Etch-A-Sketch Quote Of The Day

“I’m not familiar precisely with what I said, but I’ll stand by what I said, whatever it was.” -- Mitt Romney

Quote Of The Day

"And so, Obama has finally finished evolving on same-sex marriage.  And about time! I, for one, never understood the point of saying you were 'evolving' when many of the voters you were pandering to don’t even believe in evolution."
-- Frank Rich

Quote Of The Day

"Today, the struggle continues to celebrate May Day not as a "law day" as defined by political leaders, but as a day whose meaning is decided by the people, a day rooted in organizing and working for a better future for the whole of society."

-- Noam Chomsky, Zuccotti Park Press

Quotes Of The Day

“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” --  Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes

“We may have a democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” -- Justice Louis Brandeis

"In fact, the 'Buffett Tax' hike touted by President Obama has been called everything from a 'sham' to a 'hoax' to 'total gimmickry.'"  -- House Speaker John Boehner

Quote Of The Day

"You know, I feel like, one, trying to become a knuckleballer and work on something new and deconstructing what I once knew as a conventional pitcher and trying to relearn a mechanic, that helped me be a better human being. Going through counseling and trying to live in the moment well helped me be a better knuckleballer."

R.A. Dickey on Fresh Air, discussing his memoir "Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball."

Quote Of The Day

“I wish they weren’t called the Bush tax cuts. If they’re called some other body’s tax cuts, they’re probably less likely to be raised.” 

George W. Bush,  Bush Institute Conference on Taxes and Economic Growth

"So there you have it," as Hunter at Daily Kos puts it:  "Bush finally expresses some remorse for something, but it turns out it's not over his stupid tax cuts wrecking the budget, ballooning the deficit, and generally prepping America for it's uncomfortable handbasket ride to the netherworld. No, it's because the Bush family name sucks so bad (for some unknown reason that he cannot possibly fathom) that things associated with it are less popular than they really ought to be."

Quote Of The Day

"The "Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act" (in addition to everything else, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market."

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, Why Obama's JOBS Act Couldn't Suck Worse

Here's more:

In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.

Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) to attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market.

The law also rolls back rules designed to prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business, a practice that was so pervasive in the tech-boom years as to be almost industry standard.

Even worse, the JOBS Act, incredibly, will allow executives to give "pre-prospectus" presentations to investors using PowerPoint and other tools in which they will not be held liable for misrepresentations. These firms will still be obligated to submit prospectuses before their IPOs, and they'll still be held liable for what's in those. But it'll be up to the investor to check and make sure that the prospectus matches the "pre-presentation."

The JOBS Act also loosens a whole range of other reporting requirements, and expands stock investment beyond "accredited investors," giving official sanction to the internet-based fundraising activity known as "crowdfunding."

But the big one, to me, is the bit about exempting firms from real independent tests of internal controls for five years.

And more:

There's just no benefit that the JOBS Act brings to an honest startup company. In fact, it puts an honest company at a severe disadvantage, because now it has to compete against other, less scrupulous companies that can simply make their projections up on the backs of envelopes.

Quotes Of The Day

"For me, the most compelling reason to reject the death penalty is to set ourselves on the path to the kind of society we really want for our future.  I want something better for our future.  We cannot confront darkness with darkness and expect light." 

Connecticut State Senator Gayle Slossberg (D-Miford)

"Today is a dramatic and potentially historic day because the Senate has ... an opportunity to correct the arbitrariness, the discrimination, the random haphazard approach to the application of our death penalty in this state.''

Connecticut State Senator Eric Coleman (D-Bloomfield)

“I cannot stand the thought of being responsible for somebody being falsely accused and facing the death penalty. For me, this is a moral issue and realizing that mistakes are obviously made.”

Connecticut State Senator Edith Prague (D-Columbia)

Quote Of The Day

"You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."

Jim Bouton

Quote Of The Day

"This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern American history."

Maureen Dowd, Men In Black 

Quote Of The Day

“Ultimately I’m confident the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.  And I just remind conservative commentators that for years, what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. An unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I’m pretty confident this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

President Barack Obama, Rose Garden press conference

Quote Of The Day

"The limit is the Constitution." 

Akhil Reed Amar, from Ezra Klein's Wonkblog

Amar, a Yale law professor, goes on to say:  "The most important limit, the one we fought the Revolutionary War for, is that the people doing this to you are the people you elect. That’s the main check. The broccoli argument is like something they said when we were debating the income tax: If they can tax me, they can tax me at 100 percent! And yes, they can. But they won’t. Because you could vote them out of office. They have the power to do all sorts of ridiculous things that they won’t do because you’d vote them out of office."

Quote Of The Day

In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I 

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

Quote Of The Day

"The frictionlessness and invisibility of modern warfare for the American public represents a drift off the course set for us by the Constitution. It has made wars easier to start but, perhaps more important for us now, has also made them harder to stop. It has almost normalized the condition of America being at war. But even an inured public has a limit, and maybe 4,000 days is it."

Rachel Maddow, 4,000 Days of War in Afghanistan

Quote Of The Day

"Thanks to [Paul] Ryan, we now know that this election is not about deficits at all. It is about whether we will respond to growing inequalities of wealth and income by creating even larger inequalities of wealth and income."

E.J. Dionne, The Right's Etch-A-Sketch Imperative

Quote Of The Day

"[A]ll this emphasis on clothing as a motive for murder is just a smokescreen for sidestepping the real issue, which is that bigots shouldn’t be allowed to have hand guns."

Juan Cole, Basic Facts on Clothing and Murder for American Bigots.

Cole continues:  "In fact, since you can’t hunt deer with a hand gun and most owners of a hand gun are not reservists in the National Guard of their state, it is unclear why the US tolerates so many hand guns. In countries like Britain, which do not, the murder rate by gun is vanishingly small compared to the annual carnage in the US."

Quote Of The Day

"Letterman landed a new dog joke just this week. (“It was such a beautiful day today, Mitt Romney was riding on the roof of his car.”) Comedy is the only business we can be certain that a Romney presidency would grow."

Frank Rich, New York Magazine, Why Romney Is So Ripe For Parody

Quote Of The Day

"America has always been the kind of place where people can reinvent themselves, escaping from their pasts by turning the knobs on their own virtual Etch-A-Sketch identities. But the ubiquity of video technology has made this much, much harder to do. Videos have a way of reminding everyone who you are — and were."

Robert Reich

Quotes Of The Day

The Trayvon Martin case "is obviously about race, and is important on those grounds. Race relations are after all the original and ongoing tension in U.S. history. But it is also about self-government, rule of law, equality before the law, accountability of power, and every other value that we contend is integral to the American ideal." James Fallows, The Atlantic

"I just want to echo this sentiment and expand on it a bit. The approach here is not 'either it's about race or it isn't.'  It's 'this is about race along with. . .'  . . . Moreover, it's worth understanding that this movement toward an absurdly low threshold for self-defense claims is a national one, which is making headway in states where very few black people live. As is often the case, black people bear a spectacular burden for bad public policy. But the burden is never solely--and rarely even mostly--born by black people."

Ta Na-Hesi Coates, The Atlantic

Quote Of The Day

"There is, quite obviously, a desperate need to believe that when an American engages in acts of violence of this type (meaning: as a deviation from formal American policy), there must be some underlying mental or emotional cause that makes it sensible, something other than an act of pure hatred or Evil. When a Muslim engages in acts of violence against Americans, there is an equally desperate need to believe the opposite: that this is yet another manifestation of inscrutable hatred and Evil, and any discussion of any other causes must be prohibited and ignored."

Glenn Greenwald, Discussing the Motives of the Afghan Shooter