Tags for this video have been changed from 'dow jones index, G20, tim geithner, declining real wages, income disparity' to 'dow jones index, G20, tim geithner, declining real wages, income disparity, colbert' - edited by Grimm

No. It's not a crime. Manning committed the crime. Then he blabbed about it and is getting what he deserves.

Not until he hangs will Manning 'get what he deserves'. But I doubt we have the balls to hang traitors anymore.

Assange's crime is taking those classified documents as well as classified diplomatic cables and making them available to a wider audience, including America's enemies. Corporate espionage and the rest is another matter and another set of crimes.

Uncovering secrets is what real journalism is all about.

The American mainstream libmedia gave up journalism long ago. Now the useful idiots just carry water for taxocrats and the left.

What's going on here is pure fucking evil perpetrated by the incestuous marriage of business and politics.

Which has been going on since the beginning of human history. And really, how much of THE TRUTH changes things? It was known well before Tim Geithner was made Secretary of the Treasury he was a m0therfcking TAX CHEAT. Did anyone care? Apparently not.

When it comes to shining a light on the truth that none of you fucks are free, the cables, the collateral murder video and all the rest is nothing compared to the reaction to them, by business and politics.

It's the people screaming "You are not free" who have even more tyrannical plans for the human race. There's nothing more common than "revolutionaries" adopting the same tactics and principles of the "oppressors" they overthrow. And so: yawn.

It used to be common sense that to maintain freedom and order, things like military operational readiness, technology and war plans and even diplomatic secrets should be hidden from the prying eyes of our enemies. I'm sure the Germans wished for American "transparency" about D-Day and the Japanese (Happy December 7th!) about our atom bomb programs.

For attacking the USA the wikiclown should be considered fair game. He claims to be an "anarchist" so I'm sure he'll enjoy his fate.

Looks a lot like Tim Geithner

>> ^undefined:

>> ^TheFreak:
>> ^Yogi:
Probably the greatest way to control people is to focus their attention elsewhere, such as huge sports spectacles and events like American Idol. In order to prevent a free society from being to democratic you have to make sure to neutralize the public, it's distraction...down to a science.

Yeah, American Idol is obviously a conspiracy. It's not a goofy show designed to appeal to the widest audience possible in order to make piles of money...it's a tool of the goverment to distract us while they...I don't know...do something...obviously something insidious...
Or maybe it IS just a TV show. I guess that makes more sense.

Hence why the brainwashing is so effective. Because people like you and her think it's just a tv show.
No harm could come to our society by becoming emotionally involved in manufactured "reality" show like this woman, right?
Meanwhile, on the rest of the planet.. Tim Geithner's shovelin' into money into the bank accounts of his friends at GoldmanSachs. BP & Haliburton are covering up all their crimes. and Blackwater's still murdering civilians and raping girls in cargo containers.
Tho you're right. It's probably just a tv show.


Oh, please. "People like you"? What a complete misrepresentation of what he said. You're free to provide evidence that this in is fact NOT just a TV show and that the only reason it exists in the first place is because it's what the viewers want to watch, however stupid it and they may be for doing so.

How people react and hinge their lives on it, and how the powers that be benefit/profit from these distractions is a completely different story. Again, unless you have evidence that these mind numbing excuses for entertainment are just a big conspiracy, in the way people on planet Earth normally define it. You might be engaging in intentional hyperbole (if so, then I apologize) but the whole situation is far more complex than the simple-minded conspiratorial ejaculate that some have left here. I see where you guys are going with this line of thought, but it's far too simplified to be taken seriously.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think Heinlein's Razor also might be useful here.

If American Idol didn't exist, this obese woman in her trailer would definitely be watching the latest news about Geitner, BP and Blackwater. Most assuredly. It's too bad she's brainwashed or she'd do something about the travesties affecting the world.>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

Hence why the brainwashing is so effective. Because people like you and her think it's just a tv show.
No harm could come to our society by becoming emotionally involved in manufactured "reality" show like this woman, right?
Meanwhile, on the rest of the planet.. Tim Geithner's shovelin' into money into the bank accounts of his friends at GoldmanSachs. BP & Haliburton are covering up all their crimes. and Blackwater's still murdering civilians and raping girls in cargo containers.
Tho you're right. It's probably just a tv show.

>> ^TheFreak:

>> ^Yogi:
Probably the greatest way to control people is to focus their attention elsewhere, such as huge sports spectacles and events like American Idol. In order to prevent a free society from being to democratic you have to make sure to neutralize the public, it's distraction...down to a science.

Yeah, American Idol is obviously a conspiracy. It's not a goofy show designed to appeal to the widest audience possible in order to make piles of money...it's a tool of the goverment to distract us while they...I don't know...do something...obviously something insidious...
Or maybe it IS just a TV show. I guess that makes more sense.


Hence why the brainwashing is so effective. Because people like you and her think it's just a tv show.

No harm could come to our society by becoming emotionally involved in manufactured "reality" show like this woman, right?

Meanwhile, on the rest of the planet.. Tim Geithner's shovelin' into money into the bank accounts of his friends at GoldmanSachs. BP & Haliburton are covering up all their crimes. and Blackwater's still murdering civilians and raping girls in cargo containers.

Tho you're right. It's probably just a tv show.

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^chilaxe:
I could get behind liberalism if there was a movement within it to hold accountable those fellow liberals who sabotage the cause.
Liberals have plenty of sites like 'Crooks and Liars" or Mediawatch to keep an eye on the excesses of conservatives... why can't they do the same to keep an eye on the excesses of fellow liberals?
Such a movement is certainly under way. I think Chris Dodd would have been primaried if he didn't resign (incidentally, you should rent Michael Moore's Capitalism -- he trashes Dodd pretty nicely in there and raises more than a few doubts about Democratic resolve). Charlie Rangel is a popular target too. Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, etc.
If you want a liberal taking Democrats to task with no holds barred, try Glenn Greenwald's blog. I read it occasionally, but most of the time I find him far too depressing.
I don't read Firedoglake anymore, because they've, IMO, gone off the deep end (Jane Hamsher was pushing people to work together with the tea parties to kill HCR once the public option got stripped), but if you're looking for progressives critical of Democrats, they're another good resource.
Personally, I'm a big fan of DailyKos. It's probably the biggest progressive community on the net, so often it's the battleground upon which most left vs. left fights are played out. The main content is geared towards organizing activism and electoral strategy, and commentary on the day's political events, but the Diaries are usually a grab-bag of all kinds of interesting topics, not all of which are political.
They're starting to shift from a focus on "more Democrats" to "better Democrats", but I'm not sure how many opportunities we'll have for that in 2010. Most of those that they've talked about are House races, or Arlen Specter's ongoing primary.


That's good to hear that there are left vs. left debates. However, are these mostly just folks on the far-left of the political bell curve 'pushing harder even if it means we lose'? As long as that's the dominant liberal paradigm, they don't seem to me to be reliable societal partners who can be reasoned with.

That might sound very uninvolved, but I think any intellectuals who go into politics (i.e. not Moore, Olbermann, Huffington etc.) will find that the tail wags the dog: if intellectual figures don't tell the liberal masses what they want to hear, the masses will just find figures who will. Olbermann saying "I'm not a liberal; I'm an American" seems to be a good example of that kind of permanent intellectual simplicity.

I suppose this is an inevitable macrohistorical problem... perhaps any intelligent species on any planet would face it... the necessary legacy of human evolution is that the kind of interest in cognitive complexity that's advantageous in a complex modern society wasn't sufficiently advantageous during the last 10,000 or 100,000 years to be widespread today. In other words, any collection of social norms that must appeal to 50% of the population can only achieve a limited level of intellectual accuracy.

The take-home lesson for me is: that means an individual with a greater level of intellectual accuracy can out-predict them, and thus position themselves in the right place at the right time (for whatever opportunity is targeted).

>> ^chilaxe:
I could get behind liberalism if there was a movement within it to hold accountable those fellow liberals who sabotage the cause.
Liberals have plenty of sites like 'Crooks and Liars" or Mediawatch to keep an eye on the excesses of conservatives... why can't they do the same to keep an eye on the excesses of fellow liberals?

Such a movement is certainly under way. I think Chris Dodd would have been primaried if he didn't resign (incidentally, you should rent Michael Moore's Capitalism -- he trashes Dodd pretty nicely in there and raises more than a few doubts about Democratic resolve). Charlie Rangel is a popular target too. Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, etc.

If you want a liberal taking Democrats to task with no holds barred, try Glenn Greenwald's blog. I read it occasionally, but most of the time I find him far too depressing.

I don't read Firedoglake anymore, because they've, IMO, gone off the deep end (Jane Hamsher was pushing people to work together with the tea parties to kill HCR once the public option got stripped), but if you're looking for progressives critical of Democrats, they're another good resource.

Personally, I'm a big fan of DailyKos. It's probably the biggest progressive community on the net, so often it's the battleground upon which most left vs. left fights are played out. The main content is geared towards organizing activism and electoral strategy, and commentary on the day's political events, but the Diaries are usually a grab-bag of all kinds of interesting topics, not all of which are political.

They're starting to shift from a focus on "more Democrats" to "better Democrats", but I'm not sure how many opportunities we'll have for that in 2010. Most of those that they've talked about are House races, or Arlen Specter's ongoing primary.

^ I'd said "that I can recall in the last few years". Clinton is over 10 years ago. Condit I had to look up who he even was (and his scandal was 8 years ago). Other than Frank being gay, I had to look up what scandal you're talking about, and that one was 20 years ago.

Paterson didn't really have a scandal, so much as the day he was sworn in he said "here are all the skeletons in my closet", including admitting to an affair years before he'd become Lt. Governor.

I'll admit Ohio AG is sticks, but Kilpatrick was mayor of Detroit, and Blagojevich was Governor of Illinois. I'd forgotten about Newsom, but if Kilpatrick is sticks, so is the mayor of SF.

I've not heard much about the Charlie Rangel thing lately, but the whole thing seemed a bit tame, and more of a "he screwed up" than "he intentionally broke the law". You're also way overstating the Tim Geithner thing -- he owed back taxes, and paid them. The commentary surrounding the discrepancy was that it's a common mistake for people to make on their taxes, even if they use a professional.

Edwards, you make an interesting case. Perhaps as an outsider you might not know about how the party insiders reacted to his affair, but most people in the grassroots were furious with him -- not because we think his personal indiscretions disqualify him -- but because he was an early favorite in the grassroots, and had he won the primary he might've handed the White House to the gang of thugs known as the Republican party.

Lately there's been a quiet murmur about missing his voice on the issue of poverty, but I've not heard of any serious attempts for him to recover his image. To be honest, I'd like to see him try, because I think his voice would add to the party, assuming he can get public absolution for being a jerk to his wife (who the grassroots almost like more than him).

Personally, I don't care about sex scandals. They are really none of our business at all. I think people in office should be judged more on their execution of their state-granted responsibilities than what they do in their personal life.

I actually feel a slim bit of sympathy for Mark Sanford since he seems to have a rather serious personal issue to work through, and having public scrutiny doesn't help with that. But I think he needs to resign for the "I'm leaving the country for 10 days and telling no one" part of the story. I don't care that he was going away to have sex for those 10 days. In fact that was almost a relief to me, I was worried it'd turn out to be some ugly weapons deal or drug dealing kind of thing (like Reagan and Iran-Contra...).

I just want to make sure you have the facts straight.

Bill Clinton
John Edwards
Eliot Spitzer
Gary Condit
Gavin Newsom
David Paterson
Barney Frank

These are the most famous politicians that I am actually familiar with. I didn't do any research on obscure politicians from the sticks. I'm sure we can all agree that I could go on, but what's the point. Same as the republican party - there are more than have been previously mentioned.


Paterson is still Gov of NY so he obviously didn't resign
Newsom didn't resign
Clinton didn't resign
Edwards didn't resign or get pushed out of anything. He had already removed himself from the Presidential race before anyone knew about his infidelity.
Condit didn't resign even though there was more than just cheating involved in his scandal.
Barney Frank is still "spraying it, not saying it" to this day.
Only Spitzer resigned.

Edwards and Clinton have continued to be active in politics since their affairs were made public. Clinton remains popular among some democrats (he was very active during the last Presidential election) and Edwards gave an interview last week in which he stated, "What happens now? If you were to ask people during the campaign who's talking most about [poverty], it was me. There's a desperate need in the world for a voice of leadership on this issue. . . . The president's got a lot to do, he's got a lot of people to be responsible for, so I'm not critical of him, but there does need to be an aggressive voice beside the president."

I guess he thinks the world needs him. Doesn't sound like a resignation to me.

And don't get me started on all the TAX evasion scandals this year: Charlie Rangel and Tim Geithner to name the two biggest.


You guys are all so cute with your delusions and wild imaginations, though. It was a nice attempt at winning the game of "partison politics."

It's pretty clear to me who has a "holier than thou" attitude here on the sift and on the news.

>> ^imstellar28:
NetRunner, you are talking about reducing/punishing crime but you don't seem to understand (or acknowledge) why crime is a problem.

I think we just disagree about the root problem that we're trying to solve with laws.

In my mind it's about protecting society from individual actions that damage or risk damage to the whole, or enforcing a commonly accepted moral judgment about individual behavior (e.g. adults shouldn't have sex with 12 year-olds, even if the 12 year-old consents).

In your philosophical outlook, I have this 100% backwards, all law is intended to safeguard the rights of individuals. That, however, doesn't describe the actual state of what law has been and is being used for here or in other countries. It's your desired state, but it's not a description of the system in which you live.

I'm all for establishing rights for individuals, I just think there's also a wide range of self-destructive or society-damaging behaviors that it's perfectly okay to use laws and police enforcement to curtail.

You disagree with that, and call it authoritarianism, no matter how open or inclusive I make the process of writing those laws.



I do agree with volumptuous that this is a serious tangent from blankfist's original point.

I think as libertarians you have to tie yourselves in logical knots in order to think this is somehow a ridiculous concept.

If we were talking about an individual, you would say that they should be held accountable for damage they do to others; they should be made to provide restitution if it's desired. In some circumstances, you might even make them directly fix the problem they created (by returning stolen property, or scrubbing the wall they vandalized, etc.).

On a corporate level this is also considered true by libertarians. In the nuclear power-plant example, the company that created the spill should be forced to pay to clean it up. It might even be the case that the company that does the cleanup is owned by the same parent corporation as the one that was responsible for the spill. There will also be market repercussions to the company that one would hope would force them to take steps to prevent the problem from happening again, or change management, or even go bankrupt, but that's far from guaranteed.

Why then at a government level shouldn't we expect the same to be true, and use the same reasoning that excuses what happens in the corporate-level example for the government-level case?

In my mind, this joke is more accurately directed at individuals on Obama's economic team than at government generally. People like Larry Summers shouldn't have a seat at the table. I'm still undecided about Tim Geithner, but his hands aren't clean either.

I don't know why liberals like Stink Uygur have such a hard time allowing middle class workers to keep more of what they earn. The wealthy are already overtaxed and in fact pay the lion's share of taxes.

The bolsheviks always say, "tax cuts for the wealthy we can't afford" but never "government programs we can't afford".

As long as Republicans act like liberals, they will lose, and this current crop is barely worth defending, but they're not the ones at bat, PrOmpbama is; by his own admission, only Tax Cheat Tim Geithner knows what to do with the the Scamulus monopoly money...no one else supposedly "understands" how it works.

OK, but it's a lie.

I suggest people read more into this story before believing what's being fed to us.


from Glenn Greenwald:
"That is simply not what happened. What actually happened is the opposite. It was Dodd who did everything possible -- including writing and advocating for an amendment -- which would have applied the limitations on executive compensation to all bailout-receiving firms, including AIG, and applied it to all future bonus payments without regard to when those payments were promised. But it was Tim Geithner and Larry Summers who openly criticized Dodd's proposal at the time and insisted that those limitations should apply only to future compensation contracts, not ones that already existed. The exemption for already existing compensation agreements -- the exact provision that is now protecting the AIG bonus payments -- was inserted at the White House's insistence and over Dodd's objections"

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/17/dodd/index.html

>> ^Diogenes:

You're right that she doesn't jump on CNN's bandwagon to blame Dodd, and here's why:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/17/dodd/index.html

That said, it just shifts the blame to Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers, both people from Obama's Treasury department.

I'm all for cutting those two loose, and feeding them to the angry mob, but I still think Dodd is one of the good guys.

I hope once we get some actual facts on who's really to blame that action is taken, no matter what party affiliation they have. But in the meantime, it's fair for Rachel to point out that the Republicans are all big fat lying hypocrites, since they were on the "don't limit pay" side of the original argument.

If it turns out some Democrats yielded to such insanity, they deserve to be raked over the coals for it.

QM, in the modern intellectual world, there are significant differences between accomplished intellectuals like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.

Conservatives live in a bubble world in which they don't have to listen to the world's foremost intellectuals unless they're explicitly conservative... which of course isn't very often.