Matt Drudge Still Can't Quit Bill Clinton...

All In The Family

From Robert Scheer on Truthdig.com:

Out of respect for privacy, even concerning famous people, I wasn’t going to write about the marriage of Chelsea Clinton to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler with the resources to buy a $4 million loft so soon after graduating from Stanford. Hopefully Marc Mezvinsky won’t follow in the footsteps of his financier father, “Fast-Talkin’ Eddie,” as they called him back in Iowa, a former Democratic House member who just completed a five-year federal sentence for dozens of fraud felonies.
Anyway, Chelsea also worked at a hedge fund, her mother dabbled in banking shenanigans in her Whitewater days and father Bill’s radical deregulation made it a lot easier for financial plunderers to stay on the right side of the law. So the Clintons and the Mezvinskys have a lot in common. I hope their children will do better, and I was going to simply wish them well until I read Tina Brown’s paean to power, “Why America Needed Chelsea’s Wedding,” in the trend-chasing Daily Beast, which she edits.
It was then that I realized that the revival of the Clinton legacy was on in earnest. Brown, a prominent Brit import, is an expert on refurbishing tarnished royalty, as she demonstrated with her gushing tribute to the Clinton wedding as “a happy throwback to the carefree 1990s.” So carefree that no one of importance, certainly not in the Clinton White House, took serious stock of the collapse of hedge funds like Long-Term Capital Management, a harbinger of disasters to come.
In what I assume was not self-parody, Brown stated that “the Clintons are enjoying political rosy-glow syndrome. In the light of what’s happened since—two grueling wars, the implosion of debt, 14 million unemployed … Chelsea’s wedding allowed us to remember all that prosperity, those continuous Clinton surpluses.” But not, as I the party pooper must add, the Financial Services Modernization Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which enabled the financial bubble that caused those 14 million to be unemployed.

It's all here.

Ooops!

Well, I'm glad we've got that straightened out...
Excerpted from ABC News:

"On derivatives, yeah I think they were wrong and I think I was wrong to take [their advice] because the argument on derivatives was that these things are expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of investors will buy them and they don’t need any extra protection, and any extra transparency. The money they’re putting up guarantees them transparency,” (Bill) Clinton told (Jack Tapper.)
“And the flaw in that argument,” Clinton added, “was that first of all sometimes people with a lot of money make stupid decisions and make it without transparency.”
The former President also said he was also wrong about understanding the consequences if the derivatives market tanked. “The most important flaw was even if less than 1 percent of the total investment community is involved in derivative exchanges, so much money was involved that if they went bad, they could affect a 100 percent of the investments, and indeed a 100 percent of the citizens in countries, not investors, and I was wrong about that.”

Today? The stock market is smokin' again.

(Jeez, that worked out so well last time...)

Sen. Byron Dorgan In 1999: "I Think We Will--In Ten Years' Time--Look Back And Say, 'We Should Not Have Done That.'"

Today's the ten-year anniversary of the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which opened the floodgates for bankers to act like drunken frat boys on a weekend getaway to Vegas.
Yeah--we should not have done that...

The New York Post: All Crass, No Class.

That's an actual headline from Rupert's trashy tabloid.

What a shock!

You stay classy, NY Post...

"A Conservative Government Is An Organized Hypocrisy."

This post's title comes from British Prime Minister and novelist Benjamin Disraeli.

With South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford back from Argentina and admitting to an extramarital affair, there are these reminders of hypocrisy from ThinkProgress.com:

While serving as a U.S. congressman, (South Carolina governor) Mark Sanford was incredibly critical of his colleagues’ marital misdeeds, including the affairs of former congressman Bob Livingston and President Bill Clinton:

“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. He lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.” [Sanford on Livingston, CNN, 12/18/98]

“We ought to ask questions…rather than circle the wagons for one of our tribe.” [Sanford on how the GOP reacts to affairs, New York Post, 12/20/98]

“I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally (to resign). I come from the business side. If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.” [Sanford on Clinton, The Post and Courier, 9/12/98]

“The issue of lying is probably the biggest harm, if you will, to the system of Democratic government, representatives government, because it undermines trust. And if you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything.” [Sanford on Clinton, CNN, 2/16/99]

Sanford has also been an opponent of same-sex marriage, saying in 2004, “As Jenny and I are the parents of four little boys, we’ve always taught our kids that marriage was something between a man and a woman.” [The Post and Courier, 2/11/04]

Gov. Sanford, I am not an expert on matrimony, but I was unaware that the man in your ideal marriage can leave his wife and fly to Buenos Aires to hook-up with his mistress. Is that a brand-new definition, or just a Southern thang...