The ever-revolving door between government and Wall Street

The incestuous relationship between the big investment banks and the US Treasury Department, nowhere more exemplified than by the revolving door between the two sectors, is one of the big scandals of our time. The pattern is for Secretaries of the Treasury to come from Wall Street firms or investment banks, do favors for their friends while in office, and then return there once they leave. The current secretary Jack Lew is a slight exception in that he had served only two years on Wall Street as COO of Citigroup. It will be interesting to see whether he will take a lucrative job on Wall Street once he leaves office.
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How to come out to your parents

It must be quite nerve-wracking for an adolescent to tell her parents that she is gay. 15-year old Laurel decided that it would be easiest to tell her parents with a cake and an accompanying note. Neetzan Zimmerman tells us what the cake and the message were and what the response of the parents was.

As a lover of puns, I enjoyed Laurel’s approach.

It is not just the plutocrats who whine when criticized

President Obama’s trusted sidekick, the confirmed liar James Clapper, whines in a softball interview with Eli Lake of The Daily Beast (these people never agree to give interviews to people they know will ask hard questions) about how actually he is the victim and how his family suffers when they read the bad things people say about him.
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Anti-gay movements experience setbacks

So the governor of Arizona Jan Brewer has vetoed the bill that would allow people who have ‘sincerely’ held religious beliefs to not serve those whom they disapprove of (i.e., members of the LGBT community), saying that the bill would have ‘unintended consequences’ (translation: the business community was telling me that they would suffer and Arizona could even lose the hosting of next year’s Super Bowl).
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The new gilded age

Jon Perr displays ten graphs that chart various economic measures over the last century or so. These include the share of total income by the top income brackets, CEO-to-worker compensation ratios, marginal tax rates for the highest income levels, effective tax rates, average incomes, and more. The graphs are spectacular in their clarity even if depressing in their implications. I reproduce just one because it is illustrative of a point that I wish to make.
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Rewriting history

Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore on The Daily Show have another one of their insightful and entertaining discussions about race in America, this time about the revisionist idea that slavery was not the cause of the southern secession that led to the Civil War and that if that socialist Abraham Lincoln had not been such a hothead and rushed to war but had instead been patient and used capitalistic ideas, the bloodshed could have been avoided.
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Texas’s ban on same-sex marriage ruled unconstitutional

Today comes word that US District Judge Orlando Garcia has ruled that Texas’s ban on same sex marriage, as specified in Article 1, section 32 of the Texas state constitution, is unconstitutional, saying that “the prohibition on same sex marriage conflicts with the United States Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process.” The order was stayed pending appeal. Texas thus joins Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Utah in this action, and other states have similar cases pending.
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