Barack Hussein Obama -- Mmm! Mmm! Mmm!

[Mozza220559]

You were "arsed", but none of that has anything to do with you. So be "arsed" elsewhere.

What are you on about, you mong?

 

[jamescagney]

You were "arsed", but none of that has anything to do with you. So be "arsed" elsewhere.

Very "effective." I see now what CG was saying. Please accept my most humble apologies.

 

[Mozza220559]

You can't be "arsed" and I retorted. Mong, please. No cooking shows for you. I am going to get Ainsley Harriot to put his hands in your food.

As much as I try to ingnore your off-beat non-sequitor bollocks, i'll have you know Ainsley is a f***ing ninja of a cook!

 

[iamnicola]

As much as I try to ingnore your off-beat non-sequitor bollocks, i'll have you know Ainsley is a f***ing ninja of a cook!

He actually is. I am not going to hate on Ainsley, even though he comes off as a sex pest.

 

[Mozza220559]

He actually is. I am not going to hate on Ainsley, even though he comes off as a sex pest.

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[iamnicola]

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In a more serious matter, Ainsley cooks Calamari!
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[Dave]

Dimon didn't make a lot of risky deals. JP Morgan turned a profit during the year of the bank collapse. Some banks were never at risk. Some banks were forced to take TARP money. Banks that have already returned it.. here is a list..

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/09/treasury-allowing-banks-repay-tarp-money/

These banks had to ask permission to pay back the money.

Blankfein is another one who has led his company to profitability during hard times for banks. Huge bonuses is part of being in charge of a huge company, be it a bank or an auto-maker or an insurance company.

Some banks were basically told they had to take the money. If 9 banks stand tall and the rest are all taking money, everyone would have moved their assets to the successful banks. Taking TARP money was not to save JP and GS, it was to save the competition.

http://www.businessinsider.com/unco...-paulson-forced-banks-to-take-the-cash-2009-5

So the government had a choice.. let a bunch of banks collapse and lose tons of jobs or save all banks by making all banks look like they screwed up.

Since Obama knows that Dimon and Blankfein actually helped heal the banking industry he knows that they should get bonuses.

I would speculate that Bloomberg knows these facts but chooses to write a slanted article because let's be honest, people love to have something to complain about and this type of story allows for that much more so than a story about how the banking industry was saved by the very people they are trying to make look bad.

okay. I was just going by what the article implied and other stories about other people. My mistake.

 

[bored]

okay. I was just going by what the article implied and other stories about other people. My mistake.

It's completely fair to go with that. It's was an article from a well known publication.

Regardless of what Fox News says or any other news agency says, there are no "fair and balanced" media outlets that has any major audience.

 

[IanK87]

I would speculate that Bloomberg knows these facts but chooses to write a slanted article because let's be honest, people love to have something to complain about and this type of story allows for that much more so than a story about how the banking industry was saved by the very people they are trying to make look bad.

It's an article from a well known publication.

What was posted was clearly a blog aggregation site's coverage of the reaction (specifically that of Jake Tapper and of The Huffington Post) to the Bloomberg story. The original Bloomberg story contains all of the information you provided above, and isn't "slanted."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aKGZkktzkAlA

Blankfein and Dimon took their bonuses in stock rather than cash, which Obama encouraged other corporations to do. Such compensation, he said in the interview, “requires proven performance over a certain period of time as opposed to quarterly earnings.” He said that’s a “fairer way of measuring CEO success and ultimately will make the performance of American businesses better.”

His comments come just days after 2009 bonus packages were announced for Dimon and Blankfein. Dimon, 53, led New York-based JPMorgan, the second-biggest U.S. bank, to a profit during each quarter of the financial crisis. Blankfein, 55, was at the helm when New York-based Goldman’s shares doubled last year as profit soared to a record high. The two banks were among those that repaid the bailout money they received from the government during the financial crisis.

Obama said compensation packages over the last decade haven’t always been commensurate with performance, and reiterated his call for shareholders to have a say in CEO pay.

 

[Dave]

My reaction was to Obama's remarks, which implied that these two were heads of banks that performed at below the level that might have been expected. He compared them to professional athletes who he seems to believe are overpaid, despite not performing as well as they might. This analogy was pointless and misleading anyway you look at it. It implies that these two did not deserve the bonuses because their performance was off. I already said I was in error for jumping to a conclusion.

 

[IanK87]

My reaction was to Obama's remarks, which implied that these two were heads of banks that performed at below the level that might have been expected. He compared them to professional athletes who he seems to believe are overpaid, despite not performing as well as they might.

Your reaction was to a very careful selection of his remarks, divorced of their context, which was that he was discussing the large bonuses of two successful bankers.

And no, he did not. He did not compare "these two," Blankfein and Dimon, to any athletes, certainly not ones who were "not performing as well as they might." He drew comparison only between the startling dollar amounts involved, and the very point was that, while startling, there is no call for intervention.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

That is not a comparison of Blankfein and Dimon with any baseball players. Maybe you're misunderstanding the "either," which should be read as "to boot" or "at that." It isn't drawing an equivalence between the performance of millionaire baseball players who don't make the World Series and that of these two bankers. Since you now know what was the quality of the bankers' performance, you should understand that that didn't and doesn't make any sense. In the original piece Obama goes on to praise the performance of these bankers, so he clearly is not "shocked" by their performance. Had you read the original article rather than an obviously sensational, third-hand splice-and-dice piece, you might have understood this the first time around.

The President said that he personally (just like people on "Main Street") finds America's highest salaries "shocking"--which is a visceral reaction, not an intellectual one--whether one is considering athletes or businessmen. This doesn't at all mean that he disapproves, however, or that he believes anything about the situation should be changed. On the contrary, the very point of the comparison (of the dollar amounts) was that while most Americans may indeed find the high salaries of some athletes "shocking," they can also understand (because most people can understand competition for contracts among players in baseball, but most know less about competition for positions in the world of high finance banking) that these men are nevertheless being paid their expected worth within the market of their line of work. Again, this means only that he's startled, as most of us are, to hear such numbers, and perhaps also startled that these people sometimes fail to grasp whatever brass ring is involved for them, sometimes flopping outright. (He is perhaps playing the peasant a little here. Or perhaps not. He's not Bush or Cheney, though he's done well enough.) But he is not decrying anything at all, not in the remarks you've zeroed in on. He does not indicate belief that anyone being discussed is "overpaid," whatever that would mean. One of his main general points, throughout his remarks, was precisely that there is not necessarily any such thing as being "overpaid" for the successful American, presuming pay and performance are tied. It is a free market, and some people will command "shocking" (for people on "Main Street") salaries in such an environment. He is talking to a publication called BusinessWeek, which has a reader base not infrequently targeted by the Limbaugh/Hannity Obama-wants-to-punish-you-for-succeeding-and-give-your-money-to-the-blacks line. Such people tend to identify, when talk of taxes and pay caps is in the air, with people making much, much more than they themselves actually make. Think of "Joe the Plumber," worried and belligerent about what would happen when he finally began making a quarter of a million annually--which he was nowhere near close to doing at that time, I believe.

This analogy was pointless and misleading anyway you look at it.

You misread the analogy. Perhaps the third-hand article encouraged that misreading; but there were bright red flags throughout the piece. When you're reading a piece of journalism about another piece of journalism, and it in its course references two other pieces of journalism about the original--and you're so excited by this piece that you want to post it on an internet forum and announce that the President "needs to go"--wouldn't you click through and read the original?

What you have otherwise is a level of critical thinking slightly better than that which leads to "Obama is a half-breed muslin" signs, or the comments about "filthy" Muslims and "Palestinkians" on this wonderful, thoughtful forum.

It implies that these two did not deserve the bonuses because their performance was off.

It is inevitable that some baseball players who command "shocking" salaries will nevertheless not make the World Series, despite what some may have "expected," or hoped. The tie between performance and pay doesn't involve clairvoyance. There will always be "shocking" failures of equivalence between the two at the end of every World Series or financial quarter, because some people fail, on Main Street and on Wall Street. The failures on Wall Street will nevertheless command salaries shocking to perhaps both the failures and the successes on "Main Street."

Incidentally, while I used the words "dollar amount," Blankfein and Dimon took their bonuses in stock, not cash. bored may have mentioned that.

I already said I was in error for jumping to a conclusion.

You seem not to have abandoned the conclusion, though, only to have regretted how you made your way to it this particular time.

 

[jamescagney]

You seem not to have abandoned the conclusion, though.

Good luck with that. No one here is ever wrong.

You could post on here that "Liberals don't want us to know that polar bears can swim," be proven wrong, and then later re-post the same thing in another thread. It's amazing to see the things people believe, and the mental gymnastics they go through to avoid reconsidering what just sounds right to them.

 

[bored]

Good luck with that. No one here is ever wrong.

You could post on here that "Liberals don't want us to know that polar bears can swim," be proven wrong, and then later re-post the same thing in another thread. It's amazing to see the things people believe, and the mental gymnastics they go through to avoid reconsidering what just sounds right to them.

You say this after Dave said he took a new position on the contents of the blog. I think you're wrong on this one.

 

[Worm]

I encourage anyone who wants to read a piece of journalism with substance to it to pick up this month's Harper's. Scott Horton wrote a pretty damning article on the Guantanamo "Suicides" (the quotation marks should indicate the direction the piece took). Aside from the sad details of the incident, which occurred in 2006, there is convincing evidence that Eric Holder, and by extension Obama himself, covered up, or at any rate failed to prevent a cover-up of, the torture and murder of three apparently innocent prisoners.

 

[Theo]

This came out last Friday. I guess it comes out on a Friday in the hopes that people won't notice.

WASHINGTON – A new congressional report released Friday says the United States' long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama's grim budget submission last month.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama's budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That's $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.

The agency says its future-year predictions of tax revenues are more pessimistic than the administration's. That's because CBO projects slightly slower economic growth than the White House.

The deficit picture has turned alarmingly worse since the recession that started at the end of 2007, never dipping below 4 percent of the size of the economy over the next decade. Economists say that deficits of that size are unsustainable and could put upward pressure on interest rates, crowd out private investment in the economy and ultimately erode the nation's standard of living.

***

For the ongoing budget year, CBO predicts a record $1.5 trillion deficit. That's actually a little better than predicted by the White House, but at 10 percent of gross domestic product, it's bigger than any deficit in history other than those experienced during World War II.

Digest that shit. $9.8 trillion.

Hope and change.

 

[Theo]

It is now beyond disturbing how obsessed the Democrats have become about passing massive health care legislation that virtually the entire country opposes.

It seems they will stop at nothing to defy the will of the people.

House may try to pass Senate health-care bill without voting on it

The tactic -- known as a "self-executing rule" or a "deem and pass"....

A Demon Pass. Wow. I mean, "deem and pass". Hmm. Is this democracy?

It's about time to make sure you're loaded up on guns and ammo, folks. The socialist swine are taking us down an ugly road.

 

[LetsGoDevils]

It is now beyond disturbing how obsessed the Democrats have become about passing massive health care legislation that virtually the entire country opposes.

It seems they will stop at nothing to defy the will of the people.

House may try to pass Senate health-care bill without voting on it



A Demon Pass. Wow. I mean, "deem and pass". Hmm. Is this democracy?

It's about time to make sure you're loaded up on guns and ammo, folks. The socialist swine are taking us down an ugly road.

I know Theo, I just don't get it.
This pissed me off
http://www.breitbart.tv/nancy-pelosi-we-need-to-pass-health-care-bill-to-find-out-whats-in-it/
I like my health insurance. For a $10 copay I go to whatever doctor I want, when I want.
All I know if this passes it will cost me more money to insure people who don't have insurance.

 

[DavidMich]

It is now beyond disturbing how obsessed the Democrats have become about passing massive health care legislation that virtually the entire country opposes.

Correction:


"It is now beyond disturbing how obsessed the Democrats have become about passing massive health care legislation that virtually all conservatives oppose."

haha

anyway. According to polls. yes, there are currently slightly more people against the bill, but that includes many progressives and liberals who are against it for not having a public option (hardly something you would agree with). And then also a handful who are pissed over the abortion compromise (which I don't see as a big deal).

Not to mention all the lies the conservatives have been telling. good luck.

 

[Robert Tressell]

I know Theo, I just don't get it.
This pissed me off
http://www.breitbart.tv/nancy-pelosi-we-need-to-pass-health-care-bill-to-find-out-whats-in-it/
I like my health insurance. For a $10 copay I go to whatever doctor I want, when I want.
All I know if this passes it will cost me more money to insure people who don't have insurance.

Selfish bastard

 

[LetsGoDevils]

Selfish bastard

Right, the selfish bastard who will have to pay an extra $7000 a year in taxes unless the Senate can fix the Cadillac tax.
All because Congress can't be bothered to read a bill that they exempted themselves from, or a President who smokes, or a treasury secretary who forgets to pay his own taxes.