Merrill bonuses and Obama's mask

So, it turns out that more than 2/3 of Merrill bonuses were discretionary:

Merrill had little choice but to pay many of the bonuses, Mr. Liman said. Of the $3.6 billion, Merrill had committed $850 million in the form of guaranteed bonuses. Mr. Liman said the rest of the money was shared among 39,000 workers who received average payments of $91,000 — though he did not mention that there were 696 people at Merrill who made more than $1 million in bonuses.

“I’m glad you think that $91,000 is not a lot of money,” the judge said. “I wish the average American was making $91,000.”

Another black mark for Obama in my book: although he campaigned as a left-leaning Dem (as most Dems do especially in the primaries), he slipped in March and admitted to a few fellow DLC-ers that he's actually a New Democrat (decoding ring applied: right-leaning Democrat as a good portion of Dems, Senators especially, are nowadays). This is not a revelation really since Obama's voting record already shows that he was a closet DLC-er, but it's interesting that he let down his guard and a few DLC-ers already spilled the beans on him (maybe to claim him as trophy while they go licking more corporate boots). As a primer on the Dems transformation through/by the DLC gauntlet and their major shift from left (i.e. labor) to right (i.e. corporate) donations, see Robert Dreyfuss' excellent 2001 article in the American Prospect, How the DLC does it.