Why should NYers know that our departed deputy mayor was arrested?

Plus: What to watch for in the Teabaggers' Delight presidential debate (see below)

Former Deputy Steve (the urban wonderman) and Mayor Mike in happier times -- which is to say with no snow falling and nothing of note being reported from the D.C. police blotter

"I thought the immediacy of my resignation mooted the need for further explanation. I was wrong. The lack of a fuller disclosure I now regret as I regret the loss of my public service career and the intrusion my children have experienced."

-- former NYC Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith

by Ken

This expression of regret from former Deputy Steve is farther than the deputy's former boss, Mayor Mike, is willing to go. However, if you read deep into the story, you'll find that Mike and Steve are in agreement that any disclosure should have come only from the deputy.

Bloomberg Says Disclosing Deputy Mayor's Arrest Not His 'Responsibility'

September 5, 2011 12:13pm | By Tom Liddy, DNAinfo News Editor

MANHATTAN — Mayor Michael Bloomberg refused to apologize Sunday for failing to disclose that former Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith had been arrested in Washington D.C. just days before he stepped down.

Breaking his silence after a church service at the Christian Cultural Center in Canarsie, Brooklyn, Bloomberg said that it was not his "responsibility" to tell the public about the July 30 arrest, according to the New York Times.

"I did not believe it was right for our administration to put out a story about an incident that had the potential to [bring] even more suffering to the Goldsmith family," he said, WCBS/Channel 2 reported.

The mayor, who canceled an appearance on his weekly radio show with WOR's John Gambling Friday in the wake of the revelations, said that while he had an obligation to his constituency, he also had a duty to treat his employees fairly.

"I also believe as an employer, employers have a responsibility to treat employees with some consideration and that is how I built my business, that’s how we run this government and that’s how we will continue to do so," he said, according to CBS.

However, Bloomberg added that if Goldsmith, once touted as a superstar but widely blamed for the administration's disastrous response to the Christmas 2010 blizzard, had not resigned, he would have been fired.

"Given the high standards we set for government service and the serious circumstances surrounding his arrest, Mr. Goldsmith could no longer continue work at City Hall," Bloomberg said, according to WCBS.

Bloomberg's comments drew quick fire from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

"Unfortunately the Mayor has this backwards: His first obligation is to protect the public, not to protect a staff member," he said in a statement. "The City Council should hold hearings, so we can get a full accounting of the facts in this matter."

The revelation last Thursday that Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis, had been arrested for allegedly shoving his wife during a heated argument at their D.C. home sparked a flurry of criticism from local politicians, including Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.

Bloomberg, who reportedly accepted Goldsmith's resignation at a meeting the day after his arrest, merely said that his deputy was leaving office to pursue work in the private sector.

"Your claim that Deputy Mayor Goldsmith was 'leaving to pursue private-sector opportunities in infrastructure finance' was a misrepresentation of the facts," de Blasio wrote in a Sept. 2 letter to Bloomberg.

"I cannot accept the leader of the City of New York lying to its citizens."

In a statement, Stephen Goldsmith said that he did not reveal the reason behind his resignation because he did not want to embarrass his family, nor did he want to become "a distraction to the important work of City Hall."

"I thought the immediacy of my resignation mooted the need for further explanation. I was wrong," Goldsmith said. "The lack of a fuller disclosure I now regret as I regret the loss of my public service career and the intrusion my children have experienced."

Goldsmith also said that it was his responsibility to disclose the reasons for his resignation, not the mayor's.

"I regret the criticism of the Mayor for his support of my family," Goldsmith added.

If city officials are arrested within the five boroughs, their arrest is reported to the Department of Investigation. However, those arrested outside the city's boundaries are not subject to the same rule.

The public advocate plans to introduce legislation to close this loophole.

According to a Washington, D.C. police report obtained by DNAinfo.com, Goldsmith, 64, allegedly shoved his wife, Margaret, into a counter.

"I should have put a bullet through you years ago!" Margaret Goldsmith yelled, according to the document.

Goldsmith then broke a phone and grabbed his wife and would not let go, the report said.

The Goldsmiths have disputed the account in the police report.

Several observations:

(1) I'm sorry to say I don't pay close enough attention to municipal affairs to have any meaningful insight into how good a job Deputy Steve, the reputed (if only by himself and Mayor Mike) urban wonderman, did. Sure, he f**ked the blizzard up royally, but maybe that was the solitary blemish on an otherwise splendid record of job performance. It's merely my unsupported impression that the guy's a highfalutin stiff.

I do recall Mayor Mike insinuating repeatedly that we should be on our knees celebrating our good fortune in having such an august one as Deputy Steve, an authentic urban wonderman (a former mayor of Indianapolis, after all), as our deputy mayor for administration. And Mayor Mike would know. I guess.

(2) Pursuant to the above, I spent some time perusing the reader comments posted on some website or other when the story of Deputy Steve's, er, embarrassment first broke. There was one category of comments which annoyed, maybe even scared, the heck out of me; we'll come back to that. But I recall one solitary soul raising the first question I had when I was trying to digest the original report, which as I recall made reference to the incident in question taking place in the Goldsmiths' home in D.C..

So I was immensely relieved that that one commenter thought to pose the question: What was a deputy mayor of New York City doing with a home in D.C.? In some account or other I did find the explanation that Deputy Steve split his time between NYC and D.C. Not quite good enough, I think. The question simply changes to: What was a deputy mayor of New York City, authentic urban wonderman or not, doing splitting his time between NYC and D.C.?

Perhaps we should be grateful, not just that the urban wonderman deigned to take this job but that he spent some of his precious time in our city, and the rest of his "home" time however-many-miles away in D.C., as opposed to setting up his urban-wonderman laptop in -- oh, I don't know -- Cabo San Lucas.

(3) As to the comments that distressed me, it was the strain of "why's everybody bustin' the guys balls?" and "what marriage doesn't include disagreements?" comments. To which I can only say: Ferchrissakes!

While it may well be that the Goldsmiths, as the above report notes, "have disputed the account in the police report." It's clearly true that whoever might have pressed charges declined to do so. That said, I'm not aware of any dispute that:

(a) Mrs. Deputy Steve called the cops on her husband.

(b) Deputy Steve was arrested. (As in "arrest report.")

It should go without saying that neither of these considerations, separately or together, establishes guilt, and I'm making no such presumption. I do, though, wonder at the sanity of anyone who suggests that a wife calling the cops on her husband is a "what's the big deal?"-type occurrence in a marriage, and I wonder at the suggestion that when a deputy mayor is arrested, the people he serves don't have a right to know about it.

With, of course, appropriate explanation from the parties of the first and second part. Deputy Steve, you notice, takes a sort of in-between position: that if he hadn't stepped down as deputy mayor (forgetting for the moment Mayor Mike's revelation that if he hadn't, he would have been fired), then sure the public would have had a right to know, but since he did quit, it's nobody's business and his family is entitled to its privacy. Um no.

One extra observation: Since the Goldsmiths are disputing the account in the police report, it's apparently not definitively certain that Mrs. Deputy Steve indeed said, ""I should have put a bullet through you years ago!" However, could we have a show of hands here? How many people believe the cop who wrote the report made this up?

In the original public accounts, it should be noted, the line was attributed to Deputy Steve rather than the missus, which creates a certain "oh, the brute!" frisson. It is apparently a fact, however, that the police report attributes the line to Mrs. Deputy Steve. One might point out that the erroneous information would almost certainly not have circulated if the actual report hadn't been still under wraps, but never mind. Again stipulating that we're entering here the realm of speculation, not to be confused with either judicial process or full investigative inquiry: If Mrs. Deputy Steve indeed said it, at whatever level of frustration, anger, or whatever, is there anyone to whom the thought doesn't occur that who after all knows the guy better?


MY INSIDER'S TIP: WHAT TO WATCH FOR IN THE
"TEABAGGERS' DELIGHT" PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Okay, I got carried away here, with everybody else offering their personal "what to watch for" tips. But seriously now, what are you, nuts? You would actually consider watching these specimens "debate" in front of a horde of militant, "f**k the facts" doodybrains?

Which bring us finally to today's --

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Good news for Texas Gov. Rick Perry

"In a positive piece of news for the Texas Governor, a new poll shows him leading the pack among voters who describe themselves as delusional."

-- from today's Borowitz Report, "Perry Outlines
Bold Proposal to Repeal Twentieth Century"

#

My only question: How did they know it WASN'T Glenn Beck lunging for that burger?

"I liked the way he bit off that guy’s hand, and the way he did his business in the middle of the stage. We need more of that in Washington."

-- Jefferson City (MO) Tea Party supporter Gwendolene
Thomason, as quoted by The Borowitz Report (see below)

by Ken

This just in (OK, well, early this morning -- in the grand scheme of the cosmos, that's barely a trice ago):

Rabid Dog Briefly Mistaken for Tea Party Candidate
Receives Standing Ovation at Missouri Rally

JEFFERSON CITY, MO (The Borowitz Report) – A rabid Doberman Pinscher jumped on stage at a Tea Party rally in Missouri on Labor Day and barked at the crowd for nearly twenty minutes before people realized he was not a candidate.

The dog, later identified by its owner as “Mister Buster,” held the crowd spellbound as he barked, growled, and frothed at the mouth, eventually receiving a standing ovation for his exertions.

Gwendolene Thomason, 42, a Tea Party supporter from Jefferson City, was one of the hundreds on hand who were convinced that the Doberman was a Tea Party candidate until he was outed as a dog.

“I liked what he had to say,” she said. ”He reminded me of Glenn Beck, only furrier.”

The Doberman’s canine identity finally became clear when he lunged at a man in the front row and wrested a hamburger from his right hand, taking two of the man’s fingers with it.

While the discovery that Mister Buster was not a Tea Party candidate disappointed many in attendance, Ms. Thomason held out hope that, dog or no, he might consider running for office at some point.

“I liked the way he bit off that guy’s hand, and the way he did his business in the middle of the stage,” she said. ”We need more of that in Washington.”

This might usefully be read against the backdrop of the new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Here are some of the juiciest gleanings of WaPo's Jon Cohen and Dan Balz, in a piece headlined "Obama ratings sink to new lows as hope fades":

The sense of deflation is particularly apparent among Democrats, with nearly two-thirds saying things are pretty seriously off on the wrong track. The percentage of Democrats saying things are headed in the right direction has cratered from 60 percent at the start of the year to 32 percent now.

Among political independents — a prime target of Obama’s new outreach — 78 percent see the country as off-kilter. The percentage saying so in January 2009 was 79 percent. Pessimism was even higher among independents — and everyone else — during the depth of the financial crisis in late 2008. But for Obama, things are back to square one.

Obama’s overall approval rating is down 11 percentage points from the start of the year. The only other time a majority disapproved of his handling of the presidency in Post-ABC polling was a year agoafter another rough summer.

For the first time, fewer than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 give the president positive marks. Young voters broke overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008, but just 47 percent of those under age 30 now approve of the way he is doing his job; just as many disapprove.

Fewer than three-quarters of Democrats approve of the president; his disapproval rating among independents ties its high from a year ago at 57 percent.

No doubt at Obama reelect campaign HQ they're dancing on the desks over this exciting news:

Obama does, however, rate better than do congressional Republicans, his adversaries in recent, fierce confrontations on federal spending. Just 28 percent approve of the way Republicans in Congress are doing their job, and 68 percent disapprove, the worst spread for the GOP since summer 2008.

This gibes perfectly with the apparent reelection strategy: to pray that the Republicans nominate someone so appalling that the president, following his now-standard practice of positioning himself as "Republican lite," appears to just enough voters to be merely "appalling lite."

Meanwhile that peerless political sage Chris Cillizza went to town ("Vote out the entire Congress? You bet.") on a rival NBC/Wall Street Journal poll,

where 54 percent of those tested said that if they had the opportunity to vote out every single Member of Congress -- including their own - they would take it.

That’s the highest that number has been in the 18 months or so that NBC/WSJ have been asking the question -- and the clearest evidence yet that we may be headed to a “pox on both your houses” election the likes of which we have never seen before.

One of these damned polls, I'm pretty sure I heard on the radio, reported that something like 163 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. One might feel more sympathy if the respondents hadn't voted these very bums in, and weren't standing ready, to judge by history including the excellent midterm replacements they chose in 2010, to replace these bums with life forms a bare minimum of twice as bad, and ideally 20 to 100 times as bad.

That'll fix the problem for sure.

#

Happy Labor Day!

by Ken



Howie already offered a Labor Day message, and I have nothing to add that isn't likely to be bleedingly obvious to DWT readers: that there hasn't been any time since the American labor movement took hold when workers -- and I mean all kinds of workers, union and non-union -- were less respected by their bosses.



As with so much of the apparently succeeding assault on the social fabric built up since the New Deal, I think what makes it possible for demagogues and power-grabbing morons to hornswoggle eager-to-be-deceived Americans is that the benefits are so entrenched that people with microscopic attention spans have no idea how much of the good in their lives is built on organized labor, government regulation, all kinds of government spending, and on and on. It's a willed stupidity that works wonders for the oligarchs and their faithful stooges, whose reward is to suck up most of what little trickle-down trickles down from the greed-besotted elites. It's not such a good deal for the rest of the populace.



People so stupid as to be fooled into believing that labor unions are their enemy and management is their friend will learn how wrong they are. Meanwhile, once again Andy Borowitz is wait out ahead of the official nooze media.

Labor Day Officially Moved to China

First U.S. Holiday to Be Outsourced





BEIJING (The Borowitz Report) -- Labor Day, one of America’s most beloved and longest-celebrated holidays, has been officially moved to China, U.S. officials confirmed today.



The Labor Day celebrations are expected to kick off Monday afternoon in Beijing with a barbeque attended by over seven million people and presided over by former NBA star Yao Ming.



The transfer of Labor Day to China represents the first time in American history that an entire holiday has been outsourced, experts said.





“It may be just as well,” said the University of Minnesota’s Davis Logsdon, who has lectured extensively on Labor Day traditions. “It’s been getting harder and harder for Americans to remember what labor is.”





Tracy Klugian, 37 said he was sorry to see his annual Labor Day barbeque relocated from his home in Medina, Ohio to Beijing, but is taking the loss in stride.

“I used to really look forward to Labor Day,” he said. “But to be honest, getting a day off isn’t as special as it used to be.”





While Mr. Klugian said it was “a little strange” for Labor Day barbecues to occur in China with no participation by Americans, he added, “Maybe someday we’ll be able to make illegal fireworks for them.”





Meanwhile, U.S. officials said it was looking "more and more likely" that Thanksgiving would be relocated this year to India.





“At the very least, Americans will still be able to celebrate Thanksgiving by phone,” one official said. “But they should listen closely because some menu options have changed."

#

There's just one thing I want to say about S&P's bond-rating downgrade -- then I'll turn the floor over to Andy Borowitz and Ian Welsh

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, explaining his decision to hold onto his current post: “I didn’t want to look for a job -- it’s fucking scary out there.” (See "Bonus Andy" below.)

BOROWITZ REPORT



Predator Drone Seen Hovering over Standard & Poor’s Headquarters

Company Could Be in for Downgrade of its Own, Experts Say



WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -– Just days after downgrading the credit rating of the United States, Standard & Poor’s was on high alert this morning after an unmanned Predator drone was seen hovering over its headquarters in lower Manhattan.



While the mission of the Predator was unclear, some insiders speculated that S & P might be in for a downgrade of its own.



The Predator appeared in the skies above the company's headquarters minutes after it was rumored that S & P was about to downgrade the United States to the same status as Pluto.



As a so-called "dwarf nation," the U.S. would no longer be accorded the same respect as a recognized country like France or Brazil, one S & P source said: "Basically, the United States would be considered a social network with parking."



At the White House, President Obama offered no comment on the Predator’s mission, saying only, “The Predator is an effective weapon against the enemies of the United States of America.”



He did offer apologies for what he called “an accidental Predator missile strike” over the weekend at a golf course in Virginia which narrowly missed Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA).

by Ken



So, on the first day of trading after the Standard & Poors U.S. bond downgrade, "Stock market plummets after historic downgrade of U.S. credit rating" -- a 5.6 percent drop, Wall Street's "worst day of trading since the 2008 financial crisis as investors reacted to the historic downgrade of U.S. credit by selling so heavy that it wiped out $1.2 trillion of stock market wealth Monday."



There are a number of things that could be said about the bond downgrade, most of them silly -- and there's been no shortage of people saying them. I have just one point to make. For how long now has the Tools of the Oligarchy Right been warning that all sorts of catastrophic mayhem will result from our catastrophic debt catastrophe, including the collapse of the financial markets. The chief threat always has been that the bond market will punish us for our fiscal recklessness. And for how long have people like Paul Krugman been pointing out that bond interest rates showed no sign of going up, that apparently the dreaded bond market had no shortage of confidence in the U.S.'s financial stability. Bond buyers were only too happy to buy all the treasuries put on sale, at historically low interest rates.



This has to have driven the Pete Peterson Doom Via Debt prognosticators absolutely batty. Here they were trying to scare the bejeezus out of us with their phony-baloney "crisis," and the damned bond buyers were too dense to provide the chills the plutocrats' doom scenario called for.



Well, glory be, the bond buyers have suddenly had their confidence shaken, and bond interest rates will go up -- meaning that the bond-buying oligarchs not only have the "crisis of confidence" they've been threatening, but some nice new profits too!



Now here's Ian Welsh's take:

Comments on the S&P Downgrade



by Ian Welsh



Aside from hysterical laughter, here are the key points:



1. Obviously the US isn’t even close to insolvent. The gold in Fort Knox is held on the books at $37/ounce, for example. Most Federal lands are held on the books at 19th century valuations. Not to mention that the US’s debt is denominated in its own currency, which means it could simply be printed, and that the US government has a lot of unused room to tax, should it ever deign to use that on people with money, as opposed to those without.



2. As everyone is pointing out, the idea that S&P, who rated all the subprime trash as AAA, has any credibility, is a joke.



3. However, Obama and Democrats refused to destroy S&P when they had the opportunity and every reason to do so. The submprime crisis could not have been nearly as bad without S&P and the other rating’s agencies rating trash AAA so that investors who must buy AAA by law could do so. To put it simply, S&P engaged in systematic fraud. They, like everyone on Wall Street and in the major banks, have not been indicted for this. The choice to not indict is policy. Obama’s policy.



4. If Obama did not want this to happen, it would not happen. Could you imagine what LBJ, Nixon or Truman (or, hell, Bush Jr.) would have done if a rating’s agency tried this? The President has the necessary tools to utterly destroy S&P and every senior analyst working for them. You could use terrorism statutes or RICO, just as two examples. Send the FBI into their offices, seize all the assets of both the company and everyone working for it, and then got through their records. I guarantee, as absolutely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, that there is enough evidence of fraud in those records to put them away for life. In the meantime, RICO laws are used to seize all the assets of everyone involved, meaning they will be using public defenders (don’t like a bad law? Use it against real people.) When S&P informed the White House they were going to downgrade, the White House could have quietly let them know what the consequences would be.



5. The US has effectively unlimited drawing rights from the IMF. Those drawing rights mean that if any of the core economies have an AAA rating, in effect, so does the US. (ie. if Germany is AAA, so is America.)



6. S&P knows all this. They are doing this because they know the President and Congress and the real people in the oligarchy want it done. Remember, a downgrade increases rates, and that is a direct increase to their income. And they know the US can pay, they aren’t fooled by idiotic talk about a default. The US may default at some point, but that will be a political decision.



7. This is another manufactured crisis, on top of the original manufactured debt ceiling crisis. The oligarchy wants the opportunity to buy federal assets at dimes on the dollar. They believe they don’t need the poor or middle class anymore, so they are good with getting rid of SS and Medicare. And Obama is, as he always has been, onside with this.



These people, are, however, playing with fire. Just because it’s a crisis that didn’t have to happen, a crisis, that is manufactured as another looting opportunity, doesn’t mean that it won’t have real consequences.

BONUS ANDY



In today's outing, I would say that the "other" jokes appended to the Borowitz Report are actually funnier than the report.

In other financial news:



-- In an effort to find a safe haven, rattled investors fled the dollar today and moved their money into Groupons.



-- In one rare bright spot on Wall Street, manufacturers of red ink posted record profits.



-- And finally, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner explained his decision to remain at the U.S. Treasury: “I didn’t want to look for a job – it’s fucking scary out there.”

#

Breaking News: "Obama, Boehner Come to Agreement That Cantor Is Douche" (The Borowitz Report)

Hot, hot, hot. Not a fun weekend weather-wise, especially for those of us who participated in the New York Transit Museum's Coney Island Nostalgia Tour on Saturday (traveling on authentic restored 1930s IND cars), and then came back today to venture a Municipal Art Society tour with star tour leader Francis Morrone to the posh Manhattan East Side enclaves of Beekman Place and Sutton Place. So I think I'll just pass on this breaking report from the Borowitz Report. -- Ken

JULY 24, 2011

Obama, Boehner Come to Agreement That Cantor Is Douche

Could Be First Step Toward Debt Deal



WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In what members of both parties are hailing as an important first step on the road to a deal on raising the debt ceiling, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner today came to an agreement that Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is a douche.



Mr. Obama and Rep. Boehner made the dramatic announcement in the East Room of the White House late Sunday afternoon.



“Speaker Boehner and I have come to an agreement that Eric Cantor is a douche,” the President said. “We’ll see if we can build on that.”



The breakthrough reportedly came Sunday morning, but both sides spent several hours hammering out the language before agreeing on the word “douche.”



“Boehner had been pushing hard for ‘dickwad,’” said a source familiar with the discussions. “He was concerned that using a like ‘douche’ could be alienating to his base because it’s French.”



While skeptics cautioned that agreeing about the douchiness of Eric Cantor is still a long way from agreeing on raising the debt ceiling, a new poll shows that Messrs. Obama and Boehner have broad public support for their position on the congressman from Virginia.



According to a new poll of likely voters, 56 percent agreed that Mr. Cantor is a “douche,” 32 percent agreed that he is a “asshat” and the remainder characterized him as a “dickhead,” “cocksucker” or “motherfucker.”



“With all the partisan bickering in Washington, the American people should rest assured that we all agree on one thing,” said Rep. Boehner. “And that is, Eric Cantor is one irritating mofo.”

One theory: Eric Cantor's career has been secretly concocted and promoted by sinister deep-pocketed forces who want to build him up to help foment a resurgence of cutting-edge anti-Semitism in America.





UPDATE: Eric Cantor the shonda fur die goyim



In the comments, Michael Takiff shares a link to a Salon piece, "Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda," in which he asks, "Am I the only Jew in America who finds the House majority leader deeply embarrassing to our people? Am I the only tribe member who considers this smarmy yutz today’s numero-uno shonda fur die goyim?"



No, Michael, I assure you you're not.

When a Jew is publicly bad -- especially publicly really bad -- large numbers of the rest of us Jews cringe. That Jew becomes a shonda fur die goyim -- a disgrace for the non-Jews, an example for the gentiles to latch onto as evidence that every one of us is out to control their banks, run their newspapers, and make matzoh from the blood of their children.

Yes! As I wrote in reply:

It hadn't even occurred to me that Cantor is Jewish until my friend Peter asked. Peter's father, I might note, was a refugee from Nazi Germany who read the New York Times religiously every day of his American life and was wont to ask, anytime a Jew committed what he considered a public embarrassment, whether this was "good for the Jews."

#

You can't have a bitchin' "austerity" movement without an International Conspiracy of Dunces -- meet Our Davy Brooks

Once upon a time, Doonesbury's Roland Hedley went spelunking in Reagan's brain. Would anyone have the courage to attempt the same quest in Our Davy Brooks's brain?

by Ken

I expect many of you have already seen this, but I don't think you'll mind looking at it again. (Sorry I can't provide a link. Somehow as of this writing it still doesn't seem to have been added to the Borowitz Report website. Well, there's a link!)

BOROWITZ REPORT
June 17, 2011

Greece Offers to Repay Loans with Giant Horse
Steed Wheeled Into Brussels at Night

BRUSSELS (The Borowitz Report) – In what many are hailing as a breakthrough solution to Greece’s crippling debt crisis, Greece today offered to repay loans from the European Union nations by giving them a gigantic horse.

Finance ministers from sixteen EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.

The horse, measuring several stories in height, drew mixed responses from the finance ministers, many of whom said they would have preferred a cash repayment of the EU’s bailout.

But German Chancellor Andrea Merkel said she “welcomed the beautiful wooden horse,” adding, “What harm could it possibly do?”

I've intentionally led off with a light moment because, as promised, we're about to descend into the murky, incomprehensible depths of DavyBrooksWorld.

Just this morning on the radio I heard some pompous economic semiliterate, commenting on the Greek crisis, saying that we know how to deal with their debt problem but now we just lack the political will to do so. Of course what he means is that we know the forced-austerity technique, which transforms the ill-gotten gains of the financial players who've made out like bandits in the runup into a price to be paid by people who've gotten no benefit from it.

The "serious" people who tut-tut about the Social Security "crisis" tut-tut in exactly the same way. We know what has to be done; we just lack the political gumption to do it. Or the state budget crises raised to toxic proportion by the economic meltdown: Hoodlums like the new governors of Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio know how to deal with it -- and they've got the political gumption to do what has to be done: "solve" the problems on the backs of people who didn't cause them, thereby protecting the movers and shakers who did, and in many cases got rich, or I should say richer, doing it.

I suppose if you just wanted to pick on Our Davy Brooks, you could equally well deconstruct every pile of manure Our Davy shovels onto the NYT op-ed page. The levels of stupidity and dishonesty are really that predictable.

I can think of several reasons why I've glommed onto the column he wrote last week, hailing an astonishing discovery, the most important discovery since the discovery of sunshine: that the economic meltdown was caused by . . . Freddie Mac! (Or maybe Fannie Mae, I forget which.)

First, I had a moment of instant revulsion when I noticed the blurb for that column (for which, on principle, I'm not going to provide a link; that seems to me just encouraging him) on the day's NYT e-newsletter. It didn't take a particularly keen olfactory detector to smell a turd. It looked to be, only three years late, yet another assault on the best scapegoat the Far Right has come up with to deflect blame from the class of movers and shakers whose private parts they live to lick.

Maybe too I was primed because I once made the mistake of allowing a wingnut commenter to drag me into his inexhaustibly "sourced" conviction that the true cause of the economic meltdown was the Community Reinvestment Act of 2008, by which the government held guns to the head of scrupulously honest bankers and forced them to lend money to vile scum of the criminally poor class (not very hidden subtext: overwhelmingly people of inappropriate skin pigment) for the purpose of sinking the economy. Of course those inexhaustible citations, if you look at them, turn out to be either just plain bogus or twisted-beyond-recognition distortions, all to buttress the ideological delusions they've made up in their head, all of which are totally impervious to facts, which the Far Right has come to consider its deadliest enemy.

Now my point here, and the reason I bring it up, is that this is exactly the way Our Davy Brooks works. His trick -- and I'm not equipped to say whether it's a stroke of genius or a stroke of luck -- is to wrap his ideological rigidities in a veneer of "centrism." But he practices "journalism" the way David Brock -- as he reported in Bllinded by the Right -- discovered was the standard practice of the Far Right pseudo-journalists he'd attached himself to, among whom he had made himself the shiningest star. It occurred to him rather belatedly that where actual journalists set out to find out what the story is, his people started out with the story fully written in their heads and then went out in search of anything they could find, or more likely twist, to seem to support it.

THE POINT IS NOT THAT FANNIE
AND FREDDIE ARE BLAMELESS

To start with, it appears that that book Our Davy read, well, he doesn't seem to have actually read it, just glommed onto the part that fits his ideological fixation. I'm told by people I trust a lot more than Our Davy that he ignored substantial parts of the book that dealt with the Fed, Wall Street, and nonbank financial parties.

More to the point, though, he's just got the Fannie-Freddie story wrong. Which is not to say that Fannie and Freddie don't deserve brickbats. Here's economist Dean Baker's take:

The trillions of dollars that the geniuses at the private investment banks funneled into the housing market were the force that inflated the bubble to its 2006 peaks. Fannie and Freddie were followers in this story, jumping into the subprime and Alt-A market in 2005 to try to maintain market share. They were not the leaders.

Just to be clear, Fannie and Freddie were serious bad actors. They are both huge companies that do nothing else but deal with housing. It is incredible that they did not recognize the housing bubble and take steps to try to deflate it, and protect themselves, before it grew to such dangerous levels.

Suppose that Fannie and Freddie started demanding appraisals of rental values and refused to buy any mortgage where the ratio of sale price to annual rent was higher than 20. This action by itself likely would have shaken some sense into the housing market. I said this back in 2002, when I first warned of the housing bubble and predicted the collapse of Fannie and Freddie. I also frequently criticized Fannie and Freddie in public forums, including debates with their chief economists. Unlike Brooks, I wasn't worried about non-issues as economic disaster loomed on the horizon.

However:

As much as Fannie and Freddie deserve blame for incompetence and corruption, no serious person can make them the main culprits in this story. The Wall Street crew made hundreds of billions on pushing fraudulent mortgages. Furthermore, if we had competent economists running the Fed, they would have been shooting at the housing bubble as early as 2002 also. This does not mean raising interest rates in an economy that was struggling to recover from the collapse of the stock bubble. (I'll say that again, since people have a hard time understanding "do not raise interest rates." The Fed should not have raised interest rates.)

If Greenspan had paid attention to the economy he would have had the Fed's staff devoted full-time to document the evidence for the housing bubble and he would have used every public appearance (e.g. congressional testimonies, public speeches, international forums) to warn of the risks posed by the housing bubble. He also would have used the Fed's full regulatory authority to police the mortgage issuing practices of the banks under its supervision. He also would have prodded other regulators to use increased scrutiny for the institutions under their control. (Greenspan was never shy about making suggestions to others.)

My guess is that these actions would have by themselves crashed the bubble and done so long before it grew to such dangerous levels. They would be essentially costless, so it is difficult to see why a vigilant Fed chair would not have followed this route.

It is difficult to believe that these actions would not have been sufficient to deflate the bubble. After all, the David Brooks of the world can ignore Dean Baker warning of the housing bubble, they cannot ignore the Fed chair issuing such warnings, backed up by endless Fed papers documenting the case.

But Our Davy has found his narrative, and restored the earth to its rightful axis. And people continue publishing and reading his gibberish.

#

Without Weinergate, would this bunch of pols be any more likely, or more able, to deal with real-world problems?

"Big numbers are thrown around -- Sen. Jon Kyl said Tuesday that Republican agreement to raising the debt ceiling would require $2.5 trillion in spending cuts -- with little inquiry as to how such reductions would affect actual people, future economic growth or our capacity to invest in ourselves. Ah, but trying to answer such questions would distract us from the Weiner story.

"Okay, most of us will always pay attention to sex stories, and apocalyptic fears are usually a form of paranoia. But we’re a superpower with big economic problems. We’re acting like a country that has all the time in the world to dance around our troubles by indulging in ideological fantasies and focusing on the behavioral fantasies of wayward politicians -- who, by the way, keep creating opportunities for distraction."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column today,
"Anthony Weiner and the tweet road to oblivion"

"Obama knows -- and, indeed, has stated as much -- that if we continue along our present path we’ll guarantee our children a much more dangerous future. Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them."

-- Elizabeth Kolbert, in a New Yorker
"Comment" piece this week, "Storms Brewing"

by Ken

It happens every election cycle. Serious people wail about candidates' failure to engage with real issues. Yet the infotainment noozemedia devote roughly 99 percent of their attnetion to mindless sound bites, sensationalism, and horse-race prognostication, leaving any poor sap of a candidate who fantasized about "running on the issues" to face the fact that approximately nobody gives a damn.

Case in point: I don't know how anyone could run a more issues-rich or issues-intelligent campaign than then-Rep. Joe Sestak did last year in the Pennsylvania Senate race, against a candidate who is a pile of pure garbage, a cynical rich-guy opportunist who ran on a platform that said basically: "I'm betting that enough Pennsylvanians are rich opportunists, low-life slimeballs, or garden-variety morons." It turned out to be a winning bet, and I don't suppose we should be surprised.

But I digress. I know I promised last night ("Confidential to Anthony W. of Brooklyn -- you twit!") that "barring unforeseen circumstances" we would be talking tonight about the results of New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's online quest for a viable universal cartoon caption -- suitable, for example, for the magazine's much-cherished weekly cartoon-caption contest. I don't know if you could call the developments that have developed since then exactly "unforeseen." Did anyone foresee the circus surrounding Congressman Anthony W. of Brooklyn fading into the night.

True, there is one "unforeseen development." No, I don't mean the tacky disclosure that Mrs. Weiner is pregnant with the couple's first child, which you'd like to think was pretty much their affair. (It was interesting to note, though, that there wasn't any steadfast "little woman" at Anthony W.'s side as he continued blundering his way through his mess.) No, I mean the still-unconfirmed report of the congressman's resignation -- to run for premier of Italy.

BOROWITZ REPORT
June 9, 2011

Weiner Resigns: Will Run for
Prime Minister of Italy

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) - Embattled congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) sent shockwaves across the political landscape today, resigning from his seat in Congress and announcing a run for Prime Minister of Italy.



“Today is bittersweet for me,” he said in a resignation speech on the floor of the House of Representatives.  “But it is time to say goodbye to the past and buongiorno to the future.”



Mr. Weiner said that before resigning his seat, he briefly considered running for Prime Minister of Italy while still serving in the House: “I’ve shown that I’m good at multitasking.”



But instead, Mr. Weiner decided to devote himself wholeheartedly to his new campaign: “I’m very excited about this, as all of my followers on Twitter can see.”



Mr. Weiner hit the ground running this morning, blasting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for his use of prostitutes: “As Prime Minister of Italy, I will bring with me a much more fiscally prudent approach.”



According to early Italian polls, Mr. Weiner is appealing mainly to women in the 21 to 22 demographic.



“That’s a group that Berlusconi has totally ignored,” said Italian pollster Donatello Bibbo.  “He considers them too old.”



BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS . . .

"Now, I am always wary of those who do what I’m about to do next: Take a tawdry sex scandal that people read about because we like to read about tawdry sex scandals, and use it to make some larger point."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in the above-cited column

It's easy enough to understand E.J.'s wariness, but I find that the people you usually have to worry about are the ones who aren't wary about such dangers.

What's got E.J. down isn't the Weiner story itself, but its place "at the end of what Thomas Jefferson might call 'a long train of abuses.' You really don wonder what's happening to our democracy and those who serve it."

[T]he Weiner episode marked the culmination of several months during which other sideshows involving outrageous male behavior -- John Ensign and John Edwards come to mind — dominated news coverage at a moment when our country’s future really is on the line. (Bill Clinton’s scandal played out when we were in very good shape, which is one reason he survived.)

Add to this the political media’s tendency to prefer covering personalities that the media created in the first place (Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, above all) to those taking the trouble of running for president and thinking through what they want to say. It’s another case of politicians being reduced (or, maybe, reducing themselves) to celebrities.

I have no particular sympathy for the political views of Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty or Rick Santorum, but at least the three of them are doing the hard work that democratic politics requires. Thus: Palin’s unusual comments about Paul Revere got far more attention than did Pawlenty’s economic speech this week. It fell to policy bloggers such as The Post’s Ezra Klein to take Pawlenty’s ideas apart. Thus: Palin’s bus trip to the New Hampshire seacoast got at least as much attention as Romney’s announcement of a real, live candidacy.

"But it’s not all the media’s fault," E.J. says,

and this is not just about politicians who conduct themselves badly in their personal lives. Much of what passes for debate consists of irritable ideological gestures. The recent disappointing economic news has not changed the set-piece Washington deficit debate one bit.

Big numbers are thrown around -- Sen. Jon Kyl said Tuesday that Republican agreement to raising the debt ceiling would require $2.5 trillion in spending cuts — with little inquiry as to how such reductions would affect actual people, future economic growth or our capacity to invest in ourselves. Ah, but trying to answer such questions would distract us from the Weiner story.

The cruel fact is that we now have a politics that is almost totally divorced from real-world problems, except insofar as those problems can be mangled beyond recognition by pols who behave as if their brains function at a barely pre-kindergarten level. (The game of figuring out whether they're too stupid to understand or merely too demagogically cynical or opportunistic has long since lost its charm.)

In this week's (June 13) New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert has a timely "Comment" piece called "Storms Brewing," in which she writes:

For decades, climate scientists have predicted that, as global temperatures rose, the side effects would include deeper droughts, more intense flooding, and more ferocious storms. The details of these forecasts are immensely complicated, but the underlying science is pretty simple. Warm air can hold more moisture. This means that there is greater evaporation. It also means that there is more water, and hence more energy, available to the system.

What we are seeing now is these predictions being borne out. If no particular flood or drought or storm can be directly attributed to climate change—there’s always the possibility that any single event was just a random occurrence—the over-all trend toward more extreme weather follows from the heating of the earth. As the cover of Newsweek declared last week, “weather panic” is the “new normal.” The larger problem is that this “new normal” won’t last.

The evidence continues to accumulate, Kolbert writes, that we're running out of time to get any kind of control over these developments. She points out that Barack Obama 'appointed some of the country's most knowledgeable climate scientists to his Administration, and it seemed for a time as if he might take his responsibility to lead on this issue seriously. That hope has faded."

Of course, it almost goes without saying at this point that the President’s potential opponents next November are all worse on the issue. Tim Pawlenty, who, as governor of Minnesota, took some commendable actions on climate change, has now renounced them, saying that everyone “has got some clunkers in their record.” Much the same holds for the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, minus the commendable actions. National Journal has summed up the situation this way: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe.”

E. J. Dionne Jr. extrapolates from the "Weiner circus":

Social networking has taken us where human nature always threatesn to go: downward. Do we want to give politicians incentives to limit their thinking to 140 characters?

And he concludes toady's column:

Britney Spears, appropriately enough I suppose, has a catchy song out with the refrain “Keep on dancin’ till the world ends.” Forgive me for wondering whether her song will provide the soundtrack for some future documentary on our national decline if we don’t get very serious, very soon.

Meanwhile Elizabeth Kolbert concludes her "Storms Brewing" piece:

[N]ow that the immediate crisis has passed, the President needs to stop asking the kind of questions that can’t be answered and start addressing those that can. Obama knows—and, indeed, has stated as much—that if we continue along our present path we’ll guarantee our children a much more dangerous future. Taking the steps that would reduce the risks of climate change is not going to be politically popular, which is why it is the President’s obligation to press for them. It may be beyond our power to control the climate, but we can determine it. This is precisely what we’re doing right now, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.