Friday, October 11, 2013

Speed Blogging, October 11, 2013. On Mansplaining, Stock Market Shenanigans, How To Deal With Extortionists and Boobs in Politics


A wonderful sermon, this one:

“You know, there are those of us in this society who have told women that there’s a war on them because that cute little baby inside of them, they may want to get rid of it and there are people that are keeping you from doing that,” Carson continued. “And women say, ‘No, no, they’re not doing that to me! No!’ And they get all riled up.”
He added there was obviously not a “war on women” because men give up their seats to pregnant women.
“There is no war on them, the war is on their babies,” Carson insisted. “Babies that cannot defend themselves. Over the past few decades, we have destroyed 55 million of them. And we have the nerve to call other societies of the past heathen.”
“What we need to do is re-educate the women to understand that they are the defenders of these babies.”
The term "mansplaining" * was invented because of statements like this one.  Well, it's not just "mansplaining," in the sense of assuming that one's audience knows nothing and must be schooled, but something even more revealing because Carson himself appears not to have spent any time thinking about the issues at all.  He's waging a war on behalf of the egg-Americans and has blinders on about everything else having to do with women as people.

This is an interesting story about the possible effect of power in the regulation of stock markets:


In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.


Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.
That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.
Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.

  I have no further information on the particular case, but it is certainly true that the overseers were not allowed to do any overseeing for many years.

And here Michael Kinsley argues that the best way to solve the government shutdown by the Tea Party conservatives is for Obama to cave in:

President Obama should give in.

...

He should speak to the nation and say,
...
“The sad truth is that if you don’t care about any of that, it gives you tremendous power over those who do. Perhaps unfortunately, I do care. And I believe the stakes are too high to let this become a testosterone contest. So I have sent a letter to Speaker Bohner, saying that I will agree to a year’s postponement of the Affordable Care Act, if he will agree to a rise in the debt limit that is at least big enough to spare us another episode like this for a year.

What to say about that, eh?  The way to deal with extortion is by giving in to it, I guess.  Or rather, the Tea Party wants to kill the Affordable Care Act, and delaying it by a year gives them more time to kill it.  That is the reason for the government shutdown, as I have mentioned before.   So they should get what they are aiming at, never mind the precedents and never mind the fact that this is redoing elections by other means and so on.  Indeed, democracy itself is unimportant here.

Finally, a piece which elicits no comments from me that could be publicly posted.  It's about boobs and politicians.  You decide what or who the boobs are.
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*Others can act this way, too.