Your new lies

There's got to be a sort of sad realization about your life when you realize that all you do is take large sums of corporate money to help politicians find the best poll-tested ways to lie about something hat could benefit Americans. But such is the life of Frank Luntz. First he partnered up with health giants and the GOP to take on health care, but with Democrats willingly giving up that fight the new battlefront is financial reform.

And because not enough House members and Senators are completely owned by the banking and finance lobby, he's devised a series of dishonest new talking points that will soon drive you crazy with the repetitive frequency with which you hear them and by the sheer, ball out dishonesty of them. Here are the words he advises be used by people seeking to kill any financial reform. Because doing things as they've been done for the past decade is the only way forward.

ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY & OVERSIGHT, LOBBYIST LOOPHOLES, ENFORCEMENT OF CURRENT LAWS, BUREAUCRATS, WASTEFUL WASHINGTON SPENDING, NEVER AGAIN, GOVERNMENT FAILURES AND INCOMPETENCE, LET’S HELP SMALL BUSINESSES, BIG BANK BAILOUT BILL, BLOATED BUREACRACY, FINE PRINT, UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, SPECIAL INTERESTS, HARD WORKING TAXPAYERS, ANOTHER WASHINGTON AGENCY, UNLIMITED REGUATORY POWERS, DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS, RED TAPE

Bold print for bold words. Some of them are also an alliterative delight. We'll ignore the spelling errors on 'bureaucracy' and 'regulatory', because who cares about spelling if you aren't going to care about basic truth? Yes, that's right, a bill which intends to put new restrictions of credit card companies, banks, financial institutions, mortgage companies, and all the other groups that shitted the world economy and provide new protections to consumers is going to be attacked as something that will “punish taxpayers" while rewarding “big banks and credit card companies.” Creating a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which smart people like Elizabeth Warren feel is absolutely integral to getting real reform and real protection for citizens, is creating an “unaccountable czar.”

Just like health reform, where anything and everything that could conceivably be proposed was going to be knocked as a socialist government takeover/Bolshevik plot, anything that attempts to look at the last few years, the state of the economy, and effect it has had on the country and go "Hey, wait a minute, maybe we should do something" is going to get accused of bailing banks out and stealing taxpayer money to give to Goldman-Sachs. So a quick round of applause for men like Frank Luntz and the country we live in that enables their cheap bullshit. I know you probably didn't have high hopes for financial reform, I didn't either, but you really need to lower those hopes. A lot.

Like father, like daughter

In the torture debate we've heard from many sources debating the merits and legality of torture. Except one: Dick Cheney's kids. Liz Cheney has a notion and she wants you to hear it. Her contention? Of course: it's not torture even if it was done, which it wasn't. She's gotta make a full throated defense, because she really doesn't want to make that weekly trek over to the federal pen to see her dad and put $50 bucks in his prison account.

O'DONNELL: Well Liz, we'll get to that argument in a minute, about whether the means justify the ends, whether torture justifies itself...

CHENEY: Well, it wasn't torture, so that's not the right way to lay out the argument.

O'DONNELL: Ok.

CHENEY: Everything that was done in this program, as has been laid out and described before, are tactics that our own people go through in SERE training.

Later in the interview, Cheney insisted that "We did not torture our own people. These techniques are not torture."

As we see the Cheney genes fully kick in, we get to see her move from basic lying to baldfaced lying, replete with invented "facts" to bolster her lies. SERE training (which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Evasion. Apparently they couldn't come up with a different second E.) is quite different than the torture that her old man got pushed through. It's so different that even the Bush Justice Department was kind enough to point that out....in their own torture memos. The CIA was kind enough to make the distinction as well.

But that misses the central point: soldiers go through SERE trailing to help them experience torture and learn to resist any possible torture by the enemy. But once your so deep into lying, that kind of stuff doesn't penetrate the mental undisclosed location you've sent your sense of morality or honesty to. I hope one day when I have children, or possibly midget hostages, that we'll have shared interests. Hopefully those intersts will be sports or a fondness for reading and not a shared affinity for enacting, covering up, and excusing torture. But then again, different strokes for different folks.

"I didn't earn it, give it to me."

Deciding to make a late charge in the "Biggest Balls of the Year" competition, Merril Lynch CEO John Thain decided that despite the fact that his company lost $11.67 billion and was forced to sell to Bank of America to stave off the negation of its existence, he deserves a fat stack of cash with a cherry on top.

Merrill Lynch & Co. chief John Thain has suggested to directors that he get a 2008 bonus of as much as $10 million, but the battered securities firm's compensation committee is resisting his request, according to people familiar with the situation.
...
Thain has said he deserves a bonus because he helped avert what could have been a much larger crisis at the firm, people familiar with his thinking told the WSJ.

Ah yes, I believe this is what's known as the "Incredible Huevos Maneuver". The old "Although we faced total ruination under my stewardship, we only hit 90% ruination so....uhhhh...money please" gambit. I guess by the standards of economic relativism, yeah Johnny, you didn't go Lehman Brothers on everyone. By normal standards you are a nitwit who ran his company into the ground and helped contribute to the new depression. Take pride, have a cookie, and fuck off. Sans the $10 million bonus you didn't earn.

DeBeers: Adding insult to exploitation

From DeBeers, the company that funds murderous African paramilitaries, juntas, civil wars, worker exploitation, slave labor, deadly working conditions, and illegal price fixing comes: diamond tribal masks. Y'know for all those Africans who want to bling out a generically exploited form of their culture. That is if they're able to save up the pennies a day they get paid for a thousand years, aren't drafted into a militia to go fight a civil war, and if DeBeers hasn't illegally thrown them off their tribal lands.

Those are all pretty likely, so I guess rich white women will have to pick up the slack and buy them. They can wear them to a inner city schools benefit.

Sadly this necklace was DeBeers second design choice. They were going to go with a blinged up migrant worker, a kid with his arm hacked off, and a diamond pit, but they couldn't work out how to represent abject poverty, shameless exploitation, or excessive human rights violations. Maybe the Monopoly guy sitting on a worker, lighting a cigar with a burning map of Africa. But then we get into likeness rights issues with Parker Brothers. The masks were the right way to go. At least the money will go to help improve conditions in Africa a kickass yacht party.