According to Williams, they were conducting a routine test of the annular, a ring of rubber that closes around the well at the top of the BOP stack. While the annular was closed, thus closing off the well, a driller accidentally pushed a joystick, which pulled the pipe casing up through the rubber seal at very high pressure. A short time later, after drilling had resumed, pieces of rubber began coming up from the bottom of the well. A drilling supervisor told Williams that the rubber debris was "no big deal".

3. The BOP has two redundant electronics boxes, called pods, which communicate with the surface. These are critical devices which trigger the BOP to close the well in emergency. One of the two pods was problematic and occasionally inoperable. The batteries on the BOP were also weak.

4. The well was in the process of being closed with cement plugs when the blowout occurred. The day of the blowout, there was a disagreement between the Transocean supervisor and the BP supervisor over how that should be accomplished. The Transocean guy wanted to keep mud in the well (i.e., keep pressure in the well) during the cementing. The BP guy wanted the mud pulled from the well for cementing, because it was faster and they were already behind schedule. The BP guy won the argument. If pressure had been maintained in the well during the cementing operation, the blowout would not have occurred.

The bottom line: the blowout was caused by gross negligence on the part of BP. There is no other way to spin it.

The whole piece on Keith Pickering includes the damning clips from the show. More news includes lax regulatory inspections under the Bush/Cheney Administration that clearly continued after they left. And this is with BP having been called out along the way:

A summary of the inspection history said the Deepwater Horizon received six "incidents of noncompliance" – the agency's term for citations.

The most serious occurred July 16, 2002, when the rig was shut down because required pressure tests had not been conducted on parts of the blowout preventer – the device that was supposed to stop oil from gushing out if drilling operations went wrong.

That citation was "major," said Arnold, who characterized the overall safety record related by MMS as strong.

A citation on Sept. 19, 2002, also involved the blowout preventer. The inspector issued a warning because "problems or irregularities observed during the testing of BOP system and actions taken to remedy such problems or irregularities are not recorded in the driller's report or referenced documents."

During his Senate testimony last week, Transocean CEO Steven Newman said the blowout preventer was modified in 2005.

According to MMS officials, the four other citations were:

_ Two on May 16, 2002, for not conducting well control drills as required and not performing "all operations in a safe and workmanlike manner."

_ One on Aug. 6, 2003, for discharging pollutants into the Gulf.

_ One on March 20, 2007, which prompted inspectors to shut down some machinery because of improper electrical grounding.

Late last week, several days after providing the detailed accounting, Interior officials told AP that in fact there had been only five citations, that one had been rescinded. The officials said they could not immediately say which of the six had been rescinded.

And who will pay for the spills? Ask Alaska's Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R):

In the wake of last month's catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion. The Republican lawmaker said the bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), would have unfairly hurt smaller oil companies by raising the costs of oil production. The legislation is "not where we need to be right now" she said.

Murkowski's move came just hours after Washington's top oil lobby, the American Petroleum Institute (API) expressed vociferous opposition to raising the cap. It argued that doing so would "threaten the viability of deep-water operations, significantly reduce U.S. domestic oil production and harm U.S. energy security." API's membership includes large oil companies like ExxonMobil and BP America, as well as smaller ones.

The big question that goes to the heart of our democracy is if the damage from BP's negligence destroys the grand natural resource that is the Gulf of Mexico and damages both land and water masses beyond, if it eliminates the livelihood of tens or hundreds of thousands, if it dries up a significant percentage of our food supply, all because they wanted to save some money, then what is the appropriate legal remedy? Is it for BP to go bankrupt and some government to seize its assets? Is it for our government to have to step in and spend billions in band-aids for these ills? Should the CEO on down be imprisoned for life?

I'm not sure there is precedent for an industrial environmental disaster of this magnitude, in large part because it is in the ocean, source of all life on earth. On dry land you can always erect fences; by it's very nature the ocean flows.

For a larger, starker analogy (that may not be so far off), if a large multi-national, billion dollar corporation were to accidentally irradiate the entire earth...would there even be a remedy? Sure, we wouldn't want them to get away with it, and we'd want them to pay everything possible in useful reparations, but at some point the damage to mama Earth is too great, when it irrevocably alters life as we know it, irrevocably degrades life as we know it.

So is the disaster in the Gulf a big enough warning, finally, that even the yahoos alter their drill baby way of thinking?

Bada-bing

+2MM March.

Trashy

It appears that the Palin entourage is taking everything from Hollywood that it can, grabbing goodies from the Oscar suite:

Or, in common-sense language, Palin and her handlers, "practically cleaned out the suite." Another unnamed source from HollywoodLife.com says that the former Vice Presidential candidate intent on spreading all that wealth around her own circle. "She insisted every person in her huge entourage get something, and there were assistants, nannies, security - insanity!" The same source also said that security swept the venue and would not allow photos, which are often expected by companies to use as promotion in exchange for the free products.

Class all the way. But she's not the only Republican acting like they were raised the wrong way -- there's the leaked Republican National Committee memo showing exactly what they think of their donors:

The small donors who are the targets of direct marketing are described under the heading “Visceral Giving.” Their motivations are listed as “fear;” “Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration;” and “Reactionary.”

Major donors, by contrast, are treated in a column headed “Calculated Giving.”

Their motivations include: “Peer to Peer Pressure”; “access”; and “Ego-Driven.”

R-e-s-p-e-c-t!

Deficit King

Now the Ronald Reagan fetishists want him to replace President Ulysses S. Grant on the fifty dollar bill. I think they're aiming too low -- after all, Reagan gave us record deficits, financial deregulation that led to the disastrous derivatives markets, dropping the walls between banks and brokerages, and cross-leveraging assets into financial meltdown.

So either his face should be on the billion dollar bill...or perhaps the negative fifty dollar bill.