As conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan parroted the talking points of the GOP, Rep. Anthony Weiner set her straight and demonstrated what happens if, as an alleged journalist, you actually do your homework. So glad to have someone with access to the main stream media who is actually knowledgeable about that of which he speaks. Perhaps Noonan should take note the next time she decides to mindlessly spew the nonsensical talking points of the right.
Am I living in an alternative universe or something? How is it that FoxNews is the most trusted network by Americans. Public Policy Polling asked 1,150 Americans which of the five networks do they trust most? The highest percentage of participants answered……Fox News!!! This the the same network that pushes the meme that the President was not born in the United States. Seriously???? The network that houses Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity??? The same network that deceptively edited footage of a tea party gathering to include footage from a prior more attended gathering so as to make it appear that the crowd was much larger than it actually was on the day in question. Seriously??
“49% of Americans say they trust Fox News to 37% who disagree,” the poll’s authors wrote. “Predictably there is a large party split on this with 74% of Republicans but only 30% of Democrats saying they trust the right leaning network.”
“CNN does next best because it is the second most trusted of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. 39% say they trust it compared to 41% who do not, with 59% of Democrats, 33% of independents and 23% of Republicans saying it carries credibility with them.”
When the punditocracy on Morning Joe were asked to explain why Republican Scott Brown won a United States senate seat in the most liberal state in the nation the following exchange took place:
Donny Deutsch got the ball rolling, suggesting that voters may be “going back to basics” after electing an African-American president and seeing “the female candidates and whatnot.” Scott Brown, Deutsch added, “looks like the traditional view of a candidate,” which may bring a “visceral comfort” to voters.
Mike Barnicle found value in the observation, saying that “there’s something to it.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan added that Brown is “a regular guy” who “looks like an American.”
?????????????? Can someone alert President Obama and Secretary Clinton that only Anglo-Saxon males “look like Americans?” Are they serious!!! Or do they not know that WE KNOW what they are talking about????
There was an incident at Sen. Claire McCaskill’s health care town hall meeting on Tuesday where an African-American woman, Maxine Johnson, and a couple of her friends were peacefully holding up a picture of Rosa Parks reading “First Lady of Civil Rights” during the meeting. Signs were not allowed at the meeting. After being berated and booed by the crowd the women rolled the posters up and put them away. A journalist then came over to one of the African-American women, Johnson, and asked to see the poster. Johnson rolled out the poster on the seat in front of her. While doing this, a Caucasian man, James Winfrey, walked across the six feet isle and grabbed the poster, crumpled it up, and threw it on the ground. What did the main stream media show, a picture of a full-figured black woman yelling and screaming as she is being escorted from the building with no explanation as to why. The man, Winfrey, was reportedly ARRESTED for assault! Yet the only scene that the main stream media ran on a loop on Tuesday under the heading of something like “town hall brawling” was the African-American woman being dragged from the auditorium by THREE, count them, THREE policeman. Three policemen needed to escort one woman from a building?? While only one officer escorted the man from the building and he was the aggressor. MSM did not bother to show how the situation came to past and the woman was rightly upset or that the man was also escorted from the building and had been arrested while the woman had not been. No, corporate media only showed the AA woman being escorted out of the building visibly upset. See the video below. UNBELIEVABLE!!!!
The cherry on the pudding is that when Sen. McCaskill tried to explain to the entire group what had ACTUALLY happened she was booed so she stopped in the middle of the explanation in an effort to keep the peace. The Senator instead ended with “the bottom line is that we had two people who got involved and shouldn’t of.”
Statement by Maxine Johnson:
Maxine Johnson: When I sat down I put my sign in the chair in front of me. It was rolled up. And the reporter kind of, news reporter crawled over there, she was standing up and she asked could she take a picture of the sign. We unrolled the sign laying down in the chair. And she was taking a picture of Rosa Parks. This man comes out of the crowd, snatch my sign, I stood up, they said he pushed me. I don’t remember anything ’cause you know by that time my adrenaline going everywhere…All I’m thinking about is getting my sign back. I got up in…to proceed, go get my sign back. ‘Cause he was crumbling it up. I said, “Give my sign back!” When I said that, next thing I know I had four police officers on me and one on him. I’m the victim here, [laugh] you know. And then as I say, “I’m pressing charges!”…I said, “Obama, Obama!” So, you know what, you know like I said Rosa Parks fought for our freedom back then, now I’m fighting for our freedom now…So we’re fighting for the next generation…
For those of you who missed it, Chris Matthews had Joan Walsh on his show discussing Supreme Court Justice potential nominee Sonia Sotomayor and a 7-6 decision out of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that Sotomayor and six other justices ruled not to hear. The case involves reverse discrimination and was brought by seventeen white candidates and one Hispanic who work for the New Haven Fire department. The named plaintiff is Frank Ricci. The case stems from two promotional exams for fire lieutenant and fire captain where the results of the test revealed that the top scorers were virtually all white. This also was the first time this particular exam had been administered. The city asserted that the test had a disparate impact on minority firefighters and refused to certify the test. For the Captain exam, out of the twenty five white candidates who took the exam, seven white firefighters scored high enough to qualify for promotion in addition to two Hispanics. No blacks scored high enough to be considered for promotion to Captain even though a total of eight blacks and eight Hispanics took the exam. For the Lieutenant exam, 75 candidates tested, out of which 43 were white, 19 were black, and 15 were Hispanic. Thirty-four candidates passed, 10 of which were white, 6 Black and 3 Hispanic. The top ten scorers were white thereby being the only ones who would be considered for promotion to the eight Lieutenant vacancies. Therefore, no blacks or Hispanics would be promoted to Lieutenant. Now that you have the background, this is the exchange that took place between Chris Matthews and Joan Walsh. (I didn’t include Buchannan’s comments simply because they are to ridiculous to warrant comment)
Joan Walsh: Here we are three Irish Catholics talking about one of the toughest, I think, affirmative action cases in the country. There is a reason why we have some of these ugly cases and that is a failure of our politics to really resolve some of these ugly conflicts. We have fire departments all over this country, God bless them, that are still disproportionately, not just white, but Irish Catholic. My home of San Francisco is that way. I’m in New York today and it’s…..a majority of New Yorkers are black or latino and only ten percent are firefighters and so what’s happened in a lot of these cases Chris is that Irish Catholic dominated unions have really fought against efforts to make the test more fair…
Chris Mathews: Yea…well I’m suspicious of your argument Joan because I think we’ve had in the past a lot of Italian barbers and don’t see any problem with that…we had a lot of Mexicans running Mexican restaurants I don’t see the problem…but if you can prove discrimination then I’m with ya..Pat..its about proving discrimination, you have to prove it you can’t assume it.
Walsh: Do you really not see a problem, do you really think there…..
Matthews: It’s about proving discrimination….you have to prove it, you just can’t assume it…
Walsh: So we think there is something uniquely Irish Catholic about being able to fight fires?
Matthews: It’s called tradition, it’s called tradition…its been going on since the nineteenth century
Walsh: And it discriminates against black people
Pat Buchannan: ……what is happening now to white men right now is exactly what was done to black folks
Matthews: I…I. don’t buy a…..Joan my problem is results based fairness..if fifteen guys go out for a basketball team or any sports team and ten of them who win happen to be one ethnic group I’m not gonna say that there is something wrong with the try out. I would say the top ten won and that’s why there on the team. I wouldn’t say redo the try out so that you have racial balance on the team or any other kind of sports…I thinks its about…its about fairness not about results.
Walsh: Public sector jobs are a very different animal from a sports team.
Matthews: How so?
Walsh:there are plenty of black and Latino and female firefighters who can do the job, who can meet requirements for the job, but these tests have often historically been rigged and the entire promotion system has been rigged, we are unrigging it……
Matthews: Well…one of the arguments I accept from Clarence Thomas, who I normally disagree with was..he says that the problem with this a…so called affirmative action, I’m for some affirmative..I’m certainly for reaching out to people that don’t normally make the list and I’m certainly for aggressive recruitment, but when it comes down to rigging test so you get a certain result that’s what Clarence Thomas says his presence at Yale law bothered him. He said there are some people that see a fellow like him at Yale law and say oh you got in because they had some quota that got you in..he doesn’t like that…that that notion out there and this kind of court ruling if they go in that direction is gonna sell that idea..that the only way a minority gets a break in this country is cause somebody gave him a break ….(undetectable)…and that’s not healthy. (Did he really just raise Clarence Thomas as support for his argument? Does Thomas make the same complaint about his position on the Supreme Court? If so, and Clarence felt so strongly about being perceived as a quota recipient why not turn down the Supreme Court appointment? It always astounds me when folks bring up Thomas as the token black person that validates their anti affirmative action position when he is the most infamous and hypocritical affirmative action recipient of all time. Give me a freakin break)
……………………….
Matthews reiterates that the named plaintiff in the case is Italian and one of the complainants is Hispanic. He then goes off on some irrelevant tangent about the majority of firefighters killed in 911 being Irish Catholic and the Irish Catholic proud family tradition of firefighting that goes back to the nineteenth century. (Uhhh what exactly does that have to do with the price of cheese)
Walsh: Don’t race bait me please Chris…I have firefighters in my family..God Bless them, they’re brave but the fact…
Matthews: Right..then why are you accusing them of bigotry?
Walsh: Because the fact of the matter is they have protected those jobs for their brothers, for their sons, and they’re public sector jobs, this isn’t the family business Chris. Bravery comes in all colors
Matthews: We’ll see if that…we’ll see if that….we’ll see if that was a fair test or not but you can’t judge a test by the results
Walsh: Bravery comes in all colors
Matthews: You got to judge a test by its basic fairness and we’ll see when the final court rules on this.
Let me start out by saying that this is a difficult case with no easy answers. Now lets talk about the law. According to the Supreme Court, if a test for merit disproportionately eliminates one racial or gender group and another equally valid test does not, the employer must use the merit test that does not. Many have successfully argued that merit can be measured in different ways. For example, someone who scores high on a “multiple choice” test may be “book smart” but not “street smart” both of which are equally valuable in firefighting. The fact is that some written tests produce racial disparities in certain job categories that are unacceptable to a majority of specialist in the employee testing field.
To Mr. Matthews and others, a test does not need to be proved unfair to have a disparate impact on certain minorities thereby making it a violation of antidiscrimination laws. A bias can exist based on those drafting the test who in so doing, subconciously or conciously, give an unfair advantage to certain groups. Another way racial or gender bias can be determined is in the way the test is graded or weighted which can make it unfair to a specific ethnic group or gender. There are many considerations that are used to determine whether a test does not disproportionately negatively impact certain ethnic groups all of which are legitimate.
Further, diversity is a legitimate and “compelling” goal of the department and its promotion process and though you may not agree with the weight the department gave such a goal you are not running the New Haven Fire Department. Believe it or not diversity is a legitimate business objective for many corporations not because of some benevolent motive to reach out to minorities and women but because they want to better serve there customers and increase profits. The way to do this is to hire folks who look like your customers so they can better market their products. To sum it up, a racial motive is not synonymous with unconstitutionality. Think about it, every anti-discrimination statute used to combat racial discrimination and all enforcement measures taken reflect a racial motive. Isn’t this employer doing the same thing as the anti-discrimination statutes by throwing out the test before a disparate impact claim can be brought? It was proved that based on the calculation of the scores there was a disparate impact on African-Americans thereby subjecting the department to future lawsuits by minority firefighters in the department. Trying to prevent discrimination and lawsuits by evaluating the exam and taking action preemptively is exactly what the anti-discrimination statutes are there for. In addition, the law dictates that employers can use race-neutral means to improve diversity in their corporations or organizations without violating the Constitution and doing so does not equate to discrimination against non-minority employees. This case was not a quota or set aside program, the same exam was given to all the applicants and none of the results were certified. The employer believed that the results yielded a disparate impact on minority employees and chose to remedy the situation by not certifying the results. The decision not to certify the exam affected all applicants equally.
Finally, the plaintiffs do not have a legal property interest in the results. Plaintiffs scores would have merely given plaintiffs an opportunity for promotion not a guarantee. In this case no minorities would have been given the opportunity to be promoted to lieutenant and at most two Hispanics and no blacks would have the opportunity to be promoted to Captain. One final word on this point, if a profession or field where the salaries of the employees are paid by tax payers is overwhelmingly dominated by a single ethnic group shouldn’t the employer start asking questions as to why?
I was going to rip Matthews apart but Walsh did it for me. The firefighting profession does not belong to Irish Catholics simply because they have been doing it since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Further, the fact that Irish Catholics have dominated the profession lends support to the argument that the test could be rigged, intentionally or unintentionally, to ensure that they continue to hold the majority of the high ranking positions because they are drafting the exams. I am not saying that this is the case in the Ricci instance because I do not know all of the facts but it is a legitimate question that should be addressed. Also, Justice Sotomayor is one of seven justices who followed established law and decided not to hear this appeal and thus should not be singled out and falsely accused of selling a particular idea.
It turns out that Jim Cramer along with other cronies within the Wall Street chattering class may not always be on the up and up when predicting how well a company or stock is doing. Read the following account of how CNBC and many of their financial “journalist” are manipulating Wall Street for their own personal gain. This relates to the current financial crisis because the SEC is currently investigating whether abusive or illegal practices such as those described below brought down Bear Stearns and Lehman.
This rabbit hole involves the thugs surrounding Jim Cramer and some of the top financial “journalists” from the New York Times, WSJ, Fortune magazine and BusinessWeek, top hedge funds, the Mafia, and the DTCC. It also includes “blackmail, smear campaigns, espionage, fraud, harassment, extortion, bribery, rumor-mongering, sabotage, off-shore money laundering, political cronyism, frivolous lawsuits, witness tampering, biased financial research, false identities, bogus credit ratings, bribery, libelous blogs, bad science, forgery, wiretapping, counterfeiting, collusion, lying, cheating, threats and theft.”
Apparently Cramer and his wife had figured out how to manipulate the markets by way of the media long before his entry into television punditry. This is directly from Cramer himself:
“We had it down to a science in 1992: my wife would pick stocks that technically looked ready to go up, or she would keep track of merchandise to see what was down to tag ends. She would then generate a list of stocks that could move quickly on good news. Jeff would then go to work calling the companies to try to find anything good we could say about them. I would call the analysts to see I they were hearing anything. When we found a stock that looked ready technically to break out, or where the supply had been mopped up, and Jeff found something positive at the company, and I knew the analyst community didn’t know anything positive, we would load up with call options and common stock and then give the good news to our favorite analysts who liked the stock so they could go do their promotion. That would get the buzz going and we would then be able to liquidate the position into the buzz for a handsome profit.” (Confessions of a Street Addict, page 61).
More detail about Cramer’s background from the distinguished and highly repected business editor and financial reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review Mark Mitchell.
Cramer, who is a sociopath, owns TheStreet.com with Marty Peretz, who is an aristocrat. Peretz is also the former editor of the New Republic magazine. He dabbles in high finance and Harvard professing, which has resulted in his entrusting a large portion of his family fortune to a close-knit group of hedge fund managers, several of whom were his students. For example, Cramer was his student. Then Cramer was destitute. He lived in a car with a loaded gun hidden under the seat. Eventually, though, Peretz gave Cramer some money to start a hedge fund, which Cramer managed with celebrated ruthlessness until he resolved to seek spiritual enlightenment as a TV news host.
Cramer had originally planned to run his hedge fund out of the offices of Ivan Boesky. Shortly before he was to move in, however, the feds busted Boesky for insider trading, making him one of the most famous criminals of the 1980s. (This is not necessarily to suggest that Boesky is the “Sith Lord” mentioned in Patrick’s “Miscreants Ball” presentation. Some people have wagered that Patrick was referring to Michael Milken, a business colleague of Boesky known as the “junk bond king,” who also went to prison in the 1980s. Patrick has since modified the analogy, saying that the crime has multiple masterminds – “like Al Qaeda”).
When Boesky went to prison, Cramer worked instead with hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt. The media portrays Steinhardt as a financial wizard, a deep thinker and an all-around swell guy. The truth is, he’s a thug who perfected the concept of trading on privileged information, and pounded it into the heads of his employees. “What’s your edge!?” he’d shout, pacing his trading room floor. “What’s your fucking edge!?” After one of Steinhardt’s tirades, a top employee (and the godfather to Steinhardt’s children) had a heart attack. It is said that Steinhardt showed no remorse.
Indeed, Steinhardt has one of the most fearsome reputations on Wall Street. Which is perhaps unsurprising given that Steinhardt’s father, Sol “Red” Steinhardt, was a mobster once described by a Manhattan district attorney as the biggest Mafia fence in America. Steinhardt Sr. worked for the Genovese organized crime family, with goons like Meyer Lansky and Vinnie “Blue Eyes” Alo, before he was sentenced to a number of years in Sing-Sing prison.
By Steinhardt Jr.’s own account, the principal partners in his first hedge fund were the Genovese Mafia, Ivan Boesky, Marty Peretz (the aristocrat who funded Cramer), and a man named Marc Rich. Rich is closely connected to Ronald Greenwald, described in the authoritative book Red Mafiya as the man who, along with the Genovese family, brought the Russian Mob to America.
In 1983, Rich was indicted for trading illegally with Iran while Islamic revolutionaries were holding the American embassy hostage in Tehran. Along with his associate, “Pinky” Green, he fled to Switzerland. In 2001, Steinhardt, a big-time operator in Democratic circles, convinced Bill Clinton to give Rich a scandalous presidential pardon, but Rich remains in Switzerland to avoid paying his tax bill.
In the early 1990s, Steinhardt shut down his hedge fund after he was implicated in a scheme to corner the U.S. treasuries market – a horrendous infraction with serious implications for the U.S. economy.
So this is a rough crowd. Says one Wall Street trader: “It was the day the bad guys came to town — when Steinhardt and his people arrived.”
One of Steinhardt’s people is Jim Cramer. Another is Cramer’s wife, who was known as the “Trading Goddess” when she worked as Steinhardt’s head trader. Maria Bartiromo, a CNBC anchor known as the “Money Honey,” is married to the top partner in Steinhardt’s newest hedge fund. (A former employee of Cramer’s hedge fund has written that Cramer often fed tips to the Money Honey, trading ahead of her stories, and it is rumored that she recruited him to CNBC.)
And then there is David Rocker, the short-selling hedge fund manager believed to be scheming, along with Cramer and Herb, with Gradient Analytics, the financial research shop under SEC investigation in 2006.
Cramer says he’s met Rocker only once – apparently while squeezing the grapefruit at some grocery store. But the truth is, Cramer knows Rocker well. Rocker is a former employee of Steinhardt’s hedge fund. He worked there at the same time as the Trading Goddess.
And, until recently, Rocker was the largest outside shareholder in Cramer’s website, TheStreet.com. Cramer sometimes quotes the hedge fund manager on his television show, and once interviewed him live. Rocker is also a regular writer for TheStreet.com, where he bashes stocks that Cramer subsequently also bashes in multiple stories on both the website and CNBC.
In February 2006, the SEC is investigating Gradient Analytics for disseminating false information about public companies. The agency has affidavits from former employees who say that Gradient’s “independent research” is produced by recent University of Arizona graduates who know little to nothing about finance and essentially take dictation from hedge fund managers, including David Rocker.
One of these employees says that Herb conspired with Rocker to hold his negative stories (premised on Gradient’s false information) until Rocker could establish short positions. This is called front-running – a jailable offense. It is reasonable to suspect that Rocker had similar relationships with TheStreet.com (of which he has owned a substantial portion) and other media.
Not long before Cramer announced his SEC subpoenas, Rocker sold all of his shares in TheStreet.com. Cramer sold around $2 million of his own shares. If Cramer knew about the SEC investigation before he sold his shares, which was almost certainly the case, he was trading on insider information – another jailable offense.
But Cramer don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. And Herb thinks the SEC investigation is an outrage. So Herb and Cramer have commandeered CNBC. They are live on CNBC. Herb has jabbered something about a conspiracy – a conspiracy to get Herb.
And now Cramer is going to show us something.
He’s pulled out a big, red magic marker. Veins are popping, rope-like, from his bald cranium. And he’s snarling. Cramer is actually snarling while he uses the big red magic marker to scribble something on a piece of paper.
He holds the paper up to the camera.
It’s…it’s his government subpoena…Cramer has vandalized his government subpoena! On live TV… in big red letters…
For those of you who do not know Jack Cafferty he is the endearing curmudgeon on CNN that pretty much speaks his mind without filter. Mr. Cafferty lost his wife Carol of 35 years last September. In the midst of all the economic turmoil his recent revelatory commentary made me smile. I hope it does the same for you. See Jack Cafferty’s own words below.
NEW YORK (CNN) — I think I am developing a crush on America’s first lady. Michelle Obama is more compelling than her husband. He’s good, but she’s utterly fascinating.
Mrs. Obama has blown away the stale air in a White House musty from eight years of the Bushes. It’s like the sun came out and a fresh spring breeze began wafting through the open windows.
It’s the people’s house, and Michelle Obama totally gets it. So much so that she has taken to inviting people in from the streets to see her home. Nice touch — one completely lacking in her recent predecessors.
Watch her when she visits a local school and you see the warmth and affection she instantly triggers in people. Kids are pretty much totally honest with very good BS-detectors. If they sense you’re a phony, forget it. But around the first lady, they want to hug her and laugh with her and tell her stories.
You can see the same qualities these kids recognize in her daughters. She is the consummate mother as evidenced by the poised, polite smiling children she and her husband are raising. I have four daughters, and trust me — they don’t turn out like the Obama children without devoted parents.
New to the Washington neighborhood, Michelle Obamahas taken it upon herself to go around and introduce herself to the people in the various agencies of government. When’s the last time a first lady did that? I don’t ever remember it before. And during her visits she listens rather than lectures. And people respond to her.
She was raised on the south side of Chicago by blue-collar parents. She went to Princeton University, and Harvard Law School. But in many ways she’s still a kid from the south side of Chicago, and that’s what makes her special. She knows exactly who she is.
The Obamas bring a humanity and humility to their tasks which sets them far apart from the run-of-the mill phonies who populate Washington. It’s exactly what the doctor ordered for this wounded nation.
Michelle Obama’s unassuming, but dead-on, sense of style has the fashion press gushing all over itself.
Her arms are becoming the stuff of legend. Who appears sleeveless on the cover of Vogue, let alone in front of a joint session of Congress while her husband delivers one of the most important speeches of his life? And the reviews were rave.
Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour magazine gushed, “Oh my god! The first lady has bare arms in Congress in February at night!” If she keeps it up, Seventh Avenue will soon stop making women’s clothes with sleeves.
Ok, I admit it. When it comes to the first lady, I’m smitten.
