David > Recent Status Updates

What a racket: the Fed gives free money to banks, which lend the money back to the government at 3% interest by buying Treasury bonds. Risk-free profit at zero cost!

Obama appears not to take women working with him seriously. Too bad, because they seem to be some of the most competent and honorable people in the executive branch.

"...having some people paid tens of millions for activities of no social or really economic value -- or, as the crash shows, negative value -- just tears a society apart, at all levels, top to bottom. Well, maybe not top." Paul Volcker, former Fed chairman

Maybe Geithner is even worse than Summers.

Obama kissing the asses of 13 bankers: that's just one spectacle of many in this saga. If everyone read this book Occupy Wall Street would be Destroy Wall Street.

With all the Wall Street insiders in the Obama administration, there was no way real reform or regulation would be imposed on the financial industry. The free market would not be allowed to make banks suffer consequences of recklessness. No, the government bail almost everyone out.

I'm definitely getting the feeling that Larry Summers was a BAD choice for the Obama administration.

Interesting passage on the role of women in the crisis -- regulators and a congresswoman -- who were all RIGHT.

Just as I suspected: Obama lacked experience to be president. Maybe he'll have wised up enough for his second term.

Could there really have been a run on banks? Would people have withdrawn all their money and kept in the mattress indefinitely? It would have found SOME safe place -- right?

I predict that Larry Summers will come out as the bad guy in this tale. Now I know for sure that Obama was reading Krugman, and O's economic advisors were trying to refute K.

Obama had Rooseveltian fantasies? What the fuck happened to them?

"worthless collateral": if you had to pinpoint the problem in two words, these would suffice.

Eager to read this one and see if Suskind blows the lid off of anything.

After reading bios about Joe McCarthy and Lyndon Johnson, it's nice to read about a real hero.

If you want to understand the right-wing extremists you have to know about the ultraconservatives of the McCarthy era. Really an excellent history of that era and a good summary of many of many parallels with the politics of today.

Get this: Sen. Joseph McCarthy to the Secretary of the Army (the branch of the military that McCarthy is investigating for Communists): "Roy [Cohn]... thinks Dave [Roy's secret boyfriend who's just been drafted] should be a general and work from the penthouse of the Waldorf." Now THAT'S fucked up. Yet McCarthy had America terrorized and leaders kissing his ass. Successful demagogue -- until he self-destructed.

Eisenhower: Americans should not be suckered into calling anyone a Communist "who may be a little brighter than ourselves."

From LBJ to Joseph McCarthy: I'm surveying the rogue's gallery of modern American politics.

There's so much to dislike about LBJ, and almost nothing to like, let alone admire -- at least in the period covered by this volume of his biography. Alas, bad guys do succeed, good guys fail. But Coke Stevenson does end up happy in the end, while that could hardly be said about the miserable and loathed LBJ.

The immense power behind LBJ's '48 senate election was Brown and Root -- the "BR" of "KBR" who made so much money during the Bush-Cheney regime. It's easy to imagine this campaign as a template for Bush's victory against Gore: a technical win accomplished by an unprecedented court action.

LBJ used every dirty trick in the book and then added several appendices full of new ones in his senatorial campaign of 1948.

Crooked elections probably aren't as flagrantly rigged as they were in Texas in Johnson's time but vote buying and other things still go on, I suppose. In those days, even an honest politician might not have a chance unless he also cheated (not that Johnson was honest).

LBJ was a mad man as early as his 1948 campaign for senator. Seriously mentally ill but with a mania to win. There's really NOTHING to admire.

The "loyalty" LBJ demanded was actually subservience.

Not much chance you like LBJ, let alone admire him: he made a point of point of publicly displaying him dominance over Lady Bird. This man who actually did a lot of good for America nevertheless turns my stomach.

Johnson wasn't just a pathological liar: he was pathologically unable to tell the truth -- about anything.

So far, from the introduction, I have learned that LBJ was a pathological liar. There are many things to despise about LBJ but consider the accomplishments of the Great Society. Good people don't necessarily make great (or even good) leaders. The author's question is a good one: do ends justify means?

An epidemic of neurological disorders CAUSED BY a popular treatment: huge doses of mercury. That was medical "science" in the 18th century.

People used to eat much less meat. E.g., during medieval times there were enough Catholic holidays to make people vegetarian for half the year.