Checks & Balances? The checks all bounced, and they’re all unbalanced!

From Newsweek:

One of the great questions of Donald Trump’s presidency is how well he’ll get along with House Speaker Paul Ryan and more traditional conservatives. If the president’s meeting with congressional Republicans in Philadelphia on Thursday is any indication, the answer is they’ll do very well.

One of my sources on the inside at the retreat sent me a picture of the  Commander In Chief  Demander-and-Thief and what seems to be (from this picture) the Streaker of the House.

Original image (if anyone can tell me the name of this painting and the artist, I would appreciate it. I looked and looked with no success.)

617-27-054

From NPR:

Bernard Madoff has gone from a $7 million penthouse to a tiny jail cell in Manhattan. Madoff pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday, but implicated no one but himself. Investigators continue to pore over records, trying to figure out, among other things, who helped Madoff engineer the $64 billion fraud that may be the largest in U.S. history. Madoff will be sentenced on June 16.

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The Hate Talk Express

From Politico:

Sen. Joe Biden said Wednesday that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has gone “way too far” in her attacks against Barack Obama.

“It’s just malarkey, flat malarkey,” Biden said on CBS’s “Early Show” of Palin’s attacks linking Barack Obama to former 1960’s radical William Ayers.

“You know, the idea here that somehow these guys are, once again, injecting fear and loathing into this campaign I think is mildly dangerous,” Biden added.

…snip…

“I mean, some of the stuff she’s saying about Barack Obama and the stuff that people are yelling from the crowd, if she hears it, she should be at least saying, whoa, whoa, whoa; that’s overboard. I mean, you know, this is — this is volatile stuff. And it’s — I just — I felt we were kind of beyond this place that it seems to be going.”

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I Wonder how $520 Ferragamo Loafers Taste

From the Interational Herald Tribune:

WASHINGTON: Republican John McCain has maneuvered himself into a political dead end and has five weeks to find his way out.

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Chimpy chows down, while Captain Underpants wants to raise unemployment numbers!

From The Trail at The Washington Post:

GREEN BAY, Wis. — Republican presidential nominee John McCain elaborated a bit this morning on why he said yesterday that he would fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox if McCain were president, a position later softened to a call for his resignation.

McCain portrayed it as a matter of honor — although he flubbed his payoff line a bit.

…snip…

“My friends, that kind of accountability and responsibility is missing in Washington today,” McCain said, and then he misspoke. “That’s why I believe the chairman of the FEC should resign and leave office and be replaced.”

The FEC, of course, is the Federal Election Commission, which oversees campaign finance laws, and not the financial world.

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Now he can look for a younger, prettier, richer adviser

From The Telegraph:

Carly Fiorina, who rose from a secretarial position to become chief executive of the technology giant Hewlett-Packard, made the gaffes in two separate interviews.

First she was asked by a radio host – who had just praised her own business record – that since Mr McCain “thinks Mrs Palin has the experience to be president … do you think she has the experience to run a major company like Hewlett-Packard?”

Miss Fiorina replied: “No, I don’t. That’s not what she is running for.”

Asked later in a television interview about her remark, Ms Fiorina said: “Well, I don’t think John McCain could run a major corporation.”

Miss Fiorina has since had planned television appearances cancelled.

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It’s a Miracle!

(CNN) — Sen. John McCain’s senior domestic policy adviser said Tuesday that the BlackBerry mobile e-mail device was a “miracle that John McCain helped create.”

When asked, Captain Underpants laughed and said, “That’s silly! People can’t invent fruit!”

The adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, discussing the nation’s economic woes with reporters, said that McCain — who has struggled to stress his economic credentials — did have experience dealing with the economy, pointing to his time on the Senate Commerce Committee.

Pressed to provide an example of what McCain had accomplished on that committee, Holtz-Eakin said the senator did not have jurisdiction over financial markets, then he held up his Blackberry, telling reporters: “He did this.”

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McCainomics 101

From Consortium News:

John McCain has been purging lobbyists from his campaign trying to reclaim the mantle of political reformer, but there’s one lobbyist whose role as a key economic adviser makes him almost untouchable despite ties to the sub-prime debacle, links to the Enron disaster and alleged evasion of ethics rules.

Former Sen. Phil Gramm, who was listed as a lobbyist for banking giant UBS as recently as December 2007, has emerged as what Fortune magazine calls “McCain’s econ brain,” filling McCain’s acknowledged void on economic expertise (“I don’t know as much about the economy as I should”).

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