-
Recent Comments
Best Periodical Period
Best Site Anywhere
Political Sites
- Air America
- American News Project
- Andrew Sullivan
- Arts and Letters Daily
- Balloon Juice (John Cole)
- Brad DeLong
- Consortium News
- Crooks and Liars
- Democratic Strategist
- Digby
- Editor and Publisher
- Eric Alterman
- Eschaton
- Fora TV
- Huffington Post
- Juan Cole
- Kos
- McClatchy
- Media Matters
- Observationalism
- Paul Krugman
- Pew’s Journalism.org
- Pro Publica
- Real News Network
- Salon
- Slate
- Talking Points Memo
- TalkLeft
- The Plum Line (Greg Sargent)
- Think Progress
- Tom Dispatch
- Washington Independent
WordPress
x train yus
Pages
Archives
- February 2012
- December 2011
- October 2011
- March 2011
- December 2010
- September 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
Meta
Daily Archives: Monday, February 16, 2009
Drat!
The lousy economy is now hurting George W. Bush in a pretty direct way: U.S. News reports that fundraising has slowed down for the Bush library, making it difficult to meet the $500 million goal.
The situation is so bad that Bush has had to personally make phone calls to raise money, along with his father and Karl Rove, in order to meet the deadline of a 2013 construction. from TPM
Want to see Limbaugh’s Gulfstream?
Limbaugh’s jet slide show. Less the medicine cabinet, we’ve noticed.
Posted in Detritus
Aunty Em would recognize this Kansas
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas has suspended income tax refunds and may not be able to pay employees on time, the state’s budget director said Monday.
The state doesn’t have enough money in its main budget account to pay its bills, prompting Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to suggest transferring $225 million from other accounts throughout state government…
And so would Scrooge and Mr. Potter
…But the move required approval from legislative leaders, and Republican leaders refused Monday.
The Reagan myth
Allan Barra reviews ”The Man Who Sold the World” (also with reference to Will Bunch’s new book on the creation and sustenance of the Reagan myth)
“The aftermath of Reagan’s presidency,” Garry Wills wrote in a famous introduction to his 1987 book “Reagan’s America,” “has proved, over and over, that Reaganism without Reagan is unsustainable.” In the two decades since Wills’ book was published, a significant portion of the press and public seems to have forgotten that. William Kleinknecht is on a mission: In “The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America,” he is out to demonstrate that Reaganism with Reagan never worked.
…“The Man Who Sold America” has much in common with another recent scathing indictment of the Reagan administration, Will Bunch’s “Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future.” Both books cover much of the same territory: Contrary to the nearly two decades of idolatry from the right, Reagan was no more popular than numerous other modern presidents (as Kleinknecht notes, just 27 percent of eligible voters elected him in 1980, a year which saw a record-low turnout at the polls), the legacy of the famous 1980 tax cut was an era of deregulation that spawned CEO and Wall Street greed, and, most important, the Reagan revolution did not do what it set out to do, namely to reduce the size of government (“Big government,” writes Kleinknecht, “was not stripped away in the Reagan years; it was just redirected to the needs of private enterprise”).
As John Dewey observed, “Politics is the shadow cast by business”. Absolutely the case as regards the modern Republican party.
Jeeeeeeezus – more stupiditude from the Washington Post
George Will, writing this weekend as global-warming-denier-of-the-day for the WP, said:
According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
Within hours, it seems, the center he quotes posted the following on its website:
We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.
And it doesn’t get better… continue reading here
Update: Nate Silver further demonstrates the lack of intellectual integrity of Will’s column here and here
Posted in Environment, Media failures
Goldfarb ain’t done a lot of backpacking in Europe
Vive le Canada
From the AP:
The Obama administration said late Saturday that it would participate in planning for a U.N. conference on racism despite concerns the meeting will be used by Arab nations and others to criticize Israel….
During the Bush administration the United States and Israel walked out of the first U.N. conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 over efforts to pass a resolution comparing Zionism — the movement to establish and maintain a Jewish state — to racism.
Those efforts failed but there are signs the resolution may be reintroduced at the so-called “Durban 2″ meeting in Geneva and Israel has been actively lobbying the United States and European countries to stay away from this year’s meeting.
Our unilateralist neighbors to the north have already announced they will not be attending Zionism=Racism 2. The Obama administration, meanwhile, is intent on proving that, “in line with our commitment to diplomacy,” the United States can “change the direction in which the review conference is heading.” At this rate, it won’t be long before backpackers start swapping out those Canadian flag patches on their gear in favor of Old Glory lest they cross paths with some anti-Zionist youths while bumming around Europe. Weekly Standard (standards just aren’t what they used to be)
The poor bugger is caught up in a nationalist fantasy here. As any Canadian who has backpacked around Europe has understood for decades, the costs of travel can be ameliorated through the sale of iron-on Maple Leaf flags to American kids. Thus it was in the late 60′s. Just go to any airport and head over to the International Flights (US) baggage claim and start hawking. Ten minutes and you were covered for your day’s supply of bread, wine, and hookah happiness. And today? My daughter left here with $100 in cash and a thousand canadian flags. That was four years ago. When things get tight, I ask her to wire me some money.
Posted in American Exceptionalism
Quote of the day – “good luck with that, sincerely” category
Thus Peres now faces a public task of supreme importance: trying to form a stable government that will include both large parties, Kadima and Likud. Haaretz
Update: Steve Clemons at The Washington Note links a Fareed Zakaria debate and analysis of the election.
US military officers in Iraq – fraud bigger than Madoff’s?
In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme. Bruce Cockburn reports
Ollie vs Hugo – The Fracas in Caracas.
CARACAS, Venezuela, Feb. 15 — Fourteen months after his first attempt failed, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez won a referendum Sunday to eliminate term limits, paving the way for him to rule far into the 21st century to carry out his socialist transformation of this oil-rich country. More details here
So, I guess it will have to be Ollie North mano a mano. The “Fracas in Caracas” on pay per view. Sarah Palin in swimsuit between rounds walking about with signs promoting Gatorade, Glock and Tourism Alaska. It’ll be great. Heroic. Uplifting.
(Fight promo…Ollie rappin’)
We gonna be WAILIN’
on that
VENEZUELAN
me and
Sarah PALIN
gonna bring him DOWN
Mano a MANO
me and the
CHICANO
my fist’s a
PIANO
it’s gonna
HURT THAT CLOWN
My Wasilla
FLOWER
got ocycontin
POWER
we gonna make him
COWER
we gonna
TAKE HIM DOWN
Posted in Uncategorized
Some more stupidness from the Washington Post
A piece this morning by Michael Shear and Paul Kane begins:
Thanks to the party-line nature of Congress’s votes on the economic stimulus package, the plan to turn around the worst financial crisis facing the country in more than 50 years now carries not only enormous fiscal stakes but also political stakes that are nearly as large.
“Nearly as large”? The temporary fates of two American political parties are comparable in magnitude to the real possibility of a 30′s era worldwide depression? One would have trouble finding a worse example of the myopia and insularity of the Washington press corps.
But that’s not all. Writing on Eric Cantor, the House minority whip, Shears and Kane report that Cantor’s model for political strategy at this point is Winston Churchill. No mention at all of Nagourney’s reporting yesterday.
Mr. Cantor said he had studied Mr. Gingrich’s years in power and had been in regular touch with him as he sought to help his party find the right tone and message. Indeed, one of Mr. Gingrich’s leading victories in unifying his caucus against Mr. Clinton’s package of tax increases to balance the budget in 1993 has been echoed in the events of the last few weeks.
Worth noting in this piece as well is the two-pronged strategy of the Republicans to propagandize any outcome from the stimulus bill. If it fails to work as hoped, they will use that to bludgeon Obama and the dems in two years and again in four. Obviously, any data suggesting it has helped will be attacked regardless. But Rove demonstrates another propaganda option to throw into the bullshit blunderbuss – if there is a turn around in the economy, well, it would have happened anyway.
Karl Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, predicted just that kind of Democratic bragging in an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal late last week: “If history is a guide, sometime late this year or early next, the economy will rebound on its own. When that happens, Democrats will argue that their un-targeted, permanent spending actually revived the economy.”
Banking At The Brink- Frontline series beginning on Feb 17, both broadcast TV and online
So much is still at stake that it’s hard to remember what happened even a few months ago when the Bush administration and Congress gave Wall Street its first bailout.
“Inside the Meldown” is a post-traumatic-stress flashback: a searing look at how the treasury secretary at the time, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and others acted — and failed to act — in those fraught days in September when the world’s entire economic system seemed on the brink of evaporating. “Frontline” concludes that by refusing to rescue Lehman Brothers, Mr. Paulson kicked off the worldwide credit freeze and deepened the recession.
CNBC’s inquiry weaves together Wall Street bankers, first-time homeowners, mortgage brokers and even the mayor of a fishing town in Norway. Blame is spread far and wide, with no one culprit singled out — though Mr. Greenspan, unburdened by remorse and blithely philosophical about the inevitability of it all, indicts himself. Of the two programs this one is broader, more comprehensive and ultimately more compelling. continue reading
Posted in Economic stuff, Politics and the economy
Tagged economy, Frontline, Inside the Meltdown, PBS
Drug policy shift?
This NY Times story on R. Gil Kerlikowske, presently chief of the Seattle Police Department and possibly Obama’s choice for drug czar, is indeed hopeful. Bill Bennett he isn’t.
Economic discontent in Vladivostok
Behind the scenes, though, it appears that the Kremlin is concerned that resentment over the tariffs will continue to spread from the car dealers to the general population — and turn into a bigger backlash over the government’s handling of the financial crisis. Revolt of the Used Car Dealersblockquote>
The instances of such local economic turmoil in many parts of the world are increasing. Obviously worrisome.
Update: Japan sank deeper into recession with its worst quarterly contraction in 35 years, data showed on Monday, its reliance on exports and soft domestic demand dragging down the world’s second-largest economy.
Posted in Economic stuff
Faith-based
…Speaking last July in Ohio, Mr. Obama set forth his “basic principles” for assuring constitutional balance. “First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use the grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of religion,” he said. “Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be used on secular programs.”
He said taxpayer dollars should not be used to advance partisan interests, and there was reassuring language about maintaining the separation of church and state in Mr. Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast preceding the issuance of his order, and in the order itself. But it would have been a lot more reassuring if the directive had actually revoked Mr. Bush’s 2002 executive order authorizing religious-oriented recipients of federal funding to hire and fire on religious grounds.
We suspect that Mr. Obama was not particularly proud of this omission. He chose to sign his order away from the view of television cameras or an audience. Joshua DuBois, the Pentecostal minister selected by Mr. Obama to lead his initiative, says the president is “committed to nondiscrimination,” and that the executive order “provides a process” for case-by-case review to decide if grants to faith-based organizations are “consistent with law.”
What process? The executive order says only that White House officials “may” seek Justice Department guidance if questions arise about particular grants. Discrimination by faith-based grantees should be barred.
We’ll wait and see what further details and comments surface here. But if this New York Times editorial editorial has the shape of things right, that’s not good enough.
No wealth creation since 2001
Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.
Posted in Economic stuff, Politics and the economy
Tagged bank bailout, economics, Krugman, stimulus bill
