Niall Ferguson will still be a respected columnist for The Daily Beast/Newsweek despite publishing a featured article without empirically supporting his thesis or telling the truth. Fareed Zakaria‘s plagiarism has been relegated to his HR file as he has been reinstated after TIME and CNN found it wasn’t that bad even though he also has a one size fits all commencement speech. Both of them will be featured speakers at some conference, like Davos, Aspen Ideas Festival or some other resort party because in despite of their actual work, they are both “one of our” most valued public intellectuals.

Public intellectuals meaning Ferguson, Zakaria and other world renowned academics who have a successful media strategy, demand the highest fees from their speakers bureaus and attempt to launder stolen material or build arguments back from their own personal biases, re-use their own work without attribution while cultivating a reputation of having an important brain. Though they have repeatedly failed when it comes to rigor, they have succeeded when it comes to wooing the “Our”. “Our” is not the citizens of the world “our”. “Our” is the salon organizers, idea cruise planners, conference sponsors and chairmen who decide whose words are interesting enough to hear. Invites from “Our” are sent to these public intellectuals so that they can be conference keynote speaker and to be invited over to the house for dinner and cocktails . These same “Our” use these “valued intellectuals” as shields of culpability: well one of our leading intellectuals agreed with me, so who could-a known?

So even when Krugman is shrill because he is upset George W. Bush lied us into an Iraq War with the aid of a delinquent congress, Bob Herbert is boring because he talks so much about poor people with indignant tone, you must remember: Fareed Zakaria is modest and correct when he basically says he is doing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s job already and Niall Ferguson is a delightful “swashbuckling” thinker that believes such provocative things like: colonialism and proxy wars are the best is worth like 75K per speech.

Even though Zakaria has resigned from Yale, Ferguson’s continued tenure is good for Harvard students: if you sit in one of Ferguson’s lectures, you’ve gotten more than your money’s worth for the year.

“Free ball so hard the FBI wanna fine me! First Cantor gotta find me!

What’s the Sea of Galilee to the Tea Party? Can you please remind me?”

Let’s play Jeopardy. The category? #TeaPartyInTiberias!

A: Tea Party Congressional Caucus Republicans on a trip led by Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to Israel

Q: What do you call 30 or so male congressional colleagues who skinny dip with staffers after dinner in biblical holy waters while on an official trip sponsored by AIPAC?

The FBI has investigated GOP freshman lawmakers who took a booze-fueled late-night swim in the Sea of Galilee — one of them completely in the buff.
The website Politico named six Republican congressmen, including Staten Island Rep. Michael Grimm, who participated in the Holy Land shenanigans. But the website said up to 20 lawmakers and senior aides were in on the hijinks.

But Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) admitted that he took off all his clothes and dived into the sea that the Bible says Jesus walked on.
The incident took place on Aug. 18, 2011, during a fact-finding mission to Israel headed by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Also, leave to House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor to be redundant and behind the curve:

Politico reported that Rep. Steve Southerland of Florida and his 19-year-old daughter also took part in the late-night dip in the holy waters. Also named was upstate Rep. Tom Reed as taking part in the swim.
The incident left Cantor livid and prompted him to give his colleagues a dressing-down

Silly Majority Leader Cantor, they were already dressed down, dummy! You’re all wet! Er, rather, they were all wet with these folks:

Rep. Steve Southerland (R-Fla.) and his daughter; Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) and his wife; Reps. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) and Michael Grimm (R-N.Y)

Is this how Ben Quayle unwinds after working so hard to “knock the hell out of Washington” (whoever that is)?Also, Remember the big deal with Jon Favreau?. Favreau was on his spare time when he was kicking it without a shirt and it was representative of the Obama White House’s “amateurism”. These idiots were on an official trip in Israel and decided to treat a holy site like the hot tub at a Sandals Resort.

Well we know this: Tampa, get ready! 30 wild and crazy guys and 10 of thousands of their closest friends are on their way!

I really hope that a guy who thinks illegitimate rape is an scientific intelligent designy phenomena would have a hard time winning statewide election in any state. I hope.

It’s well known that in many developing countries with autocratic regimes, they treasuries are used as slush funds for dictators:

The thing is, we can only point to these details because SCB and HSBC, because of Lawsky and Levin’s efforts, have undergone more transparency than all the other banks helping dictators strip their country’s wealth. Regulators apparently want to keep us from knowing how much purportedly respectable banks help these dictators to shore up their own power and loot their countries. Moreover, they only want to penalize these banks for a tiny fraction of the business they do with these dictators even after they’ve been sanctioned.

source: You Don’t Suppose All These Dictators Have Been Looting with SCB’s and HSBC’s Help? | emptywheel.

It isn’t just the guy at the top, a lot of these celebrated “defectors” and the like during these conflicts are guys who see everything crumbling and want to be on the winning side so they can stay winning. Also, we always hear about what a bear regulation is, but we never hear how it helps to litigate or wind down financial institutions like MF Global, because it doesn’t:

After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.

[…]

In the most telling indication yet that the MF Global investigation is winding down, federal authorities are seeking to interview the former chief of the firm, Jon S. Corzine, next month, according to the people involved in the case. Authorities hope that Mr. Corzine, who is expected to accept the invitation, will shed light on the actions of other employees at MF Global.

source: No Criminal Case Is Likely in Loss at MF Global – NYTimes.com.

I don’t really know what to say, but it seems to me if you say “I’m professionally responsible” for something, and you let that something be stolen or taken, you should be penalized for it. I understand the argument is “we don’t know where the money is”, but they should know where the money is. It’s their job. If you are a Professional Engineer and you design a building or bridge and it collapses shortly after it’s construction, you suffer criminal penalties and a permanent professional accreditation revocation because you are the person who signed off on the plans. If you run a business for customers to invest money and money disappears, you get to have a nice conversation. I’m not saying investors should never lose money, but you the burden should be on the professional who issues the prospectus to clients. In addition, maybe the SEC should hold onto some documents:

Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records – “including case files relating to preliminary investigations” – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term “Orwellian,” devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or “Matters Under Inquiry” – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission’s internal website. “After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation,” the site advised staffers, “you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI.”

Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.

source: Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? | Politics News | Rolling Stone.

Tomorrow, we should go outside because 40% of us adults haven’t walked for ten minutes in a week:

There’s a new report out from the Centers for Disease Control that finds nearly 40 percent of American adults had not walked for a ten-minute period in the previous seven days. Yikes.

source: Walking Rates in America Improve, Still Pitiful | Streetsblog.net.

It’s really different phenomena these days. Or at least it seems to be. The deal was summer time in the 80’s when I was a kid and into my teens going to the early 90’s we would go outside and play pick up anything. All the time. Ride bikes or just go get into some kind of trouble. I know I live in downtown Philly, but you can go to basketball courts, baseball and football fields (nearest to me is this one) and find them largely empty all summer.

We (voters) often have a big problem with our mayors proposing cuts to libraries, pools, and parks because we want these things to be available for children today. We (communities) have a big problem getting people, especially young people, to go out and use them. Part of that is walking, exercising and play habits that may be getting worse generation by generation. It’s especially bad for young girls of color.

No clue what to do except to go outside.

Really awkward.

“Trust me”

Doesn’t the fact that this are two media narratives that exist kinda tell you that too many journalists we all get our news from farm their data research out to pr reps?

Maybe every climate scientist should take up P90X.

Via Digby by way of Nate Silver’s 538: Ryan is even more conservative VP nominee than Dick Cheney.

Ezra Klein breaks down what Paul Ryan is really about:

But the real north star of Ryan’s policy record isn’t deficits or spending, though he often uses those concerns in service of his agenda. It’s radically reforming the way the federal government provides public services, usually by privatizing or devolving those public services away from the federal government.

source: Paul Ryan isn’t a deficit hawk. He’s a conservative reformer.

Spending less, spending later or paying to private enterprise has an additional cost. When it comes to medicare, medicaid, education, infrastructure and defense spending: We can either invest and raise revenue now, or repair later and have to raise more revenue to pay for that repair.

Over to Atrios….

Federal spending is not something Paul Ryan hates at all: Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Galt’s Gulch, Wisconsin. He just hates federal spending for everyone else.

Paul Ryan loves deficits. Read: Paul Ryan, deficit-cutter? Here are his votes on the Wall Street bailout, Bush tax cuts and Iraq War – Up with Chris Hayes.

It’s rich to see these guys complain about their parties M.O. now that Republican scorched earth tactics have been turned on them:

Senate President Steve Morris (R-Hugoton), who lost his own seat to state Rep. Larry Powell in the primary, confirmed that internal polls showed moderate Republicans in the lead until roughly three weeks ago when a series of conservative groups launched radio and television attack ads on moderates, tying them to President Barack Obama and claiming they supported Obamacare. Seventeen out of 22 moderate Republican Senate candidates were defeated Tuesday, a culmination of a bitter GOP war that has engulfed the state since 2011.

“They tried to tie our folks to President Obama even though we had nothing to do with him,” Morris told HuffPost. “They said we all supported Obamacare and that’s not true. It’s effective. The campaigns we did were positive and informational. The campaigns against us were very nasty. Evidently negative campaigning must work.”

source: Steve Morris, Kansas Senate President, Blames Moderates’ Defeat On Conservative Attack Ads

These so called “moderates” don’t understand, the Koch Brothers, Adelson and others want their people in office, not their party in office. In supporting the Tea Baggers they helped to forge the knives driven into their back by those in the farthest right wing of their party.

In early 2009, just a few months after Planet Money was launched, NPR announced it had secured Ally Bank (formerly GMAC) as the show’s exclusive sponsor. It was an unusual setup for NPR, and unusual (and highly dubious) for anything that called itself journalism, because it meant that a major troubled financial institution was the only source of money for a news program about finance. At the time that the unusual agreement was signed, Planet Money was the only NPR program underwritten by a single exclusive sponsor. The arrangement raised eyebrows and would have been unthinkable before the crisis—but even by post-crisis funding arrangements, Planet Money’s deal with Ally Bank stood out as such an obvious violation of basic journalism standards that even Ad Age, the advertising industry’s trade publication, was taken aback by the “close alignment of message and news program.”

source: Adam Davidson’s Journalistic Corruption: NPR Host Boosts for Wall Street, While Taking Undisclosed Banking Money.