Sean Hannity, while excoriating Obama over housing crisis, quietly snapped up hundreds of foreclosed properties

I think that “turn the other cheek” proposition was pretty much eschewed during WWII, and for good reason. So I say the ever-loving shit beating tool should always be kept at the ready and used when appropriate.

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Zach Weinersmith / SMBC Comics

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Bertrand Russell, who was a noted pacifist and went to jail for it during WWI, did support fighting against the Nazis during WWII. His argument, IIRC, was that the Imperial Germany, while not especially pleasant, wasn’t ultimately all that different from the other European colonial empires and Great Powers of the time. Whereas the Third Reich was significantly worse than anyone else, even Stalin’s Russia, and presented a whole different level of threat to democracy, Enlightenment values, etc.

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Me after reading news:

4edc1a4224a7b64b623b6f0f23d37d9c--young-ones-the-young

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Seems accurate.

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There are at least a couple of reasons this is example 1,967,931 of Hannity’s general crapulence.

First, if you’re offering commentary on TV and the radio to an audience of millions of people decrying the state of the housing market while also making millions of dollars swooping in and buying foreclosed properties unbeknownst to your audience, you may have some ethical issues. There’s a reason that he did this through layers of shell corporations.

Second, if you’re going to offer the kind of commentary Hannity does while also secretly benefiting from HUD loan guarantees, then you’re so far beyond hypocrisy that you’re approaching it from behind at this point.

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Sorry, but this type of behavior is garden-variety stuff for the Fox news crew and its ilk. Hypocritical? Absolutely! Ayn Rand-ish to the extreme? Yup! Ethically dubious? Seems so.

Do we expect better from Sean Hannity? Where’s the “news” here?

Just saying…

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Especially when the default for them is Greedy Short Sighted Asshole. Let the nice ones make their own case.

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I do agree with the argument that, as a person who makes his money off of his name in a public setting, this maybe want’ the brightest idea from a public image point of view (most of his audience is too stupid to understand anything about anything…and yes I’m a badperson with a hipster beard who likes nitro-infused coffee from Colombe…and I wouldn’t be caught dead in a lesser Starbucks…also I’m a Vegan and I think I’m better than most people…and yes I cry easily). But public image decisions often don’t make logical sense, since the audience isn’t logical, so perhaps not the best choice for him.

but you can be critical of something (tax cuts) and still be glad the other “people” somehow voted against their own interests and gave you a tax cut.

It’s good that we still have “guys” out there who exhibit good behavior, but I wonder how good these guys would have been but not for laws, rules, regulations, and the threat of fines and jail time.

(Thinking now about the so-called Gilded Age, and how the current administration with GOP complicity is trying like fuck to take us back to a time when there was little if any restraint to the “guys”.)

gilded_age

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looking at this picture only makes me wish I had a Trust. :frowning:

I’m hopeless. Money can’t buy you happiness, but in the system we set up (perhaps any system), lack of money will buy you misery.

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To address that “lack”, this country’s politicians would do well to re-read and understand that little blurb about “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, and see how that extended not just to England, but should also extend in our time to politicians.

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can you pls explain - I think I’m about to learn something but I am too dense to follow without some hand-holding.

Part of the problem is that American politicians who subscribe to various degrees of neoliberalism (along with pundits like this buzzard Hannity) currently read that phrase as Locke’s original “life, liberty and property.” Unfortunately, a lot of Americans in general buy into the materialistic view of money and possessions as a means of keeping score.

In that cartoon, the “trusts” being referenced are the various Gilded Age monopolies later busted by Teddy Roosevelt. No single human or corporate entity should have one of those without severe regulations being placed on it.

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$90m / 870 = $103,448

Hmm…he’s a slum lord?

A now we have (just as a start) even a greater push for privately-run prisons and charter schools. Cui bono (something even incompetent lawyers would ask), and how inspired is this current administration to institute severe regulations, much less not make cutbacks to current regs? And what’s to prevent any, even severely regulated, monopoly from providing shoddy products and services?

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Life, Liberty, etc., directly addressed the founding fathers’ concerns with the unfair laws and taxes levied against its colonists here. To a very large degree, the concern hinged on the struggling of a free people to remain loyal citizens while they were not being treated as such (i.e., being allowed a fair chance at making a living ($$) and thereby provide for loved ones).

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The records link Hannity to a group of shell companies that spent at least $90m on more than 870 homes…Hannity is the hidden owner behind some of the shell companies.

I don’t think Hannity spent $90M of his own money.

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Perhaps he got into some of that sweet Trump money laundering action.

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I agree with that, although I would say most Americans, and if “keeping score” did not mean some associated assessment of how fair life has been to them. I like to believe that most people eventually (many times too late) come to the realization that… well… maybe they should have stuck it out and studied harder.

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