Chiefly, Valerie Jarrett. Nameless “current and former” White House officials with whom Milbank has spoken “raised questions about Jarrett’s effectiveness and judgment,” is the thing. She “flaunts her friendship” with Barack Obama. When the president ran into PR problems over his all-male basketball games, he “conferred with” her about it and she convinced him to set up a special dinner with his senior lady staffers (TOTAL PUSSY.) Worse, she steadfastly refuses to “head off to make money, write books or run for office” like Obama’s senior man staffers. Why? Because she is on a secret suicide mission to fill the empty slots with OTHER BITCHES. “Elizabeth Warren is in the administration because of Valerie,” another insider told Milbank, requesting anonymity out of fear of the wrath of their soon-to-be-synced menstrual cycles.

Hey guess what, the same industry that voraciously sucked up trillions of dollars worth of mortgages so they could roll them into securities that are now approximately 97% worthless due to vast systemic fraud, is now committing vast systemic fraud in the process of kicking people out of their homes. This obviously proves that the industry has enough problems without someone “difficult” and “radioactive” Elizabeth Warren around policing stuff.

Yo, remember the “flash crash”? They ever figure out what caused that thing? Yeah I’m gonna go with no.

Harsh words from Tom Friedman on the Tea Party movement: “It has no plan to restore America to greatness.”

Stephen Roach has an NYT op-ed today titled “Cultivating the Chinese Consumer.” The pull quote reads “How to actually fix the U.S.-China trade imbalance.” The crazy thing is, he doesn’t even, like, pretend to know. It’s actually almost like his editors at the Times didn’t even care what he wrote, that just sticking that headline above 1200 words of worthless text (Sample line: “Why do we have these deficits? Because Americans don’t save.”) was enough to reassure the populace that someone out there was still hard at work laboring in an earnest effort to solve this tricky, complicated problem (without raising taxes)

Deep thoughts from America’s richest New Yorker staffer: “If stories have a beginning and an end, why do they need a middle? Does self-knowledge necessarily lead to self-loathing? Why does language require letters? Why do older men leave their wives for younger women—is it because of the hair? Am I having a good hair day? If history had never happened, what would be happening now?”

Photo by World Economic Forum/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0