Virginian Pilot Sells Financial Crack Heroin to Readers

Like all good members of the Liberal MSM the Virginian Pilot is outraged, OUTRAGED by the financial shenanigans of those greedy Wall Street bankers who got poor, unsuspecting home buyers to get in way over their heads. How dare they! Off with their heads – or perhaps strangulation with piano wire.

It seems that those greedy Wall Street types were aided and abetted by the good folks at the Virginian Pilot.

“How?” you say? Well, how did those poor innocents find out about those 100% financing, no-doc, no-money down mortgages with the low, low teaser rates that were never designed to pay off the mortgage, but only got the homebuyer deeper in the hole with every month that passed.

Why … they read about their opportunity of a lifetime in the Virginian Pilot.

So now the shit has hit the fan and we know the root cause of our financial melt-down, don’t we? And we won’t do it again, will we? No, we’re not going to sell homes to people who can’t afford them, will we?

In the middle of a financial melt-down cause by the explosion of a world-wide real estate bubble, the Virginian Pilot – in its own little way - decides to throw gasoline on the inferno destroying the global financial markets. The ad below has run numerous times and is paid for by Franciscus Homes in Virginia Beach.

Note the terms:


100% financing (no money down so the buyer who cannot afford a down payment can buy a house starting at $249.990!)

A “teaser” mortgage rate of 3.0%. Anyone who can fog a mirror knows that his is not a market rate and is either an adjustable rate or a reverse amortization mortgage (the amount you owe GROWS each month instead of declining).

If you can’t even afford closing costs - no problem - the builder offers $5000 toward closing!

Act Now! Sure, and Arbeit Macht Frei!

This is exactly, EXACTLY! how thousands - if not millions - of people bought and then ended up losing their homes.

It makes my blood boil. And the goons at the Virginian Pilot are bringing in the next batch of the soon-to-be financial suicides.

I wrote the Virginian Pilot advertizing department asking what their standard were; what they would not advertize. I was told that the rules were so large and complex that the file was too cumbersome to send. I was invited to submit an ad for review.

Apparently the Virginian Pilot's advertizing standards do not prohibit selling financial crack to junkies.

The People Who Brought You AIG and the Housing Crisis Want To Run Your Health Care. A Cautionary Tale From England, Where the Future Is Now.

Gordon Brown has apologized after an investigation showed that the British National Health Service-run Stafford Hospital was so abyssmally bad that patients drank water out of flowerpots and that too many died in squalor or agony as untrained and undermanned staff were forced to meet “targets” instead of providing the care they advertised. Brown claimed these were “isolated” incidents.

The commission’s report - revealed in yesterday’s Daily Mail - said at least 400 deaths could not be explained, although it is feared up to 1,200 patients may have died needlessly.

Speaking to MPs at Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons, Mr Brown said: “We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford hospital.”

...

Any system, whether public or private, is made up of people. The circumstance that it has to work; that it should work; or that it must work is irrlevant. It won’t work unless it is made to work. Just look at how well Dodd, Geithner and Obama have been managing the financial crisis. If they were doctors in charge of a patient’s life, how much better would they do?

Let's Hear It For the Tards

Iowahawk reprints an advice column from our "Tard in Chief"

Dear Barry:

Our 12 year old son Tyler is developmentally disabled. Tyler's learning center has a Special Olympics program and we (along with his teachers) have been encouraging him to participate. Every time we bring it up to him, however, Tyler pushes back and becomes very withdrawn. We love Tyler very much and don't want to force him into it, but we think the Special Olympics would be a terrific experience and help him conquer his shyness and introversion. Do you have any suggestions for helping him get past this fear?


Jean and Ted in Westmont

Dear Jean and Ted:

As you know I am a big fan of the Special Olympics program, and all the good things it does for young Mongoloid-Americans like your son. Nothing inspires more than the sight of these heroic young tards hilariously giving it their all in the arena of friendly athletic competition.

Read the rest, it gets better.

Is this the end of America?

The National Post...

U.S. law-making is riddled with slapdash, incompetence and gamesmanship


A paper just published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, source of the chart above, says that the Fed will have to be prepared to absorb all the excess money it has poured into the U.S. economy. It will be a technical and political challenge unlike any central bank has ever undertaken. The future of America is at stake.

Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering over a banking reform program amid rising concerns over his competence and a monumentally dysfunctional U.S. Congress is launching another public jihad against corporations and bankers.

As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?

Vice President Biden is the smartest person in the Administration. Seriously.

Barack Obama's teleprompter explains:

"Teleprompter, is Joe Biden as buffoonish in private as he is in public?

Heh. Vice President Biden is the smartest person in the Administration. Seriously.

Remember that whole dustup about Big Boy giving back the Winston Churchill bust the British government had loaned President Bush after the terrorist attacks on September 11th (no terrorist attacks on our nation's soil since ... just saying, America)? It was Biden’s idea. He persuaded The Big Guy that it wasn’t appropriate for such a great Administration to have a bust of a frowning Benny Hill in the Oval Office. That’s not just street smarts. That’s Delaware street smarts.

Thousands Of Bankers To Lose Bonuses They Already Banked

The US House of Representatives has voted for legislation that will impose a 90% tax on any cash compensation over $250,0000, paid to bankers after 31st December last, at firms which have received more than $5bn in government bailout funds.
The legislation will now go before the Senate, which looks likely to impose even tougher changes, as four senators have now proposed taxes of 70% are levied on individuals (earning over $250,000) at firms which have received more than just $100m in government assistance.

As it stands, the big losers will be senior staff at AIG, Bank of America / Merrill Lynch, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. And all but Merrill Lynch staff (who received their bonuses before the retrospective cut-off point) look like losing almost all of their 2008 bonus payouts to tax (state and local taxes will take care of most of the rest). Just how this will impact (if at all) employees of these firms who work outside the reach of the US tax code is currently unclear.

So several thousand bankers who thought that they had bagged bonuses for their work in 2008 look like now finding themselves financially disadvantaged. One banker told Here Is The City: 'So much for the 'Land of the Free'. Who would ever want to work for a bank in America now ? These lawmakers appear to have done in less than 60 days what the Soviet Union couldn't do to our country in over 60 years - turn us into a communist-like dictatorship!'.

Worst political class ever. And they started from a low baseline.

HEH!

Via Glenn Reynolds.


And from the New York Times, of all the fishwrap in the world, after taking some populist, stupid and unjustified swipes at the people trying to clean up the AIG book

And Congress, with its howls of rage, its chaotic, episodic reaction to the crisis, and its shameless playing to the crowds, is out of control. This week, the body politic ran off the rails.

There are times when anger is cathartic. There are other times when anger makes a bad situation worse. “We need to stop committing economic arson,” Bert Ely, a banking consultant, said to me this week. That is what Congress committed: economic arson.

How is the political reaction to the crisis making it worse? Let us count the ways.

IT IS DESTROYING VALUE - ...Treating all of A.I.G. like Public Enemy No. 1 is a pretty dumb way for a majority shareholder [the american taxpayer] to act when he hopes to sell the company for top dollar.

IT IS, UNFORTUNATELY, BESIDE THE POINT - ...But there is a much bigger issue that has barely been touched upon by Congress: the way tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money has been funneled to A.I.G.’s counterparties ...

IT IS DESTABILIZING - ...How can you run a company when the rules keep changing, when you have to worry about being second-guessed by Congress? Who can do business under those circumstances?

Take, for instance, that new securitization program the government is trying to get off the ground, called the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility — or TALF. Although it is backed by large government loans, it requires people in the marketplace — Wall Street bankers! — to participate.

This program could help revive the consumer credit market. But at this point, most Wall Street bankers would rather be attacked by wild dogs than take part.
...

In previous columns, I have been an advocate of nationalizing big banks like Citigroup. But after watching Congress this week, I’m having second thoughts. If this is how Congress treats A.I.G., what would it do if it had a bank in its paws?

Not to be too contradictory with a writer who gets most of it right, but Nocera in the NY Times continues the theme of “bonuses” as if these payments were grants for superior performance in a company that obviously did not deliver even sub-par performance.

They may be labeled “bonuses” but they are not. They are retention payments. Last year after the people who created the problems at AIG had been fired, the staff at AIG’s Financial Product Division was asked to stay on to sell off the assets at as good a price as they could get. They knew the inventory and who their customers were and how to sell them and get the best price for them. These people could have left for other well paying jobs at companies with a future; AIG does not. Instead they were asked to stay at dead end jobs and if they did this for a year, they would get a lump sum payment; enough to see them through if they could not land a job for a while.

If they had been smart, they would have said “No thanks. The insane are running the asylum in Washington and this job is a political hot potato.” But I suspect that many of these people are Democrats (this is the Northeast after all) and people like Dodd, Schumer and Obama are on AIG’s payroll after all. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it’s this: the people are getting more than a little tired of the political class throwing money around as if this was a Monopoly game. So the political class decided that they could use a little distraction, and they threw their AIG supporters under the bus. Then backed up and ran over them again. And never underestimate the stupidity of the people when they are in the hands of demagogues. This past week shows that we here in America really are the descendents of the immigrants from the Weimar Republic.

Skip the entire holocaust and go right for stringing them up with piano wire. I had no idea that the SS was alive and well in Connecticut.

Barney Frank wants AIG CEO's Choked with Piano Wire for getting Bonuses - Death Threats

DEATH OF THE MEXICAN GUN CANARD? (Not if the MSM has anything to say.)

Via Glenn Reynolds:

Testimony from law enforcement officials concludes that, generally, military hardware is not flowing into Mexico from the United States. We gun nuts have been saying that for years. More testimony here. The experts on the panel do not conclude that more gun control is the answer.

Don’t expect this to change the party line.

Wait, here's more:

The Mexican Canard

The experts on the panel do not conclude that more gun control is the answer.

But this canard continues to be parroted by the press and the anti-gunners, but I repeat myself.

and...
Snowflakes in Hell:

Senator Feingold asks about smuggling of military hardware across the border.
The gist of it is that the military hardware isn’t coming from the United States, but from other sources.

So the people on the ground aren’t calling for changes in our country’s gun laws in order to deal with the Mexican problem, apparently much to the dismay of Senators Feinstein and Durbin. We also now know those on the ground don’t believe that military grade weapons are coming from the United States, and certainly not from US gun shows. So one wonders whether the media in the United States are going to continue to blame the US for the proliferation of miltiary weapons into Mexico. I suspect that the media will ignore this testimony, but let’s hope that Congress won’t.

Cam & Co.

Bonfire of the Trivialities

Charles Krauthammer

The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress summarily cancels contracts?

Even worse are the clever schemes now being cooked up in Congress to retrieve the money by means of some retroactive confiscatory tax. The common law is pretty clear about the impermissibility of ex post facto legislation and bills of attainder. They also happen to be specifically prohibited by the Constitution. We're going to overturn that for $165 million?

The very last thing we need now is American protectionism. It is guaranteed to start a world trade war. A deeply wounded world economy needs two things to recover: (1) vigorous U.S. government action to loosen credit by detoxifying the zombie banks and insolvent insurers, and (2) avoidance of a trade war.

Free trade is the one area where the world indisputably turns to Washington for leadership. What does it see? Grandstanding, parochialism, petty payoffs to truckers and a rush to mindless populism. Over what? Over 97 Mexican trucks -- and bonus money that comes to what the Yankees are paying for CC Sabathia's left arm.

Leonard Pitts in Delusions of Adequacy

Leonard Pitts, nationally syndicated Black columnist – and a contributor to the Virginian Pilot – brags about the scoops the MSM has broken: Larry Craig’s “wide stance” and Kwame Kilpatrick canoodling. In an article deploring the decline of newspapers he claims that they provide a service that's irreplaceable. If this is the best that Pitts can do, the MSM can’t die fast enough, because this is simpy crap.

The MSM has simply become malevolent. it's so used to insulting it's customers that Pitts provides one glaring example in his screed:

And yes, I know some putative conservatives, displaying their usual delusions of potency, are gloating over all that.

Thanks, Leonard, for not letting us down and having to search your other columns for your classic insult. Can we say affirmative action hire?

He conveniently forgets to mention Dan Rather’s forged documents, but I digress.

Pitts believes that it’s the MSM that is the one institution which is capable of “holding accountable the mayor, the governor, the local magnates and potentates for how they spend your money, run your institutions, validate or violate your trust.”

Thanks, but that role was abandoned long ago. Today, people like Leonard are shills for the powers that be - perhaps hoping for a bailout from their patrons in government.

In fact, it’s the Internet that’s finding the truth in the fog of “facts’ that this government and the MSM is peddling. The idea that the MSM is holding anyone to account is a joke, and a sad joke at that.

The example du jour: it was on Rush Limbaugh today that I heard that Tim Geithner lied about when he heard about the AIG bonuses. The MSM had simply been repeating Team Obama's talking points.

It was a full week before he claimed to have learned, in congressional testimony, that he was asked about it by Joe Crowley, Democrat of New York. Which means that Crowley and undoubtedly other members of congress knew about it at least a two weeks before the story hit the news and all the members of congress claimed to have been blindsided in one of the most shameless and sickening display of fake outrage it has ever been my misfortune to experience.

And who broke the story? The vaunted MSM? No!

It was a blogger Ed Morrissey and a radio show host Rush Limbaugh who told the American public about this. And the MSM? They’re still stuck on stupid.

Morrissey:

In other words, everyone knew about these bonuses. Congress even knew enough about it to question Geithner on it, with remarkable accuracy on the total amount due to be paid out, on March 3rd — nine days before Geithner initially claimed to know about it.
This whole episode has been a farce perpetrated by Congress and the administration to stoke artificial outrage over contractual compensation obligations. It’s a freak show put on by Democrats. They’re giving us populist circuses in order to build a mob mentality — but for what purpose?

Why don't you apply your decades of journalistic powers to this question Leonard, and tell us why? Obama got your tongue? Why don't you ask Obama's teleprompter?

JOURNO LIST IS NOT AN ECHO CHAMBER!!! an echo chamber! an echo chamber! an echo chamber!

How great is the JournoList, that off-the-record electronic salon where liberal journalists and policy gurus can exchange views, and which is emphatically *not* an echo chamber?

Read the whole thing.

The Real AIG "Bonus" Story

Via Washington Post...

... they [the traders] told him that they worried mostly about getting shot, despite the guards now patrolling the parking lot, the front door and some of their homes.


A sense of fear hung in the room -- the palpable, unsettling kind that flashes across people's eyes. But there was anger, too. No one would express it publicly, of course. Who wants to hear a wealthy financier complain? And yet, within those walls off Danbury Road lies a deep sense of betrayal -- first by their former colleagues, now by their elected leaders.

The handful of souls who championed the firm's now-infamous credit-default swaps are, by nearly every account, long since departed. Those left behind to clean up the mess, the majority of whom never lost a dime for AIG, now feel they have been sold out by their Congress and their president.

"They've chosen to throw us under the bus," said a Financial Products executive, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. "They have vilified us."

They say what is missing from this week's hysteria is perspective. The very handsome retention payments they received over the past week were set in motion early last year when the firm's former president, Joe Cassano, was on his way out the door. Financial Products was already running into trouble on its risky credit bets, and the year ahead looked grim. People were weighing offers from other firms, and AIG executives feared that too many departures could lead to disaster.

So AIG stepped in with an offer to employees of Financial Products. Work through all of 2008, and you'd get a lump payment in March 2009. Stick around through 2009, and you'll get paid through 2010. Almost all other forms of compensation -- bonuses, deferred payments and the like -- have vanished.

"People are trying to do the right thing," the same Financial Products executive said. "Guys have worked their [tails] off to try to get value for the taxpayer. This isn't money that's being advanced to us. People have performed the work and done it exactly as we asked them to do."

In actuality, he said, nearly all the troublesome sectors of the business -- namely, the risky credit derivatives written on mortgage-backed securities -- are now out of the equation, as are the people who worked on them. That leaves a small number of employees to untangle the remaining trades in four main areas: commodities, interest rates, currency and equities -- most of which were fully hedged and have caused little problem. The effort also requires a sizable number of "back office" staff, such as systems, computing, accounting, human resources and legal teams.

Couldn't anyone do this job for less money?

But what about the argument made by top AIG officials that the people receiving retention bonuses have unique skills and knowledge that make them indispensable?

"They are replaceable," Pasciucco acknowledges. "If we were running a long-term business, we could probably replace them over time, not all at the same time."

But it would be impractical at best, dangerous at worst, to get rid of everyone at Financial Products, according to AIG officials. If everyone leaves, Pasciucco said, "you don't have people that really, truly understand the book [of business]. We're still big enough that that matters."


If they did walk out the door, who would volunteer to work at the Chernobyl of the financial world? And what would become of the mammoth portfolio that remains?

"It would become the biggest naked position on Wall Street," one longtime Financial Products executive said, "and everybody would exploit it."

They have been asked to give back half the pay they were promised, by the guy who is already so independently wealthy that he can afford to take the job for $1 a year.

Before he waded into the circus on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Liddy e-mailed a letter to the employees of Financial Products, asking them to "step up and do the right thing." He asked that anyone who received more than $100,000 in retention payments return at least 50 percent.

The Financial Products staff met twice Wednesday inside one of the firm's large, glass-walled conference rooms to discuss the boss's letter. Numerous employees indicated that they would be willing to return the money, but most wanted nothing more to do with the firm. It was a preview of the possible exodus to come, one that concerns Liddy himself.

"My fear is that the damage is done," he told a congressional subcommittee. "That they will return [the money], but that they will return it with their resignations."

There is little doubt within Financial Products that he's right about that.

"Nobody is going to give it back and then stay," said one of the firm's employees. "If they give back the money, then they will walk. And they will walk into the arms of AIG's counterparties."

When you give in to threats and blackmail, the threats don't stop, they increase. And the bums in congress and Team Obama have organized a lynch mob. If I were an employee and I or one of my family were harmed, this government would not be safe.

In the meantime, the e-mails from the public have continued to roll in, including death threats and calls to blow up the firm's Wilton headquarters.

Weimar anyone?

TOTUS writing book

See, this is the kind of thing that really gets me hot under the prompter. I better get my 20% ... daddy needs a new set of rubber footies for the outdoor events.

Obama envoy Holbrooke was on AIG's board when the bonuses were awarded

Via Obama's AP...

Obama administration special envoy Richard Holbooke was on the American International Group Inc. board of directors in early 2008 when the insurance company locked in the bonuses now stoking national outrage.

Said Holbrook: "I know Nothing!"

How did this get reported? AP writer Richard Lardner better not get near a bus.

Obama's Teleprompter Denies Involvement

Okay, I see the bus coming right at me, so let's be clear: this was His ad lib.

I tried to stay to watch the "Tonight Show" taping, but I was given the bum's rush like everyone else. That said, I did get to watch some rehearsal time, and man, Leno really rehearses. I mean, he doesn't leave anything to chance. He's all about timing. In other words, Jay doesn't leave much to chance.

And it isn't just this particular show where Leno is a control freak. I've got a cousin out here in LA; he's an Autoscript GP-15P GoPrompt, with a High-Bright Color LCD screen. He mostly does commercial work, but he does okay. No White House Commission with commisary privileges, but hey, there's always Schwarzenegger if Auto wants to dabble in politics. But I digress. Auto tells me that Leno's prompters tell him that Leno and his team do this kind of rehearsal and briefing for every show. So it wasn't like My Man didn't have a chance to think about a better line ... and PUT IT ON MY SCREEN!!

It's days like this that make me miss the days when He and I would walk the streets of Chicago, doing community activism. Sure, it took Him 30 minutes to set me up, and sometimes he couldn't get the extension cord to reach an electrical outlet, or the folks he wanted to talk to would walk off because they had better things to do, or the glare off my screen made his remarks unreadable. But it was a simpler time, when he could stay on script and didn't feel the need to "speak his mind," and we were a team. All I know, is it's going to be a long flight home.

Obama’s “Special Olympics” joke: The teleprompter made him do it!

Michelle Malkin

Jake Tapper reports that Barack Obama pulled a Joe Biden (or a Barack Obama, for that matter) and ended up mocking the Special Olympics in a lame attempt to make fun of his weak bowling skills. But of course, the White House says he “in no way intended to disparage the Special Olympics.” You be the judge:

The first appearance by a sitting president on “The Tonight Show” may well end up being the last.

President Obama, in his taping with Jay Leno Thursday afternoon, attempted to yuk it up with the funnyman, and ended up insulting the disabled.

Towards the end of his approximately 40-minute appearance, the president talked about how he’s gotten better at bowling and has been practicing in the White House bowling alley.

He bowled a 129, the president said.

“That’s very good, Mr. President,” Leno said sarcastically.

It’s “like the Special Olympics or something,” the president said.

When asked about the remark, the White House said the president did not intend to offend.

“The president made an off-hand remark making fun of his own bowling that was in no way intended to disparage the Special Olympics,” White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton said.

The Anchoress...

Sigh. One almost gets tired of saying it, but one must say it, still: Can you IMAGINE what the press and the Dems would do with that, had Bush said it. Can you IMAGINE what the press and the Dems would have done with the Irish PM Teleprompter gaffe (the press has helpfully embargoed the video, so Obama doesn’t have to see it playing 24/7, as Bush would have - had Bush so gaffed). Can you IMAGINE what the press and the Dems would have done if Bush had given the Prime Minister of Great Britain a lousy pack of 50 “Classic” DVD’s that didn’t work in the UK?
Another story the press isn’t actually covering…

Without the help of the press - hiding his mistakes, never asking a tough or uncomfortable question, not even curious enough to ask to see his grades in college - where would this guy be? I’m thinking he wouldn’t be in the Oval Office, right now, that’s for sure.

So, tonight, he gets forty minutes on Leno. Next week he’ll have all four networks ditching programming and losing money for him. Again.

When things get hot, when the polling isn’t going right, when he feels unloved, or he needs to be happy, he gets on his big, expensive-to-run Air Force One, with his limos, etc, and he steps before the camera.

Gonna be a long four years.

Ed Morrissey writes: You know how you can tell when a President has a bad day? When his comparison of an American corporation to terrorists is the second-stupidest thing he said…

This sort of thing may be fun for the commentators and may provide lots of fodder for Rush Limbaugh, but we live in this country and having a "Special Olympics Affirmative Action President" is not a joke.

Chris Dodd is shocked.

"Wrong Region" (Obamateur Hour crowd at the White House)

It turns out that the genius members of Team Obama actually gave British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs that only work on video equipment made in the US … not England.


Mark Steyn:

I like the way the Telegraph's Tim Walker sets the scene:

While not exactly a film buff, Gordon Brown was touched when Barack Obama gave him a set of 25 classic American movies – including Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins - on his recent visit to Washington.

Alas, when the PM settled down to begin watching them the other night, he found there was a problem.

The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words "wrong region" came up on his screen...

Ah, well. The White House spokesman is said to have "sniggered" upon hearing the news.

UPDATE: At Powerline...

The Obama administration is rapidly earning a reputation for incompetence. We'll leave the last word to Mark Steyn:

But don't forget, folks: Somewhere in Texas a village has been reunited with its idiot, and we now have the whip-smartest administration of David Brooks' lifetime.

ONE MORE THING: Can you imagine the Democrats' reaction if the Bush White House had given a European head of state a set of DVDs that can only be played on North American machines? It would have been conclusive proof of Bush's provincialism, lack of sensitivity to our allies' sensibilities, ignorance of the wider world, techno incompetence, failure to appreciate the superiority of European civilization, blah blah blah. That's how it would have been reported and editorialized on in every newspaper. So let's check tomorrow's papers and see whether that's how Obama's gaffe is covered. Or whether it's covered at all.

UPDATE 2: Remember how Joe Biden was described by the MSM as a serious egghead with outstanding foreign policy credentials despite all the evidence to the contrary? Today he is hidden away by an administration that is so incompetent it can't even give gifts without gaffing. What is it with these people?

More Press Than Protesters Show Up At Goldman HQ

For the press, it's all about the narrative.

Whoops. Turns out nobody wanted to brave the rain to protest outside Goldman Sachs (GS) HQ today. According to one on-the-ground eyewitness, members of the press far outnumbered the the actual sign-wavers and chanters.

Obama Criticizes His Own Policies

We get secret task forces, secret budgeting, slanted intelligence, and the shameful smearing of people who speak out against the President's policies.

Hope he changes.