Why newspapers are dying. Your whopping 14% on Editorial is showing, boys.
cc: publishing houses and Rupert Murdoch. See that 52% line item there? That’s why eBooks (and newspapers) should cost less than dead tree books (and newspapers).

Center-right radical socialism

“ My fellow Americans, in the past weeks we have witnessed a string of avoidable tragedies caused by the excesses of corporations and their executives. Millions of innocent people have suffered economic losses and dozens have lost their lives. The heedless rapacity of BP will cause suffering to the fishing industry, damage to the Gulf’s fragile ecology and new economic losses to a region that is only beginning to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

“The mining disaster is another reason why we cannot rely on corporations to act in the public interest. Unless government vigorously policies mine safety, more miners will lose their lives, more wives will lose husbands and more children will lose fathers. But better enforcement of oil and coal safety will never solve the entire problem. We as a nation must do what BP cynically professed it was doing. We must move beyond petroleum and beyond carbon.

"And the mother of all economic catastrophes, the financial collapse, is further proof that markets must not be left to their own devices. We need the toughest possible regulation of Wall Street so that the rest of the economy can recover.

—Robert Kuttner, saying what Obama won’t.
Kuttner goes on:

Gentle reader, presidents on occasion have actually made speeches like this. Roosevelt did. Lyndon Johnson did during the civil rights era. You could look it up. They used events to move public opinion. They built popular support for progressive interventions.

To which I add: yep.

Mysterious Una(ni)mi(ty)

Bernie Sanders’ “Audit the Fed” amendment passed today:

The 96-0 vote came after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) modified an earlier version of the audit legislation that was strongly opposed by the White House and Federal Reserve. They argued the amendment would compromise the independence of U.S. monetary policy.

By this margin, even noted fucktard Orrin Hatch can declare himself “satisfied” that it is “good for the country.”
Likewise Ben Nelson, who was irrevocably aboard way back at 70 votes. The era of partisan bickering must be over.

Just so we’re clear, in the 21st century, Republican gubernatorial candidates are attacked for accepting modern biology and being only a partial Biblical literalist.

Steve Benen. Why yes, Steve, yes they are. Nothing to see here.

Hero

azspot:

The hero of the Times Square bomb attempt was an immigrant. A Muslim.  Senegalese newcomer Aliou Niasse was the first to notice the smoldering car and draw attention to it. He had no time left on his cell phone and realized his English probably wasn’t up to the task, so he got a passerby to call 911.  In Arizona the cops would have hauled him off to jail while the car exploded.

I disagree. In Arizona, the guy would have never told anyone what he saw, specifically to avoid being “hauled off to jail while the car exploded.” He would simply have melted away into the crowd, never to be heard from at all. Then there would be lots of delayed retribution about “all these passersby” that didn’t do anything at all and much concern trolling about what is going wrong in the ‘Merican spirit.

Rest assured, though, that the wages of treating people like second-class shit and little more than domestic servants would never, ever come up. That would be shrill.

Hero

HFT demonstrably does not provide liquidity unless the market is going up and has market-wrecking implications. This is to say nothing about the advantages it gives institutional traders over non-HFT firms or individuals.

unsolicitedanalysis
reblogging nonolet
This strikes me as the critical truth of the recent craziness, and one that I’ve not heard uttered by anyone at any level of the MSM, who were almost universally still peddling various demonstrably false interpretations.
tl;dr: We are fucked

My sweet untouched Miranda

It occurs to me that people like Joementum, the Commonwealth’s own Code Brown, and apparently all of those in the media that slavishly cover them simply don’t understand what the Miranda warning even is.

Here’s what it’s not: conferring you any new rights

Here’s what it is: warning you of the rights you hold, by dint of being a living citizen of these United States and of which you may or may not choose to avail yourself (specifically, this boils down to the right to sit there mute unless and until you’ve spoken to counsel). Beginning to see why they so frequently put that word “warning” in there after the word Miranda?

How is it that these same folks that recite and (incorrectly) parse the Second Amendment ad nauseum (but inevitably, and notably verbatim) don’t understand the most basic concepts regarding what I would deem the single most fundamental right governing our interactions with our pre- and post-W.Bush-administration government?
Ironically, though, does it surprise anyone that gun ownership also happens to be the one Constitutional right that suspected terrorists get to keep under the GOP’s dream setup. Honestly, we should probably make it even easier for the suspected terrorist to buy guns; I’d assume this policy is best achieved through a wide-ranging program of blanket tax cuts.

So, once again for the truly slow and Brian Williams: Mirandizing someone simply ensures that they are fully aware of rights that are operative for all citizens no matter what; it doesn’t confer said rights, and neither do those rights magically begin only subsequent to their being invoked by rote recitation. Just like on all the cop shows!

These people are thoroughgoing frauds – a bunch of right-wing victim-mongers whining about something they have no actual ideas about confronting. They are not something new. They are the decaying stench of the Republican corpse. If they get into power somehow, it will be Weekend At Bernie’s for conservatism.

Andrew Sullivan on the Tea Party. Whole thing well worth your short read. Breathtaking stuff. (via spiegelman)