No jail time for bankers

Here. Go read Matt Taibbi’s latest at Rolling Stone. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even …

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More fraudulent smear videos from the right

What a surprise. The woman who created videos passed around to Beck and the House Republicans heavily edited them to make Planned Parenthood look like an evil “abortion-first” agency rather than the women’s health organization it really is. That let the already-biased House defund it without any concern at all about the one-in-five American women …

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Avoid that cliff, Republicans

Given the lasting impression of Republicans as the big losers in the last round of government showdowns during the Clinton years, I’ve been wondering if there are any cooler heads in that party who are counseling against forcing another one over the budget cuts they want to enact. Well, maybe. However, they still have to …

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Pensions are deferred wages

Lost in the hooha about public workers’ pensions is the fact that those pensions are in fact deferred wages, negotiated by the public workers in lieu of higher cash compensation in the form of salaries. That’s been true forever. State and municipal governments say to their employees “We can’t pay you what we’d like to …

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Curses

Granted that having two front-end CV boots in imminent danger of rupture/failure is unsafe, why did the problem have to get noticed while trying to get the car its annual safety sticker? Why not the next time it’s up on a lift? Life is unfair.

Filed under Car