[Quote:]

City bankers have not lost a penny of their multimillion-pound bonus packages so far, despite the credit crunch which has caused the worst financial crisis in 80 years, new figures show.

Official statistics reveal that, in the financial year to April, City workers took home £16bn, almost exactly the same as in 2007. The period covers the Northern Rock nationalisation and the UK employees hit by the Bear Stearns implosion. During the period, banks across the world were forced to make huge writedowns on investments linked to US subprime mortgages.

Bonus payments in the UK financial sector have more than trebled in just over five years, from £5bn in 2003, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This is shared among just over one million employees in the sector, but that is heavily skewed towards the high-powered executives, who are routinely handed seven-figure packages.

Last year, Bob Diamond, the president and head of investment banking at Barclays whose base salary was £250,000, was paid £18m after bonuses and options were taken into account.

The remuneration figures were released only days after Gordon Brown vowed to wage war on the “irresponsible” bonus culture that had helped cause the financial crisis gripping Britain. Financial sector payments made up about two-thirds of the bonuses across the entire British economy.

[Quote:]

ING verzekerde vrijdag een sterke kapitaalpositie te hebben en vooralsnog geen problemen te voorzien.

Toch handig, zo’n woord als “vooralsnog”.

[Quote:]

And your fault, too. The conservative columnist Melanie Phillips has an explanation for our current economic problems, for drunkenness and drug abuse, for rudeness, for psychopathic killers, and for the wholesale collapse of Western culture. What could possibly be the single root cause of so many catastrophic consequences? Why, atheism, of course.

[Quote:]

1. A man with a middle eastern name.
2. Considered an outsider by many in his own country.
3. There is a long span of his life for which there is no public record and of which we know nothing about. What is he hiding?
4. He has often been critical of his own country.  He spent a good portion of his childhood abroad exposed to foreign customs.
5. It is known he spent his childhood in a country that today is known to be a hotbed of extremism, and credible reports place him in what is now a known where he first made contact with one of his close associates terrorist State. The oft repeated excuse that this happened centuries before those places became to be associated with terrorism is not the point (I don’t care about a washed out terrorist State): the point is that this man has never given a full account of what he was doing in these places.
6. It is well known he palled around with shady characters and has never given a public explanation of this or of the full extent of his associations even when publicly confronted about them.
7. Serious questions about his true religious beliefs and conduct have been raised. He’s spoken harshly about respected conservative religious leaders and has had a longstanding relationship with an incendiary preacher. Some religious people have even gone as far to suggest he might actually be anagent of the devil.
8. Critics have repeatedly belittled his young age, very thin resume, lack of executive experience and remarkably short public record.
9. Although he has surprising popular appeal, many observers have been repelled by what they perceive as misplaced adulation from the crowds. In fact some people have publicly confronted him about this but he has remained completely unapologetic.
10. He admittedly has a way with words but many of his ideas could be considered subversive  and a corrupt influence on the nation. He’s often been accused of not using plain language when expressing his positions. In a famous example, when publicly asked to define his position on taxes, he equivocated and tried to have it both ways.

All we really know about him, he’s opinionated, very conservative, and we’re not sure about the plumbing…

Oh my God, he’s Ann Coulter!

– Bill Maher

[Quote:]

Nederlandse wietkwekers verdienen jaarlijks ruim twee miljard euro met illegale export.

[..]

Ruim tachtig procent van de illegale kweek is bestemd voor export, stelt Daniel.

Door de teelt illegaal te houden, verliest de staat dus minstens een half miljard tot een miljard aan belastingen (afhankelijk van hoe je accijns en btw heft op export en lokaal gebruik).

En dan tel ik het geld dat we kwijt zijn aan politiekosten nog niet eens mee.

[The Onion is at it again:]

In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago’s School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

“On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced,” said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. “While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don’t have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them.”

In 2002, Fultz’s team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and dumb questions during question-and-answer sessions.

[Quote:]

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the nigger!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the nigger.”

In this economy, racism is officially a luxury. How is John McCain going to win if he can’t win those voters?

[Quote:]

Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government’s cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.

Pay plans for bankers have been disclosed in recent corporate statements. Pressure on the US firms to review preparations for annual bonuses increased yesterday when Germany’s Deutsche Bank said many of its leading traders would join Josef Ackermann, its chief executive, in waiving millions of euros in annual payouts.

[Quote:]

On the October 15 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Bob Grant said: “[W]hat is that flag that Obama’s been standing in front of that looks like an American flag, but instead of having the field of 50 stars representing the 50 states, there’s a circle?” He then said: “Is the circle the ‘O’ for Obama? Is that what it is?” Grant later said: “[D]id you notice Obama is not content with just having several American flags, plain old American flags with the 50 states represented by 50 stars? He has the ‘O’ flag. And that’s what that ‘O’ is. That’s what that ‘O’ is. Just like he did with the plane he was using. He had the flag painted over, and the ‘O’ for Obama. Now, these are symptom — these things are symptomatic of a person who would like to be a potentate — a dictator.” ‘

Here’s the picture:

And here’s what the Ohio Stage Flag looks like:

But people are stupid, and start repeating it.

Even Michelle Malkin, and I don’t think you can’t get more right-wing as a columnist than she is, calls people out for being silly.