Sachs Socialism, Mind Bullets

Compelled by a headline about Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein saying that he does "God's work," I pored through this article from UK TimesOnline and discovered a scheme to horrify the Ayn Rand set: collective rewards!

The idea of teamwork goes right to the top. Goldman may not be a private partnership any more — it went public a decade ago — but the bosses work hard to foster a "we’re in this together", family-style approach. Others say it feels more like a cult, but they mean it as a compliment. Some of its practices make perfect sense. Bonuses, for example, are not based on personal performance, as they are at many banks, but on the performance of the firm as a whole, and partners receive a sizable chunk of their remuneration in stock that they cannot sell until they leave the firm. It weeds out what Dina Powell, 36, the firecracker Egyptian-American boss of Goldman’s philanthropic arm, calls "egomaniac jerks" who might be tempted to bet the farm on red in the hope of skewering a bigger bonus.

"Egomaniacal jerks" pretty much describes every true-believing Ayn Randist I've ever met. That bit's on page three, and is immediately followed by a scene from Brazil:

Other practices are distinctly creepy. Goldman-ites are forced to check their secure voicemail morning, noon and night for the latest bon mots of Blankfein and Eileen Dillon, 48, who is officially head of operations for the executive office but unofficially camp counsellor. Goldman is the biggest user of voicemail in the world. The "mind bullets" consist of anything from the latest profit and loss figures, to reports of what the chief executives of key clients have told Blankfein and his top team over lunch, to instructions to "switch off on holiday, for goodness sake".

I'm scared now and want to go home.

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Large Hardon Collider Sabotaging Itself?

Remember that theory about the Large Hadron Collider sabotaging itself from the future? The billion-dollar experiment has now been affected by a bird and a baguette:

The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.

Link here.

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Saturday Afternoon TV

The Day the Universe Changed, Episode 4: A Matter of Fact

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Saturday Morning Cartoons

The Tick vs. The Breadmaster

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Worst Blogger

Robert A. George at NBC Chicago calls Obama "disconnected." His proof? Obama didn't cancel the Tribal Nations Conference to jump on Air Force One and bring his personal condolences to Fort Hood.

Seriously. And for this he got on Memeorandum and Drudge.

Keep it up, wingnuts!

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Compromise Reached On Health Care Bill: Anti-Abortion Amendment To Be Given Floor Vote

Media quote of the Week goes to Ryan Grim at HuffPo:

Lost in the back and forth are the tens of millions without insurance and the nation's broken health care system. More surprising than the behavior of Congress, perhaps, is the fact that it has gotten as far as it has.

Yes. We are further now than we have ever been.

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Chuck DeVore: New Conservative Darling, Birther

HuffPo has an excellent write-up on a California Republican rapidly becoming the apple of the wingnut eye. Among other things, the article lists his strong connections to birthers. He's a true believing wingnut Republican and he's probably going to run against one of California's "RINOs."

In his honor, I have composed a bit of doggerel based on a song from 101 Dalmations:

Chucky DeVore, oh Chucky DeVore

If he doesn't scare you, then your life's a bore

He's nothing but a corporation whore

Oh Chucky, oh Chucky DeVore



The curl in his lips, the ice in his stare

You innocent liberals had better beware

He's just a birther and a wingnut bore

Look out for ol' Chucky De Vore



At first you think ol' Chucky is the devil

But after time has worn away the shock

You come back to your wits and see he's full of $hit

Trying for to undermine Barack



This vampire bat, this internet beast

He'll get the base riled up to never retreat

Republicans won't want him any more

Ol' Chucky, ol' Chucky DeVore

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Veteran Deconstructs Tancredo

I briefly met Markos Moulitsas at Netroots Nation, so I had not formed much of an opinion of him. After watching this, I can report that he's an impressive debater who does not suffer Teh Stupid™ or the hypocritical. Via GottaLaff at Political Carnival:


Those of us who actually have shed their blood and sweat in the sandbox have a hard time with chickenhawk Republicans. Tom Tancredo on WikiPedia:

Tancredo was born in Denver, Colorado to Adeline Lombardi and Gerald Tancredo. Both sets of his grandparents emigrated from Italy.^[5] He attended St. Catherine's Elementary School and Holy Family High School there. He graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a degree in political science. Tancredo was active with the College Republicans and a conservative, nonpartisan organization, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). As a Republican student activist Tancredo spoke in support of the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of Northern Colorado he became eligible to serve in Vietnam in June 1969. Tancredo has said he went for his physical, telling doctors he had been treated for depression, and eventually got a "1-Y" deferment^[6]. In 1976, while teaching history at Drake Junior High School in Denver, he ran for and won a seat in the Colorado House of Representatives. He served two terms (1977–1981) and was one of the leaders of a vocal group of conservative legislators opposing the policies of Colorado Governor Dick Lamm^[7]. During the 1970s, Tancredo pioneered opposition to bilingual education, an issue that would remain a feature of his political orientation.

Tancredo was appointed by President Reagan to be the regional representative in Denver for the Department of Education in 1981. He stayed on through the first Bush administration in 1992, and pared the office's staff from 225 to 60 employees. He became president of the Independence Institute in 1993, a conservative think tank based in Golden, Colorado, serving there until his election to Congress. He was a leader in the Colorado term limits movement.

"Poltroon" and "movement conservative" are two terms that come to mind while reading that bio. His career has been all about the deconstruction of the Department of Education and the system of American public education; now, thanks to my fellow Army vet, his smaller-government agenda for the Department of Veterans Affairs has been laid bare.

Tancredo's idea of replacing veterans health services with vouchers does not appeal to a majority of veterans. Indeed, the other night I sat in on a telephone town hall with Representative Parker Griffith (D-AL), bluest of Blue Dogs. Here are the problems identified by random veterans in a very red state: we can't find jobs, have trouble starting small businesses, and can't afford insurance for our families. Several callers were having trouble getting their claims through the VA system -- which is no surprise.

Dr. Griffith is a military veteran as well as a physician who has treated countless veterans. During the call, he said "the VA has always been underfunded." That's certainly true, but this decade has been a disaster for veterans. Aside from the Walter Reed debacle (the wages of privatization), Bush cut personnel in the claims processing department when there was already a massive backlog of claims and a huge, new wave of combat injuries coming down the pipeline. The GOP Congress didn't even address this until 2005.

Even today, the best answer Republicans can come up with is to automate claims processing -- which sounds good until you realize that the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration don't talk to each other. As Congressman Griffith observed in the call, this problem won't go away until the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Veterans' Affairs do something about it. The problem, then, is in the executive branch -- not Congress.

"As veterans get further and further from the conflict in which they served, they get less and less attention," Griffith said. Millions of American veterans have a forest's worth of paper documentation from their years in the military and in the VA system. Indeed, disappearing paperwork is a perennial problem for vets, and the backlog of claims got so large that in 2008 desperate VA employees were caught shredding paperwork instead of processing it.

That is the Republican formula for government and the chickenhawk's way of thanking veterans for their service. As the wingnutosphere erupts over Markos' impolitic deconstruction of a party hack, bear in mind what smaller government actually means for America's heroes.

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Beck Praises Nurses, Trashes Their Union

Glenn Beck was hospitalized with appendicitis on Wednesday. Thursday, he tweeted praise for his "AMAZING drs/nurses" -- even though the nursing staff are members of a union Beck despises. Alexander Zaitchik explains at Alternet:

The quality of care he is receiving should not have come as a surprise. When Beck complained of acute abdominal pain during his radio program on Wednesday, he was rushed to a nearby hospital. The security-conscious Beck has not disclosed the name of the facility, but it's a safe bet that it is staffed by proud members of a storied union: New York's Local 1199, aka United Healthcare Workers East, which belongs to the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU has organized all of Manhattan's major hospitals, including every facility to which Beck could have conceivably been sent.

Here is what Beck thinks of the SEIU:

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Just Like Bush

Another for the "just like Bush" file: Obama has restored the Endangered Species Act. By my count, that's ten real victories for the progressive agenda in just the last week.

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