Despite the fact that taxes are at their lowest levels in 60 years (in large part due to the stimulus bill he signed into law), thousands of old white people gathered around the country to sing out against the communist usurper, Barack Obama.

Having been warned ahead of time by organizers not to show any signs of racism and/or homophobia, teabaggers kept it classy.

Thank God for small favors.

Tonight's rescue brought to you by Got a Grip, mem from somerville, shayera, vcmvo2, watercarrier4diogenes, and YatPundit, with srkp23 editing.

• mark louis recounts the bizarre adventures of the corpse of one of this nation's most beloved presidents in The long, strange odyssey of Abraham Lincoln's body. (Got a Grip)
• leftyparent offers My Kudos to Community College, a paean to a primary steppingstone out of poverty for many Americans. (watercarrier4diogenes)
• erictmacknight thinks we should hail intellectuals and teachers more than we do celebrities as part of How to fix America's schools. (mem from somerville, PhD)
• wheatdogg communicates cross-culturally with a fascinating view into ESL in China with [Teachers' Lounge] Teaching the little ones. (mem from somerville)
• Josh Stearns opines that Making Media Local Again will be even more necessary as our "traditional media" (™Kos) continues its slide into irrelevance. (watercarrier4diogenes)
• whoknu wonders about their "Day without Hate" Is this why Westboro & the Phelps decide to visit? (shayera)
• Daveparts wonders if we need something stronger than Tea to extract some truth in The Alcohol Party. (mem from somerville)
• citizen k delves into the ineptitude of money managers on both side of the pond in The other sides of the Goldman-Sachs scandal: bankers worse than mafia. (Got a Grip)
• hiphoplawyers reports about the mirage of financial transparency in Hudson Castle: How Lehman Brothers hid risk in their "alter ego". (vcmvo2)

jotter serves up High Impact Diaries: April 16, 2010.

carolita brings Top Comments 4-17-10 – Patriotic Games Edition.

Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this open thread.

Could a little-known city councilman score an upset and flip a Senate seat to the Dems? Rasmussen thinks so, if the GOP nominee is conservative insurgent J.D. Hayworth. Don't worry, though, the Ras-ster returns to form elsewhere.

Also, you'll be surprised by the incumbent Senator who got outraised by his challenger this quarter, and one other incumbent Senator is fighting a pollster, which is rarely a good idea. All this and more, in the weekend edition of the Wrap.

THE U.S. SENATE

GA-Sen: Good News for Dems As They Get Solid Challenger for Isakson
In what sure looks to be a challenging year for Democrats, they are still managing to land some solid recruits to go after Republican incumbents. The latest example is in Georgia, where state labor commissioner Michael Thurmond is going to announce next week that he will challenge freshman Republican Senator Johnny Isakson. Thurmond gives Democrats a statewide elected official in the race, albeit one that will have to overcome fairly low name recognition, if a recent Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll in the state is any indication.

IA-Sen: Conlin Narrowly Outraises Grassley In Hawkeye State
This will come as a bit of a surprise to a lot of folks, and is a particularly pleasant one in a time when good news for Democrats in electoral politics is a touch hard to come by. Leading Democratic challenger Roxanne Conlin actually beat Charles Grassley in the money chase in the 1st quarter. Conlin raised $ 629K, which edged out Grassley, who reported $ 613K for the quarter. Grassley, as a long-time incumbent, still retains one structural advantage to be expected: he has a five-to-one cash on hand edge over the challenger.

KY-Sen: Bunning-McConnell Feud Comes to 2010 Senate Race
Was this week's surprising endorsement of insurgent candidate Rand Paul by outgoing Republican Senator Jim Bunning a shot at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell? Reid Wilson at the National Journal thinks so, and he brings some pretty compelling evidence. For example, Bunning's claim that Paul's primary rival, Trey Grayson, was insufficiently conservative is somewhat rebutted by the fact that it was Bunning who encouraged Grayson to get into the race after his retirement. The sudden animus, therefore, could be more properly directed at McConnell, who earned Bunning's unyielding animosity for very overtly encouraging the retirement of his Senate mate.

The endorsement was a brutal slap at Grayson, who loses a key argument for his primary. Grayson had been making excellent hay out of the argument that Paul was endeavoring to be a national political figure, and had no real support in-state.

NV-Sen: Reid Fights The Polls (...and the Polls Won)
Apparently, the campaign of Senator Harry Reid forgot the maxim about not getting into fights with people who buy their ink by the barrel, because this one is just brutal to witness. You might recall that on Monday's edition of the Wrap, we noted a new Mason Dixon poll, taken for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, had Reid trailing leading Republican Sue Lowden by high single digits. The Reid campaign pounced on the poll, dismissing its findings on the logic that the poll did not list all of the available options listed to voters in the Fall, including the state's famous "None of the Above" option.

Inspired by the critique of the Reid campaign, Mason Dixon and the LVRJ simply...released another poll. With all of the options. Showing Reid losing this time by ten points (47-37). That led team Reid to criticize this poll as invalid, as well, saying that it was not of likely voters. The Reid campaign argued likely voter screens were particularly important in Nevada, a state they claim has chronically low voter turnout.

Not only did the newspaper dispute the charge, they were joined by Pollster writer Charles Franklin, who pointed out that random-digit dialing of registered voters is a perfectly valid polling method.

In other Nevada Senate news, Tea Party candidate Scott Ashjian, despite his mountain of legal woes, got one piece of good legal news this week. A Nevada State Court ruled that he could remain on the ballot, after his candidacy was challenged by a conservative lawsuit which stated that he could not stay on the ballot because he was still a registered Republican when he ran under the Tea Party banner.

NY-Sen: Schumer Might Finally Draw a Candidate
In a week where the GOP lost their top candidate to take on Kirsten Gillibrand in New York, they might have found a candidate to take on the other U.S. Senator in New York up for election this year: Chuck Schumer. The candidate is Nassau County Comptroller George Maragos. Maragos is a political newcomer of sorts, he has only served as county comptroller for about four months. Schumer is heavily favored to be re-elected to his third term in the Senate.

THE U.S. HOUSE

PA-12: Dems Get Serious About Holding Murtha Seat in Special Elex
Pulling together what the National Journal's Reid Wilson referred to as a "wartime budget", the DCCC has reserved almost a million bucks in ad time between now and the May 18th special election in southwestern Pennsylvania to replace the late John Murtha. The first ad hits Republican Tim Burns on favoring a national sales tax, saying that it will raise the costs on food, gas, and medicine. Burns squares off against Democrat Mark Critz in the election. The GOP released an internal poll last week showing Burns up narrowly.

THE GUBERNATORIAL RACES

NH-Gov: Democratic Incumbent Announces Bid for 4th Term
This will come as a surprise to virtually no one, but Democratic Governor John Lynch announced that he will be seeking a fourth term as Governor of New Hampshire. Lynch was first elected in 2004 (NH Governors serve two-year terms) by defeating then-incumbent Republican Craig Benson. His main challenger this time around is likely to be Republican John Stephen. A recent Rasmussen poll had Lynch, routinely re-elected by huge margins, leading Stephen by double-digits, though below the 50% threshold.

OR-Gov: Great Moments in Debating, With John Kitzhaber
This sounds like something that only happens in really overproduced television political dramas, but it actually occurred Wednesday night at a Democratic gubernatorial debate. In the midst of a student-run debate at the University of Oregon between candidates John Kitzhaber and Bill Bradbury, someone in the audience screamed for a doctor for an elderly man having a seizure. Kitzhaber, who was an ER doctor before his foray into politics, left the stage and administered first aid to the man until paramedics arrived. After a twenty-minute delay, the debate resumed. Bradbury, to his credit, was fulsome in his praise for Kitzhaber's handling of the incident, as well as his ability to resume debating after dealing with such an event. A raw video of the event is available here.

THE RAS-A-PALOOZA

Ras stays out West to close out the week, hitting three states in the Intermountain West: Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. Could Rodney Glassman pull off the upset of 2010 if J.D. Hayworth finds a way to knock off John McCain? Ras has it closer than you might think. Other than that, this edition of the Ras-A-Palooza is just Ras being Ras.

AZ-Gov (R): Gov. Jan Brewer 26%, Buz Mills 18%, John Munger 14%, Dean Martin (R) 12%
AZ-Sen (R): Sen. John McCain 47%, J.D. Hayworth 42%
AZ-Sen: Sen. John McCain (R) 54%, Rodney Glassman (D) 32%
AZ-Sen: J.D. Hayworth (R) 48%, Rodney Glassman (D) 39%
CO-Gov: Scott McInnis (R) 48%, John Hickenlooper (D) 42%
UT-Gov: Gov. Gary Herbert (R) 57%, Peter Corroon (D) 29%
UT-Sen (R): Sen. Robert Bennett 37%, Tim Bridgewater 14%, Mike Lee 14%, Merrill Cook 6%, Cherilyn Eagar 4%

No one could have anticipated this:

... tea-partiers are disproportionately attached to, and perhaps influenced by, FOX News. And they are particularly enamored of Glenn Beck. Nationally, just 18 percent of people have a favorable opinion of Beck (the majority have no opinion whatsoever about him). But most tea-partiers do. Do the math, and you'll find that 59 percent of those who do think highly of Beck consider themselves a part of the tea-party. This is, in fact, the single biggest differentiator of any of the items that the NYT asked about: not ideology, not any particular political belief, but whom they watch on television.

And what are they listening to day after day?

Which must be why Michele Bachmann (LUNATIC-MN) describes teabaggers as the “happiest people you would ever want to meet.”

This week, the Dartmouth College Democrats hosted Katrina Swett and Ann McLane Kuster in events just days apart. Each candidate was asked a similar question. Their answers are telling.

There was Orange to Blue candidate Kuster:

In an interview with The Dartmouth, Kuster said that her progressive record — including her committed pro-choice stance, opposition to troop increases in Afghanistan and opposition to nuclear energy — distinguishes her from her opponents in the primary.

And there was Lieberdem Swett:

When asked by a student what distinguished her from the other candidates in the race, Swett said that she viewed herself as the most practical, non-ideological candidate for the Democratic nomination.

“I believe I am the most electable,” she said.

Swett, of course, has never stopped touting her electability since her 2002 loss to Charlie Bass.

That's their own words: It's a choice between Kuster, who is distinguished by her progressive record, and Swett, who believes she is electable because she is non-ideological.

Ann McLane Kuster for Congress
Contribute to Ann McLane Kuster

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ….

• Dante Atkins will discuss the importance of younger voters to the Democratic cause and how the Party can better reach this crucial demographic.
• Is health reform driving doctors out of business and to refuse patients, or  might that simply be part of ongoing change coming to the practice of  medicine?  DemFromCT will review the “new normal” landscape from a doctor’s perspective.
• What liberal media? Meteor Blades will take a look at the Sunday talk shows, triggering his gag reflex.
• AdamB will review Rob Witwer's and Adam Schrager's The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care).
• Devilstower looks into the abyss of the libertarian "golden age," and doesn't like what's looking back.
• Against the background of the past few weeks of non-stop nuclear weapons news, Page van der Linden will strongly caution those who want to forget Cold War history, and those who want to revise it and view its key players through rose-colored lenses. She will focus on a particular book that she thinks everyone should read, because the ripple effect from past mistakes is still influencing us today.
• Hunter will have a few words of well-deserved praise for John McCain.

Before heading into the election digest this week (and sending you off to take the poll), I'd like to highlight some commentary from three progressive state blogs that offer cleverness, analysis, originality or all three.

Michael Hurta writes Burnt Orange from Texas:

I'm not the biggest fan of the University of Texas' Student Government, but I do enjoy my campus's tradition for joke candidates and campaigns.  Last year, Zak Kinnaird insisted he deserved the student body presidency because he looked good in a suit.  A handful of students voted for him, but no one thought he was truly ready to run student government.

It was a joke, and it was funny.  A guy named Liam O'Rourke was elected student body president and everyone moved on.  We laughed safely because student government only slightly affected our lives.  But for a real government leader, one in a position that significantly affects my life, to put on a suit and expect us to think good of him?

Oh wait.  We have Rick Perry.  Bill White succeeded to make education a priority in the 2010 election talk, because that's part of what state government does.  In response, Governor Rick Perry just puts on a suit.  He's just disguising himself and looking good.

Michael Shay at hummingbirdminds in Wyoming:

This is old news now, but Bill Ayers is coming to speak at the University of Wyoming in Laramie on April 28. This convoluted story gets more interesting all the time. Suffice to say that it took free-speech advocate Meg Lanker a few weeks to get Ayers to Laramie. He won't be speaking on campus -- that's been ruled out by the administration. But he will be speaking somewhere in Laramie.

Empathetic Republicans are always so concerned that anger may be escalated. That's only when it comes to speeches by Liberals. Who cares when Tea Party activists threaten bodily harm against elected officials? ...

And when did Wyomingites turn into such weinies? Intimidated by a little ol' leftist? People in Laramie scared? What would The Virginian say to that?

TheGreenMiles writes at Blue Virginia:

Last month, I asked "Is there anything State Sen. Robert Hurt (R-Chatham) won't do for his donors at [American Electric Power subsidiary] Appalachian Power?" Today, we're learning more about what's in it for Hurt as he tries to win the GOP nomination to challenge Rep. Tom Perriello (D-5th).

Hurt's shilling came into the spotlight as he made outlandish excuses to defend Appalachian Power's massive rate hike in December. When 5th district voters expressed outrage at the huge price spike in the middle of a recession, Hurt claimed Appalachian Power had no choice but to raise rates because of carbon pollution regulations. Just one problem -- those regulations don't actually exist yet.

Take the poll, then find some candidate diaries to read from last week's crop.

Oh, terrific.

Women with a hyphenated last name or their husband's surname are judged as being more traditionally feminine, according to a new study. More specifically, surname-changers are seen as more dependent, less intelligent and less ambitious -- a triple threat of perhaps the most unflattering of female stereotypes.

And you know what that means.

When participants were asked to evaluate hypothetical women as job candidates, "these judgments affected the chance that a woman would be hired as well as the estimation of her salary: compared to a woman who kept her own name, she was less likely to be hired and her salary was estimated considerably lower" -- $1,172.36 lower, to be exact.

Okay, so women shouldn't change their names when they marry. Right?

About 70% of Americans agree, either somewhat or strongly, that it's beneficial for women to take her husband's last name when they marry, while 29% say it's better for women to keep their own names, finds a study being presented today at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco.

Oh, and it gets better.

Hamilton says that about half of respondents went so far as to say that the government should mandate women to change their names when they marry, a finding she called "really interesting," considering typical attitudes towards government intervention. "Americans tend to be very cautious when it comes to state intervention in family life," she says.

So women should change their names when they marry -- heck, maybe the government should even make it mandatory -- but then they'll be perceived as dependent and less ambitious. And less intelligent. And they'll be paid less. But hey, it's all for the good of The Family, so suck it up, ladies.

Who needs to be independent, fairly paid, and intelligent anyway?

• Dan Savage thinks teh gays should reward Iowa for that whole equal marriage thing.

  Des Moines—where I was once briefly incarcerated—is an interesting city with corn-fed gay boys (and a couple of actual gay bars) and tons of straight people who are thrilled when people drop by in between the Iowa caucuses. If teh gays got together and booked a block of rooms in a hotel in Des Moines on a Thursday night and bought out the Hotel Pattee for the rest of the weekend, I'd fly in—instead of over—for that.

• Backwards B, Part II.
• Closeted Out anti-gay crusader State Senator Roy Ashburn sentenced to 48 hours in jail and three years of probation for driving under the influence. But perhaps the bigger punishment is this Facebook group: 1,000,000 Gay Men and Allies Against Roy Ashburn Having Sex Ever Again.
• Shocker: Newt Gingrich was wrong.
• More evidence that mainstream organizations charged with protecting reproductive rights have utterly failed with the post-Roe generation.

  A survey of 700 young Americans showed there was a stark "intensity gap" on abortion. More than half (51 percent) of young voters (under 30) who opposed abortion rights considered it a "very important" voting issue, compared with just 26 percent of abortion-rights supporters; a similar but smaller gap existed among older voters, too. Worse still for NARAL, the millennials surveyed didn't view abortion as an imperiled right in need of defenders. As one young mother in a focus group told NARAL, it seemed to her that abortion was easily accessible. How did she know? The parking lot at her local clinic, she told them, was always full.

• Celebrity sex tapes are ruining traditional porn.
• Redemption for those of us who damn well know Han shot first.

Last week's best of Q1 was a tight vote:

Per the rules, the top-two vote getters would move on to the end-of-year competition. But out of nearly 6,000 votes cast, only eight votes separated the #2 and #3 emails. So for now, I'll consider the "whore" email a potential wild-card entrant in the end-of-year contest.

For those of you who want a walk down memory lane, or if you missed it the first time around, here's the best of 2009 edition. That was the year of the socialist fuckstick.

One more housekeeping note: This week marks the ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY of Saturday Hate Mail-a-palooza. Here's the first edition. Time flies when we're having fun, huh?

In 1776, as things were getting a little busy in the soon-to-be United States, a former philosophy professor in the progressive city of Edinburg was publishing a book on economics.  An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was an immediate hit.  Not only did Smith give a systematic explanation for the rise and fall of salaries and prices, he explained how an open marketplace could enrich both buyer and seller. Overnight he became the patron saint of the "free market" (and the most misquoted man in history).

The basic assumption that Smith makes: that the market will be constrained to behave well because good behavior benefits all participants, might as well have been carved in stone. In fact, for many people it's the basis of the One Commandment: keep thy smelly regulating hands off my market.

But, smart as Smith was (and he was a terribly bright fellow), here's a bet -- he didn't see this one coming.

Earlier this week, the government filed charges against Goldman Sachs. The exact details of what Goldman did that's against the law are a little hard to pick out of most media reports. Basically, the accusation is that they misled investors by not letting them know that they, or firms they had partnered with, were betting against the same investment vehicles that Goldman was pushing.

What's more interesting is what Goldman was doing that may not be illegal. Goldman was involved in what's become known as the Magnetar Trade.

Magnetar is a hedge fund that moved into the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) market at the end of 2005, just as everyone thought the market was about to collapse.  The way these instruments are structured is a bit like a multi-layer Tootsie Pop, with a really nasty core. That innermost layer -- the "equity tranche" -- is the riskiest part of an already risky package. Putting together a CDO is difficult unless you can find someone to buy that ugly little chunk.

For investors looking at the fading CDO market, it was Magnetar to the rescue. Magnetar swooped in and announced that they would buy the equity tranche of CDOs, and they didn't seem to be scared off by the low ratings of some of the CDOs they were buying into. Pretty soon, Magnetar's willingness to bottom feed wasn't just powering existing CDOs, it was causing new instruments to be generated. In fact, Magnetar began to order up new CDOs on demand, delivering to bankers specifications for how bad they wanted the loans involved to be. What they wanted were assets so risky that some bankers refused to sell what they wanted. If someone tried to slip good loans into one of the packages, Magnetar refused to buy. Around the industry, other analysts and hedge fund managers looked at Magnetar and snickered.

No matter what happened in the market, there seemed to be no way for Magnetar to avoid getting pasted. But everyone was relieved to have Magnetar there, because just by buying those equity bits, the CDO market wasn't just sustained, it actually grew. A lot.

It took awhile before everyone got the joke.

What Magnetar was actually doing was playing two of the markets most convoluted instruments against each other. Not only were they buying CDOs, they were buying credit default swaps. Default swaps started off as ways for investors to protect their investments, but by the time Magnetar entered the market, default swaps had become vehicles independent of original obligations. You could get someone to sell you a default swap on someone else's debt. In essence, you were insuring a loan you didn't make, and getting paid off if it failed.  And that's just what Magnetar did. They took out default swaps not on the little equity tranche that they had bought, but on the larger layers built on top of that purchase. Those other layers could be ten times, or a hundred times Magnetar's original investment. Imagine that Magnetar was building foundations, putting in the specifications that only the weakest concrete and shoddiest construction could be used, then taking an insurance policy on the whole skyscraper built on that foundation.

What Magnetar was doing was shocking. They had found a way to game the system and profit by constructing instruments literally built to fail. You'd think that would have stopped anyone from dealing with them. Maybe even send up some warning flags. Certainly you'd think that the banks involved would put out a warning to investors.

That's not what happened. Instead, a dozen other hedge funds got into the act, including Paulson & Co., the fund that's directly involved in the charges against Goldman. And none of these guys had any trouble finding banks to create the CDOs. Hell, Goldman was not only selling these instruments, they were buying the CDOs themselves, even knowing that these things were ticking time bombs.

Goldman certainly wasn't alone.  Merrill Lynch was doing the same thing.

Cooperatieve Centrale Raiffeisen-Boerenleenbank BA, known as Rabobank, claims Merrill, now a unit of Bank of America Corp., failed to tell it a key fact in advising on a synthetic collateralized debt obligation. Omitted was Merrill’s relationship with another client betting against the investment, which resulted in a loss of $45 million, Rabobank claims.

Who was that "other client" of Merrill? Magnetar.

But why would they do this? Why would banks destroy their relationships with long term customers by selling them instruments they knew to be heading for the Dumpster? Why in holy hell would the banks swallow this poison themselves? This is where Dr. Smith's two hundred year old perscription falls short. A rational bank wouldn't do these things. But a rational banker would. Why? Because the bonus structure at these banks rewarded bankers not for scoring profits for their customers, but for just setting up the deal. Individual bankers were pocketing a percentage of each CDO. Sell a hundred million, pocket two million. Sell a billion, pocket twenty. Unlike the customers they were selling to, the bankers made their money as soon as the deal closed, so they didn't have to be concerned about the ultimate outcome.

So the hedge funds and the individual bankers collaborated in destroying the banks and robbing their customers. In the process, they got very, very rich. If you can get payouts large enough, quickly enough, you can be sitting at your upstate mansion long before anyone realizes they've been screwed.

How big this market became isn't quite clear yet, but Goldman appears to be the tip of a very large, very dirty iceberg.

My sincere gratitude to  Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein at ProPublica and economics blogger Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism who brought the Magnetar trade story to light. Without their work, a group of Wall Street insiders would be the only ones who understood that the cause of the recent collapse wasn't idiocy, it was malfeasance. I realize that this year's Pulitzers have just been handed out, but the committee could do a lot worse than penciling these folks in for 2010.

Update [2010-4-17 13:24:1 by Devilstower]: This American Life audio story of the Magentar Trade, based on the ProPublica article with Alex Blumberg from Planet Money.

As most of you are aware, another tea party tax rally was held Wednesday in Washington D.C., where outraged Americans gathered, apparently to protest the fact that their taxes are the lowest they've been in 60 years ... but never mind that, because they're outraged.

Of course we're all familiar with tea party protester's embrace of teabonics, their oft-times blatant racism, and of course their reliance on Fox-fueled misinformation. So instead of rehashing the lunacy from the crowd, let's focus on how the protest was reported by two news organizations ... one from Politico's Ken Vogel, and the other from CBS News' Brian Montopoli ...  and see what a reader would have learned and what message they would take away from the event.

From Vogel, one would learn that a spokeswoman from the Tea Party Express thought that rallies were great but that, "if we truly want to affect change, we are going to have to get involved in the election process," and that:

... speakers at the midday Washington rally, including several Republican members of Congress, proclaimed that the tea party movement had already reordered the political landscape.

... followed by several paragraphs about "infiltrators" trying to destroy the movement, about organizers condemning "reports of slurs and threats of violence against Democratic members of Congress," and a quote from a protester:

I’ve been to five rallies and I haven’t seen any of that.

... then a couple of more paragraphs about infiltrators, the assertion that there were "few if any edgy sentiments – from infiltrators or otherwise – on tee-shirts or signs at Thursday’s midday rally," and concluded with its one and only quote from a speaker -- Michele Bachmann (R-MN):

" I say it's time for these little piggies to go home," she exhorted the crowd, urging them to help conservatives being targeted for defeat – including her. “We need to have your help for candidates like me. We need you to take out some of these bad guys."

All in all, it sounded like a lovely event, suitable for the whole family ... now let's look at Mr. Montopoli's account:

Clutching angry signs and occasionally breaking out into chants of "USA! USA!," the protesters listened to a series of fiery speeches attacking the Obama administration for what they cast as irresponsible spending and far left wing policies.

Rep. Michele Bachmann said the "gangster government" has instituted a "takeover of one private industry after another," again making her questionable claim that "the federal government owns or controls 51 percent of the private economy."   [...]

She said the Obama administration is "perfectly content with presiding over a decline in our economy," adding: "I'd say it's time for these little piggies to go home, and come November that's where they're headed."

Well, that sounds a little different, doesn't it? But that was probably just one speaker:

Earlier in the rally, former Saturday Night Live cast member Victoria Jackson played a ukulele and sang a song claiming "there's a communist living in the White House." Part of her evidence for that claim, she said, was that both of the president's parents were communists before they "abandoned him."

Okay, that was quite vicious, but at least, as Mr. Vogel reported, there were "few if any edgy sentiments" on display:

On the more extreme end was a man dressed in tar and feathers and an Obama joker mask. There was also a large bus circling the rally with "kill the bill" written on it and photos of aborted babies and grim reapers.

The Associated Press documented some of the signs being waved: "We Want Regime Change," "Save a Seal, Club a Liberal," "Down with the Gov't Takeover," "End the Fed" and "Waterboard Bernanke."

Amazing, isn't it? It's hard to believe that those two stories were about the same event ... brings to mind the expression, "consider the source," doesn't it?

And for more positive, upbeat coverage of the tea party protest, be sure to check out Vogel's follow-up story on infiltrators, or this hard-hitting news story about Michele "gangster government" Bachmann's assertion that tea party protesters are the “happiest people you would ever want to meet.”

There were many causes of the turmoil that ripped through our economy over the past two years.  But above all, this crisis was caused by failures in the financial industry.  What is clear is that this crisis could have been avoided if Wall Street firms were more accountable, if financial dealings were more transparent, and if consumers and shareholders were given more information and authority to make decisions.

In remarks peppered with pointed specifics, from blaming AIG to quoting Warren Buffett, President Obama this morning ripped into Wall Street in a bid to garner additional support for financial reform measures on deck in Congress. And in response to the Republicans' constant lies of the past week regarding the proposed reforms, he had a couple of very clear sentences about future bailouts and taxpayer funds:

And we’re going to put in place new rules so that big banks and financial institutions will pay for the bad decisions they make – not taxpayers.  Simply put, this means no more taxpayer bailouts.  Never again will taxpayers be on the hook because a financial company is deemed “too big to fail.”

Can he make it any more clear? No. Will it shut Republicans up? Ha. No.

Is the President of the United States getting pretty sick and tired of the bullshit? Apparently so.

Now, unsurprisingly, these reforms have not exactly been welcomed by the people who profit from the status quo – as well their allies in Washington.  This is probably why the special interests have spent a lot of time and money lobbying to kill or weaken the bill.  Just the other day, in fact, the Leader of the Senate Republicans and the Chair of the Republican Senate campaign committee met with two dozen top Wall Street executives to talk about how to block progress on this issue.
 
Lo and behold, when he returned to Washington, the Senate Republican Leader came out against the common-sense reforms we’ve proposed.  In doing so, he made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts – when he knows that it would do just the opposite.  Every day we don’t act, the same system that led to bailouts remains in place – with the exact same loopholes and the exact same liabilities.  And if we don’t change what led to the crisis, we’ll doom ourselves to repeat it.  That’s the truth.  Opposing reform will leave taxpayers on the hook if a crisis like this ever happens again.

He finishes off with the assurance that the good guys -- the reformers, if you're keeping score at home -- will prevail.

The full transcript can be found at the White House website and beneath the fold.

The Bad Astronomer has a nice expert synopsis of Obama's NASA policy. One item that any self respecting, redblooded US space race kid thinks is neat: the President has challenged NASA to look beyond the moon for its next manned destination, and one obvious contender under serious discussion would be a type of asteroid affectionately known as Near Earth Object or NEO:

NASA has tracked nearly 7,000 near-Earth object that are bigger than several feet across. Of those, 1,111 are "potentially hazardous asteroids." Objects bigger than two-thirds of a mile are major killers and hit Earth every several hundred thousand years. Scientists believe it was a 6-mile-wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Landing on an asteroid and giving it a well-timed nudge "would demonstrate once and for all that we're smarter than the dinosaurs and can avoid what they didn't," said White House science adviser John Holdren.

Despite the 'near earth' moniker, these objects are on average dozens of times farther away than the moon and on much more complicated trajectories relative to earth's orbit. But they could be worth it in more ways than inspiration: many of these objects are loaded with vast amounts of valuable stuff like nickel and iron, water/ice, and hydrocarbons, all of which would cost millions of dollars a pound to lift to deep space and be worth trillions of dollars if they were sitting on earth.

• We have an ambitious unmanned spacecraft with a revolutionary ion drive en route to visit two large asteroids right now. NASA's Dawn spacecraft will encounter the asteroid Vesta in July 2011 and then move on to the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015.
• Preliminary data from Eyjafjallajokull's ash suggests it won't cause much if any global cooling, but it remains a pain in the ass for Europeans and a big hazard for airplanes. Compared to the volcanoes on the planet Venus and the Jovian satellite Io, we're actually pretty cool.
• Via Georgia10 -- we miss you! -- a nice thoughtful piece on the pace of science and the age of discovery:

  So will we fly someday to the stars? Einstein says never. But what does a patent office clerk know? I’d subscribe to Robert Goddard’s sunny optimism in his valedictory address: "It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today, and the reality of tomorrow."

• An evangelical scholar dares suggest that evolution could be compatible with his faith and the American Taliban goes into ruthless attack mode. Gosh, what happened to Teach the Controversy?

Saturday punditry.

Tom Schaller:

More specifically, for tea party supporters, those abnormal views in every case but one or maybe two reflect higher expressed levels of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Some commenters wondered if TP approval is merely a proxy term for "white conservatives," and vice versa for disapprovers/"white liberals." However, in detailed multivariate results that control for ideology which Dr. Parker assured me by email he will soon publish in detail on the WISER website, tea party approval or disapproval is not simply a proxy for these labels, and does in fact have independent explanatory power of the level of intolerance expressed by whites. In any case, the idea that the recent Gallup demographic study "proves" that the views of tea partier supporters are "mainstream" is, it's fair to say, a fiction.

Dana Milbank:

I stopped by Freedom Plaza on Tax Day to check on the progress of the nation's populist revolt.

On the stage, I saw the great populist leader himself: Grover Norquist, who, after getting two Harvard degrees, developed his common-touch lobbying for the tropical island paradise of the Seychelles. Norquist spoke from a lectern bearing a Tea Party emblem and a simple message: "The people speak."

Kathleen Parker (2010 Pulitzer prize winner):

Is the political environment becoming so toxic that we could see another Timothy McVeigh emerge?

No one knows the answer, but fears that anger could escalate into action beyond the ballot box are not misplaced. Ninety-nine percent of angry Americans might be perfectly satisfied to rail at their television sets -- or to show up at a Tea Party rally -- but it takes only one.

Peter Beinert:

A new New York Times poll shows Tea Partiers are grumpy, older, well-off Americans who think white people are oppressed — in other words, Republicans.

This has been a media theme all week. It's beginning to dawn on our pack animal friends in the media that there's less "there" there to the Tea Party than Fox would have you believe, and the usual Republican elite (see Dick Armey and FreedomWorks) is funding the faux populist show. But it's so much more interesting to cover the tea party than to cover <yawn> issues or fact-check Michele Bachmann, like noting that (hard facts) Americans are suffering under the lowest tax rate in 60 years, 98% of Americans got a tax break this year, most Americans think their taxes are fair, etc... because, y'know the tea party is all about taxes and not about the black Democrat in the WH.

NY Times:

The demand for [high school basketball pheenom Josh] Selby has increased throughout the protracted recruiting process. With legs that double as trampolines, Selby has attacked the rim with ferocity while bouncing around to three high schools in four years. He originally committed to Tennessee but then in July chose to reopen the competition, which now includes a host of blue-chip programs: Kansas, Kentucky, Connecticut and Arizona.

On Saturday night, Selby’s whirlwind journey will finally come to an end when he announces his decision in his characteristically outsize way, on national television during the Jordan Brand Classic at Madison Square Garden.

What's wrong with this picture? The kid's in high school.

Business Week/Bloomberg:

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats are using the Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing Goldman Sachs Group Inc. of derivatives-linked fraud to bolster their case for overhauling financial-industry regulations.

Reuters:

After successfully shepherding his healthcare overhaul through Congress, Obama is now pushing hard for a legislative victory on financial regulatory reform, a popular issue with voters ahead of congressional elections in November.

The Senate is expected to vote within weeks on the reform bill, which Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address would "hold Wall Street accountable" and put in place rules to ensure U.S. taxpayers would never again be called upon to bail out companies in financial trouble.

"Never again will taxpayers be on the hook because a financial company is deemed 'too big to fail'," Obama said.

Never? "You keep using that word. I don not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya

Gail Collins:

I don’t know how you’re spending your spring, but here in New York we are all busy waiting for Andrew Cuomo.

Andrew! Soon he will come forward and agree to be nominated for governor. And then he will walk among us, and speak to us. And perhaps even tell us how he would balance the budget.

And New Yorkers will all live happily ever after.

Why? Does that mean the Yankees will win the Series again?

Some excerpts from the May issue of Harper's Index:

• Number of states that tax the possession of illegal drugs: 19

• Percentage change in 2009 in the U.S. rate of violent crime: -4.4

• Chances that an American believes crime went up last year: 3 in 4

• Estimated amount that 2007 regulations on power adapters have saved Americans in electricity costs: $830,000,000

• Average increase in cost for each new adapter: $0

• Percentage of TV meteorologists in a University of Texas survey who said they thought global warming was a "scam": 29

• Percentage of Americans who say7 they their TV meteorologists' opinions on global warming: 56

• • • • •

At Daily Kos on this date in 2003 (on the burning of the National Library and Archives in Baghdad and Rush Limbaugh's reaction):

If George Bush advocated incest and married his twins, Rush would celebrate the wedding and commend the president on his choice of two beautiful women.

The problem with the right, not the pros, who have to be embarassed by this gross breach of both law and common sense, is that they see everything through the prism of politics. Oh, we're blaming Bush because he's a Republican and we don't get it, there was a war on.

You're watching a valuable part of the world's history burn to the ground feet from US troops who ate MRE's as they burned.