The Republic of T.

Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for January 31st from 15:10 to 15:53:

• Immobility Nation – OtherWords –

  America is becoming "a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by," President Barack Obama declared during his State of the Union address.
  The numbers back him up. Executive compensation and the poverty rate are both at or near all-time highs.
  Surprisingly, it was Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum who first made economic mobility an issue in the 2012 elections. Three months ago, he pointed out that children born to poor families rarely grow up to become rich, or even middle class.

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• Newt’s Fatal Flaw –

  If Newt Gingrich ends up losing Florida tomorrow—as polls now agree he will—and ultimately loses the GOP nomination, you could hear the most important reason in just a few words he uttered in a Tampa suburb on Sunday. The former House speaker stepped out of a church service at the delightfully named Exciting Idlewild Baptist Church and opened fire on Mitt Romney as a “pro-abortion, pro gun-control, pro-tax increase moderate from Massachusetts” who had “carpet-bombed” his way to a lead in the Florida polls. That wasn’t the problematic part. It was this: "I have had a long record as a very hard-hitting Reagan conservative, and the idea that that record would be deliberately falsified by a Massachusetts moderate using money from Wall Street … is really about as big an outrage as I've had in my career.” Gingrich’s only chance to take the nomination is as the leader of a movement—loosely defined, the Tea Party movement—and he spoke to its anti-elitist streak powerfully in his dramatic victory in South Carolina. But you can’t lead a movement when everything you say eventually comes back to you, above all else. It can’t be my outrage; it has to be our outrage. But instead of effectively casting the Romney campaign as the enemy of all anti-establishment conservatives—as Sarah Palin and Herman Cain tried to do for him over the weekend—Gingrich seems incapable of putting the brakes on his megalomania. From Bachmann to Perry, Cain to Santorum to Gingrich, the story of this entire GOP contest has been that Tea Party Republicans have the numbers, but they have not had a candidate. 

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• Establishment Republicans have only themselves to blame – The Washington Post –

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• The Ugly Words of Newt Gingrich | Consortiumnews –

  Most people probably think that scientists working on embryonic stem-cell research are committed to finding new treatments to help fellow human beings suffering from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, paraplegia and other terrible ailments – but not former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

  To the Republican presidential hopeful, these researchers are engaged in what amounts to “the use of science to desensitive society over the killing of babies.” Just stop there for a minute. In Gingrich’s world, these researchers are using “science to desensitive society over the killing of babies.”

  That comment on Saturday at a Baptist church in Winter Park, Florida, got the applause that he apparently was hoping for and maybe some votes from Christian fundamentalists who object to the experimental use of embryos, even ones destined for destruction at fertility clinics. However, in doing so, Gingrich put on display, again, his casual use of ugly language to demean fellow Americans.

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• Newt Gingrich Says College Students Should Have Jobs, But Did He? – The Huffington Post –

  Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says college students are being coddled, but his own educational record doesn't exactly elicit images of a person who had to struggle to make ends meet while earning a degree.

  …But as the Post notes, Gingrich himself took a different path during college, according to a 1995 Vanity Fair article.
  According to the report, Gingrich leaned on family members for money and said he didn't want to get a job while in school.

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• Robert Reich (The Biggest Risk to the Economy in 2012, and What’s the Economy For Anyway?) –

  Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few days ago, said the “critical risks” facing the American economy this year were a worsening of Europe’s chronic sovereign debt crisis and a rise in tensions with Iran that could stoke global oil prices.

  What about jobs and wages here at home?

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• Is Capitalism on Trial? Or Just Big Business? Or Just Mitt Romney? – The Huffington Post –

  "I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death," Frank Luntz, an influential GOP pollster and strategist, warned the Republican Governors Association at a meeting in Florida last month, referring to the Occupy movement. "They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism."
  Perhaps Luntz had already discovered this startling finding, buried in a recent Pew Research Center survey: roughly the same number of 18-to-29-year-old Americans have positive views of socialism as of capitalism. In a survey conducted in early December last year, 49 percent had a positive view of socialism, while 47 percent had a positive view of capitalism. Similarly, only 43 percent had a negative view of socialism, compared with 47 percent who had a negative view of capitalism.

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• Politicians’ Failures of Generosity | Common Dreams –

  It’s intriguing to me that wealthy politicians, even knowing that the public will scrutinize their charitable contributions, are so strangely stingy. At a time when so many are hurting, it would be so simple to be generous, even for the most self-serving of reasons. Given the rhetoric around “class warfare” and “envy” on the one hand and “sharing the burden” and “fairness” on the other, it’s almost bizarre that these high net worth politicians give so little proportional to their income.

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• Eugene Robinson: The GOP’s Anti-Gingrich Campaign – Truthdig –

  MIAMI—When the empire strikes back, it hits hard. The Republican establishment is deploying every weapon and every soldier—even Bob Dole—in an increasingly desperate attempt to pulverize the Newt Gingrich rebellion. Eventually, the shock-and-awe campaign may work.

  But then what? In the establishment’s best-case scenario, the party is left with Mitt Romney, a candidate whose core message, as far as I can tell, seems to be: “Yes, I made a ton of money. You got a problem with that?”

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At the risk of repeating myself, my response to the Romney campaign staffer who summed up the Florida primary by saying “It’s about destroying Gingrich,” is the same as my response to Sarah Palin’s claim that the “liberal media” and “the establishment” were out to destroy Newt Gingrich: Nobody needs to lift a finger to destroy Newt. All you have to do is sit back, give him room, and let him do it himself.

In fact, Newt’s accomplishing his own destruction just by his dogged determination to stay in the race all the way to convention, and he’s threatening to take his party down with him.

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Another GOP debate as come and gone, and there’s a clear consensus on who won and who lost this round. After two fabulously bombastic debate performances, Newt Gingrich was defeated by the one man he can never seem to beat: himself.

Ultimately, Newt’s problem is just being Newt. It always has been, because the real Newt bears a strong resemblance the one portrayed in his opponents attack ads.

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for December 5th through January 4th:

• Newt the Destroyer | Mother Jones –

  "Newt Gingrich has finally reached his destiny: destroyer of the GOP.

  In a bitter and spiteful concession speech last night in Iowa—Kanye West could do no worse—the former House speaker, who finished fourth, signaled a shift in his mission. He would no longer be running to obtain the Republican presidential nomination; he would be campaigning to obliterate Mitt Romney. He would be Sherman; the former Massachusetts governor would be Georgia.

  If Gingrich does pursue this march—and there are two debates this weekend in New Hampshire in which Gingrich can be a suicide bomber—Gingrich will be reaching the peak of his 30-year career as a Republican demolition man. And now his target will be the candidate the GOP establishment believes possesses the best chance of unseating President Barack Obama."

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• The Hypocrisy And Stupidity Of The GOP’s Hatred Of The EPA – Forbes –

  "GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum has taken advantage of his newfound popularity to get on board the Republican war against clean air and water.

  According to Santorum, the new EPA rule that will finally place limits on how much mercury the nation’s coal and oil fired power plants can spew into the air —a regulation specifically created to protect young children and developing fetuses from the damage known to be caused by mercury, a dangerous neurotoxin—will shut down 60 power plants in the US and is “not based on any kind of science.”

  Nonsense.

  Indeed, the only thing not based on any kind of science is Santorum’s determination that causing some private power plant operators to install the technology required to stay within the new emission limits is more important than the estimated 11,000 premature deaths and 130,000 asthma attacks that will be prevented each and every year as a result lowering the level of mercury in the air."

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• Rick Santorum? Mitt Romney? Why the Iowa Caucuses Don’t Matter – Leslie Marshall (usnews.com) –

  "The bottom line is, I’m not worried. I’m not worried about who wins Iowa and I’m not worried about who is on the GOP platform because at the end of the day, the American people who don’t want their Medicare slashed, who don’t want to go to war with Iran, who don’t want to sit back and let people be slaughtered in places like Libya or Egypt due to isolationism, who are realists about the Middle East and the inevitability of a two state solution and who are studying facts, such as the economy is turning around and the unemployment rate is slowly coming down know there is only one guy for them. And that is the very man who is sitting in the White House, the man who we still count on for hope and change, not some consolation prize.

  Remember the Republicans wanted anyone but Romney, and if Romney is on that platform, they’ll marry a guy they wouldn’t even ask to dance this past year; because they want anyone but Obama. And if they’re among the middle class, they’re cutting off their nose to spite their face, or cutting their own benefits to spite the Democrats."

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• Race, liberty and Ron Paul – 2012 Elections – Salon.com –

  " By equating the Civil Rights Act, which expanded American civil liberty, with the Patriot Act, which reduced it, on the grounds that both are federal laws with sanctions, Ron Paul displays the moral idiocy of someone who declares that a person who pushes a little old lady out of the path of a bus is just as bad as a person who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus, because both are equally guilty of pushing little old ladies around."

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• Robert Creamer: Iowa Results Bad News for GOP –

  "To maximize their odds of reclaiming their hold on the White House, the Republican establishment believes they need two things:

  • To nominate Mitt Romney;
  • To effectively end the Republican nominating process as soon as possible.

  Last night's results from Iowa lower the odds they will get either.

  In fact, what we saw in Iowa last night was the Republican base gagging on the presidential candidate the Republican establishment is trying desperately to cram down their throats. "

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• The Stop Online Piracy Act: Class War in Cyberspace | Truthout –

  "The One Percent and their employees are masters of word play. They turned the estate tax into the "death tax," life-saving health and environmental rules became "job-killing" regulations and, of course, when it comes to taxes, the richest of the rich are now "job creators" who are supposed to be exempt from paying taxes.

  Given this track record, it is hardly surprising that a bill that would require every web site in the country to become unpaid copyright enforcement officers for Time Warner, Disney and The Washington Post comes packaged as the "Stop Online Piracy Act." While the name may lead the public to believe that Congress is trying to keep our email pure and our computer screens safe, the real story is that the One Percent are again trying to rig the rules so that they get as many dollars as possible from the rest of us."

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• Send In the Clueless – NYTimes.com –

  "Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).

  And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.

  So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or to be totally clueless. "

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• The Long Road to Marriage Equality – OtherWords –

  "Won the battle,
  Cheers galore;
  Now we need
  To win the war.

  With the legalization of gay marriage in New York, Iowa, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia, plus other forms of recognition elsewhere, it's easy for straight folks to assume that equality has been won.

  Not so. Discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation still prevails in most of the country."

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for November 30th through December 5th:

• Time for a Wall Street ‘Perp Walk’? | Consortiumnews –

  "Critics of Occupy Wall Street want the movement to grow up, be more focused and “pragmatic” as in engaging in policy debates defined by others. In a specious denunciation of “The Decadent Left,” Russ Douthat, one of the New York Times’ Op-Ed wags, snipes that the “movement was dreamed up in part by flakes, and populated in part by fantasists.”

  To him, being political means moving from the outside to the inside and losing the very qualities that built the Movement. It means not aligning with unions or building coalitions. It means playing the Game.

  In contrast, I believe the Movement has to stay true to itself, while making all of these issues more personal to the American people who are suffering because of Wall Street’s manipulations. The people have to be told who is really responsible for their terrible distress: the loss of jobs, pensions and homes."

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• Political Animal – The nature of GOP tax-cut demands –

  "The political world has come to accept a basic truism: the Republican Party is, above all else, an anti-tax party. GOP officials always want to cut taxes, regardless of merit or circumstances.

  The maxim is incomplete — Republicans love tax cuts, but their affection is limited to cuts for the very wealthy. An extension of the payroll break largely benefits the middle class, and that immediately gives the GOP pause.

  Indeed, the very debate has tied Republicans in knots. They want to cut taxes, except for these taxes. They don’t believe tax cuts should be paid for, except these tax cuts must be paid for. They believe tax breaks always work to benefit the economy, except these tax breaks don’t do much of anything, no matter what economists say. They believe letting tax cuts expire counts as a tax increase, except these tax cuts, which don’t."

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• OWS and Inequality: How “expenditure cascades” are squeezing the American middle class. – Slate Magazine –

  "Republicans have never wanted to talk about inequality, and many Democrats now seem afraid to…

  The remarkable achievement of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been to make continuing silence about inequality politically unacceptable. Some have criticized the movement for not pressing specific demands. Yet most protesters wouldn’t pretend to have a sophisticated understanding of the forces that have been causing growing income disparities, or the policy experience to prescribe what might be done about them. But now that the movement has forced inequality onto the agenda, the time is ripe to focus on these issues."

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• Tomgram: Steve Fraser, "De-Fault Is Ours" | TomDispatch –

  " In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a famous essay, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.”

  His idea was simple: the starving Irish should sell their own children to the rich as food.

  …Inspired in turn by Swift, I want to suggest that we put in motion a similar undertaking: on January 16th, Martin Luther King Day, citizens from around the country should gather at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Let’s call this macabre gathering — with luck and even worse times, it should be mammoth — “We Surrender” or “Restore Debtor’s Prisons” or “De-Fault Is Ours” or “Collateralize Us.” And plan on a mirthful day of mourning.

  The basic idea is that we offer ourselves up, 99% of us anyway, on the altar of high finance as a sacrifice to the bond markets. It was Karl Marx who first observed that high finance is “the Vatican of capitalism.” How right he turned out to be — right with a vengeance! "

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• Political Animal – What Gingrich doesn’t want us to talk about –

  "Over the last three decades, wealth has become increasingly concentrated at the top. The middle class is struggling with stagnant wages and a growing class gap; poverty rates are soaring; the jobs crisis seems never-ending; and a growing number of Americans are suggesting it’s time for a larger conversation about economic inequalities and tax fairness.

  Newt Gingrich believes that conversation must not occur. In fact, the Republican presidential candidate questions the patriotism of those who choose to draw attention to the problem.

  …Even for a candidate who says truly ridiculous things on a daily basis, this is extraordinary."

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• The Sunlight Foundation: Six Banks That Benefited Most From Fed’s Sweetheart Lending Were Big Political Players –

  "On Sunday, Bloomberg News reported on an estimated $13 billion worth of income that banks gained by taking advantage of the Federal Reserve's below-market interest rates, which were sometimes as low as 0.01 percent.

  The six banks that benefited the most from this "subsidy" – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo – reaped a combined $4.8 billion of estimated extra income from the below-market loans.

  It's worth pointing out that all six of these banks were major political players."

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• Supercommittee failure: The surest sign that Republicans killed it is their continued insistence that they didn’t – Slate Magazine –

  "If you think that political leaders can’t link arms and get things done, you haven’t been watching the aftermath of the supercommittee. Sure, the 12-member team of rivals never came up with a deficit-shrinking plan. Its existence cheapened the prefix “super” more than anything since Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. But when the Gang of 12 died, the six Republicans who killed it formed a new pact: They would tell the history of the superfailure and the debt crisis the way it should be remembered. Oh, that embarrassing slapstick collapse? It was the other side’s fault.

  Democrats absorbed the collapse and moved right along. After issuing a statement and giving a punchy press conference, respectively, Sens. Patty Murray and John Kerry basically stopped talking about it. Rep. Jeb Hensarling, co-chairman of the committee, signed off on the statement immediately before the Wall Street Journal published his woe-is-us op-ed."

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• If You Aren’t in the 1%, Kiss Your Dreams Goodbye: An Occupy Wall Street Anatomy of America | Economy | AlterNet –

  "Here’s the financial overview: the top 1% of Americans now take in more than 25% of the nation’s income and control at least 40% of its wealth. (A quarter of a century ago, the figures were 12% and 33%.) To make it into that top 1%, according to economist Emmanuel Saez, your family needs to make a minimum of $368,238 a year (based on 2008 income figures); for the 15,000 families that make up the top .01%, average annual income is $27,342,212.

  In other words, if you aren’t in the top 1% right now, it’s all what is, and never what if — no dreams allowed. "

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• The Enshrined Entitlements of America’s Wealthy » New Deal 2.0 –

  "The super committee on deficit reduction has now disbanded without even having managed to agree on scaling back tax expenditures. These social welfare policies that are hidden in the tax code bestow their greatest benefits on high-income taxpayers, as I have shown elsewhere. They amount to over 7 percent of GDP, more than what we spend on either defense, Social Security, or Medicare and Medicaid combined, not to mention domestic discretionary programs, which cost far less than any of these.

  Its inaction means that regular spending priorities — with the exception of those that policymakers explicitly agreed in advance to shelter — will now be made subject to automatic, draconian cuts. But tax expenditures, which no one has even mentioned, will remain completely immune to such reductions. This is because these policies enjoy a protected status granted to no other entitlement programs. Unlike other forms of direct spending, they are not subject to the annual budget process; they grow undeterred and lawmakers do not take account of their costs."

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• Hilary Rosen: Barney Frank — the Man, the Quips, the Impact –

  "Some of my favorites:

  "Gay people have a different role than other minority groups… Very few black kids have ever had to worry about telling their parents that they were black"

  "They're (congressional opponents) saying that my ability to marry another man somehow jeopardizes heterosexual marriage. Then they go out and cheat on their wives."

  "The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity."

  "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" (in response to a critic at a healthcare town hall meeting)"

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Looking for a new drinking game for the remainder of the Republican debates? (According to the schedule, there’s at least five more to go.) I’ve got one that, even with the remaining candidates, is guaranteed to put you under the table well before the end of the debate: Take a shot every time these guys attack each other and get each other right.

Just please give your car keys to someone who’s not playing this drinking game. According to the rules, you’ll be taking a shot every time the candidates attack each other, because every time they attack each other they get each other exactly right. (more…)

OK. I love old R&B music just as much as president Obama does. I sing along with Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Dionne Warwick all the time — at home, in the car, etc. I get it. I do.

But will somebody on Obama’s campaign staff please tell him to stop singing in public? Mrs. Obama, can you speak to your husband about this? [Via TMP.] (more…)

There are some interesting details about Newt Gingrich’s response to ex-wife Marriane’s explosive revelations.

How Clintonian of him. (more…)

I’ve been having some fun with the Republican presidential candidates lately. It’s funny, how much these guys get right — when they attack each other, that is. But I haven’t had nearly as much fun with a couple of candidates as I could. Until now.

Yes, it’s too easy. Certainly, it’s low-hanging fruit. But this is politics. There’s no such thing as a shot so easy that you shouldn’t take it. So, let’s go there. And let’s start with Newt Gingrich.

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After Newt Gingrich was rewarded with a surge in the polls, for playing the race card during the South Carolina GOP debate, Mitt Romney launched another all out attack on Newt –  this time focusing on Newt’s record as speaker, with an assist from some Republican former members of Congress. But Romney isn’t forgetting his other rivals. He’s unleashed the mother of all robo-call campaigns, and one of the main targets is Rick Santorum. Now that Romney’s narrow victory in Iowa has vanished — transformed into virtual tie, thanks to a 34-point Santorum lead combined with missing precincts and other irregularities — we can probably expect more attacks on Santorum.

The thing is, Romney’s attacks on Santorum are spot on. It’s not about Santorum’s extremism, though there’s more than enough material there. The label that may undermine Santorum with Republican primary voters isn’t “extremist.” It’s “Washington Insider.”

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It if seemed as though Newt Gingrich — veteran of pitched partisan battles, and no-holds-barred ideological cage matches — had been off his game of late, he came roaring back during the GOP debate in South Carolina. After flip-flopping on his attacks on Mitt Romney’s record as a vulture capitalist, Newt went a long way towards making both Republicans elites and the conservative base forget that he made them spend a week struggling with a problem for which they not only have no solutions, but they haven’t even decided is a problem. He may even have convinced some that he’s got what it takes to face off against President Obama in November. He confirmed, yet again, the worst of many Americans’ suspicions about conservatives and about the GOP.

And all he had to do was play the proverbial race card. With that, Newt knew he just might have a winning hand.

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It looks like the old joke about the weather — “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes and it’ll change” — is also true about Newt Gingrich. If you don’t like this Newt Gingrich, wait five minutes and he’ll change. When it comes to his attack on Mitt Romney’s vulture capitalist past, Newt has changed more often than the weather these last few days.

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It looks like attacking Mitt Romney’s Bain resume has become the bane of Newt Gingrich’s campaign. In his latest flip-flop, Newt wants a do-over on his 28-minute Romney attack ad.

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The Romney campaign’s “Bain problem,” which is also now the Republican party’s problem, doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. Sure, Republicans are figuring out that this is not a winning issue for them. Thus they’ve circled their wagons around Romney, and even tried to get Newt to turn it down a couple of notches. Even the funder who gave Newt the money to green-light “When Mitt Romney Came To Down” is having second thoughts.

But never mind all that. The story has now gotten big enough to draw Sarah Palin out of an extended break from her bus tour, to advise Romney to open up the books on his tenure at Bain. (more…)

There’s one Newt Gingrich flip-flop I left out of my previous post about his latest flip-flop, concerning his on-again-off-again-on-again attack on Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist. It’s a big one, and — in typical Newt fashion — he says it really somebody else’s fault. (more…)

It’s starting to look like Newt Gingrich has more in common with Mitt Romney than just a background in vulture capitalism. During the Iowa primaries, Gingrich attacked Romney’s “flip-flops” on a number of issues, but Newt has his own list of “flip-flops.” Yesterday he added another one to the list, when he flipped-flopped on his attack on Romney’s vulture capitalist past — twice in one day.

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Mitt Romney, with a win the New Hampshire primaries under his belt, seems ready to take the GOP presidential nomination in a walk. However, if the last few days are any indication, it’s not going to be a cakewalk. There’s plenty of time for Romney to stumble, and plenty of people can easily trip him up — his opponents, his surrogates, and even the candidate himself.

Romney won the New Hampshire primaries, but some Granite State Republicans were “disappointed,” and some even complained that Romney’s “insincere comments” during his victory speech didn’t do much to “seal the deal.” That’s funny, because it was a very conservative speech according to Michael Tomasky, and one almost tailor-made for the GOP’s base.

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Yesterday, I posted about Newt Gingrich’s scathing — and utterly truthful — attack on Mitt Romney, just in time for the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. Now, Newt is catching heat from conservatives for hitting a front runner none of them seem to like much anyway. But Gingrich is only giving as good as he got when Romney (among others) unloaded on him in Iowa.

Like I wrote yesterday, the biggest benefit of the GOP’s never-ending primary season is that every time one of the remaining candidates attacks another, we rediscover how right these guys are about each other. (It turns out, Newt has his own ties to vulture capitalism.) Newt’s attack on Romney’s record relies heavily on the truth. That’s because Newt learned an important lesson from Romney’s attacks against him in Iowa: The truth hurts.

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One of the benefits of the seemingly endless Republican primaries, aside from the entertainment value, is the opportunity to discover how right the candidates are … about each other. With the Iowa primary and its game-changing outcome behind them, and even-higher-stakes in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries ahead of them, the remaining candidates have intensified their attacks on one another. What’s more striking than the intensity of the candidates’ obligatory attacks, however, is the accuracy of their worst accusations against one another.

The most recent, and perhaps most striking example, is Newt Gingrich’s latest attack on Mitt Romney.

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Back in 2009, I asked “What’s Wrong With Wall Street?”, and then spent three posts answering that question.

In my daily perusal of economic news, I have found myself more than once staring my computer monitor in open-mouthed wonder, occasionally exclaiming, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” or “What’s wrong with these people?”,or something like that. To do what they’ve been doing, you’d either have to not be paying attention to what’s going on or just not care.

In their case, it’s a little of both. And it’s diagnosable, if not treatable.

How else do you explain the utterly mystifying payment of $18.4 billion in bonuses to some 80% of Wall Street employees including employees of firms being bailed out by taxpayers, who are due to shell out another $350 billion? And even as Americans are losing their jobs and their homes, in the midst of a financial crisis largely brought on by the financial sectors arcane shenanigans?

I even offered my own diagnosis as an armchair shrink.

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