Matt Taibbi On Henry Paulson

Oh boy, Matt Taibbi makes me feel goooood:

Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you’d have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a “national hero” — in the middle of a sweeping financial crisis, one in which half the world is in a panic and the unemployment rate just hit a 25-year high? Behavior like this, you usually don’t see it outside prison trusties who spend their evenings shining the guards’ boots. I can’t even think of a political press secretary who would sink that low. Hank Paulson, a hero? Are you fucking kidding us?

… Or maybe it was Paulson’s foresight in heading off the crisis before it happened that inspired you? Maybe it was the way Paulson pronounced the subprime fallout “contained” in 2007 and called the economy the “strongest in decades?” Or maybe it was the way he remained calm last July, saying that it was a “very manageable situation” and “our regulators are on top of it?” Remember how he said all that shit, Evan, just about six weeks before the world exploded? Remember that Henry Paulson was actually in charge of regulating the financial environment during the last years of the crisis and did nothing as his buddies on Wall Street built one gigantic mountain of leverage after another, gashing underwriting standards across the board, saddling the country with a generation of toxic assets that all of the rest of us will be paying for in taxes (instead of, for instance, a health care program, which we can now no longer afford) for the next fifty fucking years? Do you remember that part?

Or was it his non-intervention last summer when gas prices hit $4.50 a gallon thanks again to his old buddies at Goldman and Morgan Stanley, who juiced the commodities market with so much speculative cash that oil prices soared despite the fact that supply was up and demand was down all year? Do you remember that part? How about the way food prices soared thanks to the same commodities speculators? According to the World Food Program at the UN, about 100 million people joined the ranks of the hungry last year during the commodities spike.

Read the whole thing though. Hank Paulson scumbaggy-ness is not competely captured by the above.

See Also: Taibbi v Goldman Redux, We’re in Deep State, It’s Goldman Sachs’ Party And They’ll Profit If They Want To, and Taibbi vs. Goldman.

Design Ho!

As previously mentioned, we’ve been going through a series of changes in our design. These changes should:

a) Make the site easier to use.
b) Eliminate those annoying audio/virus hijack ads.
c) Minimize load time.

How has everyones experience been so far?

Love,
PBH Admins

The Idiot Horse That Keeps On Giving

Look America, almost Vice President Palin is talking again:

Palin said there was a difference between the White House and what she had experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the “department of law” would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

“I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out,” she said.

There is no “Department of Law” at the White House.

Oh Sarah, it’s nice to have you back baby. I could never survive without you.

See Also: The Daily Palin, The Train Wreck From Wasilla, Palin Has No One But Herself to Blame for Criticisms, Like A Grizzly With Cubs, If By “Grizzly” You Mean “Quitter”, And By “Cubs” You Mean “Kids You Can’t Be Bothered With”, Report: Two-Thirds of Cost of Palin Ethics Probes Was Spent on a Charge She Filed against Herself, The Person John McCain Thought Could Be President, and Palin Wonders Why Sudden Resignation is Such a “Darn Big Deal?”

[tags]sarah palin, sara palin, department of law, ethics complaints, did she really say that, yes she did really say that, wow she is such a complete fucking idiot, yes she is!, she was almost our vice president, i know can you believe it?, no considering that john mccains shadow is the grim reaper we would have been fucked, yah sarah palin was almost our president and she is one of the dumbest human beings to grace this planet[/tags]

Cat Power

Cat Power is the stage name of American singer/songwriter Charlyn “Chan” Marshall. She is known for her minimalist style, sparse guitar and piano playing, and breathy vocals.

In late 1996, following a three-month tour co-headlining with the band Guv’ner in support of the release of What Would the Community Think, Marshall disappeared from the music scene, initially working as a baby sitter in Portland, Oregon and then moving to a farmhouse in Prosperity, South Carolina with then boyfriend Bill Callahan. The plan was to permanently retire from public performance but during a sleepless night resulting from a nightmare, Marshall wrote several new songs. These songs would make up the bulk of Moon Pix. The record was recorded at Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne in eleven days with backing musicians Mick Turner and Jim White of the Dirty Three.

The album was well-received by critics, and gained her recognition in the indie rock scene. However, during subsequent tours Marshall states that she had grown tired of her own material. This resulted in a series of shows during 1999 where Marshall provided musical accompaniment to the silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc. The shows combined original material and many covers, many of which would later see release on The Covers Record, a collection of cover songs recorded at various sessions in 1998 and 1999. A selection of covers that didn’t make it on to the album were recorded at Peel Acres, home of the British DJ John Peel. The session was broadcast on his BBC Radio 1 show and featured Marshall’s own interpretations of Bob Dylan’s “Hard Times in New York Town” and Oasis’s “Wonderwall”, amongst others.

In 2003 she resumed releasing original material with You Are Free, which featured guest musicians such as Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, and the Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis. A music video directed by Brett Vapnek, was released for the song “He War”.

2004 saw the release of a DVD Speaking for Trees, which featured a single, nearly 2-hour static shot of Marshall performing in a woodland, and was accompanied by an audio CD containing the 18-minute song “Willie Deadwilder”, featuring M. Ward on guitar. Also this year Marshall lent her vocals to the track “I’ve Been Thinking” from the Handsome Boy Modeling School album, White People. Marshall toured through 2005, including an Australian tour supporting Nick Cave and an appearance at the Patti Smith-curated Meltdown festival. The shows largely consisted of material that would appear on her next album. In 2005 Marshall was featured on the song “Great Waves” from Dirty Three’s album Cinder.

The Greatest, was released in January, 2006. This was not a greatest hits record but rather the Matador Records-arranged collaboration with Al Green’s guitarist Teenie Hodges and other musicians. Following its release, Marshall cancelled previously arranged live shows in North America and Europe. She was struggling with a relationship with a young Miami investment banker. Ultimately, Marshall used the hiatus to recover from what she described as a “psychotic break” that had left her feeling suicidal and was brought on by mental exhaustion and alcohol abuse. As part of her recovery she was admitted to the psychiatric ward at Miami’s Mount Sinai Medical Center but left after a week, stating “being in there wasn’t me.” She later likened the experience to “a pit of hell.” Marshall gave a first person account of her breakdown in an interview for the November 2006 issue of Spin.

Even Fox News Hates Sarah Palin

Fox News, once the Kristol/Krauthammer central of Palin cheerleading, is angry at the self-centered idiocy that has become Sarah Palin (which makes on think they are all too aware of coming scandals involving Ms. Palin):

“Sarah Palin is inarticulate and under-educated… who really has no credentials for any job.”

Full Transcript of Liz Trotta’s piece on Fox News:

Liz Trotta: It’s very easy to say that the liberal media is caving in on her, and yes, they are; but she has given them a lot of raw meat. The woman is inarticulate, undereducated, and I pose this question: ‘What do you think William F. Buckley would have thought of her as the standard-bearer for the conservative party?’

I think a lot of this criticism is well-deserved.

…This is one of the rare cases where I think all the liberal stylists like Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, and the rest of them really have a case. I mean, she just begs for adjectives like flaky and wacky.

…[Maureen Dowd’s column] was a well written, funny piece. And, you know, there’s one other element here, and I think most writers are afraid to bring it up. They sort of skirt the idea that this is a woman who has used her good looks and her gender to really get ahead in the political world. That’s something, of course, the men don’t want to admit, and certainly not the women.

So what are we talking about here? We’re not talking about a great statesman of profound experience whose banner is integrity. We’re talking about somebody who, right from the get-go, has been a flashy person who gets into a lot of trouble and really has no credentials for any job.