"And that's the way it is"

I expected much wingnutosphere animosity towards the late Walter Cronkite due to his liberal bent, but I hadn't expected to be regaled with the odd notion that his product during CBS News' hay day was inferior to blogs.

Not much less thoughtless but offensive nonetheless are John Podhoretz and Say Anything, who suggest that Cronkite could learn a thing or two from bloggers, of all people. "There are no Walter Cronkites any more, and while I bear personal animosity to Cronkite himself, good riddance to that era," says the latter (I assume no slip). "But to have a big, giant, sloppy mish-mash of information available for the public to pick through than a carefully managed stream of news being spoon-fed to us by talking heads on television who became so trusted nobody dared question them."

I stand behind the theory I suggested last week.

Th'fuck?

The Epicurean Dealmaker speaks for so many of us.

But let's get real for a minute. This is a blog, people. This is a blog written by a pseudonymous investment banker who curses, exaggerates, and generally takes any and all liberties available in pursuit of an (admittedly confusing) agenda of both entertaining and informing his Dedicated Yet Quite Tiny Audience, usually not at the same time. It is a vanity project. It is a labor of love. It is something to do when I am bored, which has been happening with distressing frequency during these last several months. If you come here looking for evenhandedness, balance, and facts, I have to ask you just one simple question: What the fuck are you thinking?

One of the last voices of reason

says goodbye to the blogosphere. Godspeed, Hilzoy.

Klub Klein, or, Meet the New Boss

As you may have learned recently, Ezra Klein is now the unabashed leader of the vast leftwing conspiracy of powerful bloggers and a biased media taking their directives from Kommanders Klein and Kos. Now, this blog continues its policy of absolutely never linking to Mickey Maus, so we'll have to take it on faith that the dome topped "contrarian" is not so much bothered by Ezra's tentacles as he is by not being invited to the club.

For the record, this humble blog is not a part of that fiendish cabal. To paraphrase that great philosopher and economic determinist, Groucho Marx, I would never join a club that would have me as a member.

New ownership

Whitehouse dot gov has a startling new face.

The blog.

Nothin' to add

All the good blog posts have already been written today.

UPDATE: One more. That's it. No excuse not to actually performs some...work...for my employer.

Troll nation

Anyone else out there think Mattathias Schwartz got played?

I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”

I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.

As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.

Ideas like these bring trouble. Almost a year ago, while in the midst of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired, wilder-eyed Weev gave a talk called “Internet Crime” at a San Diego hacker convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the Firefox browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets — untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts the exact date of a political leader’s demise. The talk led to two uncomfortable interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed his legal identity altogether. Weev now espouses “the ruin lifestyle” — moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of hackers called “the organization,” which, he says, bring in upward of $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere.

We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike snout of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked on the hood. “Your bag, sir?” said the driver, a blond kid in a suit and tie.

Populist versus liberal

Nathan Newman is making sense.

The case against Obama seems to boil down to a few nuanced sentences on whether he might have any flexibility in adjusting timelines for withdrawal from Iraq, whether he thought the words "right to bear arms" could have some constitutional relationship with owning guns, whether he thought it was a good idea to funding religious organizations in helping fight poverty, and whether he thought raping children might reasonably warrant the death penalty. Oh yeah, and FISA (more on that below).

What all these issues share is that in practice, almost none of them would effect the day-to-day lives of Americans. The Supreme Court ruling on guns was incredibly narrow in specific application, the Iraq withdrawal comments were incredibly small nuances, his promotion of funding religious groups is a good thing, and it's a cost-free political position to oppose raping of children once the Supreme Court has banned the death penalty (and might even have merits on principle). But gay marriage, which does matter to a lot of peoples' lives was the place where he stood up and fought, which is exactly what a populist should do. Maybe that's the difference between a liberal and a progressive populist. The liberal takes positions that pisses off people even when it doesn't matter practically in peoples lives.

Read the rest.

Once again, let's keep things in proportion.

Lazy or lying

Now, I don't have interns. So while I knew Brooksie had the facts wrong in Tuesday's column regarding the Obama tax plan, I was too busy to track down the real numbers. And so I waited for the mighty blogosphere to look it up, and fortunately, TPM has a few resources of their own.

David Brooks made an important mistake in his Tuesday column about Barack Obama's fund raising. He writes: "If Obama's tax plans go through, those affluent donors could wind up giving over 50 percent of their income to the federal government."

According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center's analysis of Obama's tax plan, the correct share for the richest 1 percent of households--those with income above $600,000--is 36 percent; for the for the richest 0.1 percent, above $2.9 million, the rate would be 39 percent. Note also that since these estimates include taxes remitted by corporations, the actual tax returns that these households fill out would find them paying less than 30 percent of their income in taxes. Even with Senator Obama's proposal to raise Social Security taxes on those with earnings above $250,000, a proposal for which he has yet to specify a rate, tax liabilities of the affluent would still be far below 50 percent of their income.

It's also worth noting that these tax rates for those at the top of the scale are about the same as those that prevailed under Bill Clinton's presidency (average for the top 1 percent, 1993-2000: 35 percent), a period of strong and broadly shared economic growth.

I encourage you to keep reading the analysis of Brooks's column, which is really all about his deep thinking on Obama's donor base and Brooks's snide (yet oblique) implication that Obama's lying. He's not, and it ain't all that complicated.

My larger point is that while I don't have interns, columnists for the Times do. I'm pretty sure Brooks has at his disposal interns and researchers who, even if they're outsourced to Bangalore, could easily track down the facts about Obama's tax proposals and could do the simple math on Obama's unprecedented support by small donors.

So what gives? You think Brooks is being...ahem...dishonest?

And once again, the great cry rises up in the land, though it fails to pierce the heights on 52nd St.: Don't they fact check these guys?

Ennervating his base

Greenwald on the Obama campaign's last couple of weeks.

It is worrisome that after taking on and defeating the Democratic wise men that supported Sen. Clinton, Obama seems now to be taking the sage advice of those same wise men and abruptly tacking rightward. I'm not sure, exactly, how much this is true -- though often labeled as "the most liberal Senator," there isn't huge evidence that he is. Still, on a number of fronts -- mainly FISA -- his words and actions have been dispiriting.

But Obama is a shrewd politician who weighs his words and actions carefully. He's consolidating, I think, now, and building a narrative for the fall to protect him from attacks on the right and from a pro-McCain narrative in the media that will be hard, otherwise, to overcome.

We'll see. I've been disappointed by politicians before.

All that said, is Greenwald correct? Is it wrong for Democratic presidential candidates to assume they need to move to the center to get elected? I dunno. I do know this. Bill Clinton was the most conservative Democratic candidate to win the presidency since Carter, who was the most conservative that preceded him.

Just a coincidence? Beltway bullshit? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: On one of the "dispiriting" decisions on Obama's part, Steve Benen says, "cool it."

The mighty blogosphere

Kevin Drum wants to know what the "lefty blogosphere" thinks of rumors that Colin Powell will endorse Obama.

Who cares what they "lefty blogosphere" thinks? "We" "lefties" really aren't that important. Obviously, Democratic candidates don't want progressives actively going after them, but in the general election, we are small beer.

There's probably no single individual who did more to launch us into a stupid and unnecessary war that has drained the lives of over 4,000 American servicemen and women, and countless Iraqis while also draining our treasury dry.

I say, welcome aboard, general!