Things being “Rahm’s fault” in Washington was conventional wisdom. They will actually be his fault in Chicago. And there will be a lot of things to take the blame for. Can’t say I’m envious of the victor.

It’s utterly disgusting what Forde was willing to do to secure a shadow authority to exact violence on immigrants.

On May 20, 2009, Forde and two alleged accomplices stormed the Flores’ home in Arivaca, Arizona. Two men killed Raul Flores Jr. and shot his wife and Brisenia’s mother Gina Gonzalez before shooting the 9-year-old girl point-blank. Gonzalez testified during the trial that she could hear her daughter, roused from her sleep in the living room where she was camped out so she could be close to the family’s new dog, ask why her parents had been killed, then silence as the shooter stopped to reload a gun, and finally two shots that went through the little girl’s head.

[…]

Much of the chatter on the lefty blogs and immigrant rights networks in the weeks of the trial has been dominated by bitter confusion about the lack of media coverage the case got.

via Shawna Forde Gets the Death Penalty.

Why so little Forde coverage? Silly liberals! There is only one domestic story and one international story allowed at a time via TV news. The courageous union-busting of Gov. Walker of WI vs. the greedy teachers unions who get rich by teaching in public schools is obviously much more important.

Lawrence O’Donnell vs. Bill O’Reilly. LO steps in for KO and is now striking out against BillO.

A senior CBS correspondent is recovering in hospital in the US after she was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob while covering the Egyptian protests, the US network says.

It says the attack occurred on Friday in Cairo’s packed Tahrir Square after President Hosni Mubarak stepped down.

Ms Logan became separated from her crew and was rescued by women and soldiers.

via BBC News – CBS’s Lara Logan attacked by Egyptian mob in Cairo.

That’s awful.

Military Coup is what happened in Egypt.

I am not sure, but from what I understand the constitution had a succession plan that called for the head of parliament to take over in case the President steps down. Instead the military has suspended the government and the rules that define the it and has placed the country under control of the High Military Council.

The military has much to lose in the transition, these officers and analysts say. Over the years, one-man rule eviscerated Egypt’s civilian institutions, creating a vacuum at the highest levels of government that the military willingly filled. “There aren’t any civilian institutions to fall back on,” said Michael Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about the Egyptian military. “It’s an open question how much power the military has, and they might not even know themselves.”

The beneficiary of nearly $40 billion in American aid over the last 30 years, the Egyptian military has turned into a behemoth that controls not only security and a burgeoning defense industry, but has also branched into civilian businesses like road and housing construction, consumer goods and resort management.

via Succession Gives Army a Stiff Test in Egypt – NYTimes.com.

The military may be the most trusted government authority, but that may not mean they are trustworthy. They were participants in Mubarak’s autocratic regime for better (filling in civilian services) and for mostly worse (military trials and torture for civilians) and their splinter with Mubarak was his plan to transfer power to his son Gamal.

Mubarak is gone. His regime is over. The paternalistic autocracy is not.

From ThinkProgress’ Wonk Room, WV Senator Joe Manchin Claims Coal ‘Doesn’t Get A Penny Of Subsidies’. Manchin doesn’t let facts get in the way:

Puzzling out the subsidies to the coal business is as unnerving as edging through a dark mineshaft swarming with Velcro-winged bats. This is because a big chunk of the subsidies are not direct handouts, but packaged as tax credits, tax breaks, and other goodies too numerous to itemize here. The U.S. coal industry enjoyed subsidies of around $17 billion between 2002 and 2008, including tax credits for production of “nonconventional” fuels ($14.1 billion), tax breaks on coal royalties ($986 million), exploration, and development breaks ($342 million), according to a study by the Environmental Law Institute.

On top of this federal largesse, state and local governments coddle coal with hundreds of millions per year. The Kentucky state government’s net subsidy to coal is $115 million. Virginia grants tax credits of about $26 million to power plants just to burn Virginia coal, and doles out credits ranging from 40 cents to $2 per ton for another 20 million tons not burned by power plants. Bioregionalism at its finest.

via Hey Mr. Green: Does the Coal Industry Get Subsidies?

Shorter Jamie Dimon: “Don’t hate the playa! Hate the game!”

Jamie Dimon, credited with having steered JP Morgan through financial turmoil in 2007-08, had earlier in the day lashed out at persistent bank bashing nearly three years after the global credit crisis began, saying it was “unproductive and unfair”.

But when he rose at a later session of the World Economic Forum to ask Sarkozy to get the G20 to avoid overregulation of banks, the French president launched into a broadside accusing financiers of behaviour that he said had caused the crisis.

[…]

Dimon praised governments for intervening to save the financial system in 2008. But he said the G20 group of major economies, which Sarkozy chairs this year, should take a deep breath before imposing more regulation.

via DAVOS-Sarkozy to JP Morgan chief: Banks defied common sense | Reuters.

Sarkozy chair of the G20 this year, apparently knows the game:

“The world has paid with tens of millions of unemployed, who were in no way to blame and who paid for everything,” Sarkozy said to Dimon. “It caused a lot of anger.”

The French leader also renewed his call for a financial transaction tax to fund development but acknowledged that many G20 countries opposed such a levy. He suggested a small pioneer group of states might go ahead with a tiny levy or some other form of innovative financing to lead the way.

[…]

“The world was stupefied to see one of five biggest U.S. banks collapse like a house of cards,” he told a plenary session of the Davos Forum.

“We saw that for the last 10 years, major institutions in which we thought we could trust had done things which had nothing to do with simple common sense. That’s what happened.”

[…]

However, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a U.S. investigative panel last year that the credit crisis surpassed the Great Depression of the 1930s in severity and put 12 of the 13 most important U.S. financial firms at risk of failure.

“If you look at the firms that came under pressure in that period … only one … was not at serious risk of failure,” he said in comments disclosed earlier on Thursday.

“Even Goldman Sachs (GS.N), we thought there was a real chance that they would go under,” he said. [ID:nN27132640] […]

Sarkozy said bankers were wrong to resist tough rules. “There is an ocean between flexibility and the scandal we saw,” he said. “So if people present me as obsessed with regulation, it’s because there is a need for regulation.

“I don’t contest the principle of securitisation, but when one offshore country guaranteed 700 times its GDP, are we in the market economy or in a madhouse?”

Finally, the French president took aim at bank bonuses.

“Bonuses don’t bother me, provided there are also … draw-downs when there are losses. When things don’t work, you can never find anyone responsible. Those who got bumper bonuses for seven years should have made losses in 2008 when things collapsed.”

Dimon and his peers believe they have suffered enough, and they are in Davos to literally yell it from the mountaintops.

Arianna Huffington at Davos…

Burnout, Davos-Style

As I said, getting enough sleep isn’t the highest priority among Davos participants. It’s partly the active, after-hours scene (many of the parties don’t even start until 10 or 11), and partly the way lack of sleep has become a sort of virility symbol for many of the world’s movers and shakers. In the cult of no sleep, 7 a.m. is the new 9 a.m. Despite the late nights, trying to make a breakfast appointment in Davos is an exercise in sleep deprivation one-upmanship. “Oh, hi Arianna, yeah, 8 is a bit late, but it’s fine because that’ll give me time to have gotten in a couple of ski runs and a conference call with Moscow first.” The WEF organizers have apparently noticed the trend and have put together a panel to explore the question, “Why is it the latest fashion to be a burnout victim?” The panel description defines burnout as “a condition of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion” that results when “striving for recognition and success is exaggerated and the balance between work, family life and leisure is lost.” The panel is fittingly scheduled for Saturday, the last day of the forum, in the middle of the afternoon, which seems like a missed opportunity — how much more resonant it would have been if it was held at 3:30 a.m. instead of 3:30 p.m.

via Arianna Huffington: Davos Notes: State of the Union Shrugs, Burnout Davos Style, and the Spirit of RFK Hovers Above the CNBC Unemployment Debate

It’s still tone-deaf.

You have to call someone a balloonhead who said that the Founders of the United States of America rid the land of slavery.

Former Vice President Dan Quayle has to be so salty that Fox News and the Teabaggers weren’t around when he was saying stupid things.