I’m amazed that someone of your intelligence is trying to sell a home without a veal silo or any indication whether the home is “veal-silo-ready.”
In the wake of the recent vote in the House of Representatives to impose a 90 percent tax on those goddamn AIG bonuses, high-powered legal thinkers like Howard Fineman and Lawrence O’Donnell have weighed in on the constitutionality of the measure.
Finally! How were the rest of us supposed to be able to figure out whether that shifty lower house of Congress was trying to take away our precious right to be paid millions of federal dollars for performing our private sector jobs in the worst way imaginable without the sage analysis of a Newsweek hack and an oily beltway insider/actor? According to Fineman, this new tax may even be double unconstitutional(!), while O’Donnell praised Nancy Pelosi’s decision to put the clearly unconstitutional tax measure forward as a brilliant parliamentary move designed to “trap” Republicans in their own hypocrisy. Savvy!
There’s just one problem with the Fineman-O’Donnell doctrine: The ex post facto clause and the prohibition against bills of attainder are widely understood to apply only to criminal laws –not the tax code. And most of us know that Congress is constantly reshaping the tax code to encourage certain behaviors, such as buying a house, and disadvantage others. If you have ever tried to cash out your 401(k) before turning the magical age of 59 and one-half-years old, then you know what I’m talking about.
But Fineman and O’Donnell (along with many others, including MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer) shouldn’t be discouraged. Everyone knows that our constitution is a living document whose genius lies in its ability to be reinterpreted for changing times. These Betsy Rosses of the new millennium clearly think it’s time for our courts to expand their interpretation of the ex post facto clause and the prohibition against bills of attainder. After all, these clauses haven’t been used in years. I mean when was the last time you heard about Congress passing a law that tinkered around with the retroactive criminal liability of an individual or discrete group of people? That would be positively un-American! Oh wait.
Lawrence H. “Summers” (his grandparents used the surname “Samuelson”) is the former 16-year old MIT freshman cum Harvard Department of Economics wunderkind cum hedge fund shill cum Director of the White House Economic Council cum cumstain* whom historians may very well identify, years hence, as the single most important reason why Obama’s first term as POTUS was also his last.
Also, have you heard that he doesn’t think lady-thinkers can do math?
"Wait - did I write 'fear itself' or 'one big fucking monster'?"
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt first took the office of President in 1932, the country was just coming off the pool party that was Herbert Hoover’s presidency, during which the Great Depression took hold and popular resort areas known as Hoovervilles began springing up across the landscape.
On the eve of Barack Obama’s big speech, I figured it was best to spin you a seafarer’s yarn on why the poor man is going to go gray and bend at the back before this thing is done. Everyone’s curious how this thing is going to start and what he’s going to say. I suggest, perhaps, that our speechifier-in-chief open with “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Ye damned whale.”
Why would I suggest such a tone? What deadly sea-creature must Hopey slay? The answer, landlubbers, is the Kraken.
I’m shocked. Shocked!
Back in the Golden Age™, when people
still had jobs and houses and the country
wasn’t being run by a muslin socialist…
The blade began its descent on a Tuesday afternoon, and it’s still falling. We all filed into the empty space where an ancient Linotype press had roared and spit out our newspaper twenty years earlier, before it was replaced with a sleeker off-site model.
Some of us were about to be similarly decommissioned, but nothing, least of all something newer or more efficient, would take our places. Eight percent cuts, they told us, so a handful of workers at our small newspaper could either step forward and volunteer for a severance package, or be forcibly laid off with the same benefits. A more generous offer, on the whole, than a lot of staffers in our industry were receiving.
We had until Thursday to decide.
BAILOUT NEWS FLASH: much like the institution you work for, you are overrated
The new bailout bill includes limits on pay and the finance world is responding by saying, basically, “we can’t live by your rules.”
My first reaction of course is : You only get half a million dollars a year? I think I speak for many Americans when I say: Boo. Fucking. Hoo.
Those little copper discs masquerading as American currency – and the reason 99-cent menus exist at all – will continue to jangle around in your pockets and make your hands smell funny for a few years more. That’s because the U.S. mint has issued four new pennies in observance of Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday.
The penny isn’t dead. Long live the penny.
Ex-TV reporter Carolyn Gusoff, who used to cover news on Long Island for New York City’s WNBC-TV, was recently fired by that station, along with other long-time on-air talent.
Fuck you, John Thain.
It’s not just a fuck you for blowing 1.2 mil on your office just as the firm tipped into oblivion.
"You like my dress? What, this old thing?
Because this is a historic inauguration, what with our nation’s first African-American president being sworn in and all, the Times answers the all-important question: who is the First Lady wearing?
So there was this plane that was going from New York, the financial capital of the world – SUCK IT, LONDON – to a major U.S. banking center, Charlotte, N.C.
