The Hose Offers Ana Marie Cox a Job

Now that Air America is gone, former Wonkette Editor/Recent White House Correspondent/General Internet Personality/Pretty Hot Redhead Ana Marie Cox is out of a job. This is a huge opportunity for us. One we intend to capitalize on.

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The synergies are obvious. Ana Marie is a big deal, a known quantity and brings her own fanbase. She also has major balls - who else would take on the future Managing Director of Corporate Relations for Goldman Sachs in such a direct manner. The Hose could benefit greatly from her sharp political mind. For her, she gets a forum from which to continue her tough brand of political reporting.

So after much discussion with our finance team and strategy team we have agreed to extend an offer to AMC to occasionally comment on my increasingly inane posts, retweet any Hose articles she finds entertaining to her fanbase and explain teabaggers to xTian and Sparks.

AMC - please reach us on thehose@gmail.com. According to your twitter feed you have been drinking since the AirAmerica announcement. It's my hope that are you still drunk and will seriously consider this offer


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The Hose Editorial Board

More teabagging

I live in the Bay Area, where any tax is a good and justifiable tax. But today I took a business trip to the Inland Empire – California’s GOP country. Hosers occasionally call me a rich guy. I’m not there yet, but I have nothing to complain about (though I would trade it all for a little more). Today I was cruising around with my boss who really is a rich guy, and a guy whose company we bought for nine figures. He’s a really, really rich guy. We drove by all these crazy MF’s protesting the tax system.

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Don’t get me wrong - we were all very touched that these working stiffs would cash in their precious vacation days to protest President Obama’s tax policy, which would raise taxes very slightly for the guys in my car, and lower them for all the sign wavers. That shows a real commitment to their countryman. Still, I’m not sure I understand their position. Are all these people really out here protesting a 3% increase in the marginal tax rate for people making over $250,000? Who would possibly be sympathetic to that position, except plutocrats?

The only other explanation is that these people cheered while their party dramatically decreased government revenue and increased government spending during an economic expansion, but are now taking to the streets because the other party is also increasing spending, this time to stave off the next great depression. That makes even less sense.

This is going to be a bizarre couple of years, GOP-wise. I predict they will put forth a real crazy dude in 2006.

Write Your Own Caption: Teabagging Edition

This was taken at a Santa Barbara Tea Party.

WTF?

Also, what are you doing later? Call me.

Teabagging in the Free World

Political protests are fun. People are all worked up, there are usually hot chicks floating around. It can be a good scene. There's a dark side though. People who are out there earnestly are usually pretty nuts. I remember 2003 when the Iraq War was hot, I attended a protest in downtown San Francisco to soak in the scene. Ostensibly, everyone was there to talk Iraq. As I looked around, I noticed that people were out there representing a variety of interests and agendas, shouting things about gay marriage a ban on nuclear stuff etc.

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So basically you have no control over what's going on out there. I get that. Still it's a little dangerous. Sure you might be out there because you are some intense deficit hawk. Hey, if that's what you care about, great. Who am I to judge?
But you run the risk of standing next to some libertard nutjob who wants more automatic weapons and no taxes. I mean what if you end standing next to a dude holding a sign that says "End the Fed", like I saw on MSNBC today. Who wants to end the fed? What are you talking about? How would our banking system (such as it is) work without that?

Worse yet, what if you end up standing next to this dude. Not only is he crazy, he's mixing metaphors worse than Manolo on a whiskey bender. What do the Wayans Brothers have to do with anything?

I also think this might lack the purity of other protests. I am not entirely sure how credible this "movement" is. Fox News have been undermining the event by becoming part of the story. .There's a lot of debate about how "grassroots' these things are and the connection between these events and the Boston Tea Party are tenuous at best. Of course, that has not stopped d*uche bag politicians (sup Rick Perry) from stepping in and pandering to anyone who will listen. Of course, idiots that they are, CNN undermined their credibility by just showing up and picking a fight.

You gotta love that Anderson Cooper though. As a master of giving and receiving teabags, he just can't get enough of this joke. I'll be honest. Neither can I!

Feeling like a BIG man

I used to think that the only way to feel like a big man was to buy the freedom of a third world brothel worker. But today I found a new way. I called two top-notch business schools (including xTian’s alma mater) and, in the middle of a recession, asked how to post a finance job. These are good schools. Two years ago, they would have politely explained to me how to hang a flyer by the bike rack. Now, I’m a big shot. A HUGE shot. I was going to get a few resumes and do some phone interviews. Now I think I’ll arrange two days of on-campus interviews.

Too bad Wellesley doesn’t have a business school.

Under the Gun

I know most of you think Nicholas Kirstof is a bore. I agree but I am also starting to feel for him. I mean his last two facebook status messages alone tell us a lot about his current state of mind.



Sure, there is some new competition but dude, chillax! It will be alright.

Look at Tom Friedman, he doesn't care. He just makes sh*t up. Here is one example of what I mean. This article looks like something he thought up while looking for naked pictures of Meredith Baxter Birney on google.

His books are no better. They are the epitome of lazy writing. "I'm sorry, you say I owe you three more chapters on my book before you publish it. That's fine, I'll just mix the order of several paragraphs from the first three chapters and send something to you tonight. Ok, I'm off to swim in my vault full of money"

Hey Friedman - F you!

Embarrasing Democrats Part 1

Most of you know me for the pinko that I am. I want big government, gays everywhere (generating awesome dance music day and night if possible), and embryonic stem cell research into accentuating my cheek bones.

I hope you also acknowledge that I am an equal opportunity hater. Sure I think Glenn Beck is frightening and Lou Dobbs is a criminally bigoted, but I also find Keith Olbermann totally insufferable and Rachel Maddow's default smirk face really annoying.

The place where my equal opportunity skin crawls the most is Congressional hearings. We consistently learn a few things from these hearings
(1) Barney Frank is partisan but hysterical
(2) Every member of the House of Representatives is a grandstanding tool
(3) Most of them have no idea what they are talking about

Maxine Waters is the Congresswoman from Watts (LA County). Last week, she was investigated for potentially directing TARP funds to a Bank her husband is on the board of. Yesterday, during the AIG hearing with Secretary Geithner and Chairman Bernake, she made a point of implying that some how Goldman Sachs and their alumni were driving all the bail out decision in such a direction that would be beneficial to Goldman. Geithner almost threw up in his mouth when he realized where this nonsense was going:


Given that over half of our readership are employees at Goldman (according to Sparks), I have to take umbrage here. Shut up please. The people of Watts deserve better.

The incomparable Michelle Bachmann is also on this committee. Yesterday she managed to prove she has no idea how the Constitution and the legislative process works but that's a discussion for another day.

We [heart] Paul Krugman!

I usually think that posting music videos is lazy, but this different for two reasons. First, it is about everyone's favorite bearded Nobel laureate economist, NYTimes columnist, and George Clooney uncle impersonator Paul Krugman. Second, it's really pretty catchy.

The Hose opposes H.R. 1586

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1586, a bill that would institute a 90% tax rate on employee bonus payments from firms taking more than $5 billion in TARP money. The bill received overwhelming bi-partisan support, resulting in a vote of 328-93. The Senate seems likely to support a similar bill, and the President has expressed interest in signing something along these lines. The Hose editorial board soundly opposes this capricious, retroactive, and possibly unconstitutional seizure of property. H.R. 1586 has the following troublesome provisions:

• The bill is a reaction to the excessive bonuses paid to executives at the morally and fiscally bankrupt insurance giant, AIG. However, by including in its reach employees at any firm accepting more than $5 billion in TARP money, the bill extends the punitive provisions to even low-level employees at basically every major American financial institution.


• The bill covers banks like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs that took TARP money at the request of the Treasury. Punishing these healthy and helpful firms now seriously undermines any future effort on the part of the Treasury to orchestrate financial relief. No CEO in his/her right mind will participate in Treasury-coordinated programs when such abusive retroactive costs are a possibility.


• Several prominent Hose supporters will be ensnared in this unsavory wealth-grab. We look out for our own.


• Americans deserve a certain degree of tax predictability. Most of the money involved here was paid out in January of 2009 (bonus season for banks). People have spent the money, invested it, paid down mortgages or other debt, etc. Many of these people will have real trouble coming up with funds to pay this retroactive tripling of their taxes.


• This represents an unwanted and unpleasant distraction from March Madness.

The Hose editorial board urges you to contact your Senators and tell them to vote NO on the Senate version of H.R. 1586.

Stop the Presses

The news has been busy reporting on how the news is going under. Newspapers, specifically. People are consuming more news than ever, but they are getting it online (often times from newspaper-run sites) which kills the economic model. I don’t understand this.

Someone on NPR last week did an interesting analysis. I’ll spare you the details, but the conclusion was that hard copy sales (subscription + newsstand) don’t quite cover the costs of the blank cut paper that newspapers use. Just the paper here…no content, no editing, no reporting, no headquarters building, etc. Everything else is paid for by ad revenue.

In theory, going online should be great. Papers don’t make money on subscriptions anyway, since that portion of their revenue doesn’t quite cover the paper costs. But they are all still having trouble with the online switch because they can’t make as much with online ad sales as they do with hard copy ad sales. This is apparently because online ads sell for a very small fraction of the price of hard copy ads.

For me, the Macy’s ad next to the wedding announcements in the hard-copy NYTimes is just as effective as the Orbitz ad next to the same section in the online version; I pay very little attention to either. In fact, the online one is probably more effective because there is some chance that I’ll throw out my hard copy NYTimes before I even get to that section, whereas if I’m on the weddings section online, I’m certainly looking at it. I thus find the price differential surprising.

Question for Evil and KillerB and anyone else working in the marketing world: are advertisers paying too much for hard copy newspaper ads, or are they paying too little for online newspaper ads? Why is there such a huge difference? I know online ads have miniscule click-through rates, but hard copy ads have no click-throughs at all. Why do advertisers assume one is more effective than the other?