by matttbastard
Let’s hope the ugly SOB still clips his toenails.
Seriously — producing daily crypto-fascistic dispatches carefully crafted to rile up the rubes while scoring mega ad rev? Understandable.
Poor hygeine?
Absolutely unforgivable.
h/t Krugman (who, speaking of unforgivable actions, hath besmirched teh honour of Marcy Wheeler!!11one)
by matttbastard
So, after having “cut some stuff just to say that they had cut some stuff” from President Obama’s recovery plan, as publius aptly summed up last night’s contentious-yet-self-congratulatory bipartisan circle jerk, what exactly are we (the people) left with?
[T]he centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.
My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years.
Heck of a motherfucking job, kiddies.
h/t Joe Trippi via Twitter
by matttbastard
Nearly 600, 000 American jobs were lost in the month of December, the largest single month loss since 1974. These latest figures bring the total number of jobs shed in the last 3 months to 1.8 million. As a result, the US unemployment rate is now pushing 8%.
Chris Isidore of CNNMoney.com puts those numbers into proper context:
As bad as the unemployment rate was, it only tells part of the story for people struggling to find jobs. Friday’s report also showed that 2.6 million people have now been out of work for more than six months, the most long-term unemployed since 1983.
And that number only counts those still looking for work. The so-called underemployment rate, which includes those who have stopped looking for work and people working only part-time that want full-time positions, climbed to 13.9% from 13.5% in December. That is the highest rate for this measure since the Labor Department first started tracking it in 1994.
Absolutely “devastating”, as President Obama just observed during a news conference introducing his new emergency economic advisory board.
Yet, as Ali Frick at Think Progress acidly points out, “Republicans are stonewalling action to help the economy recover. Even as millions of Americans are losing their jobs, conservative Senators insist that there’s no rush to help them.”
Watch it:
Transcript:
LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): We do not need any more news conferences. What we need is getting more than 16 people in a room. We need to slow down, take a timeout, and get it right.
ROGER WICKER (R-MS): As Thomas Jefferson reminded Americans in his day — and I quote — “Delay is preferable to error.” Let’s not rush into doing this the wrong way.
JOHN ENSIGN (R-NV): So we need to act much more responsibly than this bill acts. It’s still time. There is no hurry.
TOM COBURN (R-OK): There’s no reason for us to hurry up, number one. There’s no reason for us not to look at every area of this bill and make sure the [American] people know about it.
Paul Krugman doesn’t mince words in his column today:
Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.
It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.
Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.
[…]
Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive.
As Obama put it in a speech to Democratic lawmakers last night (h/t Steve Benen), “[Y]ou get the argument, ‘Well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill.’ What do you think a stimulus is? That’s the whole point. No, seriously. That’s the point.”
Watch it:
Benen further notes that “The Politico‘s Jonathan Martin said that the president’s urgent tone was “reminiscent of the final days of the campaign.” It was actually more than just reminiscent — at one point, Obama literally asked lawmakers, “Fired up?” They shouted back, “Ready to go!“”
So, let’s go. Now.
Take action: Contact your senator and demand they cease with the tiresome, frivolous political theatrics and pass this recovery package intact (not a watered-down goddamn bullshit “moderate” compromise version) ASAP.
Go.
by matttbastard
Paul Krugman wades into the ongoing debate over whether Obama should look back or move forward with regards to extra-legal activities on the part of the outgoing administration:
Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.
[…]
Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.
First, let me make it clear that my sentiments directly and unequivocally intersect with Krugman’s, as outlined in this post. With that said, I’m all-too pessimistic about the likelihood of any serious investigations taking place. As Earl Ofari Hutchinson notes, members of the party that currently controls both branches of Congress (including and especially its leadership) also have bloodstained hands:
The Democratic-controlled Congress passed the “Protect America Act.” This put the Congressional stamp of approval on what Bush did and actually expanded his powers to snoop. The targets weren’t just foreign terror suspects and known operatives but American citizens. Democrats knew this and approved it by inserting in the law open ended wording that permitted legalized spying on anyone outside the U.S. who intelligence agencies “reasonably believed” to posses foreign intelligence information. The law deliberately made no distinction about exactly who the target could be. Then there was the infamous clause that granted immunity from lawsuits to communications service providers that made Bush snooping possible. With no fear or threat of legal action against the companies, the wraps were legally off on who could be snooped on. As an added sweetener the law also gave Bush emergency power to tap for up to a week anyone deemed a terror threat; all without a warrant.
And one can’t forget about the CIA’s torture enhanced interrogation program, of which top-level Democratic members of the House and Senate were informed early on of what was going on, yet at the time chose to do nothing. So, with all due respect to people like John Conyers Jr., any attempt to cast the spotlight on the many, many crimes committed over the past decade and hold everyone who is responsible accountable is, I fear, ultimately a futile pursuit. Forgive and (most importantly) forget will be the mantra that the Washington establishment continues to embrace, purely out of an unhealthy, cynical, yet entirely understandable bipartisan sense of self-preservation.
by matttbastard
As Ezra Klein (h/t) observed, the segment is “interesting on a meta-level, as someone who’s paid to seem like he knows these things collides with someone who’s paid to know these things. It’s expertise versus the aesthetic of expertise.”
Also known in MSM parlance as ‘balance’–which, as Klein further notes, means “the actual takeaway is that sounding like you know things and actually knowing things are, in this forum, pretty much equal.”
So, in essence, the outcomes are, by and large, predetermined. Huh. That probably explains why I’ve always thought the ritualistic Sunday morning bobblehead pantomime would be far more entertaining if the participants would go all out and wear Kabuki make-up, or dress in spandex and smash folding chairs over each other’s heads.
Picture it: Next Sunday on This Week, Krugman and Will try to even the score–in a 15 ft high STEEL CAGE!
Now that’s what I call opinion journalism at its finest.
by matttbastard
Bailout compromise bill fails. Dow subsequently plummets by a record figure (nine-eleven-shmine-eleven). TSX also plummets by a record figure, throwing a wild card onto the Canadian election table. All this capped off a day in which global markets took a major league ass-whipping (most of which, it should be noted, occurred before the bailout flame-out).
To quote Paul Krugman (who, in turn, quotes himself)
So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch.
As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes.
Heck of a motherfucking job, kiddies.
Not that I’m fully convinced, contra certain quarters I normally find myself agreeing with more often than not, that it was imperative to pass this bill right fucking now (an ambivalence further cultivated by the knowledge that the much-ballyhooed $700 billion figure was arbitrarily yanked out of some Treasury Department flunky’s ass because they “just wanted to choose a really large number” to put the fear of smoking guns and mushroom clouds into everyone’s heads). Nor is it at all apparent that Paulson’s preferred solution to the credit crisis was the only viable one (see this list of alternative proposals not currently on the table, h/t Sarah J via tweet).
But if this:
really is the primary reason House Republicans chidlishly chose to flip the bird to Democratic and Republican House Leaders (not to mention Secretary Paulson, President Bush, and John “Coalition Builder” McCain), then each and every one of the GOP dissenters up for reelection in November deserves to be unceremoniously turfed from office for being a bunch of petty, shallow, self-absorbed drama-queens apparently more concerned with partisan preening than the economic health of the nation (if not the world).
Speaking of petty, shallow, self-absorbed drama queens and partisan preening:
From the minute John McCain suspended his campaign and arrived in Washington to address this crisis, he was attacked by the Democratic leadership: Senators Obama and Reid, Speaker Pelosi and others. Their partisan attacks were an effort to gain political advantage during a national economic crisis. By doing so, they put at risk the homes, livelihoods and savings of millions of American families.
Barack Obama failed to lead, phoned it in, attacked John McCain, and refused to even say if he supported the final bill.
Just before the vote, when the outcome was still in doubt, Speaker Pelosi gave a strongly worded partisan speech and poisoned the outcome.
This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country.
No, Senator McCain, this bill failed because you, someone who has applied to become leader of the fucking free world, couldn’t whip your own goddamn party (the GOP, aka the party of fiscal responsibility, ideas and utter fucking bullshit) into line, you puerile sack of monkey shit. You demonstratively “suspended” your campaign, snatched the ball out of Pelosi, Paulson and Bush’s hands, started to do an endzone celebration on the 20 yard line and quite spectacularly fumbled it before crossing the goal.
As Marc Ambinder observed:
Two thirds of…Republicans voted for its defeat…after a weekend of telephone call diplomacy from McCain.
Nancy Pelosi may have given a partisan speech, but she was able to get most of her Democrats on board….
Mother fuck ’em and John Wayne.
bastard.logic 