Is Hillary Clinton the Worst Human Being in the Universe? Mortgage Crisis

Foreclosed homes, 2009. Photo by Will Steacy.

So here's this thing from U.S. Uncut last January where

Video Surfaces of Hillary Clinton Blaming Homeowners for Financial Crisis

That doesn't sound very nice of her, does it? That sounds like blaming the victim! But then again, it is (following a 13-second clip from the Democratic debate of October 13 2015 as introduction) a 14-second clip of three extracts from a speech, presented at NASDAQ on December 5 2007, just as the subprime crisis was staring to blow up, and you can see that it didn't exactly "surface"; it was fairly carefully edited by people who knew what they were looking for. And even as edited it doesn't say what the headline says: (a) she wonders who's to blame for the housing crisis, (b) there's a lot of blame to go around, and (c) a certain type of "homebuyers" (not homeowners) deserve some small portion of it.

If you go on to look at the text (which the U.S. Uncut site did helpfully link), you can see that the homeowners' share as she saw it was pretty small. She started with the lenders and brokers

who irresponsibly lowered underwriting standards, pushed risky mortgages, and hid the details in the fine print.

Then the Bush administration and its regulatory agencies,

Cheap shots, heels, and mountains of dreck

Yesterday I said something to the effect that Donald Trump was fearless, but I was wrong: as the Scarecrow had his terror of a lighted match, as Achilles dreaded an injury to his heel, so there's one thing the Donald fears: Questions from Fox News's ice princess.

Megyn Kelly. Photo by Alexei Hay/GQ, December 2010, via TeaParty.org. So that's what fuck-me heels are?

Amazing Conservative Logic of the Year:

I know it's still only January, but this from David Beckworth (Mercatus Institute) and Ramesh Ponnuru (American Enterprise Institute) in the New York Times is an instant classic:

Occupy Sanity

Occupy Sanity, by Davidhg, on Flickr.

From The Troubador at Daily Kos, who adds:

Words fail.

However, organizations like Occupy Our Homes aren't failing. Every day people in the Occupy movement are fighting big banks to keep families in this country from being foreclosed upon. Fighting to keep another person from being homeless, and from another housing unit becoming vacant. Fighting to change the narrative, to make this national blight more visible, more known.

And that's what spreading the above image can do. Make this injustice more known or understood in a way the mind-numbing statistics cannot, perhaps inspiring others to get up and do something with this newly-understood knowledge.

Tea and psychopathy

I have been totally fascinated by this on the subject of the Wall Street meltdown that brought us to our present unpleasant situation; an elaborate hypothesis on what made it happen is that the "chaotic nature of the modern corporation", with its "rapid change, constant renewal", and ruthless turnover, stopped the boards and other responsible parties from noticing that the companies were being rapidly taken over by charming, charismatic, psychopaths.

Psychopaths who seemed to them not just normal, but "ideal leaders".

This psychopath, the Persian king Xerxes, has a soft spot--he's in love with his tree. I love how the music is heartrendingly beautiful and hilarious at the same time because of the repeated word vegetabile. The YouTubist has thoughtfully provided the aria's one-sentence text so we can follow it.

Psychopaths whose... [jump]