Word from the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, summarized in the Fed's so-called "Beige Book," shows the economy slowing in July and August.
Duh.
But the Fed is quick to point out the economy overall is still growing -- even though it's growing more slowly than in the spring.
Can we have a moment of realism here, please?
This post was written before a visit from the FBI and a call from Secretary Gates convinced the nutty pastor to back down. Whatever form of persuasion the feds used to prevent this monstrous act, bravo. Good for Obama. Burning Qurans is not an exercise of First Amendment rights any more than unlimited campaign spending, deemed "free speech" by the Supreme Court is free speech.
***
I'm asking. Is this a crazy idea?
The president, the military, and other US intelligence agencies say that the Quran burning could lead to the murder of Americans.
On that basis, can't the President legitimately order the FBI to arrest the crazed pastor before he acts?
I don't know what legal basis there would be for an arrest but, as often happens, the feds can act and come up with a legal justification later.
Let the pastor go to court. Let him win. What difference does it make? Doesn't the US government have a compelling interest to save American lives? Is there really no law that provides the President with the authority to protect US troops? .
Why not throw the thug in jail and send that statement to the world? We are not who Hezbollah and Al Qaeda say we are. We are not at war with the Muslim world. And it, in turn, has no cause to be at war with us.
Not proposing, just asking.
For the almost 3 years I have been writing a blog, I have held to the belief that the self-important political pundits like Charlie Cook underestimated Barack Obama's political skills. In November of 2007, Charlie Cook was saying the Presidency was a tight race between Hillary Clinton (D) and Rudy Guiliani (R). Today Cook says the Democrats will lose the House and maybe even the Senate. So Obama has constantly outperformed Cook's opinion of him.
Many of you were doubters in late 2007, became believers in late 2008 and are doubters again today. But Obama understands a mid term election is like the opening of a big movie. People only begin paying attention eight weeks out. As each week ticks off, the attention levels get higher. Like any marketing campaign, you don't want the interest level to peak too early.
So Barack opened the fall campaign this afternoon in my home town, Cleveland. Read the whole speech, but first listen to this passage.
A few weeks ago, the Republican leader of the House came here to Cleveland and offered his party's answer to our economic challenges. Now, it would be one thing if he had admitted his party's mistakes during the eight years that they were in power, if they had gone off for a while and meditated, and come back and offered a credible new approach to solving our country's problems.But that's not what happened. There were no new policies from Mr. Boehner. There were no new ideas. There was just the same philosophy that we had already tried during the decade that they were in power -- the same philosophy that led to this mess in the first place: Cut more taxes for millionaires and cut more rules for corporations.
As Rosh Hashanah begins, and Ramadan ends, the virulent Muslim-baiting continues.
The controversy over the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" is only a pretense to express the hate that was already there. On Wednesday, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives refused to condemn the burning of Qurans by a deranged fanatic in Florida. He even suggested a moral equivalence between the building of the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan and the burning of the Qurans. He refused to condemn the Quran burning despite the echoes from Berlin in the 1930s and despite General Petraeus' warning that defiling Qurans would endanger American troops in Muslim countries.
It's getting bad.
This past spring, the radical right and its mouth pieces (especially Fox News) were all about immigrant bashing. But, by summer, the illegal immigrant bogeyman was replaced by the "Sharia-imposing" Muslims. As we've learned, there is absolutely nothing one cannot say about Muslims, no lines that can't be crossed when it comes to them.
But while Muslim-baiting has become part of the right's platform, that doesn't mean liberals are guiltless.
Take for instance Marty Peretz, owner of the New Republic. Peretz is no right-winger. In fact, he is on the left on most issues and so is his magazine. As long ago as 1968, he took a considerable chunk of his wife's fortune and put it into the anti-Vietnam war movement and Eugene McCarthy's candidacy for president.
We rolled out a new feature to the new sign in system this afternoon. If you look up at the upper left hand corner of the site, just below the TPM logo, there's now a "settings" link. If you click that link you can either change your username or reclaim your old TPM identity if you haven't done so already.
We're hoping to shortly roll out another part of the settings feature that will let you change your avatar. And hopefully later this week we'll roll out a custom TPM login, for those who cannot or will not use Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Yahoo.
Let us know if it works for you and whether you have any problems.
As Jews around the world gather tomorrow night to usher in the New Year--and as Muslims worldwide mark the end of Ramadan, no doubt many words from religious leaders will be uttered about the latest peace initiative initiated by the Obama Administration between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Indeed, it's almost a ritual--this longing for peace and this 'process' toward peace. In the year ahead, will peace finally come? The truth is that no one knows--all of the ingredients out there are untested, untried, completely not according to any past or prescribed script. But still, I remain ever so slightly hopeful.
President Obama reportedly will propose two big corporate tax cuts this week.
One would expand and make permanent the research and experimentation tax credit, at a cost of about $100 billion over the next ten years. The other would allow companies to write off 100 percent of their new investments in plant and equipment between now and the end of 2011 at a cost next year of substantially more than $100 billion (but a ten-year cost of about $30 billion since those write-offs wouldn't be taken over the longer-term).
The economy needs two whopping corporate tax cuts right now as much as someone with a serious heart condition needs Botox.
Welcome to the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor -- most of the rest of us -- are unemployed, underemployed or underwater. The Labor Department reported on Friday that just 67,000 new private-sector jobs were created in August, which, when added to the loss of public-sector (mostly temporary Census worker jobs) resulted in a net loss of over 50,000 jobs for the month. But at least 125,000 net new jobs are needed to keep up with the growth of the potential work force.
Face it: The national economy isn't escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working. Near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package, along with tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.
Why they started
In the wake of last week's announcement of an increase in the unemployment rate, the buzz was all about measures that President Obama would unveil to goose the hind-parts of the economy. We trust that Bill Clinton will be consulted for advice on the optimal angles. Up till a few days ago, the only hint we had from the Administration was endless droning on behalf of tax cuts for small business. One suspects this last formulation has been seized upon as a veritable cloak of invisibility against the rampaging Uruk-hai Republican Tea Party.
Today the president proposes to add a slug of infrastructure spending to the mix, in the amount of $50 billion. Even if this money is spent immediately, and well, it is much too little, too late. After all, there are 15 million unemployed in a $14.5 trillion economy. The President is talking about point-three percent. We've got 139 million employed. point-three percent of that is under half a million. If you spread it over a year, it's growth of 35-40,000 a month. We need a net growth of about 130,000 a month just to keep up with labor force growth, completely aside from the need to get the better part of the 15 million back to work. Come on!
This next week on Wednesday, 8 September at the New America Foundation a group of academics, business leaders, journalists, and other policy practitioners -- organized as 'The Afghanistan Study Group' will formally release this new report titled "New Way Forward: Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan." The report can be downloaded here.
The Afghanistan Study Group is our effort at a Team B approach to thinking through an alternative policy strategy for Afghanistan given the problems undermining America's current course.
But after reading the following article in the Washington Diplomat by Michael Coleman, it's clear that former U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel -- now co-chair with former Senator David Boren of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board -- makes a darn good "Team B" package all on his own, particularly when it comes to no-nonsense thinking about the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
The Washington Post insists that its columnists either produce top quality work or toe the company line. Dana Milbank falls into the latter group of columnists as he showed once again with his warm praise for former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson sexism and ignorance.
Senator Simpson has been in the news lately for writing crank letters to his critics in his capacity as a co-chair of President Obama's deficit commission. In one of these letters he compared Social Security to a cow with 310 million tits. This letter was sent to Ashley Carson, then the executive director of the Older Women's League.
Apparently Mr. Milbank does not even understand why Simpson was widely denounced for sexism over this letter.
Bravo to reporter Jeff Stein for even getting this story in the Washington Post which is the most pro-Likud major newspaper in America. (I am trying to avoid using the term "pro-Israel" in this context because I consider support for the Likud approach to be anything but pro-Israel).
Read the opening paragraph. You will want to read the rest.
The CIA took an internal poll not long ago about friendly foreign intelligence agencies.The question, mostly directed to employees of the clandestine service branch, was: Which are the best allies among friendly spy services, in terms of liaison with the CIA, and which are the worst? In other words, who acts like, well, friends?
"Israel came in dead last," a recently retired CIA official told me the other day.
Not only that, he added, throwing up his hands and rising from his chair, "the Israelis are number three, with China number one and Russia number two," in terms of how aggressive they are in their operations on U.S. soil.
Israel's undercover operations here, including missions to steal U.S. secrets, are hardly a secret at the FBI, CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. From time to time, in fact, the FBI has called Israeli officials on the carpet to complain about a particularly brazen effort to collect classified or other sensitive information, in particular U.S. technical and industrial secrets.
The Israeli right, and its enablers here, are out of control which only adds to the awe I feel for the brave Israelis of the left -- B'tselem, Machsom Watch, Rabbis For Human Rights, Peace Now, Gush Shalom, etc. -- who are fighting the paranoid right which is endangering Israel's existence by criminal actions like this.
I know there's been a lot of conversation here over the last week about the fate of the Reader Blogs section of TPMCafe. I've been touch and heartened by all the things people have said, most particularly how much many of you value the community that exists here. I've given this a lot of thought over the last week. And more importantly we've discussed the technical options open to us. The key, as I've said before, is that for several different overlapping reasons we cannot continue to run this version of the Reader Blogs. Mostly it's about cost. But it's a little more complicated than that because related to the cost issue is that the Reader Blogs section of TPMCafe is keeping us anchored in the 'community' installation of Movable Type. The makers of Movable Type are moving away from supporting MT for sites that operate at our scale, especially for ones that use the community features we do.
The Great Jobs Depression continues to worsen.
The Labor Department reports this morning that companies created ony 67,000 new jobs in August. That's down from the 107,000 they created in July. And because the government laid off temporary Census workers, the economy as a whole lost 54,000 jobs.
To put this into perspective, we need 125,000 net new jobs a month just to keep up with the growth of the population and the potential workforce.
Think of it this way. The number of Americans willing and able to work but who cannot find a job hasn't stopped growing since the start of 2008. All told, about 22 million Americans are now jobless. Add in those who are working part-time who'd rather be working full time, and we're up to 25 million.
And because most families depend on two paychecks, the practical impact is almost double.
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