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I’ve seen a few people start saying that we shouldn’t be worrying about the misdeeds of AIG and other bailout recipients, because the problem we face makes their sleaze look trivial.

Sure, AIG paid its employees massive bonuses after receiving bailout funds. Yes, the bonuses were even bigger than they admitted, an average of about a million dollars per person, going to the very people who destroyed the company, the folks in Joseph Cassano’s financial products division. But hey, it’s only $400 million, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Sure, AIG is also suing the government to try and get back tax it tried to avoid by using illegal offshore accounts with names like Lumagrove, Laperouse and Foppingadreef. Sure, they’re paying for the lawsuit using taxpayer dollars, and the cost of the defense will be born by the taxpayer as well—but hey, it’s only another $306 million plus both sets of lawyer fees, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

OK, it may be true that half the banks we’ve bailed out didn’t bother to pay their taxes last year. And yes, their CEOs lied about it. But hey, it’s only another $220 million, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Yes, JPMorgan Chase is taking bailout money and buying two new luxury corporate jets and building “the premiere corporate aircraft hangar on the eastern seaboard”. But hey, it’s only another $138 million, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Granted, MorganStanley has 158 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands in order to dodge taxes, yet turns around and asks for tax dollars. Yes, they’re paying themselves $10.7 billion in bonuses, almost exactly the amount they’re getting in bailout cash. Yes, the offshort accounts of MorganStanley and other banks are estimated to be costing the taxpayer a few billion dollars a year. However, we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Well, to update a phrase widely but falsely attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen: a few hundred million here, a few billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Consider it this way: Suppose you’re unemployed, and having difficulty making your mortgage payments. While you’re sitting at the table trying to balance your finances, someone breaks in through your front door, walks up, grabs your wallet, and starts walking away with it.

Apparently the right thing to do is say “Oh, hey, that’s pretty blatant–but he’s only stealing $100 in my wallet, and I’m facing a $300,000 headache, so I’ll just ignore it. I have more important things to worry about.”

Then when the next guy wanders in and tries to steal your TV, you’re supposed to ignore that too, because your problem is so much bigger and more important than such a petty triviality.

Well, I guess I’m crazy, because I think a financial crisis is exactly the time to put the smackdown on anyone who tries to rip you off.

I didn’t want to see a bailout in the first place. We should have done what every other country in the same situation has done to get out of it—nationalize the banks, fire the people who caused the mess, and then privatize the banks again once things settle down. (Listen to recent This American Life episodes and NPR podcasts for the background.)

If we must have a bailout, then the very least we should do is make sure that we don’t get ripped off. If we let Wall Street get away with it this time, imagine how much worse they’ll be afterwards, and how much worse the next resulting crisis will be. I seriously think that AIG should be liquidated. It’s time for President Obama and other lawmakers to play hardball. They need to send a message to the CEOs of the banks, showing that not only are they not getting their bonuses, but they may be losing their jobs unless they start a program of radical austerity and honesty.

Rush Limbaugh opines :

There was a promise from the Obama administration, the new era of responsibility and transparency, that all such legislation would be posted on the Internet for five days so that the public could read what is being voted on.  Ain’t going to happen.  In addition, they have reformatted the bill.  They’ve made it a PDF file when they posted it.  Now, for those of you that don’t use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched.  A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page, and so you can read every page but you cannot keyword search it.  It’s not a text file as legislation normally is, as posted on these public websites.

Meanwhile in reality, here’s where you can find the text of the bill .

The Republicans in Congress have issued a list of stimulus package line items they consider wasteful . Looking at the list, it’s pretty easy to deduce how Republicans see the world: anything related to energy efficiency, pollution reduction, government infrastructure or public health is "wasteful".

Oh, sure, there are a few stupid items. $246m for Hollywood to buy film with is a waste of money; there are already more crappy Hollywood movies being released than anyone wants to go watch, and film is a dying technology anyway. Better would be to spend $246m on grants for independent movies and tax breaks for digital upgrades to cameras and movie theaters.

Then there’s $2b for clean coal. If you think it won’t work, it’s a dangerous distraction. If you think it will work, it’s a great idea–but still fantastically expensive and unlikely to produce energy at affordable prices. So yeah, that’s a bit of a waste of money.

I suppose you could argue that reducing substance abuse amongst Native Americans will harm the already-suffering alcohol, tobacco and illegal drug industries, but I’m going to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s not the actual point they’re making. Similarly, floods are good for the GDP, but I doubt that’s the reason why spending money on flood reduction projects is being described as wasteful.

But overall, considering that the purpose of a Keynsian stimulus package is to spend government money on buying stuff and employing people, most of these items fit the bill. Several also help shore up and improve vital infrastructure.

So what would a non-wasteful stimulus bill look like, according to the Republican party? Go on, take a guess. I think maybe you can predict the answer.

It’s H.R. 470, the "Economic Recovery and Middle-Class Tax Relief Act of 2009". And if you take a look you’ll see that it’s one or two trillion dollars of tax cuts, plus a token 1% spending cut on discretionary government spending. It includes a couple of the usual hobby horses: repealing the AMT and cutting capital gains taxes, both utterly irrelevant to the current situation. (If there’s anyone out there who has capital gains this year and is worrying about AMT, I’d like to know who his fund manager is.)

We had eight years of tax cuts. They failed to prevent the crash. The Republican response seems to be "Tax cuts didn’t work? Well, it’s because we didn’t cut them enough! More tax cuts!" Still, looking at their speeches about the evils of the Obama stimulus plan, it’s nice to see them belatedly taking an interest in the budget deficit, considering they were the ones who ran it up to the highest level in recorded history.

The Wall Street Journal offers an opinion piece from Michael Stokes Paulsen stating that the Minnesota election of Al Franken is unconstitutional, based on Bush vs Gore (2000).

I don’t have any strong opinion on whether Franken or Coleman should be declared winner, not having followed all of the shenanigans. However, there are two things that spring out from the article.

The first is that Paulsen ignores the fact that the Supreme Court said that "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances…", and was not to be used as prededent. You’d think that a professor of law would know that minor detail of the highest profile legal case of the last 10 years, given that it was mentioned in most of the press coverage.

The second thing that struck me was the following quote:

The problem with the remedy was that it arguably violated the same principle that led the Court to invalidate the recount: the need to treat all votes equally. It had the practical effect of awarding the election to Bush (though subsequent media counts confirmed that Bush won anyway, under any uniform standard). This has led to enduring partisan criticism of the case, some fair and some unfair.

Note the comment I’ve highlighted. Wikipedia has a nice summary of the Florida recounts , and a quick perusal shows that what Paulsen states is the exact opposite of the truth. In the first media consortium recount, under every uniform statewide recount scenario Gore won Florida. The only way to get a Bush win is to have a non-uniform standard by only re-evaluating a limited number of ballots.

The second media review cited by Wikipedia, run by BDO Seidman, held that if you recount the votes by the strictest standard, Gore won. The third media review found that either Bush or Gore won, depending on whether you made an attempt to determine the meaning of apparent overvotes such as those caused by the poor ballot design. (If you did, and used a consistent standard, Gore won.)

So Paulsen’s throwaway comment assuring us that Bush won fair and square is the exact opposite of the truth. If the votes in Florida had all been counted according to a declared uniform standard, Gore would have won. The only reason Bush won is that a statewide uniform recount wasn’t performed. It’s important that we remember that.

(Still, what do you expect from a Murdoch rag?)

Chicago Tribune:

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.

But this isn’t just any normal political theory. After Internet blowhards started circulating rumors that Obama was born in Kenya, the Obama campaign published a scan of his birth certificate.

So the wingnuts moved on to claiming that the scan was a cunning Photoshop fake. They said that the black rectangle covering the certificate number was deeply suspicious, as was the lack of a state seal.

So factcheck.org had their people personally inspect the birth certificate, and take high resolution digital photos showing the embossed state seal, and the redacted certificate number.

The Director of Health for Hawaii has issued a statement saying that she and her deputy also personally inspected the state’s copy of Obama’s birth certificate, and found it to be genuine.

People have even tracked down the birth announcement published in the Honolulu Advertiser, available in the microfilm archives in Hawaii libraries, and published a scan of that.

All of which puts the lawsuit into hilarious tinfoil hat conspiracy theory territory. We’re asked to believe that not only did the Obama campaign fake a legal document and sneak copies into the state archives, they also went to the libraries that have copies of the Honolulu Advertiser in their archives and made sure the microfilm was replaced with edited film images, no doubt carefully aged to look genuine. Or perhaps Barack Obama immigrated from Kenya and took the identity of the real Barack Obama, murdering him and disposing of the body–that would explain why he doesn’t look like a Muslim, right?

Yeah, that’s the kind of theory the Supreme Court may decide to evaluate on Friday. So for maximum amusement value, let’s hope they take on the case, then lay the smackdown–because obviously that would prove that even the Supreme Court has been inducted into the conspiracy.

Inspired by an awesome FARK thread:

I skipped the presidential debate, but I think I might watch the VP debate. If Caribou Barbie really is as bad as rumors say, there could be lulz.

"The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers." — Ron Paul.

"The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries. [...] The U.S. Constitution established a Republic rooted in Biblical law, administered by representatives who are Constitutionally elected by the citizens." — "Constitution" Party platform.

During the 1990s, UK TV series Spitting Image included a song "Thank You Tory Voters", listing disasters caused by the Conservative government. One memorable line was "Voting Tory’s like a fart, no-one admits they’ve done it".

This was the point at which opinion pollsters noticed something interesting: Conservatives would routinely lose in every opinion poll, and then win the election. Studies were carried out, and it turned out that a surprisingly large number of people were so embarrassed by their support for the Tories that they would routinely tell opinion pollsters one thing, and then vote differently in the privacy of the voting booth.

People are starting to ask whether something similar might be happening in the US Democratic voter base. Here, it’s known as The Bradley Effect. And it’s real:

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.

[...]

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

Emphasis mine.

So a third of Democratic voters are racists. Imagine what the statistics for Republicans must look like.

The survey team also used Implicit Association Testing:

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.

From: Joe Biden
To: Barack Obama
Subject: Changes to your positions on key issues

I’ve been taking a look at your web site. There are some changes you need to make if we’re ever going to win this thing.

• Get rid of as many mentions of science as you can. That stuff scares the right-wing Christians.
• Remove the paragraph about surveillance being conducted under the rule of law. It just looks embarrassing after your FISA vote.
• Get rid of the stuff about providing opportunities for minorities to own TV and radio stations, or you’ll never get an interview on FOX.
• Remove the talk of parental controls and filtering tools. Parents don’t want to be responsible for their children’s upbringing.
• Get rid of the stuff about open government. A live feed of our meetings where we make important decisions? Are you nuts?
• Get rid of the stuff about redefining broadband to be over 200kbps. The telecoms industry doesn’t want to roll out the fiber we paid them for.
• Get rid of the paragraph about community use of the wireless spectrum, or the corporate radio stations will bury you.
• Pull all the stuff about immigration reform. Immigrants can’t vote.
• Remove the stuff about better enforcement of antitrust law.

Thanks in advance for your speedy compliance.

Joe