No. I’m saying that if you show me a person who says, “Why should my hard earned dollars go to a welfare-queen,” then I’ll show you a Republican.
Well…I’ve heard that exact same comment come from the lips of a Democrat as well. I don’t think that taking the comments from some fringe idiot spouting off is really an indication of the broader topic though. YMMV.
-XT
He seems to be the sort of guy I would want to keep.
No, it isn’t. It’s about choosing. Like that wall-eyed Frenchy said, if you refuse to choose, you have chosen. Never said it was easy, said it was necessary.
Lefties of conscience faced this most harshly in the later 30’s: support a monster like Stalin against a monster like Hitler? Knowing, full well, that you would be supporting a monster? Yes. Support the lesser evil until Hitler was safely roasting in Hell, and turn on a dime and start undermining the guy you supported yesterday. Perhaps you see that as hypocrisy, you are welcome to that view. You would be wrong.
Or you can simply throw up your hands and declare yourself as centrist of no particular persuasion, poxing both houses and choosing…well, nothing, really. Myself, I think that is a form of moral cowardice, but your morality may vary.
And this just in…
(Warning! Lefty site, tighty righty advised to observe anti-cooty protocols!)
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/19/bush-approved-aig-bonuses/
TARP inspector general says Bush administration specifically considered and approved AIG bonuses.
Oh, curse that Barney Frank, bending even GeeDubya to his will! Does his perfidy know no bounds!
You’re not hyperbolizing; you’re erecting a straw man. Yes, Republicans tend to be more averse to social spending than liberals; that does not mean they are opposed to it entirely.
Welfare reform was enacted in 1996 … have you heard many Republicans talking about cutting welfare since then? I haven’t.
From 2000-2006, we had a Republican president and a Republican congress. Entitlement spending went up. Went up a lot. Taxes on the poor went down, and more of the tax burden, proportionately, was shifted to the wealthy.
Read that paragraph again, and think about it.
More to the point, the implication you were making was that the people opposed to welfare spending are also eagerly supportive of bailouts. That’s what I’m calling bullshit on. Yes, you have people like xtisme who are reluctantly going along with the bailouts … but he’s not complaining about social spending.
I repeat: The very small number of people who oppose any social spending – or even cutting the trillions we already spend – also likely opponents of the bailout. The widespread “bitching and moaning” you refer to mythical.
On what planet? The bitching and moaning I’m referring to is the ubiquitous bitching and moaning I described earlier – the aversion to social programs. Not all social programs – the concept, not every last one. It’s not a small number of people who do that. Chrissakes, the existance of Rush Limbaugh’s audience alone quashes that theory.
And while, yes, Dems and Reps have pretty much equally poo-poo’ed the bailout, I’ve yet to hear a lefty argue that these people ought to recieve their bonuses. I’ve only heard that argument from the right.
It’s easy for a Sith Lord. (scary music)
And Limbaugh opposed the bailouts, including the ones that Bush advocated! That’s my fucking point! You’re implying that there is some kind of double standard here – money for bailouts while cutting social spending – and it’s not true. I defy you to find me anyone that’s advocating cutting social spending in the last 18 months. Nobody is doing it.
The only people who would concievably be doing it – the only ones who have seriously talked about cutting social spending & welfare in the last decade – are the libertarian/ fiscal conservative wing of the GOP. And they have generally also opposed all the bailouts.
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There are people who want to have bailouts and also want to increase or at the very least maintain social spending. Obama is one, as are the bulk of both parties.
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There are people who do not want to have bailouts and also want to cut social spending. Limbaugh is one.
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There are people who do not want to have bailouts but do want increased social spending. They would be on the hard left.
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There is NOT, AFAIK, anyone significant who does want bailouts and also wants to cut social spending. This is what you implied all Republicans think, and it is BS. This is the mythical group.
Oh, but you see you are wrong…I HAVE chosen my own ground on this subject. You seem to equate my centrist position and poxes on both houses to some kind of moral fence sitting on my part, where in reality what I don’t choose is either of the two major (fucked up) parties in this country. The fact that you are willing to compromise your own supposed principals for political expediency is, well, your look out.
Ah…you see, it’s YOU that were wrong. Stalin was by far the biggest monster. The difference between Stalin (or Mao) and Hitler was that Hitler was a biased, bigoted monster…whereas Stalin was an equal opportunity killer. Check out the stats on who killed more people some time, then get back to me on which monster was superior to support. Frankly, though you seem to think my fence sitting is distasteful, I choose Roosevelt and Churchill…
In a choice between Hitler and Stalin? Well, you can keep your moral courage, thanks all the same. A fucking pox on BOTH your houses…
-XT
We have been told by several people in this thread to keep things in perspective WRT to the bailout. I have to ask, is weeping for Fred really keeping things in perspective either? He’s making six figures and might not get his bonus this year. I know, it’s so unfair, it’s damn near tragic. What about people who wanted to retire this year but have to toil through their golden years because their 401K is empty? Or people who have lost their jobs and have little hope of finding another in 2009? I think I’m going to reserve my compassion for them, and let Fred fend for himself.
For me it’s not. I care about this issue more than care about stupid lefty/righty bullshit.
Mine, of course. As a capitalist, a conservative, and I’d like to think, a good person, I would like to foster an economic environment where business thrives and wealth thrives. As they do, thus thrives civilization. Every moment of your life you reap the benefits of capitalism, industrialization and growing wealth. Central heat, abundant food, cheap transportation. The average American lives a life of luxury abundance unimanageable to even the most wealthy of but a few generations ago.
I know you are not against people doing well, and leading happy and abundant lives of wealth and comfort and self-determination. Wealth and business is the engine that provides this. How on earth could you be against it?
That is a cheap shot, and shallow. I’ll tell you what, you start a pit thread attacking all the poor people who lost their retirement savings, and I’ll jump in and tell you are wrong there, just as you are wrong here. Until you do start a pit thread attacking them, there is no need for me to defend them.
As I already stated, this is a bipartisan issue in terms of guilt. Both the left and the right had a very strong stake in perpetuating the conditions that created this disaster.
On the left, you had affordable housing for poor folk who otherwise would never be able to own a house. On the right you had economic prosperity. For 30 years it was a win-win situation.
You and yours must also include such socialistic entities as Stalinist Russia, the gulags of which claimed tens of millions of lives, while impovershing and repressing hundred of millions more. You and yours must also include the intrusive and miserable failures of the housing projects of the late fifties, sixties and seventies, those catastrophic disasters that brought about generational welfare and poverty to our inner cities.
Me and mine includes the likes of JPMorgan who almost singlehandedly saved the economy of the entire United States in 1907, or Andrew Carnegie who gave of his entire wealth to better humanity in fashions that persist to this day, or of Bill Gates and his incredible works, or of Alfred Nobel and his Peace Prize.
What have you and yours done for anybody?
Then again, if we are to paint with such a broad brush that you and yours are responsible for the Gulags, than I suppose me and mine are responsible for the KKK, the ravages of fundamentalism, the genocide of the Indians.
So, in all sincerity if we are talking about “me and mine” versus “you and yours” I’m not really seeing much to brag about. By themselves, both sides are quickly catastrophic.
I sincerely beleive you need a mix. An pretty pure example of capitalism might be a poker game. Big poker games have independant dealers. They follow pre-established rules. They require good regulation.
Any truly good capitalist knows that capitalism does not always produce the best or most efficient solution. This has been mathematically demonstrated in game theory and by countless examples in the real world. Regulation is needed. Most capitalists beleive that a societal safety net is needed. It is bad for business if people can easily fail irretreivably, their future contribution is lost. At the same time moral hazard dictates that safety net be uncomfortable and undesirable.
Any truly good socialist knows that in order to spread the wealth you have to have wealth in the first place, and you can’t get it without capitalism. Any good socialist knows that forces of capitalism are like the laws of physics. You can’t break them. Markets will always move to efficiency now matter how much you try to stop them. Any good socialist knows that rather than being fought capitalism is a tool that can be used intelligently. For example, the trading of carbon credits is a socialistic use of the benefits of capitalism.
The truth of the matter here, buddy is that this is not about left and right. This is about balance. These market forces needed to be balanced. When they are they can work great as Freddie and Fannie did for over 30 years. Intelligent engineerin and the use of capitalism housed a nation and brought in tremendous prosperity and growth. There was no reason why it could not have gone on much longer if not stupid idiots, blind idealists and greedy bastards not behave incredibly badly.
A lot of red lights were run through on this one, and those very very few on the left and on the right who thought things were getting out of hand were roundly shouted down by the left and the right.
First, I cannot thank you enough, Scylla, for that great summation on the previous page. It really did help put some of this into perspective for me and I do understand a bit more of the situation. We are all talking about more than one thing here, so this gets long. Sorry.
I find this to be somewhat ironic. One of the cornerstones of the conservative party (the GOP and others) has been for years the mantra of “Deregulate! Deregulate! Don’t strangle business with government interference!” I’d like to see you turn this statement on its face and say instead, “What is needed is effective regulation of the financial system.” This “huge failure in regulation” is disingenuous, even though it’s true-you(general you) who scream at the slightest Gment interference now blame the Gment for not interfering. No doubt some Dems did advocate for less regs; I’m not only blaming Reps/the right here, but they are the party that is quite shrill about Money is King etc.
I don’t quite get this. These bonuses are going to men (I’m sure they are overwhelmingly male) who ran the sector of AIG that took the most risk with the shakiest of instruments. This thing was rotten from the get go. Ok, so the models showed that over time and with many “players”, trends could give positive growth. That still doesn’t mean the whole house of cards wasn’t built on sand. Sooner or later, the bubble was bound to burst (as it did). Frankly, I can understand the whole bubble mentality better than this “ennobled hero” perspective you posit. I don’t think any of these guys has squeaky clean hands. Where is this slowing down of this disaster and maintaining of liquidity? The banks are sitting on the bailout money. AIG went to that exotic and expensive resort, days after it cried “help, we’re drowning under the weight of our own stupidity!”
I understand that they may be getting scapegoated, and while that is wrong, they were instrumental in perpetuating this debacle. You say the bad guys are already gone. Ok. So, where did they go and why have none been indicted or even questioned? WHERE are these bad guys? And if these investment bankers/insurance guys weren’t the instigators of this mess, why haven’t we gone after their bosses? And those bosses’ bosses? Where does this buck stop? It must stop somewhere or a collection of somewheres. I have never just blamed Wall St-- in one of my first posts here, I stated I had plenty of anger to go around and named most of those sources of that ire.
Just so you know, I am completely against the legislation today re taxing these bonuses. IMO, the problem is too complex for that and to single out one group like that has got to be discriminatory in some way. IANAL, so perhaps Bricker can shed some light here.
To sum up: I have no problem believing that Congress (ie Dodd and Frank, and I’m sure others) have colluded in some way, whether deliberately or not to point fingers away from the politics of this. But even that does not excuse the shoddy business practices that AIG had. CDS do not work, unless they have some Gment security (if I understood your post #286 correctly. What went wrong was basic human nature: GREED. If a few bastards polluted the pool, the whole thing went under—and that’s what happened. No one should have EVER been able to get a mortgage without the most cursory of credit checks and job confirmation. It was insane. No amount of criticism of Frank will change that).
IMO, the helpless victims in this are not the AIG guys–who must have known they were playing with fire, even as they offered (offered? they were to be well compensated for their time and effort) to stay and clean up after the blaze. Too bad it was (partially) them who started the conflagration in the first place. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are also partially to blame, as is the culture of profit at any cost. Strangely enough, the smaller banks who tend to know their customers, who do conservative lending, who go for smaller, steadier profits aren’t doing too badly right now–it’s the bigger institutions that were convinced of their own infallibility that have tripped on their own egos–too bad it’s all of us that have to go down with them.
How about we stop using models as anything more than guideposts on how to deal with reality?
RE the Reps not supporting social programs. In general, I have to say they don’t. Their party platform is anti-female, anti-family, anti-gay, “pro-Christian”, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps and anyone can make it in America if they work hard enough” mythos.
My FIL is a diehard GOPer who is openly contemptuous of those who need food stamps or welfare–these he equates with black people or other minorities, and don’t clutter his mind with the facts. He’s a ChemE, who worked at Amoco for years: 2 undergrad degrees and one master’s. There are some things higher education cannot seem to eradicate. Ditto my MIL, SIL, BIL etc. Same with my neighbors on either side of me, and most of this Rep community. IMO and IME, the more isolated and entitled a community is, the more Rep is tends to be and the more misinformed and just plain uninformed. Which is not say that all GOPers are uninformed or misinformed. Just the ones I tend to know in RL. I make no such claim re the conservatives here. (and yes, there are Dems who are just as misinformed and uninformed. Thing is, they tend to be more compassionate and open minded. I haven’t really, in my life, come across any Dems who are anti-gay or think poor people are freeloaders. YMMV.)
Scylla–I hear you and agree with you re balance between socialism and capitalism. But riddle me this: WHY is this position never articulated by the right? It is not in the mainstream press, it is not in the political campaigning; it is not in casual conversation. Forgive me if I look askance at this sudden tolerance of socialism, as Fox News screams that Obama is ruining America and Limbaugh openly hopes for his failure.
They did not just get complex, they were deliberately made that way to obfuscate and be too complex for any regulators to follow. The swap agreements were 400 to 500 pages long. The Financial Pros kept themselves away from the rest of the company and went off without a sense of responsibility.They brought in billions of dollars, and that made whatever they were doing fine. To claim these thieves are irreplaceable is absurd. They should have been broomed the first day.
Are you kidding? Anybody else, I wouldn’t have to ask, anybody else, I wouldn’t even imagine they *might *have the brass balls to ask such a thing, without kidding. Kinda thing makes it hard to have a dialogue with you, because you’re perfectly capable of saying things you know are total crap, and keep a straight face.
Hell, not more than two sentences before and after, you’re all expansive and fair minded, willing to share the blame when things go wrong, so long as you get to keep all the credit for everything that goes right! You go on about balancing left and right, and then come out flat footed and straight face with this sort of jive?
Are you kidding?
Faced with the knotty policy challenge posed by the AIG bonuses, the House judiciously decides to apply a retroactive and confiscatory 90% tax on all bonuses handed out by firms receiving TARP money. The vote was 328-to-93, with half of all Republicans approving. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/business/20bailout.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
Hmmm. Seeking compassion, warmth, and human understanding. So, bank executive or Vlad the Impaler? OK, well, the bank guy probably speaks English, so that’s a point right there…
I am grateful to have it fall on receptive ears. I am trying hard to be as nonpartisan and is faithful to the facts as I understand them. I think I owe that to you guys based on the reception you’re giving me. My apologies for any failures I may make.
No problem. I’ll do my best.
You hit the nail on the head. If government is doing its job properly business will always feel that it is being unnecessary regulations and overly pessimistic safeguards. Not everybody in business is smart. A lot of people in business are only focussed on the short term. A lot of people are only focussed on their bottom line. I don’t beleive this is specific only to business. any time you get individuals with a great deal of highly specialized expertise in a very narrow rubric, their tunnel vision prevents them from seeing consequences outside that area. That’s human nature. Regulation has to look at the book picture and act accordingly for the common good. That’s the legitimate role of government.
An excellent example that pertains to game theory is the classic “tragedy of the commons.” Let’s say you and I are neighbors. Bordering our property is a pond to which we both have access for purposes of fishing, though neither of us owns it.
Let’s say we are both feeding our families from that pond. After a while the fish begin to run low, but you and I are still in competition for the resources of that pond. We may both know that the best thing to do is to scale back our fishing, give time for the fish to breed and the pond to recover. However, since we are in competition with each other and can’t trust each other I am afraid that if I slow down my fishing it’ll just mean that you will catch more fish and my family will go hungry.
You also know that it’s wise to slow down but you’re afraid that if you do I will keep fishing hard, catch all the fish, and your family will go hungry.
So, the smart thing for both of us do in this situation is to fish as hard as we can and catch as many fish as we can before the pond goes barren. That is the smartest course for both of us in this situation. It is the one with the least risk for us and our families. This is a variant of another problem called the prisoner’s dillemma, and both our good examples of how capitalism does not always find the best or most efficient solution.
One solution to this problem is that you and I hire a third party that we jointly trust, and we pay with a small quantity of fish. This third party examines the pond, determines how many fish each of us may catch and still allow the pond to recover. We also empower this person with the ability to inspect our larders etc. to determine that we are complying, and we empower this person to levy penalties if either of us break the rules.
Now, we can both feed our families and the pond can thrive sustainably.
The fish arbitrator is our regulation. If both you and I are reasonable we know that we need such regulation in the terms of the example I’ve provided.
Now, in this example it is natural that both you and I will bug our regulator relentlessly to raise the quota and let us catch more fish. If he’s monitoring the pond, and the situation warrants he should let us. If it doesn’t, than he shouldn’t. We are paying him to provide this service and make this determination responsibly.
I’ve simplified this example. Doubtless you think that you and I are reasonable people and could figure this out on our own without hiring a regulator. Probably we could. But, this is a scaled down example. What if 1,000 people are fishing this pond? How will we all possibly agree and monitor each other?
So, I think we all know we need regulation. At the same time we always argue for the regulators to let us do more than we should. There is no contradiction in this, it’s the nature of the situation.
You’re correct. They are.
No. It really wasn’t. There is nothing wrong with the concept of leverage, or CDOs, or CDSs. Think back to my example. These are necessary and useful instruments that serve real and important purposes. It’s the classic case of a good thing taken too far. “A little worked really well, so a whole lot more must be better.” A classic bubble.
House of cards and castles in the sand is not accurate. “Bubble” is. I’m sure there are quite a few crooks, quite a few idiots in the mix as well as quite a few ennobled heroes. I think the bulk of the people there are people who are smart, willing to work very hard and invest years in a highly competitive environment to acquire a very high level of expertise in order to do what they do. The bulk of these people are pretty proud of what they do. They are proud of the fact that they understand and can do something important and necessary that very few people can do or even understand, and they want to be rewarded for their efforts. Most of these people are very protective of their markets. They wish to preserve them.
The phrase “Ditta la borsa” has applied to these guys for 500 years. I find it difficult to explain what this really means so that you get it. Try this: Two traders who never met may exchange 50 million dollars worth of bonds on nothing more than a ten second phone conversation.
In theory, if the market moves, nothing is stopping either one of these guys from reneging on the transaction. There is nothing but a couple of scribbles at this point to show that a transaction has occured. There is often a huge motive not to follow through. Five minutes later the trader may have found a buyer who is willing to pay five million dollars more, or vice-versa. Busting the trade and taking the higher bid is the easiest thing to do, and you will absolutely get away with it.
But it almost never ever happens. When it does, it is almost always a genuine error, and both parties will bend over backwards to ensure the other is satisfied.
I can’t stress this enough. There are cases where a trader has made an error and finds that he cannot follow through on a trade he made and then that trader kills himself to avoid having to face busting the trade. That has truly happened.
Why?
Because your whole reputation as a trader depends upon you keeping your word and other people feeling comfortable doing business with you. If you get the merest whiff of a hint of a reputation for dishonesty nobody will ever trade with you again.
“Ditta la Borsa” goes back to the trading floors of Amsterdam in the 1600s where basic goods changed hands prior to shipping from warehouses. The trading was in a place called the Borse, and the phrase means “good with the Borse.” It was the highest compliment, the only compliment that mattered. Traders would bankrupt themselves personally to make good on a payment if the client they were working with failed to come through.
Huge transactions occur by hand in exchanges all over the world. Two guys shout at each other in a loud crowded room, they both make a scribble and millions has changed hands.
These are very very specialized guys, they care very much about what they do, and they have an extremely high level of integrity in what they do.
I am sure they must exist, but I have never met a trader who did not keep his word. They are ruthlessly honest. That doesn’t mean they won’t rip a sucker blind in a second if he’s stupid, but they keep their word. Ruthless and merciless, but honest to a fault in the terms I’ve described.
As a group, we are talking about honorable guys. You don’t last long in the industry if you’re not. The exceptions when they occur cause tremendous damage to all the rest. If you believe nothing else, beleive me when I tell you that there is nothing a trader or an investment bank hates more than someone doing his job who is a crook.
That’s a lot of what these guys at AIG and elsewhere have been doing. There were a couple of bad days last fall when the whole thing almost fell completely apart and our whole financial system almost crumbled. It almost happened when Iceland failed. It almost happened when Lehman failed. The whole thing is interconnected. If I bought bonds from Iceland and sold it to JPMorgan and Iceland failed than I can’t deliver and I fail and then JPMorgan fails. Meanwhile everybody is selling there are no buyers, because everybody is afraid. If those bonds don’t get delivered some company’s pension plan loses $20 million and a bunch of retirees don’t get a pension check. Iceland has failed though. The bonds don’t exist. They won’t get delivered. What do you do?
Multiply this crisis by many thousands.
I’ll tell you what happens. A 60 year 5 foot two Greek Guy named Nick who’s had two bypasses stares at his screen at Goldman Sachs. In his head he’s a doing a form of intuitive math that takes decades to learn. He’s not so much trying to calculate an answer as he
s trying to feel for it. While he’s calculating all the variables that he’s working with are constantly changing. He’s not looking for the answer per se. He’s looking for the answer that is going to exist ten minutes from now. In that future Nick sees that it is possible that if he is at his very best he can effectively recreate this nonexistant Icelandic security out of scraps. If he’s calculated correctly he saves two firms from failure, becomes a hero and makes a pile of money to boot. If he’s wrong he is hazarding Goldman Sachs and making the problem even worse.
But Nick isn’t wrong. He picks up the phone and notices his pits are sweating for the first time in 20 years.
There’s a whole bunch of guys like Nick. There’s also a whole bunch of guys that helped fix things by generating Credit Default Swaps. Yes. You heard me right. They guarranteed paper.
These CDSs have a bad name, but these guarrantees by people who were Ditta la Borsa helped hold the whole thing together. They represented huge risk for little return.
Things went wrong in that market too as people panicked. At first all of it was done with the best of intentions, though some of it foolishly. People were standing up to guarranty stuff they really couldn’t guarranty just to stop the panic.
Than there were some real assholes who saw ways to profit from that panic.
I’m doing a bad job of describing it. The idea though that these are a bunch of crooks is wrong.
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The banks are sitting on the bailout money.
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Yes. That’s a credit crunch.
I don’t know about AIG, but I do know about my company. We have a two day conference once a year to plan strategy. We arrive at 4 oclock. Meet for 3 hours, have dinner, another meeting, and go to sleep. The next day we meet from 8 am to 4 in a big conference room listening to speakers, and then we go home.
We held the meeting in the same (very very nice) hotel within driving distance of everybody in the whole Midatlantic who does my job. About 100 of us. This was booked and paid for 6 months in advance.
After what happened with AIG we cancelled it. When we learned we couldn’t get the money back, corporate told us to cancel it anyway. So we did, and we lost the money. It wouldn’t have cost us anything to have the meeting since it was paid for, but corporate was afraid of how it would look if it got picked up in the press.
I can tell you that we work at that meeting. If there was ever a year where we needed to get together and compare notes and come up with a strategy this is the year we needed to do it.
It was stupid not to hold that meeting. At the same time, there was no way we could because of this withchunt mentality that is going on.
No. “they” weren’t. Who is they, specifically? What exactly did they do that they shouldn’t have?
There’s a lot of bad guys. Some of them are at the rating companies. They weren’t criminal, they were irresponsible. Same with some traders. Some others specifically at AIG sold what were technically legal but at the same time wholly fraudulent credit default swaps. They weren’t illegal because they were so new that regulation hadn’t caught up even recognizing them yet. A lot of the bad guys were at hedge funds, who sought to exploit the weakness by selling short and then commiting quasi-legal acts to further the panic and fan the fire.
A lot of the bad guys are traders or corporate heads or investment bankers who failed to do their due diligence and became heavily active in areas that they didn’t understand.
I know you want to point fingers, but this is thirty years in the making. A lot of things had to go wrong or be done in very specific way for a very long time by an awful lot of people, and then a whole unforseeable set of circumstances had to happen for this particular disaster to occur. It was not inevitable. It was a perfect storm.
I don’t know. Stan O’neil destroyed Merrill. He had to lie and violate risk management protocols to do it. It was incredibly stupid, dishonest, and illegal. But he’s walked away with hundreds of millions. He should be in jail. As should the former heads of Lehman, AIG, Citigroup and quite a few others. I don’t know why we aren’t going after them.
Beleive it or not. That is spot on. People keep forgetting that if you make a model, and then use what the model tells you, you are then changing things so your model is no longer accurate.
The guys at Long Term Capital (nobel prize winners) learned the hard way, what you just said. You should have worked for them.
Your brush is a little broad there? “Anti-family?” In what way? Isn’t the family one of the cornerstones of Republican rhetoric. I’m Christian. What’s wrong with pro-Christian? I think the anti-gay thing is true, sadly, but I don’t see much better out of the Democrats. How are Republicans anti-female as a party?
I know some asshole Democrats, too.
I have a theory. It’s because things are polarized. I think most of us in our hearts are believers in balance. We just disagree with where that balance is. Sometimes we only disagree by a little bit, but rhetoric takes over and things are exagerrated and relative positions get argued as absolutes.
You’re the one that started this stupid thing as to who’s better, lefty or right, who’s more to blame lefty or right? You’re the one who says this is a partisan issue. I’m not trying to play it that way. I told you I didn’t want to. But no… you insisted. Now, out of that whole War and Peace of a post you’re going to pick that one line and bitch at me for doing what you wanted?
This, after excorciating me for not defending people who lost their retirement savings from vicious attacks that nobody here is making?
And you accuse me of being difficult to talk to?
You shameless hippie fraud, you.
Oh, if you want to see a bad guy get ripped apart go to Comedy Central and watch the three part unedited interview with Jim Cramer on the Daily Show.
We haven’t even talked about the press, which has not been helpful at all. I can’t tell you how many days I wake up and watch some bastard or bitch on CNBC tell me how the markets are poised to plunge, all the while with a gleeful little look on their face.
They have been fanning the flames in this crisis of confidence and selling fear.