Has anyone seen any discussion in TPM world about the constitutional issue regarding Hillary Clinton being nominated for Secretary of State?  Apparently at least some legal scholars believe Article I, Section 6 effectively prohibits her because she was in office when the salaries of Cabinet officers were increased.  I'm curious to know if anyone thinks this will be a significant issue either in Obama's final decision to select her or, if she is nominated, in the Senate confirmation hearings. It seems to me if this is an issue for her, it would be for any member of Congress being named to the Cabinet.  An interesting thought: had this problem occurred to Obama, a former teacher of Constitutional Law, before Pete Williams of NBC raised it on MSNBC earlier this week?

What's the distance between a throng of customers waiting outside a Wal-Mart for "doorbuster" deals and a throng of destitute people waiting in line for bread? 

WILLIAM KRISTOL (DECEMBER 2008 ISSUE, WEEKLY STANDARD): The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. 

ASSOCIATED PRESS (11-17-08): Barack Obama's incoming administration is unlikely to bring criminal charges against government workers who authorized or used harsh interrogation techniques during the George W. Bush presidency. Obama, who has criticized the use of torture, is being urged by some constitutional scholars and humans rights groups to investigate possible war crimes by the Bush administration.

But they are just advisers! I can already hear some scream. Sure. Obama could have contradicted the advisers via his spokesman, but the latter had no comments for AP (see article). 

Somehow it is so much easier to just read the various items that show on the front page of the TPM site and follow links and comments of interest than it is to coherently comment or write blog entries.  I have great respect and admiration for those who can write so prolifically and well.

This election season/cycle has be fascinating.  I'm sure one reason for that is the availability of so many thoughts, ideas and stories via the Internet.  Another is the emergence of so many strong candidates for president and the historical nature of the campaign and ultimate choices.  I continue to be interested in the on-going election stories, especially the Senate seats still not decided, but I'm also interested in comments on major news stories of the day.  I will be eagerly watching how this site evolves over the next few years hoping and expecting that as it grows, there will continue to be good writing, genuine thinking, and a commitment to integrity both in source verification and authenticity of voice with a minimum of snark just for the sake of snark while injecting some appropriate humor for the pure fun of it.

I came to this site for the first time as a result of reading about it in John Dean's book, Conservatives Without Conscience, well over a year ago.  TPM remains since then part of my daily news intake.  Thanks, and keep up the good work Josh and company.  Maybe your lead will eventually get me passed one of the psychological barriers that keeps me from regularly commenting and initiating my own posts - that is, wondering whether or not I have anything to say that anyone else would find of interest or value.

Leapfrog. We've all heard it applied to Developing World countries, right? As in, these countries don't need to repeat every single step we took on our path to development. And we'd all tend to agree that it'd be good if they could leapfrog over the hellhole factories our grandparents worked in, brutal social practices like child labor, and the inefficient old technologies, like those big thick glasses with the ugly black frames.

The sexier version of the leapfrog idea says these countries should leapfrog over even our more recent technologies, go straight to cell phones & skip the landlines; or go straight to solar PV panels, instead of massive dams.

Most of us can see there's some sense in this. It's not a perfect idea, because sometimes the older ways are healthier or more efficient or more sustainable. But cell phones vs landlines, PV panels vs coal plants... I suspect most of us would nod at that thought.

In my mind, the leapfrog idea wants to bounce ahead of this image. Where it wants to go is toward imagining where we could leapfrog to. Because the actual game we played didn't just mean you had to bend down & hold a squat while the kids in the rear jumped over you. Played right, it would go on & on, a constantly-moving chain of kids, their positions always changing, the whole thing moving forward. That was the aim, to see where you could make the chain go, not just to replace the leaders with the laggards.

But there are counter-ideas that hold us back from seriously pursuing leapfrogging, for ourselves. Perhaps most powerful is the fact that we all know our social & economic & political world has produced some real problems. And the natural tendency is to look first to "fix" them... and not mess the good things up. Fix the bad, keep the good, right? And there's some damn good roots to this desire. Most valuable, that it expresses our desire to ease the suffering of those who're worst off in our societies.

We see how we are.

Read more »

As we wait to finally discover who actually organized this bloodbath in Mumbai, I would like to point out something obvious: the Indian economic "miracle" has been more than tempting fate to have created such a growing number of exuberant and ostentatious nouveau riche in a country where hundreds of millions of people are as scandalously poor... Islamist, Maoist or things as yet undreamed of are bound to grow in the gigantic, bubbling petri dish. globalization has created in India.

So if all we had to go on was potential rage and resentment themselves, we would be looking for a needle in a haystack. It would probably be more profitable to look at the wide effects of this attack as a way of narrowing down the list of possible culprits.

Read more »

A debate has broken out on Daily Kos between two of my favorite "columnists": Teacherken and GrannyDoc. And other posts, such as this one appearing, as they do, on a progressive web site present yet another illustration of how bad things have gotten and how difficult the road back will be even with the best of leaders, the most hopeful and diligent of our citizenry and our history of overcoming worse.

And, yes, things are not as bad today as they were in 1932, but that is not serendipitous. It is because some of what the New Deal left us is still in place, roughly in its original form and is a base from which we can begin this recovery. That's the good news.

The bad news is the need to do something as radical as what President Roosevelt achieved is as great today as it was then, and the "radical" needs to be that much greater to get out of a mess we have made DESPITE what the New Deal has handed down to us. This will not be easy.

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This isn't a surprising pattern: The DC-hires are (?) qualified for the wrong mission, giving us more Abu Ghraib- and Guantanamo-like disasters, creating foreseeable (but mismanaged) problems, compounded by a flawed solution.

This time, it's with the "bailout," which the GAO audited:

TPMM on the bailout bungle: "Treasury Department had hired staff with the specific attributes needed to carry out its original plan for the bailout -- buying banks' bad assets -- only to then decide that it would change its approach by directly injecting capital."

They (stupidly) changed (midstream) the goal, but did not (as they should have) adjust the plan. Nevermind the cattle wranglers they hired knew a different river and had a useless map.

These lessons are relevant to deploying 20,000 troops on American soil.

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We've witnessed alot of hand-wringing among the progressive left liberals worried that the upcoming Obama Administration will not truly represent change from our past. Most particularly, the seemingly self-serving arguments heard recently from the GOP that we are in fact a "center-left" country has many liberals worried that Obama will govern from that place on the political spectrum and thus fail to offer any kind of "change we can believe in."

After what we have lived through, especially these last eight years, I argue instead that radical change is already upon us if we in fact find ourselves governing at the "middle-right."

ONE EXAMPLE: If Bush/Cheney & Friends (including McCain/Palin) were now awaiting the White House for the next term, just what form do you think the proposed/required government financial stimuli would take?

For openers, I would expect their economic stimulus proposals would include massive amounts of monies directed toward "national security" efforts. Halliburton would undoubtedly have multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts, perhaps to build a parallel telecommunications network that would give the Government total control over its ability to engage in secret wiretapping, near-universal video monitoring, etc.

And surely the defense industry would also be in line, gaining contracts to build the next generation of bombers and fighters and tanks and weapons to ensure the neo-cons have sufficient disposable toys in the future to project their personal penile insecurities - oops! I mean "to project power" - at will throughout the world.

For the eight years of Bush/Cheney, we have poured great amounts of money down a rathole (i.e. wars in Iraq/Afghanistan; defense spending increases; National Security budget increases; etc.) in support of the right wing "Homeland Security" agenda. Through it all, we have suffered tremendous budget deficits without gaining much in terms of economic multipliers that might otherwise have been gained were these same funds dedicated toward effective investments in our domestic economy.

But with this election, change has come. It has become obvious to all but the most extreme Libertarians among us that we are entering a period that calls for "Big Government" involvement to get us out of our financial mess. The "center-right" Americans (even the GOP leadership) are now talking about the need to target large economic stimulus packages to buoy the economy, and this investment of taxpayer dollars is targeted specifically to provide maximum leverage that will "assist Main Street." We are therefore seriously considering investments in a green economy, infrastructure improvements, and even universal health care, that will result in improvents in our environment, greater energy independence, and legitimate domestic job creation/retention and other empowerments of the middle and lower classes.

Independent of any personal ideology (or lack thereof!) Obama is certainly smart enough to see which way the wind blows. The people spoke in this last election, and are in fact shaping the discussion (at last!) toward (at least!) this middle-right course. Obama understands his mandate to be a strong shift to the left of where the Bush/Cheney/GOP map has left us: Broke. In the dark. With any sort of warm feeling being nothing more than the wealthy with full bladders trickling down upon us.

Change is already upon us. It is We the People who have already established the Obama Administration at a far more progressive spot on the political spectrum than where we last saw Bush/Cheney & Co. What remains to be seen is how much further to the left the Obama Administration chooses to direct us.

It's enough to give even an old, cynical, socialist/liberal like myself cause to find hope within the otherwise sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves.

I'm going to say it right away, I am a very optimistic liberal. So don't get your hopes up about what I am going to say. However, maybe the fact that I am an optimistic liberal gives this argument even more credibility.

You see, the Georgia Senate race, as most of you probably realize, is going to be all about energizing the base. Everything will depend on who will be able to get the most diehard Republicans or Democrats to the polls. Now, when I see all these Republican ads attacking Jim Martin, I don't feel the usual, "Oh man, that's a good ad, I wonder how Jim Martin is going to be able to retaliate..." as I did even in the final stages of the General Election. I actually feel some kind of pity towards Jim Martin, and in the end, I get a more positive image of him.

Remember how John McCain's attack ads all backfired? Well, that's more or less what's going to happen in Georgia, because this election isn't about pulling moderate democrats over to the Repubs, but energizing the base. Certainly, this will energize the deep Republican crowd, but it will also make all the mildly enthusiastic dems want to get up and go to the polls.

I used not to have very positive feelings about Martin, thinking he was just another southern conservative democrat, whose ideas lean more to the right than I like, but now, I want to see him mop the floor with Saxby Chambliss's face next Tuesday. And this is probably how the democrats in Georgia feel when they see these ads.

That's exactly what happened during the General Election; therefore, I believe that those darned GOPers are making exactly the same mistake!

   American Indians, Puritans who feared starvation, shared resources in what one side referred to as "The New World," the other by many names... but to them it was very old, going back so many generations we only have good guesses as to how it was first discovered by humans.    Now, not that much more than 400 years later, the dishes have hopefully been washed and put back, the turkey is waiting for fattened bellies to dip a bit to be carved some more, it's time to pause and reconsider a few things...

   A while ago I joined a discussion over at Volconvo.com called, "So, when will it be OK to mock Obama?"

   Here was my initial response...

  "Yeah, I complained about some of this early in the election. Things said, obviously not racist, were tormented and tortured syntax-wise until they were considered such... mocking was verboten or intentionally interpreted to be something it was not... Some of the most serious followers seemed to have a giant chip just waiting to tip over on their shoulders, their heads, even their little toes..."

   "But let's be fair. Much of the Bush II years were spent with any criticism or mocking considered "Bush bashing," or only something only al Qaeda sympathizing traitors would do. If I had to point a finger at who started this current trend; it would probably be right back at some of those... who... (complained the most) ...during the past eight years."

   "So, though I am concerned that our political landscape seems to continue to be bullsh... dozed in this manner, I also would pull out the world's tiniest violin for many of those whining about it, that also helped to encourage it... But they don't make them that damn small."

   Maybe you agree.

   Maybe you don't.

   But I'm just using that more specific comment here to make the following general observation...

"We have gotten to the point in society where our partisanship is so important we are unable or unwilling to accept humor, opinions and questions that don't confirm our preconceived notions. We are so determined to be this way we willingly take whatever has been said or done and assign both motives and meaning that either isn't there, or we'd have to be inside the other's head to really...(understand)"

   Here is another observation: this is very close to the same dynamic of the racist... so willing to see a speck in the eye of those he hates, and ignore the 100 foot steel girder sticking out of his.

   The racist observes, or thinks he observes, behavior he doesn't like. Hence: all, or most of "those people" behave like that.
Does he sincerely question his initial observation?

    ...the motives he assigns?

    ....the meaning behind it all, the reasons "why?"

    Are you kidding?

    In the same manner, the skewed partisan observes, or thinks he observes, behavior he doesn't like. Hence: all, or most, of "those people" behave like that. Their intent is "evil," or "stupid," or "ignorant."

   Question his initial observation, the motives he assigns, the meaning behind it all, the reason "why?"

   Ha! Now you really have to be kidding.

   This edition if Inspection started to dribble down from my mind; "head...ing" (pun intended) to this computer screen I'm typing my words into, a long time ago: probably in my first High School where you had to hate the other team. Hitting other fans, throwing things... well, they're less human: inferior, so why not? One didn't dare question such doctrines amongst fellow classmates. While I was never beaten up over my rather sardonic observations regarding this, I came close. Threats; including in front of teachers who said nothing about such behavior, were plentiful.

    Regular readers at my longest digital home for Inspection, Liberaltopia, are probably laughing and repeating a phrase I have typed many times, "Things don't change much, do they (Ken)?"

    There's no reason why they can't change. My mother was close to a Fundamentalist, my Father a heretic. We lived next to our good friends the Setzers. Mr. Setzer was fairly liberal. My father was a conservative. They even ran against each other for public office. Yet everyday Bill Carman and Gene Setzer would ride the hideous, dangerous; bumper to bumper at 60 mph, 20 mile commute into nearby NYC, talking and teasing each other; as only friends could do. As my friend Dell said to me recently,

"Your father knew just how to get under my father's skin."

    Jay Ward; creator of Bullwinkle, and his fellow creators; Alex Anderson and Bill Scott were quite the trio. Ward was quite conservative. The other two: one liberal, the other; somewhere between. In today's dynamic I doubt they would have ever joined forces to seed the imaginations of children with a more creative and intellectual approach to scripting. Still, in the world of cartoon-dom... (Or I suppose "cartoon-'dumb'" if you include the far less intellectual, to quite un-intellectual musings of the likes toon houses like Hanna Barbera.) ...they were known to huddle close and crack each other up with their own scripting ideas.

    What has happened to us? Well partisans and media types learned that the more hatred and animosity is stoked; the more they paint those who disagree as satanic cartoon like caricatures: the more papers they sell, the better their Arbitron ratings and the more mindless drones they get who are willing to do anything for their cause.

   Their power; far more insidious and pervasive than any single printing press, radio wave or TV station, has been bought out, consolidated and melted like rancid butter all over the country; even the world. We are truly nasty tasting "toast," if I am to continue my somewhat poor metaphor.

    It's evil.

    And nothing else but "evil."

    From the first President Adams who put a bar patron in prison until Jefferson freed him after his inauguration for calling Adams "toothless," to a most Uncivil War that has echoed unto the election of 2008, to Vietnam, I'm not even going to begin to pretend this is all "new." Puritans; some who shared Thanksgiving with one tribe of Indians, brutally slaughtered another competing tribe including... all the women... all the children: everyone. When their friends in the other tribe complained they simply did what extreme partisans everywhere, called them the current term for "pansy," and then had nothing more to do with them. True "thanks" for eagerly sharing the first Thanksgiving and helping them hold back starvation in "The New World."

    Karl Rove would be proud, the one of the many intellectual great grandchildren of these slash and burn forefathers.

    The difference between now and then is, it seems, this take no prisoners attitude has rippled down from the highest realms of our government and been institutionalized nationwide: more than a select group of White immigrants to a very unwhite land. Much has been laid at the doorstep of our president elect and a bar raised stupidly low, I fear, is already impossibly high. Despite my own doubts, I worry... yet applaud, his insistence on including those his own base has problems with.

    Will they all respond in kind, or become what Joe Lieberman has been since he was also offered a prime position for being the opposite of supportive? The history of such peace offerings, so far, had been nothing one can define with the modifier "kind." Much of this depends upon the media, and this dangerous dynamic has become institutionalized by hordes of partisans who started flooding Communications schools shortly after I graduated in the mid-70s, according to my profs, and the ever more consolidated media corporate interests who have profited from it.

    So let's go back to the first Thanksgiving and ask what we should have done, rather than slaughter those not on "our side."

    These are things you can do personally: attitudes to take, that just might move us ever so slightly away from this dangerous dynamic. Every little bit helps.

    A few rules to live by that would ease things a bit...

1. No one ever has to be anyone's, or any party's/any movement's cheerleader. Ever.
2.You could always be wrong. Always. Doesn't matter the topic. If you don't get this then you've already checked your humanity at the door. A dog has more common sense.
3. Being right doesn't make you the better person. You're probably just lucky. We all have our own personal demons quite eager to misguide us. Everyone. No exceptions.
4. Everything changes. Everything. So even if you are right at this moment, maybe not during the next.
5. We are like those proverbial blind wise man. Each of us has a piece of the elephant in their hands, but probably will never be able to see even a part of the whole without talking with others who have a different part: a different perspective.
6. Maybe you and God, Allah, (fill in other deity here), Science or rationality totally agree. More likely... not. No matter how damn smart you think you are there's a better than 99.99999999% chance you have got it wrong at least a little.
7. What you believe, you have every right to believe. You have no right to force it on others, lecture them and they have every right to disagree and be respected too.

    Hope that helps. Maybe it won't. But hey, it was worth a try. And I also hope you had a great Thanksgiving: no matter what you believe.




                                                            -30-

    Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 30 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.

[The Law of Karma.  A brief interlude.]

My main concern:  People falling through the cracks.  And how to address that under a Public Health umbrella.

We need not only universal health care - and in my view - a single payer system, but we need ways to track who needs what.  We need better Public Health.  In my view a Public Health System should literally do a census of the country.  I know that sounds impossible.  But I'm envisioning making use of the already existing ground-network the Obama campaign used to such efficiency.  If the neighborhood networks (in battleground states) were replicated all over the country, and volunteers (I'm sure Obama could raise an army of them with one appeal to the nation) fanned out across the land, armed with a public health questionnaire, to locate the elderly, the disabled, the frail, people with chronic illnesses or newly diagnosed, etc - as well as people facing unemployment and losing their homes and other financial difficulties - ok, I know this sounds pie in the sky - but we need an accurate accounting of where we are as a nation in terms of our health and the people affected by current social upheavals (which affect their health!).  Only then, once we're got a data base of who needs what, could Public Health decide how to allocate both professional resources (whether for prevention or ongoing assistance) and the implementation of a volunteer cadre to assist the elderly, the disabled, etc.

I'm a psychologist.  A therapist.  And I'm also in the middle of the muddle that is our health "system" but which too often is not "care."  I'm in a position to see how so many things interact and can affect one's health and one's mental health.  I know that simply a bunch of changes in one year, whether positive or negative, can lead to physical or mental difficulties.  I know that too many people fall through the cracks, due to ignorance or pride, or a feeling that no one cares or no one is there to listen or assist.  We've had this national fantasy that everyone is self-sufficient.  People feel guilty in this country for simply being in need.  We guard and protect people's self-sufficiency, but we don't have a social mechanism to protect them when they're really in need and don't know where or who to turn to.

Insurance is out to make a profit.  We know this.  Managed care is driving providers nuts - on purpose.  We know this.  Treatment decisions are too often taken out of the hands of professionals and given to people who make a profit from denying care or from putting obstacles into the way of receiving care.  People who are ill, particularly people who are mentally ill or cognitively unable to process all the information or access the sources of help (even if they existed!) shouldn't be saddled with trying to decide which insurance plan or drug plan (Medicare Part D is perfect example of this nonsense!) to use and whether to change it every year.  And they can't be saddled with having to navigate insurances and everything else all by themselves.  It's really a totally unfair system, right now.  Rigged against providers, against patients, against a system of care which could so easily be set up in a non-profit way.  Why do we need so much duplication of possible agencies, insurances, paper-pushers and overseers, etc - when all of that only makes it harder for those who are most in need of the services - by facing them with too many choices and hurdles?

Those who've controlled the fragmented pieces of this health care dysfunction (we call a "system") have made the case that "choice" is what every American wants.  As if my husband, newly diagnosed with cancer, is going to do a survey of all possible providers to see and find out their backgrounds and their preferred methods and so on.  Nope!  Maybe if you're Senator Kennedy, you have people to do that for you.  But most of us don't.  (We access the already existing little part of the system we're plugged into - that is nearby - and take it all on faith!)

Choice should involve primarily picking a primary care physician, who is hooked up with a medical center you trust.  That physician should be surrounded by nurse practitioners and physician's assistants (and ideally psychologists, like me, to do a consultation if the medical person thinks it's advisable to have someone talk to them at greater length - or even on a regular basis).  Doctors should be paid for their time, not the service they provide.  And medical education should be financially assisted by the government, so that no one has to go into a high-paid specialty to pay off loans.  (which has led to too many specialists - in cities - and too few generalists anywhere)  We need more primary care people.  We need them to spend time with the patient.  We need them to be able to follow that patient over years, not changing doctors and patients all the time, due to insurance changes... which seem deliberately engineered to interrupt care and thus make greater profits for their share-holders.

So I picture a primary care setting where patients really can truly find a heath care hub.  Where doctors are not spending time arguing with insurances or trying to find out which medication might be on that insurance companies "list" of meds they actually pay for.  And so forth.  Where the doctor's office (or hospital) does not require personnel to list more and more procedures and so on... so as to find ways, from their end, to game a system rigged against them.  (We have armies of insurance people reading charts to try and deny care along with armies of people assisting the medical system reading the same charts to find every jot and tittle to claim for payment!)  Yes, I picture a system where, instead of assuming self-sufficiency on the part of every patient,  we make sure that care for the frail, the elderly, the new mother, the handicapped, the chronically ill is followed up by Public Health workers (or volunteers), making sure no one drops the ball and no one falls through the cracks.  Continuity.  Treating each one with dignity. 

I'm sorry.  Health care should be like the public school system.  A right for each person.  A duty exercised by society.  Ok, if people prefer a "private" alternative, that's their choice.  But it should not be the norm.  We don't seek choice for our electricity.  It's there all the time.  Whether we need it right now or not.  Just plug things in when they're needed.

We know from research that many stressors, family conflict, workplace disruptions, financial hardships etc, contribute to mental health problems and physical health problems.  We know that not having paid vacations and paid sick days are a recipe for getting physical and mental problems.  So much of this is all interconnected!  Helping people handle stress or change (through access to mental health) prevents overuse of medical care.   (Contrarily, a plethora of choices and insurance hurdles adds to stress of any illnes and thus to the potential for further setbacks in the healing process.)

So I'd like to see Public Health as a kind of overarching umbrella, making sure people don't fall through the cracks.  Making sure that as seamless as possible a health care system is put in place.  Making sure that Public Health nurses, for example, visit the frail and elderly on a regular basis or call them in for evals - just to check on them.  Making sure that young mothers receive extra assistance or information or whatever, so they can adequately handle new responsibilities.  Call it pie in the sky - but it can be done - and far easier than raising an army! 

Right now there are so many ways that our current system leaves people floundering.  Confused.  Disregarded.  Overburdened.

This can't go on.  I myself have nearly stopped practicing psychotherapy due to utter frustration with the way insurances have made it difficult to treat and bill and so on.  There's no safety net any longer for therapists.  It's as if we're left to try and deal with suicidal people on our own.   Denied enough visits.  Denied payment.  Denied hospitalization as a way to protect people in a crisis - except for a day or two - if we're lucky.  It's insane!  I would gladly sign on - for free - to assist in setting up or monitoring a system that prevented people from falling through the cracks.  I'd gladly work - for free - to monitor ethics and so on.  I'm very concerned about our nation.  I'm concerned about those among us who are the "least" and the most "vulnerable" and unable to fend well for themselves.  This is breaking my heart here.  I'm seeing it with my elderly parents - still at home - wanting their independence - but no longer able to really notice and think through what they might need - and honestly, at a certain point in life, the elderly are often best served by dedicated strangers than by family members (where there's no baggage on both sides that gets in the way).

So I come back to Public Health.  Everything should come under that, I think.  Enfold the NIH.   Enfold the Military health care system.  Enfold the VA.  Enfold Medicare.  Enfold Medicaid.  Enfold private hospitals.  Ok, enfold me too!  Enfold it all under Public Health.  I suspect that by integrating already existing parallel systems into one whole integrated system, we'd be better off.

Consider this.  If a person goes crazy, why should we worry if it's a Vet with PTSD, to send them to a VA (hours away?) Or if the person is homeless or has insurance or not.  Or if they're "free" to just be homeless and crazy (because you're giving them a choice!).  No, if someone needs care, whether it's due to a broken leg or mental illness, that care should simply be provided.  At a place nearby.  No soldier should have to prove their difficulties are due to war - in order to get care or benefits they need.  And neither should anyone else.  If they've been a victim of incest in childhood, that should be as important to our society as if they've gone to war and been driven nuts that way!

Too many people are falling through the cracks.  Now is the time to get this right.  Can't we do that?  Can't we access the professional skills and experience of people like me in setting this up?  I am sure I am not the only person willing to volunteer time and energy to make sure we do better as a society.  I've been blogging like crazy during the election.  Now I'm blogging here this morning. Yes, Karma sent me:  I'll admit that with a husband facing cancer treatment - who's 69 - and my elderly parents, clinging to their independence but really needing way more social assistance - at 86 and 91, I'd be thrilled if the public health census person showed up at my door and asked me if there was any way I or a family member might have medical problems and the consequences of aging or ill health.  I too need help - right now!  Yes, I'll cope.  I'm well at the moment.  But suppose I get sick too.  Then what?  Nobody but me to fight the system with my catastrophic coverage only!

Public Health:  The right to live with dignity.

World War II veterans returned with "Shell Shock" and sat in the darkness of bars across the nation because back then "real men" didn't cry or whine about their horrific experiences.  "Real men" were TOUGH like George Patton.  "Real men" slapped the "cowards" who had difficulty dealing with all the blood, guts and FEAR.

Vietnam veterans returned with a psychological disorder which came to be known as PTSD.  We sat in the darkness of bars and others of us fell into the easy escape of drugs to escape the horror of nightmares, flashbacks and FEAR.  We used these "easy" escapes because John Wayne and all the other WWII "heroes" would be ashamed if they knew what we were feeling.

Those returning from the current conflicts have exponentially greater stress disorder.  As I have blogged before, Iraq veterans have legitimate reasons to have the highest percentage of PTSD of any American veterans in all our wars.  Even ignoring the political implications of our country's leadership overturning many of the "rules" of war which have kept America as a shining beacon of moral behavior for over 200 years, these vets have other factors which far outweigh the immoral acts of their Commander in Chief.

Reservists and National Guardsmen sent into battle with less training than their "regular" counterparts, multiple tours into an environment of CONSTANT danger and fear, a larger percentage of the force with families forced to face the realities of trying to survive without Dad or Mom around for years are all factors which happened far less frequently with Vietnam veterans.

What is the military's answer to all these troubled individuals returning with psychological trauma never before experienced in such large percentages?  They are increasing the numbers of counselors and psychiatric staff in the VA facilities and on military bases:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081129/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/soldier_stress

During my ongoing research for the book on PTSD which is nearly finished, I have written here many times about the "cave" where I've lived for the past 40 years.  The "cave" where so many Vietnam veterans have hidden in the darkness and relative peace of denial which allowed so many of us to "function" in society for all these years.  "We" built a wall between us and reality which protects our loved ones from knowing what's really inside.  But in our perverted "haven" which was put in place to protect our loved ones from the reality in our memories we actually caused the reverse to become "their" reality.

Drinking, drug use, physical and psychological abuse of those we love became "their" reality. Without knowing the root cause many marriages and families were destroyed.  Our ranks are thinning now.  Most of us are in our 50's, 60's and 70's now.  It won't be long until the news organizations portray the few remaining veterans of Vietnam as a "dying" breed like they do now with WWII and Korean vets.

It is despicable that such a large number of people will die without ever coming to grips with what might have been.  Help wasn't there for so many.  Suicide was the only way out for so many.  Loneliness, despair, depression and shame have been the predominant emotions for so many. 

Things might have been better for returning Vietnam veterans if there had been psychological counseling available.  Education about PTSD during basic training SHOULD be a part of ANY volunteer military organization.  Remove the "shame" and so many more would seek competent counseling when symptoms surface during and after service.

It took me nearly 40 years to finally seek help.  And the help that's available to veterans even today is pathetically inadequate.  Vet centers are popping up across the country but if my experiences are any indication, they are staffed with poorly trained people who provide an ear and not much more.  I have found my sessions with the two I have visited to be equivilant to sitting in my cave and talking to the stone walls.

I hope Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have more competent and adequate counseling available.  I hope the leadership in Washington puts in place firewalls to stop what I fear is coming.  I hope competent counseling is made available for families of returning vets.  I hope veterans become the priority they should have always been.  If not, we are destined to see violence, suicide and depression on a scale never before experienced by our country.

Write your representatives in Congress.  Offer help to these veterans when you see them.  The "shame" of having PTSD MUST be removed.  It IS real! 

Watch out America...  "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!"  

http://www.politico.com/blogs/anneschroeder/1108/No_girly_dog_for_the_Obamas.html

I don't even care that he called lapdogs "girly dogs." I just love his disdain for them.

The more I read about Obama's presumed National Security Advisor, James L. Jones, the more I like him. (I also like the fact that his name sounds like James Earl Jones, but that's neither here nor there, really.) I like his background, I like his strategy for Palestinean statehood, I like what I can tell of his character.

Eli Lake wonders, though, if Obama won't be setting up an internal war between Jones and Hillary Clinton, à la Powell-Cheney. All I can say is, if such a war were to ensue, it would speak only to Hillary's discredit. I have confidence in her at State, and certainly supprt the idea -- but I hope Obama and his team take Jones' lead, especially on Israel-Palestine.

I can't tell whether it makes me smug or concerned to hear Rove praise Obama's economic team.

Surely, though, this is part of some kind of plan to come out and say, "See! We knew it all along!" if the Obama team delivers on the success it seems to promise. He's trying to position his side as gracious, complimentary, centrist.

I just need to soothe my worry that something must be wrong with Obama's economic appointments if Rove has commended them. But surely, sincerity is too much to expect from him.

I should confess that I've been on the fence about Slavoj Zizek for a long time. I've read books and essays here and there, but nothing systematically except for The Ticklish Subject, which I learned a lot from in places. In his case I have shamelessly indulged in that very bad habit of reading more about someone than by him, because Zizek the pop phenomenon is significantly more interesting than Zizek the philosopher.

I've been kept on the fence by a real lack of clarity about whether the broad strokes of Zizek's anti-liberalism are of the astute-if-esoteric or the glibly-sensationalist sort. That is, I have always known that Zizek and I do not share the same critiques of liberalism -- but I had still been wondering whether he couldn't be some kind of helpful ally.

But, Adam Kirsch is right. Zizek's popularity is either genuinely terrifying or deeply depressing -- here's hoping it's the latter.

There is a name for the politics that glorifies risk, decision, and will; that yearns for the hero, the master, and the leader; that prefers death and the infinite to democracy and the pragmatic; that finds the only true freedom in the terror of violence. Its name is not communism. Its name is fascism, and in his most recent work Zizek has inarguably revealed himself as some sort of fascist. He admits as much in Violence, where he quotes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the "re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders of academia"--"where, I guess, I belong." There is no need to guess. ...

In this way, Zizek's allegedly progressive thought leads directly into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor. In his New York Times piece against torture, Zizek worried that the normalization of torture as an instrument of state was the first step in "a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone." This is a good description of Zizek's own work. Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse. Is Zizek's audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? I hope so, because the idea that they can hear him without recoiling from him is too dismal, and frightening, to contemplate.

I have to think that Zizek is more than smart enough to understand all of this -- that is, to understand that his own radicalism is actually the linchpin of the domestication of much of American intellectual culture into milquetoast bourgeois po-mo leftism. I have to think he must only be laughing about it -- and that is even more disgusting.

It struck me at first with some saying "Obama ran as a moderate Republican so that is why he won. Then, it was the  "center-right nation" stuff. Almost trying to pigenhole Obama into not veering this country too far into the left (he will gradually do so with specific policies that will help people but that is for another blog) and keeping it right in the center or the center-right. Then, after some of Obama's choices EVERY REPUBLICAN started using the terms "center-right Democrats". It was disturbing to say the least, I kept hearing "Obama is making solid choices, choosing the Democrats from the center-right wing of his party". It seems to me that they are doing two things:

1.They are trying to spin of course. Making their epic losses less than what they really are, and trying so save face.

2.They are trying to take credit for any success of the Obama administration by saying it's the CENTER-RIGHT Democrats who are steering this country in the back on track and only because Obama has tapped them is he doing well.

 

Personally, I don't feel this will work  very well. A "D" next to someones name is still a "D" no matter how you spin it. I am just saying I see that as a sort of defence for Obama's (hopefully) future progresses being made right off the bat, and it's Obama using core "Republican" or at least "Right-Wing" traits that are the reasons to his success.

Anne Applebaum writes at Slate about why the attacks on Mumbai should make us most afraid: because days later, the global experts are still stumbling around trying to figure out who these people are.

In the coming days, more will surely be learned about the gunmen, some of whom have been captured by the Indian police. Their weapons will be traced, their motives will become clearer, their methods better understood. Their leaders will acquire names and personalities. Still, it is worth underlining, emphasizing, and remembering this initial moment of total ignorance: If nothing else, it's a reminder of some things we learned on Sept. 11, 2001.

Or perhaps we should say, didn't quite learn.

It's not that we haven't made any advances. As Applebaum points out, it is only a matter of time before we trace the intelligence we have and figure out how to categorize the Mumbai terrorists. We now have a vastly more complex understanding of who commits acts of terror, and the many reasons for which they do so. We are, I hope, becoming more adept at identifying the place of particular acts or groups within the matrix of motivations, techniques, and networks of alliance that is (post-)modern terrorism.

But the fact that attacks such as these could come out of the blue, with no immediately obvious source or target, signifies that terrorism is still a renewable resource. In part because of the "franchise model" of Al-Qaida that Applebaum describes, the greatest danger will always be posed by the enemy we haven't met yet.

Rumsfeld said it best -- "but there are the unknown unknowns -- the things we do not know that we do not know."

Talked to Dad on Turkey Day, thought I’d see what he thought of the current situation, and to my surprise he spurted out, “I’m glad Obama’s in charge”. Well, some background - Dad’s rather Conservative Republican. Voted for Nixon once (couldn’t do it the 2nd time). Liked Reagan and the last I remember was defending Cheney quite a lot. Though stopped giving to Republicans when he saw the debts mounting and when they couldn’t stop the “no new taxes” mantra even in the face of a huge school shortfall. Suffice it to say Dad’s a bit of an ideologue but not a complete ideologue. And though Dad still voted McCain, his heart wasn’t in it, as he notes.

And while this is an anecdote, not a statistical survey, at least it’s something that says at least Obama’s veer to the right (or consistent driving to the right, depending on perspective) isn’t without some benefit. Because I’m largely inclined to believe that any sop tossed to the right is greeted with scorn and ridicule and just as an opening for another attack. But perhaps there are some fence-sitters out there who really do care about some economic and moral principles, who aren’t just delirious Rush fans looking at Democrats only as traitors and terrorists.

Now of course I’ll be happier when I see Gitmo closed, our troops heading out of Iraq, and something of a stabilized economy. I suppose there’s more I could ask for, but I never was into the hope and change stuff, just a return to normal mediocrity and mild outrage and I’ll be happy.

And Dad’ll probably be happy not having to listen to this.

Over the past week or so, MJ Rosenberg has produced a flurry of posts on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, many of them expressing optimism about the possibility of achieving a two-state solution now that President-elect Obama is about to take over the White House.

At the same time, in the general media, a number of commentators have expressed opinions that the obstacles to achieving a two-state solution are large and that expecting one any time soon (or any time at all) is foolish (Aaron David Miller's op-ed in the JPost is just one recent example of this line of thought).

Last week, long-time TPMCafe reader Dan K commented (with sarcastic humor) that all these debates about Israel and Palestine and what the Israelis need and what the Palestinians need were debates exclusively among Jews. There wasn't an Arab voice to be heard. While Dan K was being funny, his observation was serious: in the West, at least, we hear the opinions of lots of Jewish organizations and Jewish pundits, but we rarely--if ever--hear Palestinian voices. Sure, every once in a while, NPR will broadcast a three-minute interview with a Palestinian (usually University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami), but compared with the volume of opinions from Israeli and Jewish sources, the thoughts of Palestinians are practically unheard.

So, motivated by Dan K's comment, I spent some time trying to find some kind of recent Palestinian statement on the two-state solution. Thanks to an article in The Guardian, I discovered that just this August, an organization funded by the European Union and called The Palestinian Strategy Study Group, published a very interesting analysis of the options for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict called: Regaining the Initiative: Palestinian Strategic Options to End Israeli Occupation.  After reading the report, I think it is actually one of the better analyses of the situation that I have read and deserves more currency in the West. I encourage anyone with an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to read the report directly. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, at least you will be exposed to a well-articulated Palestinian viewpoint.

Here are what I believe are the main points of the report--though, again, please read the report directly since the Palestinians speak for themselves better than I can speak for them:

• The repeated negotiations toward a two-state solution are primarily a delaying tactic that helps Israel maintain the status quo while expanding its occupation and settlement of Palestinian areas
• Israel is willing to prolong negotiations indefinitely because it believes that there are more desirable options than a true two-state solution. (These options include continuing the occupation indefinitely while appropriating more land and making a Palestinian state impossible; allowing the creation of a weak provisional Bantustan-like Palestinian state while still maintaining effective control over Palestinian territory; pursuing unilateral separation on Israeli terms without any concessions to other Palestinian demands; or working for the incorporation of Palestine into Jordan and Egypt).  
• The Palestinians believe that a two-state solution is still desirable, but only if three strategic ends are acheived by it (ending occupation, establishing a fully independent and soverign Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital; and honouring the right of return of Palestinian refugees). 
• Palestinians also believe that a one-state solution (a bi-national state or a unitary democratic state) is an acceptable outcome.
• As interim measures to the resolution of the conflict through the creation of two states, a bi-national state, or a unitary democratic state, the Palestinians should reconstitute or abolish the PA (the authors see the PA as a facilitator of the occupation) and would be willing to consider some kind of UN Trusteeship as a transition to independence.
• The Palestinians should focus their short-term efforts on making the occupation as costly as possible to Israel so that the current status quo--endless negotiations and continued occupation--is no longer a viable or desirable option for Israel.  Other alternatives (weak Bantustan-like state, unilateral separation, and incorporation into Jordan and Egypt) must be resisted. By making the status quo painful for Israel and by firmly closing down paths to alternatives undesirable to the Palestinians, the Palestinians hope to force Israel to quickly settle on a two-state solution or to be forced into the alternative of accepting a one-state solution.

I've seen all the stories about big donors getting big transition roles, about the ethical standards the Obama transition team has established limiting donations, etc., etc.  But what do they need all that money for in the first place?

Okay, I can understand that there's staff to pay, and the cost of things like transportation, accomodations, rent and whatnot, in getting offices set up and getting people together for meetings and interviews and everything.  But it sounds like they're pulling in a ton of cash from all these donations.  And it's not as if they have the more obvious campaign expenses such as television commercials and field offices to worry about any longer.

So what the hell do they need so much money for? Youtube addresses and change.gov can't cost that much.

Josh has implicitly raised the question that I asked last week:  why doesn't the US use this opportunity to set up a government-owned central bank?  TTarleton replied to my post with the notion that the Federal Reserve is our central bank.  Although the Reserve shares a lot of the same functions as government-owned central banks, it is not the same kind of entity as the central banks in most developed countries.  The Reserve is a system of privately owned banks with a board of people from those banks. 

A central bank that is government-owned (like the Bank of Canada) regulates private banks, regulates the money supply, and has such large liquid assets at its command that it can intervene directly.  The Fed needs an Act of Congress (TARP anyone?) to take the kind of action that the Royal Bank took. 

The market ideology of the US has mitigated against such banks.  The Fed was set up as a kind of compromise between those who wanted a government-owned bank and those who did not.  Again, it does serve many of the same functions.  But because the people running the government now (and under Obama) are conservatives market types, it is unlikely that they will seize this opportunity.

And it is an opportunity that is worth talking about.  Better (not necessarily more, but smarter) regulation, nimbler response, more revenue for taxpayers, and above all, greater stability in the market.  Here's one example I've heard:  if the US government had a central bank--with all the assets and liquidity that go with it--then if short sellers were ganging up on an otherwise sound company to drive its stock down, the bank could intervene and buy such massive quantities of stock that the shortsellers would not be able to destroy the company.  Currently the market is not reflecting the true value of many of the companies on the exchange--this is not due solely to the exotic securitization that led to the mortgage finance collapse but also to the abilty of heavily capitalized hedge funds to throw their weight around regardless of underlying fundamentals.  Only a government-owned bank would have the ability and the incentive to offset these destabilizing efforts.

Of course, free-market ideologues will consider such interventions to be anathema.  Even Josh seems to think (reflexively) that government ownership of banks should be short-lived (why, exactly, Josh?).  But wouldn't a central bank buying assets for the taxpayers (I don't mean Treasuries but other banks, buying stocks in companies, etc.)  be better than simply throwing taxpayer money at banks in the hopes that they will start lending again (and when they don't, throwing more money at them)? 

I would like to hear someone like Krugman weigh in on these issues.  Thanks for bringing them up again, Josh.   

I just received a call from a very close friend of mine. She's the one who brought me here to Missouri to work on the Obama Campaign. For those of you who follow my posts, you'll know what a life-changing experience it was. After the election, she's one of the many Obama staffers and volunteers who flooded Georgia to aide Jim Martin in his run-off against Saxby Chambliss. Tonight's call was simple: We need donations to help Jim Martin's campaign.

So of course, I'm on board. Here's the best I can do.

Some may wonder: why help Jim Martin? I think, for those that know and understand who and what Saxby Chambliss is, wouldn't even ask this question. Don't know? I suggest you find out.

We do need your help. It's not necessarily (at least to me) about getting 60 Democrats in the Senate. Though for some, that may be the reason, and reason enough. Whatever your reason, it's important to know that this is not an issue of partisan politics. It's about what's right and wrong. Saxby Chambliss is wrong. He has proven himself unfit to hold public office on numerous occasions. Did you ever find yourself saying such a thing about McCain? This is, in essence, no different.

Just follow this link to lend a hand, and to be convinced (if you're not already) as to why this fight is important.

To all those who help, thank you in advance.

The house hearings with the tin cup delegation from Detroit showed how mediocre U.S. automotive managment is. This group is on deck for the failure. They then Search for Excellence in the form of a tax payer bailout? 

Their performance in front of the House Panel last week pointed out The Big 3's mediocre game plan. They lost sight of their business. Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, he created the affordable automobile. Had GM's Rick Wagoner, Ford's Alan Mulally, and Chrysler's Bob Nardelli shown up with a vision that would save middle class jobs and America's Chevy's, Mustangs and Minivans they might have succeeded.

They delivered only one  C in Credibility - Confidence. They forgot about Compassion and Competence. Private jets showed an appalling lack of compassion and showing up without a business plan was rookie stupid and incompetent. They must be confused, Baseball is where .330 is awesome.

They left Washington with a couple directives. Come back when you come up with a plan and come back with a little more humility (and maybe some common sense).

I'm curious if the Big 3 plus the head of the UAW didn't consult Public Relations advisors, or if they disregarded their advice; because it sure looked like this foursome prepared for the wrong talking points - if they did any preparation at all. It would have been wise for the four of them to share a flight on the way to Washington just so they'd walk in with a shared strategic plan. They ended up fouling out on dozens of wild pitches.

They were broad sided by the uninformed. The political wind was against them and too many bobble heads had their sway ahead of them. The House Panel had made up their minds before the foursome walked into the Capitol building. It's hard to believe these four men didn't realize they had to do a pursuasive bit of talking to a hostile audience. It was obvious they had skipped out on practice the whole week. They were looking to where they were going before they caught the ball.

Here's what they need to do to make a come back.

First they need to repackage themselves. They need to be both more humble and  more respectful of those who they are asking for help. That starts with flying commercial, or maybe  driving there to make a point? ...and staying in moderate accomodations when they visit Washington. Brian Williams poked the best hole in these CEO's argument for private jets:

Citing CEO's "security" as a justification is a bit shaky: what are the real chances that Chrysler Chief Bob Nardelli is going to be attacked (or generally in any grave danger) while in a first class airline seat on a commercial flight to Washington? It turns out the only attack had to do with Congressional, media and public reaction to his flight to Washington by private jet.

One big hurdle these execs must clear is the amazing amount of disinformation  that is spewed by the  Republicans, financial analysts, talking heads, pundits and MSM bobble heads that doesn't always add up. Another is that they need to stop looking at labor as the enemy and more like they are team mates. Another sticking point is, "Why the Auto Industry?" because Life Insurers and endowment funds are about to pitch their needs too. The Big Three needs to show, not say, why they are vital to our economy. They need to talk about how their recovery will fit into the overall economic recovery.

GM, Ford and Chrysler are only looking for help along the lines that Toyota, Mercedes Benz, Honda and Hyundai received. The differences being that the transplants received the help years ago when they didn't need it, the help came at their host state's expense and today's price tag is much higher.

GM, Ford and Chrysler pays their labor 12% more in wages than the U.S. Toyota, Honda and Hyundai factories. The big three need to acknowledge that labor did concede on wages in a 2 tier compensation plan. They need to make law makers see that labor has negotiated.

Automakers have already wrung billions in concessions out of the United Autoworkers over the last three years, and even if union workers agreed to work for free it would only shave 5 percent off the cost of their cars.

Let's repeat that point: if the autoworkers worked for no salary at all, it would cut just 5 percent off the cost of their cars.

GM, Ford and Chrysler pays out far more in legacy costs to retirees than the Toyota, Honda and Hyundai does world wide.

Health care costs are killing GM, Ford and Chrysler's competitiveness far more that Toyota, Honda and Hyundai because the Asian auto makers do not pay retiree health care benefits in their home countries (or here for that matter) and the transplant factories are too young to face that problem yet.

For the last quarter-century, Toyota, Honda and Nissan have strived to appear to American consumers like homegrown companies.

They built a string of manufacturing plants in the South, employing tens of thousands of local workers. They hired American designers. They spent millions on ads to trumpet their growing roots in communities across the country.

"Being a good corporate citizen starts with hiring lots of good citizens," one Toyota ad says.

Yet as they built up their operations, the Japanese "transplants" have worked hard not to resemble an American car company in one vital respect: how they treat their retirees.

"We want to avoid commitments when we have no control over their costs," said Pete Gritton, the head of human resources for Toyota's United States manufacturing operations. "We can't build in things in such a way that we won't be able to keep our commitments later."

Until recently, the issue has mostly been academic for the Japanese car companies. Most of the American factory workers they started hiring in the mid-1980's are still working.

But age is creeping up on them. All three Japanese companies are anticipating that the ranks of retirees will swell over the next several years. Toyota's American arm, for example, has just 258 retired production workers (G.M., by contrast, has more than 400,000 retirees).

But things will change over the next five years. In 2011 and 2012, a combined 1,700 workers will be eligible for retirement at Toyota -- about 6 percent of its current labor force.

The Big Three need to make the case to lawmakers that the transplant automotive industry is just earlier in the cycle than they are. They need to organize their position more strategically and come up with better tactics than they displayed last week. They need to organize their water bearers and get them on Morning Joe, Olbermann, Hardball,  and yeah, even take on the likes of Lou Dobbs and Neil Cavuto; because last week, was a reenactment of the Mighty Casey Strikes Out.

They need to admit they underfunded their contracturally mandated pension plans and emulated the U.S. social security system's pay as you go plan amd then explain how they are going to proceed.

They need to defend their products. I've seen here and everywhere that the Honda's and Toyota's are more reliable cars, but have you ever looked into why? It's because the foreign automakers don't put in the amenities American car makers do. I happen to have both a Dodge Caravan and a Honda CR-V. There's no doubt the CR-V is the "better" car. It doesn't break, but why is it we like the Caravan better? It's simple things like the rheostat on the windshield wipers. The Honda's rheostat doesn't break but it has on 3 settings: too darn slow, too friggin fast, and the mid range isn't just right either. Compare that to Dodge's 12 setting rheostat that ranges from every now and then to fast as I need. Honda's don't have visor extensions or tethers on their gas caps. Toyotas don't have turn signal indicators in their rear view mirrors. More amenities to break. More complicated cars break more often.

After they eat enough crow, then they need to deliver their plan. The devised business plan must take these automakers forward. All 3 of the Big Three must recapture Henry Ford's original focus; building affordable cars and trucks. That plan needs to:
1. Show how they are going to manage the nuts and bolts of their business to meet their target customer's needs. It needs to show time tables, cost cuttings and reappropriation of their resources.
2. Deal effectively with their legacy (retiree costs) of health care and pensions. They also need to a plan for current employee health costs, which may include a call for Universal Health Care.
3. Deal effectively with executive compensation to labor cost ratio and bring it down from the 261:1 it is now (Wagoneer $15.7 mil in 2007 vs. $60,000 for avg assembly line worker).
4. The plan must call for a moritorium on dividends.
5. The plan should offer the tax payer a stake in the business. A good old voting stock swap for a loan. We'll sell the stock back post recovery. That way we'll have a chance of getting our money back.
6. The plan needs to call for an infusion of some new key players in the managment team. Yep, they are going to have to offer up some resignations.

Once they pitch their plan they then The Big Three needs to engage the punditocracy who is oblivious to how adroitly they speak out of both sides of their mouth at the same time. Just last Friday, Pat Buchanan decried the auto bailout then called for "something to be done" to save Citibank - all within a 3 minute span on Morning Joe. Just about all the MSM are calling for a renegotiation with the UAW. It's easier for people on the sidelines to take the talking heads' talking points as gospel, but the truth is found a little deeper than our superficial media pundits dig.

Considering how poorly the $700 bil bank bailout money is going along. It makes sense that other bailouts are going more slowly. Finding out $25-$50 bil for the automotive industry has got to be part of a bigger plan that focuses on the middle class. We need to do it with the right kind of string attached. The U.S. economic recovery plan needs to stimulate a broad selection of businesses, not just ancillary businesses dependent on Detroit. 

Crossposted at dkos.

"I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process," - George Bush, in an interview with NPR (Broadcast on Thanksgiving, 2008)

---------------------------------

George seems to aspire to some pretty rare company. After all, the same could have been said by the following:

Ed Gein: Never sold his soul, but was in the market to buy material to make a few lampshades...

Dick Cheney: Never sold his soul, but left his heart behind in one of his earlier visits to Geo. Washington University Hospital

Charles Manson: Never sold his soul. His mind? Not so sure...

Table Top Joe: Never sold his soul (sole?). Didn't have much of anything else to offer, either!

Ezra Klein asks whether we should refer to African countries as "African." The basic arguments are as follows.

1. It is ridiculous to refer to all countries on the continent as similar. The continent is infinitely larger than the United States, and we barely speak of people from California and Oregon as the same nationality. Referring to it all as "Africa" instead of the name of the specific country being discussed reinforces the idea of Africa as the Dark Continent, a large mass of indistinguishable land.
   
2. There is a really powerful connection to be drawn between the African countries. Even though each has its own distinct history, countries as diverse as Ghana, South Africa, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have a similar post-colonial identity because of the shared legacy of European colonization. Speaking about "Africa" is useful to study this connection.

I see both sides. While living in Ghana for a semester, I saw that people definitely think of themselves first as their individual ethnic group - Ga, Ibo, Ewe - and second as Ghanaian or African. But there was still a certain pride in being African. My roommate Derek was thrilled by the success of Senegal's Akon and the prospect of Kenya's Obama being President of the United States. Their success showed that success for Africans in the United States was possible.

So I don't think that we should unilaterally say that the "African" connection should be used or avoided. But I think that we need to be careful about how we talk about African countries on a cas-by-case basis.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081128/ap_on_bi_ge/meltdown_coming_soon

Meltdown far from over, new mortgage crisis looms

<snip>

"It's a toxic drug and nobody knows how bad it's going to be," said Paul Miller, an analyst with Friedman, Billings, Ramsey, who was among the first to sound alarm bells in the residential market.''

<snip>

Those retailers typically were paying rent that was expected to cover mortgage payments. When those $20 billion in mortgages come due next year -- 2010 and 2011 totals are projected to be even higher -- many property owners won't have the money.

<snip>

"The system has never been tested for a deep recession," said Ken Rosen, a real estate hedge fund manager and University of California at Berkeley professor of real estate economics.

One hope was that the U.S. would use some of the $700 billion financial bailout to buy shaky investments from banks and insurance companies. That was the original plan. But Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has issued a stunning turnabout, saying the U.S. no longer planned to buy troubled securities. For those watching the wave of commercial defaults about to crest, the announcement was poorly received.

"He's created havoc in the marketplace by changing the rules," Rosen said. "It was the stupidest statement on Earth."

<snip to end>

A Thanksgiving Day editorial by the NYT focuses on the "safety net" for the poor - a typical holiday topic and framing of the issue made more topical than usual by the current economy.

And while nothing the editorial writer says is wrong exactly, this kind of exhortation of our federal government to improve the measurement of poverty won't accomplish much.

Yesterday's posting - Poverty - We Need a New Goal More Than a New Measure - turns out to be a sort of unconscious anticipation of the Times sympathetic but misguided commentary.

At The Mobility Agenda, we track media coverage of poverty proposals.

For example, this Manhattan Institute article, Getting Poverty Wrong, and the media followup is a good reminder that we will not achieve the policy results we seek (note the list of Obama proposals attacked in the article) with a conversation that makes people think in the usual way about poverty.

When we use this lens on the issue, we inevitably get a response from our opponents that goes straight to the place Bill Cunningham (a very popular radio talk show host) does in this interview:"...they're poor because they lack values, morals, and ethics."

At another spot in the interview he argues that "...unlike many countries in the world...we have fat poor people. We don't have skinny poor people. Ours are fat and flatulent."

A third interview lowlight:

"CUNNINGHAM: Steve Malanga -- the article is "Obama's counterproductive war on poverty." The war on poverty was declared in the 1960s. It was lost in the 1970s. The funding continued for poverty. You know, people are poor in America, Steve, not because they lack money; they're poor because they lack values, morals, and ethics. And if government can't teach and instill that, we're wasting our time simply giving poor people money."

Once you're in this discussion, there's no getting out of it in a good way. And there's no way to talk about poverty without ending up in this argument.

Plus, as noted yesterday, changing the measure, and even cutting poverty rates using an improved measure, is a very low bar to set for ourselves.

Instead, we need better goals addressing well-being and inclusion, leading to more and better jobs, creating stronger communities, and strengthening our democracy and economy.

Perhaps this is test number one but it begs the question....India or Pakistan...when it comes to fighting terrorism which is the wests' best ally? Pakistan seems very divided when it comes to fighting with the west against the terrorism in Afghanistan.....they often appear as a third front. India on the other hand has a very clear position with dealing with terrorists whether on land or sea (they are one of the few maritime forces that has attacked the pirates off Somalia). Regardless, January and the new president are a long way off and many new challenges will probably happen......too bad Bush doesn't just end his lame duck gig early and let the new guy get on with the serious job of leading the country.

"Thanksgiving, after all, is a word of action." - W.J. Cameron

I intended to drop in here and say exactly that, but I have to confess I'm a little taken aback that there is no mention of India anywhere on the home page.

Are we so preoccupied with the affairs of our country that we have we lost our compassion? Growing up as I did in the 70s and 80s, that used to an oft-echoed critique of our Republican-led country. Do we truly realize how precious a commodity life is, how precious is our own station in this United States of America?

Today I acknowledge the troubling times in which we live. ..... And how gratitude fills my soul, while in so areas around the globe - India, Zimbabwe, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, others - being thankful means you and your loved ones surviving another day with even a scrap of food in your belly.

It's past time for me - for us all - to get right with our neighbor, ourselves, our God. It is past time for divisive politics or thinking, it is past time to seize the moment and act.

Happy day and happy Season to all. May our eyes, minds and arms be forever open.

A very Happy Thanksgiving to all .  We have so much to be thankful for in such transcendent times.  Keep your heads up, and be patient.  With a little elbow grease, and some stickum, I'm sure it will all get better.

Thank you, Josh, et. al. for this place.  I've met so many friends here.

The Church Committee did not hamstring America's Intelligence Agencies. That is a myth promoted by the right-side of the political bipolarity as a method enabling them to shirk personal responsibility for the plethoric intelligence failures of contemporary conservatism. Time and time again, many of the very same governmental appointee failures from the past, have risen up like spectres from the grave to haunt the American Psyche.

This past cycle: The Tyranny of GW Bush; has traversed far beyond amusing; from my vantage point without the idiocy of the two-party system. This Administration has with willfullness, waged an immoral War Upon Iraq, the evidence notwithstanding, whilst the Nation's true enemies and perpetrators of 911 were allowed to escape at Tora Bora, when the military had them dead in their sights, and were close to taking them to ground as hunted mongrels. Al Qaida has metastasised in the Pak/Afghan Frontier, and reemerged as a threat to our tranquility. The Bush Administration has stolen Natural Liberty from its rightful possessors: ALL humans, who are endowed with this at birth, by that which they perceive to be the force of creation. They have stripped away life, liberty and property from humans who had never been convicted of any crime in a trial that afforded due process of law. They have consciously entered into a conspiracy to engage in, and committed serial acts of, human torture. The blame need be properly laid at their bloody boots, and there should be an accounting for their repeated bestial rapine of The Dreamtime America. Contemporary Conservatism is a giant slug which need be mortally wounded, then salted, to assure its manifest evil can never arise again.

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BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

 

The Statue of Liberty Depicts a Freed Slave

For over a hundred and twenty years the Statue of Liberty has greeted immigrants to these shores with open arms and the promise of the kind of freedom that they had never known. As a result, that towering, stately, and majestic lady has come to represent the quintessential symbol of freedom, liberty, and justice for people all over the world. Just the sight of her brought hope and inspiration to millions of European immigrants as they entered New York Harbor, and that initial vision sustained them as they started their new lives in America.

The scene must have seemed surreal as their boats slowly moved past her in the harbor. Oceans of tears must have flowed as the immigrants stared in awe at this magnificent lady. In her right hand she held the burning flame of passion and enlightenment--outstretched and high, as though reaching for the very face of God. In her left arm she held the tablet that represents the rule of law, and the guarantee of equal justice for all, and on her right foot, the broken shackle of a freed slave. That's right-millions of European immigrants were welcomed to America by the statue of a freed slave.

On the pedestal upon which she stood, were the words that had inspired their journey. It says... "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse to your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

As a child in school I was taught that the idea of the Statue of Liberty was conceived by a Frenchman, Edouard Laboulaye, as a monument to the collaboration and friendship of the United States and France during the Revolutionary war, and that it was sculpted by sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. But at the urging of one of our readers I revisited the issue, and did a little research. As a result, I found that Laboulaye did indeed conceive of the Statue of Liberty, but not as a monument to the Revolutionary War. The Statue of Liberty was conceived as a monument to the end of slavery, and to honor those men, women and children who had been enslaved.

Laboulaye conceived of the Statue of Liberty in 1865. That was a hundred years after the Revolutionary War, but it just happened to be the very year that the Civil War came to an end. And it also turns out that Laboulaye wasn't just any Frenchman--he was not only an abolitionist who had dedicated his entire life to the abolishment of slavery, he was a leader of the French abolitionist movement. In addition, the sculptor who actually created the Statue of Liberty, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, was connected with the abolitionist movement as well.

In an Associated Press interview, Richard Newman, a research officer at Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research is quoted as saying, "It is widely believed in academic circles that Laboulaye meant for the statue to honor the slaves, as well as mark the recent Union victory in the Civil War and the life of Abraham Lincoln."

The Statue of Liberty wasn't actually completed until 1886, but there's a 21 inch replica of the statue that was completed in 1870 on display at the Museum of the City of New York. That replica, or, original, is not white, it's terra cotta (brownish-orange), and it is said to have been designed in the likeness of a Black woman. In addition, the replica has a broken shackle around her left hand. The 151 foot statue in New York Harbor has a more . . . Discrete shackle around her foot.

The words at the base of the Statue of Liberty from the poem, "The New Colossus", by Emma Lazarus wasn't added to the statue until 1903, during a time when there was a huge surge in European immigration, and that's when the fiction began. During an interview with the Associated Press, Rebecca M. Joseph, a Boston-based Park service anthropologist is quoted as saying, "There is wide agreement that Liberty's now-familiar association with immigration was not planned by the statue's creators."

Nevertheless the thoroughly ironic scene of European immigrants weeping as they passed the Lady's flame must have played out thousands of times. It's the stuff that movies are made of-and just like most movies, the irony of a magnificent subplot churned discretely beneath the surface. One of the ironies is that now, many the grandchildren of some of those very same immigrants--those indigent immigrants that Lady Liberty welcomed into this country with open arms--have used voting fraud, unfair labor practices, redlining, blatant discrimination, and every other device, in an attempt to undermine the very people that we now know the Lady was originally created to embrace.

So irony is the operative word in this piece, and exquisite in its irony is the deplorable state of ingratitude of many of the people that this magnificent symbol of Black liberation welcomed to the country. It is all but a complete indictment on human nature that some of the very same people that Lady Liberty served as a symbol of hope, and who she welcomed to this country as literal vagrants, would now attempt to slam the door of hope and justice on the very people that she was created to enshrine.

Considering that ironic twist brought a tear to my eye as I researched this issue, because as a kid, I couldn't help but be awed by the majesty of that Lady--and that was in spite of the fact that I thought she was created for everybody but people like me. But now to find that she was created specifically for me, and even that was stolen, is almost too much to bear. Just think of how many young Black lives might have been salvaged by just the simple nudge to their self-esteem that something so grand and majestic could have provided had they know what it was created to represent. Just that knowledge alone could have given them the sense pride, dignity, and purpose that might very well sustained them throughout their lives.

But in spite that, or maybe because of it, the Lady continued to hold her flame high, as a tantalizing subplot silently played itself out beneath the surface. For even as the pernicious indulged in their evil machinations, yet another immigrant quietly sailed passed the Lady's burning flame. He was a solitary young man from Kenya, who presented papers in the name of, Barack Obama.

I'm sure the immigration official laughed and said, "Who?" But little did he know, it wouldn't be long, before the entire world could answer his question.

Eric L. Wattree, Sr.

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis (my old newspaper) has put together an absolutely fascinating way that users can experience what is happening in the recount between Norm Coleman and Al Franken: They've selected 599 challenged ballots (don't have a clue what their selection requirements were) and give users an opportunity to judge how each ballot should be decided. Whoever had this idea should get a bonus; it is a really slick way to let folks understand what the recount involves firsthand.

One interesting point for me is that no matter one's (or mine, at least) preference in the election, it is relatively easy to set that aside and decide the ballots fairly objectively. Of course, each person, lacking the instructions given the judges, will apply somewhat idiosyncratic criteria. But, still, it is an interesting, informative exercise.

I did the first 100 ballots and came up with: Coleman, 40; Franken, 39; no one/other, 21. Note: if you see no mark, look at the whole ballot before concluding the voter intended to vote for no one. Sometimes there are very clear preferences, but in the wrong place

Also, I was interested that the order of the names never varied; I thought it was SOP to randomly vary the order in which the candidates appeared???

The url is: http://senaterecount.startribune.com/

Glenn Greenwald tackles my Number One Issue from the Presidential campaign. Via The Daily Kos, which also has some interesting comments to add.

It appears that the media is beginning to put the brakes on any sorts of investigations of the MYRIAD--literally--crimes of the Bush administration. It would 'tear the country apart'. It would 'be disruptive'. It would be 'partisan witchhunting'.

Yet they impeached a President for having a girlfriend. Impeached. Tried to remove him from office. Tried to destroy him, utterly, for the crime of lying to a Grand Jury--something Scooter Libby did repeatedly before HE was eventually convicted.

This entire past eight years is about to slide down the Memory Hole, folks. It's been said before: Americans have the worst case of cultural mass amnesia than any other country.

Why? It helps boost sales, that's why.

11/29/08 Update: As a couple of readers pointed out, the National Republican Trust PAC is probably using a a mail drop at the UPS store as an address.

I've been posting about the National Republican Trust PAC's operations elsewhere on TPM if anyone is interested.  I suspect the NRT PAC's Reverend Wright ad campaign was planned well in advance of the GOP convention and that Rick Davis and maybe others running the McCain campaign knew about it beforehand.

Based on an informal online survey conducted by me, it appears the Reverend Wright ad was broadcast  a lot more frequently than was reported by the NY Times. That would mean the NRT PAC spent a lot more for air time than it reported to the FEC or the national networks gave the NRT PAC a very substantially discounted rate - as in free. 

The ACORN smear, the Obsession dvd, the Reverend Wright ads, etc. etc. etc. - Coordinated by the GOP Department of Dirty Tricks? Paid for by whom?  

As an aside, I don't know if one has anything to do with the other but the NRT PAC shares an address with the Committee In Support Of Referendum In Iran which is the US arm of MEK, the Iranian terrorist group so adored by the wingnuts. 

Where are the National Republican Trust PAC's offices located and who is paying the rent?

Per the NRT PAC website:

The National Republican Trust PAC
2100 M St. NW Suite 170-340
Washington, DC 20037-1233

But the NRT PAC isn't located in Suite 170, Suite 200, Suite 210, Suite 302 or Suite 310.

Per the Hines Inc. (2100 M St. owner) website:

Retailer Profile

Retailer Name	The UPS Store
Category	Office Supplies / Printing
Floor	1st Floor
Suite	Suite 170

Tenant Profile

Company	Stewart & Stewart Law Offices
Category	Legal
Floor	2nd Floor
Suite	Suite 200

Company	Landmine Survivors Network
Category	Charitable & Non-Profit Organizations
Floor	3rd Floor
Suite	Suite 302

Company	The George Washington University
Category	Educational Services
Floor	2nd & 3rd Floors
Suite	Suites 203 & 310

 

The Great Gazoo has returned to Earth again. He’s too busy to bother with nonsense like TPM registration, so he has asked me to convey his heartfelt regrets:

Well, dum-dums, now you’ve gone and done it. Since my brief stay on Earth during your Stone Age, I have devoted a small amount of my valuable time on Zatox monitoring your transmissions to see if any of my incredibly useful advice would take hold. (I am always right, you know - it’s a curse, but it is true.) On Zatox, I am the acknowledged expert on human affairs. If I but had the time, I could solve all of your problems in the blink of an eye. But I’m hard at work on another invention, and anyway, it’s more fun seeing you Earthlings try to get something right.

So imagine my profound disappointment at the recent election. Faced with intractable war, environmental calamity, energy depletion, financial panic, do you take the intelligent course and fall into hopeless despair and pessimism? No! You elect an intelligent, hard-working leader. One bent on solving all your insoluble problems instead of enriching his cronies! What a colossal waste of time.

I’m not the only one who feels this way; everyone on Zatox is stunned. From my observations and lectures, all of us on Zatox have developed such an intimate knowledge of your situation, indeed of your puny Earthling souls, that any of us would assure you that your noble efforts are doomed to certain failure. If only your forebears had listened to me.

Thanksgiving, indeed.

P.S. I would gladly send you a smaller version of my universal doomsday device, if the authorities would only allow it. (Philistines!)

My friend's estranged wife is scheduled to leave Tuesday morning for Mumbai on a two-month work project.  While this surely has no profound effect on the horror inflicted on Mumbai by a group calling itself the Deccan Mujahedin and witnessed by the world on our 24-7 news channels, it personalizes the attacks for a small circle of friends here in the Fox Valley watershed of the Great Lakes Basin.  Particularly unsettling are the reports that the terrorists raiding the Taj and Oberoi Hotels were conscientiously selective of hostages holding British and American passports.

Meanwhile, the news coverage of the coordinated attacks inflames the cynic in me, with its speculations over motivations and identities of the attackers.  While it may be "safe" to presume that the attackers come from India's Muslim community, it is no less irresponsible of the multinational news business to speculate ad nauseum in lieu of any confirmed facts.  We have learned nothing from Oklahoma City, least of all the similarities in temperament between our own homegrown terrorists with those of the all-purpose Islamist variety as both are prone to spectacular outbursts of violent intolerance toward any and all perceived threats to some Traditional Way of Life.

I try to ignore non-academics telling professors about their business because the discussion ends up being so maddeningly frustrating, but George Will's take on Stanley Fish is so ham-fisted that I couldn't remain silent.

Will reanimates the corpse of the 90's culture wars (last seen being carted around Weekend at Bernie's style by David Horowitz) to argue that Stanley Fish's mild conservatism is insultingly non-extremist. Fish's mistake is apparently that he does not baselessly denigrate the entire public university system for being irrevocably polluted by multiculturalism.

Now, I am surprisingly stuffy young humanities prof because I teach debate--I am wary of any heavy-handed ideology that does not encourage argument from all sides. But over the years, I have come to find that ideologues do not come from any particular discipline or philosophy (though some disguise ideological rigidity better than others) nor are all ideologues liberal. Will, on the other hand, is no friend of nuance, nor for that matter evidence. He careens about, pointing fingers wildly about, but never makes any particular claims.

Why the vagueness? My guess is that Will trying to advocate a nonexistent alternative. He may sniff at teaching students about difference and sensitivity, but we teach these things not because we are bleeding hearts and it makes us feel better but because they better explain how the world works. Economic development programs that are sensitive to women's positions in particular societies are empirically more successful than those which are not responsive to the ways gender and culture shape social and economic interactions. Theories of communication which embrace how differences in power shape the credibility of a message explain more about the way persuasion works than those who look to informational content alone. Philosophies shaped around the presumption that we are all individuals who only engage in voluntary associations are not just unfashionable, they have been roundly debunked. They can't answer important questions about why we bind ourselves together the way we do.

In other words, the ascendancy of multiculturalism has happened not because a bunch of patchouli-stinking hippies took control of the academy but because it better explains the 21st century. Will is engaging in the equivalence of attacking modern geologist for engaging in a conspiracy to silence Vulcanists.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go think more about how to indoctrinate my students in the art of looking at all sides of an argument not because that's the way we've taught debate since the time before Plato and Aristotle. I'm doing it to transgress the radical conservative agenda.

I love Thanksgiving. It is a holiday, with little or no religious significance for most of us, spent, ideally, with family or friends. Only the Fourth of July is better, in my opinion.

It celebrates our thanks for so many things, even when our lives seem particularly precious. But it is a day also to think of those less fortunate, no matter how dire we think our situation is. Murrow's Harvest of Shame was first telecast just before Thanksgiving and this year we have the horrors in Mumbai (I keep wanting to say "Bombay") and the possibility that we were its target, to remind us to maintain some perspective and humanity, despite our own troubles.

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Yesterday, I held a great big pity party of one. It's been a rough couple of weeks. I had to get two new tires for my car. The last of the doctor bills have come in for my son. Because of this, I wasn't able to make the trip to New Orleans to buy a kosher turkey. Instead, our feast will consist of the traditional Thanksgiving lox. I was a pitiful sight yesterday. Today, I woke happy. I realized overnight that it isn't the turkey that makes it Thanksgiving. It is family and friends. I realized how much I have to be thankful for. The bills will eventually get paid. I have food on the table. I have a home. I have family that love me in spite of my contentious nature. I have friends that send me emails and notifications at Facebook just when I seem to be the most down. How do they know? They're friends, they just know. Today, this is what I'm most thankful for. I'm thankful to live in a country that offers the freedom of religion to all. I'm thankful that I live in a country that has looked past the color of a person's skin and has judged on character and elected Obama. I'm thankful that even in these difficult financial times, the United States still has a wealth that towers over all. I'm thankful that I live in a country where some see opportunities to start new businesses. I'm thankful to live a country that is so generous. Even as people have to tighten their belts, there are news reports that food banks for the poor are seeing an increase in donations of food. I'm glad that I live in a country where people are not only being angels to children during this time but to the elderly as well. Walgreens in Biloxi has an angel tree for the elderly. I'm thankful that I live in a country where people are willing to give up their time to help their neighbors in need. I've stated many times before, after Hurricane Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf coast saw another surge. This surge was more massive and potent than Katrina's record breaking 28 feet guestimated by NOAA(it is closer to 40 feet). This surge consists of those who opened their wallets and donated record-breaking amounts. This surge consists of those who volunteered and cooked and drove the Salvation Army and Red Cross food vans. This surge consists of those who came to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and worked shoulder to shoulder with us clearing out mold infested sheet rock. It consists of those who came here and worked shoulder to shoulder with us clearing our streets one block at a time. It consists of those who came down here and are still coming over 3 years later, who are working shoulder to shoulder with us in raising up new homes. They swing their hammers with us. This the real America. It consists of Christians, Jews, Muslims, other religions, and atheists working side-by-side to help one another. This real America also consists of the vast numbers of college-aged and high school kids who have come down and are still coming to help us rebuild. Thank you G-d. Thank you to my family and friends. Thank you America.

I've thought for some time (maybe 25 years or so?) that Republicans were much better than Democrats at the real ESSENCE of grassroots, small-d democratic politics: Getting ordinary people who talk to each other across the back fence, or who pass in the supermarket aisle to genuinely understand, genuinely believe and genuinely support their sometimes simplistic but highly marketable ideas.

In a truly democratic society, this is vital, and it is an area that Democrats have sorely neglected. We have tended to hold too many wonky seminars, write too many snooty op-eds, and in general sort of hop from one lofty peak to another in the arcane minutia of policy disputes, ignoring the living populace in the valleys below.

Even when we may have been 'right' intellectually on the issues, we have failed to acknowledge the central FACT of democracy: It isn't enough (and may not even be necessary) to be RIGHT. A  consistent majority (most not college professors or policy wonks) must UNDERSTAND you,  SEE you as right, and VOTE that way.

I think to this day that that was a central problem for the Clinton Administration: He managed to get a bare plurality to vote him in, and he did a brilliant job in my opinion with what he was given to work with. However, he failed to leave any identifiable PROGRAM behind to rally the public around. 'Clintonism' (such as it was) did not 'sell' as well as Clinton himself did, and was not easily transferable to other less brilliant, less articulate, and less deeply studied and knowledgeable candidates.

I think I see a real chance here to reverse that trend:

Bush has jumped the shark in every possible way. Republicans have LOST the 'benefit of the doubt' advantage they have carried since Reagan. It is truly possible for Democrats to regain that same edge they had from FDR thru the early LBJ era, and become once again the default 'party of the people'.

In my opinion, it is very important that we do not MIS-READ this chance. It hasn't completely TURNED just yet. Whether President Obama becomes another Carter, or even just a Clinton (ie, a constructive contrarian blip), or whether he can become transformative in the historical sense of FDR or Reagan, is still up in the air. I think the latter has a reasonable chance to happen, if he (and we) keep in mind that many more people live in the valley than on the peaks. He has to convince THEM, in ways they can understand and support- we already HAVE the college professors, and they aren't enough by themselves.

No matter where each of us finds ourselves on Thanksgiving Day, we all no doubt have reasons to be thankful. I am thankful for family and friends; for my sweet dog, who found me in March; for the opportunity to work hard to bring about something that hasn't happened in my lifetime--a Democrat winning my state's electoral college votes. I am thankful for summer, for music, for the fact that Chicago is only a couple hours away. I'm thankful for the people in my life that challenge me to be better. 

We all seem to have a million things to get done in our lives, and I am just like everyone else, but occasionally I try to take a time out and look at a big problem and analyze it to see if I can make anything of it. Recently, in my brief moments of clarity, I've been trying to discern what exactly is the the most detrimental flaw of mankind.  Since I have limited brain capacity, this will most likely be an ongoing process as my mind spits and sputters and pretends to be doing something productive.

 

What is a trait that all or most of us have that is a cause of most or all of the worlds troubles? I guess the best place to start is by looking at the problems the world is facing.  The first problem that comes to mind is the sticky situation in the Middle East, which I mostly attribute to religious intolerance. We have Muslim against Jew, Muslim against Christian, Muslim against Muslim. Certainly the idea of slaughtering people under the pretense of religious reasons is nothing new to history.  "If you can't convert 'em, kill 'em." seems like it could have been an appropriate slogan to most major religions at one time or another. Why do religions do this? In order to understand the workings of religion, lets start one ourselves and see what happens!

-

I believe that when I die my soul will ascend to the heavens and be surrounded by cute cuddly kittens for all eternity. Now, while I am the sanest person I know, and I KNOW that I am a good person and the world would be better off if there were more people like me, my belief in Holy Kittens is only held by me.  This is troubling. I mean, if all these people think differently than me, either I am wrong, or they are wrong. Since I know I'm not stupid, it must be them. But how do I remedy this? I convince others to believe the same thing I do! If I can get a group that all believes the same thing, then we are super right! After all, we can't all be bonkers, can we?

 

So the Holy Order of Kittens is very pleased with itself and its beliefs.. that is until it meets the First Church of Dog. Dogs? Give me a break. Who the heck worships dogs? That is just idiotic. How the heck can they have so many members? They must all be insane.  Because we are good-hearted, righteous people, we must convince these canine lovers of their wicked ways so that they may come to the light. You see, by these people believing differently than us and being allowed to exist, it creates a conflict to us being right. Moreover, if Cat clergy strays to the Dog cultist side, what will that do to the Cat reputation? How do we convert Dog lovers to our side? Threatening them with eternal damnation has a certain appeal. If that doesn't work? I guess we have to kill them. Violence is nasty, but really, what else do you do with people who are wrong?

-

 

Could it be that religious intolerance is really just based on the fact that we all believe that we are good people?  By believing we are good people, we look down on others who don't think the way we do, because its easier to condemn than to put forth the effort to understand.  Why is this? We all do it.  How many times have you told someone, "I told you so?" It feels good to be right. Especially when someone else is wrong. At what point in our evolutionary chain did we develop the need to feel right? Am I over simplifying things? Please send your comments! I am hoping to get some discussion on this.

 

~my thoughts on religion~

I have nothing against people believing what they want. As a matter of fact, I think its great to have your beliefs! It gives your life structure and meaning. It provides something to turn to when nothing else is available. The problem lies with thinking that your way is the ONLY way. Exploring your own beliefs and finding what you can be comfortable with instead of just believing what was pounded into your head as a child can help you. Once you are comfortable and at ease with your beliefs, you can appreciate that other people will come with different conclusions. What you believe is right for YOU. Everyone has a little different idea of how things work. None of us will know for sure what the truth is (not while we are alive anyway). No need to be silly over it. But then again, that is just my way of thinking.

~end thoughts~

Kristof has a column in todays NYT that is typical of what fills newspapers on Thanksgiving and all through the holidays, and is still very much worth reading. He talks about the plight of several women in Pakistan and brings home the point that we are fortunate to live in America and as such, we have an obligation to reach out and share with folks from other lands and cultures. Here's a brief excerpt:

Sajida is a 29-year-old college-educated woman from a Christian family here (and a reminder that oppressive values in Pakistan are not rooted just in Islam). She scandalized her family by marrying a man she chose herself -- and then becoming pregnant.

The next step was brutal: Several women held Sajida down as a midwife conducted an abortion, while she struggled and wept.

Then her brothers weighed what to do next. Sajida's eldest brother wanted to sell her to a trafficker who offered $1,200, presumably intending to imprison her inside a brothel. Two other brothers just wanted to kill her.

The brothers fought for days over this question. So Sajida ground up sleeping tablets and baked the powder into chapati bread that she fed her brothers for dinner -- and then sneaked out as they slept.

 

What happens next illustrates how far we've come and how much work is left to do both here in the US and in other parts of the world. My best wishes to all for a day of peace, good friends and family and here is a link to Kristof's full essay:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/opinion/27kristof.html?ref=opinion

The measure of Obama's success will be based on his ability to turn swords into ploughshares. From the looks of it, he is filling his positions with some rather hawkish warriors. People who seem to prefer wielding a sword rather than pushing a ploughshare.

In yesterday's press conference he mentioned that change is still on the way and that the change buck begins and stops at him. If this is the case, then he has one heck of a job to get his change mandate implemented with these sword wielders.

His obvious plan is to take these swords and beat them into ploughshares. If he succeeds in doing this then we know beyond any shadow of doubt that this man has mastered the art of persuasion way beyond anything seen in modern times.

I for one am very happy with what he has done so far and who he has selected. Actually I am excited because I want to see this act of beating swords into ploughshares played out in the public square. I have every confidence that Obama will get it done.

If he gets it done, you know full well that the GOP will be in for a torrid time in election cycles to come. Good for them!

On November 21st the Huffington Post reported that alarmed "Obama supporters" were exhorting president-elect Barack Obama not to name torture-loving warmonger John Brennan as CIA chief. And it worked. A few days later Brennan withdrew his name from the competition and blamed the liberal blogosphere. 

But Josh Marshall, who yesterday defended Obama's decision to keep Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, did not show a similar level of enthusiasm when it came to opposing the more controversial Brennan, who had been so close to being awarded the spot that he had begun recruiting his own team.

In fact, I looked in the archives and found that Marshall did not even type the word "Brennan" once in the whole month of November, at least before Brennan's withdrawal.

I have no major beef against Gates, but in light of Marshall's silence, is it fair to say that he is so deep in the tank that his bias prevents him from joining the likes of Glen Greenwald, Anonymous Liberal, etc., in exerting pressure on Obama when needed?

Marshall's posts:
November 23-29:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2008_11_23.php

November 16-22:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2008_11_16.php

November 9-15:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2008_11_09.php

November 2-8:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2008_11_02.php

"In radio and TV appearances the final days of the campaign, Lieberman also frequently said that a Democratic majority of 60 votes, a filibuster-proof level, would be a bad thing."

 

And yet so many of you talk of that filibuster-proof Democratic majority as the ultimate prize.

 

Dream on as long as Lieberman is one of that '60.' At least the Republicans did not get on their hands and knees and grovel when Jim Jeffords bolted their Party in '01.

I just canceled my TIVO "Season Ticket" of The Rachel Maddow Show. Since the election ended she has done nothing but bitch and moan about, well,...pretty much everything Obama has done. This would not be so bad if she were to offer different ideas but all she is doing is whining about everything!

Don't get me wrong I think she COULD be an important voice in progressive politics but not by constantly complaining about EVERYTHING.

Somebody, PLEASE, TALK ME DOWN!

In 1852, Frederick Douglas was asked to speak at a convention in Rochester, NY to commemorate the 4th of July. At this point, the ownership and mistreatment of slaves was still accepted throughout the United States.

Douglass' speech, "What, to the American Slave, is the 4th of July" was a brief but well-reasoned rebuke against the (lack of) logic of asking him to speak. Pointing out the hypocrisy of American independence day, Douglass said:

Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

I wonder if Native Americans feel the same way about Thanksgiving. The revisionist history of Thanksgiving is that we Europeans jumped off the boat and were graciously welcomed by America's original inhabitants so everyone shared a massive feast to commemorate their great partnership in this great country.

We now know that this story is entirely false. In reality, Europeans stole their land, and massacred the vast majority of the Native American population. The discrimination of America's native population was official government policy for the vast majority of our history, just as slavery and racial segregation was official U.S. policy for more than two hundred years. And we have yet to repent properly.

So what, to the Native American, is Thanksgiving? It is a farce that highlights the government's selective amnesia in its darkest hours. It is a mockery of the beautiful and well-maintained land that was stolen in return for the dusty reservations that white people did not want.

Thanksgiving should make us think about what we are thankful for. But it should also make us think about our failings and how we can improve upon them. And I would like to see a more whole-hearted attempt by the United States government to apologize for its original sins of slavery and Native American relocation, even if this attempt is only in the form of words.

That would finally make days like the 4th of July and Thanksgiving fully inclusive holidays that represent national cohesion rather than ignore past oppression.

As a new set of federal policymakers gets ready to address the current economic crisis, academics and advocates are proposing changes to the official measure of poverty.

Unfortunately, as long as we keep talking about "poverty", this is much ado about almost nothing.

Earlier this year, a similar discussion ensued in Congress. At the national level, that new proposal would move the bar ever so slightly, so that being poor equals household income of less than $21,818 for two adults with two children, up from the current $20,444.

To be sure, a new measure would likely be a better reflection of the rate of material deprivation in our nation than the current one. And Brookings' Rebecca Blank proposes a very thoughtful approach.

Why is this even necessary?

Today's measure still uses a formula based on 1950s household expenditures - before housing and transportation costs went up and two-income households became the requirement, causing average child care expenses to soar. In contrast, the proposed new measure would allow for regional reflection of differences in the cost of living and would count some federally-funded employment benefits as income for the first time.

Yet, it's important to note that we aren't really accomplishing what we desire with this goal - even with a more accurate formula. This is especially true since this high-level reconsideration of the formula is occurring at a time when there are numerous calls for a national goal to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years.

What's wrong with expending a whole lot of energy on this discussion?

First, it's only a proposal to measure income and not the other resources that communities need for a strong economy and full participation in our democracy and civil society. The proposal isn't about quality education or clean air or reasonable housing costs or access to health care or reducing prejudice.... and so on. (Although, notably, Blank's long-term proposal goes much further.)

Second, a if we want a measure of income, a relative measure would be a much more useful test of how well our nation is doing at making sure all residents can contribute to a strong society. As higher income earners do better, low-wage workers must see increases in income relative to the higher earners - otherwise poverty increases. As one leading newspaper said of a new relative measure:

Third, while we do need a better standard for measuring progress as a nation on income deprivation, we're not likely to succeed in achieving the goal of better policy outcomes if we insist on maintaining a subsistence standard. Indeed, if the goal is based on any measure of "poverty" as it is currently understood in this country - material deprivation blamed on immoral or ill-considered personal choices - we should not expect much policy progress on efforts to strengthen our economy.

At The Mobility Agenda, we're engaged in a conversation about developing a goal that is more consistent with widely supported policy proposals - which tend to go way beyond income deprivation and include paid time off at work, worker voices at the table for establishing workplace policy, fair wages, and access to affordable health insurance.

When we put the poverty headline over these policy options, policymakers face real resistance created by the widely-held public beliefs about causes of poverty. We cannot change these beliefs by adopting a goal to end or reduce poverty - no matter which formula we use to define the term.

Of course, we should adopt a more current measure of income deprivation, but only as part of  larger goals related to well-being and inclusion.

Unfortunately, we're not doing so well on the policy front as it is, and changing the poverty formula will not have much of an impact on this reality. Progress on policy requires a different goal and new measures for testing our progress toward that goal. Moreover, we'll need to have a different conversation altogether - one that isn't about "poverty".

Cross posted at The Mobility Agenda.

On Chris Matthews' Show, Matthews argued that one of the major differences between President Bush and President-elect Barack Obama is the fact that Obama is intellectually curious while Bush never liked to do "homework."  Bush made decisions based on "gut".

Everybody seems to forget that a President like Bush, who doesn't really like to think but only acts on "gut" feelings, was therefore easily manipulated by other, stronger people with real convictions (not that we agree with them) like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Bush was led around by the nose by Cheney and Rumsfeld and the neocons; he basically never questioned them; so they had a field day with him.

Bush also turned, like Circe, people who worked for his Administration and disagreed with his acts, into beasts or swine by playing on their ambition and loyalty: one example is the greatness that once was Powell and the smartness that once was Rice, as well as so many others now departed. So Bush was the figurehead and people behind him like Cheney and Rumsfeld called the shots, and the Republican Congress went along with it and destroyed their party, and the Democrats, fearing to look soft on terrorism, went along as well.

What a sorry mess was made of the whole thing. If Bush were to try to confront what he had wrought, he would probably be fit for a padded cell.  No way it could sink in.  He must still feel invulnerable; his Dad will bail him out as he always has if he runs into any trouble.

I once did business with a number of General Motors divisions. This was some time ago. At one meeting, in Saginaw, I believe, I ran into a young man who was headed to executive status; he told me, proudly, that he was going to go to G.M. University. I blinked; I'd never heard of it. Afterwards, the more I thought about it, the more I began to realize how incestuous G.M. was when someone went to their university instead of being sent to Harvard, or M.I.T. or U.C.L.A. or Carnegie Mellon or any one of the major schools outside of the G.M. universe, so they could absorb new and different ideas about how G.M. should be run.

Alas, G.M. still seems to be caught in that incestuous, inwardly-looking mode. I would have thought, when they confronted that Congressional Committee recently, and they were asked for a "Plan", one of them might have reached in his back pocket, and pulled one out, and said, "Here it is. We've been working on it feverishly. Happy to share it with you. Any improvements or suggestions are welcome." But no, all these auto executives could do was slink off in shame and go back on their jets to the cocoon that they live in in Detroit.

Maybe they'll come up with something; maybe not. But I kind of wish they had had a Plan in their back pocket, happy that someone asked for what they had been working on so hard to make things right.

Foolish me.

"That's how we got here -- a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash." Thomas Friedman - NYT
"Excessively cheap money in the US was a driver of today's crisis," (Angela Merkel, the German chancellor) told the German parliament. "I am deeply concerned about whether we are now reinforcing this trend through measures being adopted in the US and elsewhere and whether we could find ourselves in five years facing the exact same crisis." - Financial Times

A link at Doonesbury led me to this fascinating information.

Big Bailouts, Bigger Bucks - The Big Picture
(...)If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let's give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history. Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures - combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

IIf a currency is supposed to have any relation to actual value, when I see these numbers it seems obvious to me that the dollar is entering the territory of the Wiemar Republic Deutsch mark: meaningless paper.

The fear, of course is deflation, but a dollar that once bought victory in WWII and trips to the Moon, but today cannot save a few banks, must be a ticket to coming hyperinflation.

It is impossible to escape certain unpleasant realities of world power

No matter how seductive the figure of Barack Obama might be, glamor cannot offset  the drag of worthless money combined with military impotence.

Joseph Nye's "soft power" is just that "soft". The brutal truth is that candy and flowers, a thoughtful word are important rites of seduction, but after these rites are performed, something hard is expected. If the USA cannot "cut the mustard", other, perhaps ruder suitors will be sought and found.

To me these numbers mean that we are living suspended over an abyss, held only in the slippery hands of a fraudulent system.
 
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

In the coming days we'll find out much more about this attack, it's planning and execution and the identity of those responsible. What is clear, so far, is that the group(s) who carried out these attacks seem to have drawn heavily from previous al Qaeda operations, whose calling card has been the targeting of a country's commercial/financial centers, transportation links, and tourism industry. So far these attacks appear to have been merely inspired, and not conducted by al Qaeda. Given their scope and sophistication, no doubt many will look eventually at Pakistan. Currently, media reports indicate that a previously unknown terrorist group, Deccan Mujahideen, has taken responsibility for the attack. The attacks are currently ongoing, as terrorists have taken hostages in both the elite Taj Mahal and Oberoi (Trident) hotels.

One who is not ready to forgive Joe Klein for having cheered hard for Bush when it was cool to do so is Glen Greenwald, top progressive blogger at Salon.com, at least until the Time pundit shows remorse and apologizes for his Bush-enabling misdeeds.

Today, Greenwald presents an example that illustrates what he calls Klein's "extreme revisionism":

Joe Klein, this week's Time Magazine, on George Bush's legacy:

  Bush has that forlorn what-the-hell-happened? expression on his face, the one that has marked his presidency at difficult times. You never want to see the President of the United States looking like that.

  So I've been searching for valedictory encomiums. . . . I'd add the bracing moment of Bush with the bullhorn in the ruins of the World Trade Center, but that was neutered in my memory by his ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the "Mission Accomplished" sign. The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure.

Joe Klein, Face the Nation, May 4, 2003, with Bob Schieffer -- 3 days after Bush's Mission Accomplished speech:

  BOB SCHIEFFER: How does [the Democratic presidential primary debate] play off against the pictures we saw this week of President Bush landing on the aircraft -- aircraft carrier and appearing before these screaming, adoring groups of military people?  As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time. And if you're a political consultant, you can just see campaign commercial written all over the pictures of George Bush.

  JOE KLEIN: Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. That was the first thing that came to mind for me. And it just shows you how high a mountain these Democrats are going to have to climb. You compare that image, which everybody across the world saw, with this debate last night where you have nine people on a stage and it doesn't air until 11:30 at night, up against Saturday Night Live, and you see what a major, major struggle the Democrats are going to have to try and beat a popular incumbent president.

Klein has been a TPM hero ever since he switched tanks. Take this post written last July by TPM Cafe's M. J. Rosenberg, for instance, wherein the author praises Klein for condemning the neocons who campaigned hard for the Iraq war, and attacks those in the media who acted as accomplices, without once mentioning that Klein himself made it clear one month before the invasion that he believed the war was justified, as reported by Arianna Huffington:

KLEIN ON MEET THE PRESS (FEBRUARY, 2003): "This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it--it's--it-it probably is." When Tim Russert presses Klein on why he thinks Iraq is "the right war," Klein responds, "Because sooner or later, this guy has to be taken out. Saddam has -- Saddam Hussein has to be taken out... The message has to be sent because if it isn't sent now, if we don't do this now, it empowers every would-be Saddam out there and every would-be terrorist out there."

I agree with Greenwald and call on Klein and any other remorseless war apologists to admit guilt and ask for forgiveness to the American people and the families of the dead and injured in Iraq.

Upon the temporary cessation of the vertigo induced by contemplating a world in which the whole damn company (factories, inventories, etc), is worth less than Avon Cosmetics, I wrestle with the following conundrum:

Why doesn’t the UAW loan itself some pocket change from its own IRA, as it were, and let Rick Wagoner take his snot stained spare change paper cup out on the corner of Market and Sixth, where they know how to treat panhandlers.

Surely this is the moment for the workers on the factory floor to purchase the instruments of production.

Vive Le Syndicat! Vive l’Internationale!

In an absolutely delicious bit of karmic justice, it seems that Ann Coulter -- that right-wing talking points spouter, prolific regurgitator/author of absurd new books seemingly every other day, anti-progressive, anti-feminist (or is she just the anti-Christ?) -- has had her jaw wired shut. No, really -- wired shut. While you likely have heard the news already, I just had to take a moment to, well, enjoy the moment.

Just in time for the holidays, boys and girls, we have all been gifted with a forced moment of silence from Ann Coulter -- something I didn't think was humanly possible. Better yet, the peaceful bliss could last as long at 5 whole weeks.

The word on the street is that Coulter fell down the stairs -- or was pushed? Okay, okay, that was not funny. Well, maybe just a little... but truly, it's not like The Zaftig Redhead to wish bodily injury on anyone. But in this instance, I simply must basque in the irony... the cosmic realignment that has given us all a much needed reprieve. I can do that and still wish her a speedy recovery, right?

It also has gotten me thinking -- always dangerous -- that if Coulter can manage to get her jaw wired shut, rendering her blessedly mute throughout the holidays, what might the benevolent universe bestow upon Sen. Joe Lieberman (turncoat-CT) to balance the scales of justice in that direction? The mind boggles... and mine, at least, also cackles with glee.

On the downside, I do worry a bit about what dipshit theories and outright lies Coulter might plot, write, conjure, etc. while in her mandatory bubble of silence. All that pent up verbiage could kill someone once the wires are removed and she's free to spew again; police would do well to clear the area, and protect us all from her blind vitriol in the new year.

 

http://thezaftigredhead.blogspot.com

When we were kids, we got one present each year. 

Pick something faddish, or breakable, or only useful during a limited season, and you were out of luck. Worse, luck might actively turn against you. Like the year I chose skates, used them once, stashed them in a garbage bag to take on the bus, and then had to live without, after they accidentally got tossed - and forever lost - at the dump. 

I remember those presents. Each one. The wonderful, dark green, 3-speed bike I got one Christmas, completely forgetting I couldn't drive it for 6 months, but trying anyway, and wiping out on the icy road, chipping its paint, bending a rim, on Christmas Day. Or the year I chose a baseball catcher's glove. Even though I played both baseball & softball, I could only choose one glove, which I would then have to use in both games, catching balls of very different sizes. I chose wrongly, enthralled by the professional-looking, but smaller, baseball glove. Its real-world upside was greater padding, but the downside outweighed that, as it made catching the larger softball almost impossible. 

Lest you fear I'm headed toward (another) nostalgic glorification of poverty, let me reassure you, hunger & cold haven't yet taken on any happy glow in my memory. But there are things to be learned from those days of being poor. Things our economic high priests have worked to obliterate. Things we might do well to bring back up, within ourselves, in these times. Things like, the value of something doesn't necessarily rise with its glitzy appearance; that flexibility or durability or quality may not equal dozens of specialized, add-on, features; that value may, instead, rise when we put more skill into its use; rise again if we add passion; even more, if its social & natural setting gives it room to breathe; and move of the charts, if it's shared with others.  

For a kid, each present was of real importance, as it shaped what we could & could not do for the next year. And it's for that reason each one sits in my mind, fully-detailed even today, carrying not just memories, but lessons. Like the Christmas my brother picked one of those plastic race-car track sets. The initial, incredible, excitement. The plans for a hundred magical configurations & derbys. All smashed when the cars broke, late that first day, impossible to repair. And the gloom that followed. 

Or the year he chose incredibly wisely, a basketball. This, on a farm of 16 boys, most of them already past 6 feet (& headed closer to 7), made it truly, our golden ball. Beyond the joy of the game, however, lay the fact that he was its sole owner - there was no chance the parents would ever buy two. Which meant that whenever he felt like it, he took his ball... and went home. Not being permitted to punch him (amongst other very specific, and strictly-enforced, rules on how we were permitted to fight), I remember following him on that long walk home, kicking him the entire way, using the side of my foot (no toe-kicking allowed.) We both remember that walk. And yes, we worked it out. We all learned to play together, to take care of each other's stuff, to ask to borrow it, and say thanks after. And the games got better, and so did our enjoyment. (And yes, I've since apologized to him. Although he - the miserly, game-wrecking, Grinchy bastard - has yet to do so.) 

Without wanting to be too snotty ("too snotty" being anything over 7 on the snot scale), there is more economic sense in what I learned from the present-picking process than from most of the Latin chanting our high economic priesthood offers these days. The most important lesson? I donno. Perhaps that the most hyped characteristics of products, and in particular, their appearances, weren't just of secondary importance, they were often pumped up to actively distract us, lead us away from questions of the thing's real value. It was as though the advertisers aimed straight for our inner magpies, to stimulate us until our nests overflowed with shiny objects. Like those shining, whizzing racing cars & their incredibly flexible tracks that first captivated us, then led us into ruin. As I grew up, the cars grew as well. But... the lesson held. 

Or the bike. I had wanted to be the first kid with a 3-speed. Both because I wanted to be able to go faster than the others, but also because... I'd be the first kid with a 3-speed. We lived on bikes in those days, and it was always a race. Which made this, potentially, the perfect present. Except the downside also turned out to be... that I was the first kid with a 3-speed. Which meant that when it broke, I owned the first 3-speed to be stripped down, taken apart & repaired according to the DIY ethos. Or rather, DIO - Do It Ourselves. Because there was no way everybody wasn't going to get their hands in, learning the mysteries, looking to the day when they too owned a bike like this. 

I also learned that this "feather-light" bike was somewhat ill-suited to our favorite cycling activity - The Midnight Ride. The Midnight Ride actually took place between 9-11 p.m. The point being to ride as fast as possible, down the pitch black roads. The challenge was to listen listen listen, ears big as bats, and to feel with our fingers right down through to the road, waiting for the sound & feel of pavement turning into gravel. Because once you'd gotten off-line enough to have hit the shoulder, you had roughly 0.14 seconds to respond, or you'd get to go Night Flying. Into the ditch. At an unhappy speed. I could pretty much avoid taking a ditch on that part of the course, but the last laps were always run back in the farmyard, endless circles, talking & driving round under the Big Light, interrupted only by someone shouting your name, and you having to race your bike, as fast as possible, into the barn. Not inside the barn, but rather, into its side. Admittedly, an unusual game. Perhaps even unusually stupid. But the Midnight Ride was intended to prove alertness, fearlessness & toughness - not intelligence. 

And thus, I came to realize that my dark green, feather-light, utterly-sleek 3-speed - with Derailleur Gears - bike was... less than well-suited for its purpose. And as we weren't about to change our course simply I happened to now own some pathetic foreign bike that wasn't up to real racing, the bike had to be... modified. Into a barely-painted, 1-speed, brakeless & well-bent thing, more suitable for rigorous, country riding. 

I suspect, now that we're all grown up, each of us owns a number of these bikes. Though we may call them electronic devices, or even houses. The thing is, I'd been waiting, so long, for my Derailleur Gears. Or, as some called them, Disraeli Gears.....

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And Dahlia Lithwick, for that matter.  [And the two of them are some of my favorite people, so this criticism is not meant as a wholesale condemnation of them].
I despise the Bush administration and I challenge anyone to a contest of which of us can list the largest number of awful things Bush, Cheney et al. have done.
But ...  I don't agree with Rachel or Dahlia that now is the time for the Obama (pre-presidency) administration to pursue a criminal investigation of Bush's wrongdoing.  Rachel's feeling was that Obama correctly stated he has a mandate, and he should use some of that large political capital to bring Bush and his staffers to justice.
I just look around at what's happening in the country -- home foreclosures, rising unemployment, small businesses (like my neighbor's applicance business) in deep trouble because of the lack of money available to them, and I know that Obama is correct to focus virtually all his efforts on bringing the country back to economic stability. 
This conclusion does not come from Obama adulation and worship -- it's from a purely practical point of view.  No one person can do everything and the economy is what's directly affecting people right now.  It's what needs urgent fixing.  The daily press conferences, cabinet appointments and stated plan for the economy is exactly what should be happening.
I hope that at some point things will start to stabilize and Obama can turn his attention to the myriad other things that need to be done to rescue our country from the garbage dump into which Bush pushed us. 
And certainly one of the first things that he should tackle, after we have some economic healing, is restoring our consitutionally guaranteed civil liberties.  A big part of that is prosecuting those people in power who violated our rights and broke the law.  If sometime during Mr. Obama's first term he does not make this one of his priorities, then I will join the chorus of criticism. 
But for now, I'm happy with what he has chosen as his primary issue.

[Note: I am simply re-posting an article a friend forwarded to me. I know this is frowned upon on the Cafe, and I apologize, but I find this article to be of absolutely critical importance to understanding the current problems of the United States.]

     I have no doubt that the latest "reports" (it is Page Six) about Coulter's infirmity might be nothing but a marketing scheme.  It would be not out of bounds for Coulter to use sensationalism and shock-stories about painful situations to sell a few more books.  As a development up to the publication of her latest book, Guilty, the press and pundits seemed to have become universally tired of her antics.  What better way to get some PR, than by the creation of a mysterious, personal misery,  although no one seems to be throwing any amount of sympathy her way. 

     I am sure she could find no refrain to blame it on some liberal insurgency.  As a violent response to the "truth" she prophets, an evolutionary inquisition led by a feminista, underground homo-henchgroup from the Democratic Party Harpy Headquaters directed from their Cuban outpost.  Her story of this leftist conspiracy putsch, as her press release might surmise, would start with her kidnapping from the Reagan Library while she was reading, within covenant, the Constitution.  The lily-livered, and up-market twisted persecution continued with the forcing of a sack made from the Tibetan flag over her head and being ferried to some island refuge off of the San Franciscan coast in a Chinese Junk Boat.  Later to be tortured and interrogated to who she insists sounded exactly like Cindy Sheehan.  It wasn't until after confusing and boring her captors with pretensiousness, by reciting the FISA Act and the Book of Revelations, was she able to escape.  Braving the caustic effects of the unpolluted waters of Monterey Bay and the general repulsion from the Left Coast, her belief in the supremacy of the perfected Jew and her little black dress fueled her deliverance to a Texas off-shore oil platform and Republican salvation.  It was, in fact, the cowardly Hollywood faction of the left, that Whore of Babylon, that wired her mouth shut (a plastic surgeon by affirmative action no doubt), knowing that was the only way to keep her from patriotically preaching the truth from the right.  And so ends her coups count.

     In spite of an immediate feeling of karmic retribution I was guilty of feeling, I am trying to remind myself that her ailment is in no way payback for her certain ways and words - the fact that she is making a living off of her work is payback enough. 

This should be interesting, before the "pre-arraignment" procedures.

The VP's lawyers haven't given convincing arguments why a sitting VP cannot be prosecuted. Regardless the court conclusions, the grand jury indictment stands.

Impeachment would bypass these judicial theatrics, and assert legislative power against the executive. The People through the States are the ones that are supposed to put pressure on the House.

Time for the States to act and pass proclamations calling on the House to Impeach Cheney. The Vermont Senate passed one, as Florida did in 1903 against Judge Swayne.

Here are the other state proclamations. This isn't something that "might" happen, but has started. Long ago. Just as the Framers intended.

Every so often some irate reader who lives in the states asks me how I can know anything about the USA if I no longer live there.

To this I reply that the USA is everywhere, all the time, intruding into people's lives in endless ways all over the world: it is outside the United States where people really understand the USA. It is the Americans who have a totally fictionalized view of themselves.

Don't you think by now that any inhabitant of Baghdad is an expert on Americans, their foibles and their reality, the space between their words and their actions?

But of course this deep and intimate knowledge of the USA is new to Iraqis and most Middle Easterners. Where Americans are really known, where the USA has bent everything and everyone out of shape for nearly 200 years, is south of the border, in Latin America in general and in Mexico, most blatantly, in particular.

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Blurring the law solely for self preservation is a questionable ploy when the Renzi defense, and the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, call on the Constitution for protection.  It is disrespectful to the Constitution and the individuals it protects when it is desperately misinterpreted, especially by those in a privileged, enumerated position.  The "Speech or Debate Clause" the defense team raises does not universally prohibit review of legislative work as they seem to suggest, it prohibits interference of such work.  If they want the evidence suppressed, they should rely on judiciary ruling that it was improperly attained, etc. - which has already been the role of the SCOTUS.  It seems like they know this strategy will fail and are irresponsibly cherry picking their next move.
This blanket defense of entitled immunity smells awfully like the President's office claim of Executive Privilege when trying to act in virtual secrecy and invisibility.  Outside of the obvious security and privacy needs, neither the President or Congresspersons are immune to review.  This is not for their protection against each other, but for our protection against them.  Demanding protection against review or investigation because of their title or position, greater than that of any private citizen, is a privilege of the aristocracy.  I think we dealt with this already.  People ferrying their name with this privileged claim should see that superiority via intellectualization still carries a representative, democratic offense.  It is not quite, "Do you know who I am?!" but it reads that same. 

I just saw a program about Patrick Henry College and we had better get ready to take on an WELL ORGANIZED group of people that want NOTHING else but to make the United States a Christian Theocracy and have the Bible replace the Constitution.

This college brags that they are making the next leaders of America. They brag that they have had more interns in the White House than any other college or university over the past decade.

They are using debate teams and moot court competitions as the training ground for what they hope are future State Attorney Generals, Federal and Supreme Court Judges and other positions that will allow the influence of religion to reign supreme over any other view without exception.

They are training the minds of what appear to be some really intelligent kids to do the bidding of Right Wing Evangelicals in whatever government position they can get in to.

It is time to speak up about what is happening in suburban Washington DC, so that we are able to keep tabs on their graduates and where they end up. I think Monica Goodling was a graduate of this school and we saw how she wielded the power given her.

Please put this on your radar screen and keep an eye out for those that hire and promote these graduates.

I have no problem with a religious school or beliefs of anyone as long as they don't try to make my belief's match their views of how EVERYTHING should be.

Given the opportunity this college and their graduates will try and take over anything they can get their hands on.

So keep an eye out and speak up when you become aware of graduates of this college in government positions.

News sources are abuzz today over FBI warnings of a possible al Qaeda attack on the New York subway system during the holiday weekend. ABC is reporting:

In a memo, the FBI said the plot was "aspirational" and based on a report that al Qaeda terrorists "in late September may have discussed targeting transit systems in and around New York City" using suicide bombers or explosives.

With the economy already chewing up expectations retailers can make the rent with a holiday shopping boom, this news is likely to impact the Big Apple's fiscal picture pretty hard. All of them - from Macy's to Target to Joe's Cigars - count on the Christmas (err... holiday) spending spree to tip their balance sheets from red to black.

But nobody wants to be blown up on a subway dock, holding Givenchy bags and nursing a frazzled nervous system. Will the post-Turkey Day crowds stay at home and punch up Amazon, or phone into QVC?

And if the "aspirational" turns out to be another "jack-aspirational" shoeless-joe terror bust - as per the FBI's usual "landmark" anti-terror operations - some very important department-store CEOs will be very, very upset.

 

 

By Lindsay Beyerstein, MediaWire blogger

It's finally official: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will be Barack Obama's Secretary of State.

Some observers thought Clinton was a curious pick because she made a point of differentiating her foreign policy views from Obama's during the Democratic primary.

However, optimism is running high in the reproductive health community that Clinton will use her new office to champion women's health issues worldwide. They expect that Clinton will push for changes in foreign aid criteria to make it easier to provide comprehensive sex ed and reproductive health services to the world's neediest girls and women.

Back in the U.S., Clinton and Sen. Patty Murray introduced legislation to block the finalization of the rules changes at Health and Human Services that would have given employees the right to refuse to administer any birth control or abortion-related services that offended their religious beliefs. These changes would have restricted access to reproductive health services nationwide.

Emily Gould of RH Reality notes the deadline for submitting rules changes is 60 days before the inauguration, but the HHS has classified these "conscience clause" changes as "non-major," thereby giving themselves a 30-day extension. It's a sneaky procedural move, but the stalling won't circumvent the Clinton/Murray bill.

Additional presidential appointments are starting to give shape to President-elect Obama's health care agenda. Melody Barnes has been named Obama's Senior Domestic Policy Adviser. Barnes is one of the few cabinet appointees so far who can be regarded as an unequivocally progressive choice. Barnes is a former executive policy director for the Center for American Progress and well-known in the progressive community.

"By appointing policy leaders like Barnes who see the connections between health and the economy, Obama appears to have pulled together an economic team that reflects many of the goals he set out during his campaign," wrote Todd Heywood in RH Reality Check.

Ezra Klein of the American Prospect compares satisfaction ratings across several countries, and between Americans on Medicare vs. private insurance: "Medicare has much higher satisfaction ratings than private insurance. Americans are much less satisfied with their health system than they are in other countries."

Healthcare reform is gathering momentum in Congress and the White House. The health insurance industry can't help but take notice and offer a few preemptive reassurances, in the hopes of forestalling more fundamental change.

As part of his ongoing coverage of the health insurance industry: Ezra Klein of the American Prospectphones Robert Zirkelbach, America's Health Insurance Plans' director of strategic communications to discuss the trade organization's recent pledge "[...] too guarantee that health plans provide coverage for preexisting conditions in conjunction with mandate that individuals keep and maintain healthcare coverage." Zirkelbach admits that the insurance companies have not pledged to make this coverage affordable. He also says that the Association resists competition from public plans as a strategy to drive down costs.

Here's a fun fact courtesy of Mother Jones to bring up around the Thanksgiving dinner table: Scientists have shown that obesity in mice is linked to the diets of their grandmothers. If pregnant mice were fed a high-fat diet, their offspring were more likely to be obese and insulin insensitive. The surprising result was that the next generation were predisposed to the same problems.

To close this Thanksgiving edition, we offer you a list of 10 things science says will make you happy, courtesy of YES! Magazine. Unaccountably, tryptophan didn't make the list, but gratitude did.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out, Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net.

This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.

Yesterday President-Elect Obama dedicated a portion of his news conference to discussing the need to make cuts in the Federal budget. Since then I've been hearing conservative and MSM pundits claim that entitlement programs are the only place to make any significant cuts. In my uninformed opinion, there is another area more suited for pruning: the military industrial complex. You know, the one that Dwight Eisenhower warned us all about when he left office.

So my question is this: Has anyone heard Obama talk about taking on the MIC, and if he has, how much defense spending could he realistically cut without harming national security?

I came across this insightful article from James Vega (http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2008/11/the_relationship_between_obama.php#more) that I wanted to share with all of you, which I think offers some useful perspective on how we could more constructively think about our role in influencing the Obama administration over the next four years.  Mr. Vega  presents two models for how progressives might relate to a Democratic President.  In Model A, the progressive citizenry is engaged in a "battle for the soul of the Democratic President."  In Model B, progressives are actively engaged in organizing independent movements around issue-specific agendas.  He explains the contrast this way:

 

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EVERYONE should review this post and these numbers. The regression results are consistent with the facts that free-market health care results in adverse selection in insurance, moral hazard, and fails to price externalities.

The regression results show a statistically significant negative relationship (as public health care expenditures go up, health improves) between public health care expenditures and infant mortality rates, while showing a statistically insignificant positive relationship between private expenditures and infant mortality (the amount of private expenditures is not correlated with health).

The fact that the number of private health care dollars has no significant effect on health is consistent with theory. Consider the United States, health care services and insurance are provided privately and they are much more expensive as a result (US health care expenditures: Canada health care expenditures = 1.71:1) but we do not receive more services (US healthcare services received: Canada health care services received .71:1). 

For those of you who do not speak econometrics - this means that public health care systems are more efficient and result in healthier nations, while market based systems are inherently inefficient due to market failures and reduce a nation's health.

Ya gotta love our new President's ability to Improv on the fly.  This week he is dominating the media cycles with carefully choreographed pep rally's.  In each he announces a new brilliant mind to replace the outgoing team.  But just who is this guy?

Oh, according to the sign on the podium, he is from "The Office of the President Elect".  O.k., I know that is what we call him, but I didn't know he needed a sign to remind us.  Still, it shows a lot of creativity.  If ya want to be taken seriously, you might as well have a name plaque to go with it.

Cheers to you Mr. President-Elect

I've been reading the book The American Presidency this year. It's been taking me a long time to get through because, honestly, non-fiction kind of bores me. Still, I have been learning all sorts of fun facts about our nation's leaders, so I thought I would share some. Eleven months after I started, I'm up to James Madison. I figure if I force myself to write about the presidents, I'll eventually finish the book. So, here we go:

Stuff I learned - George Washington:

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M: Ah. I’d like to have an argument, please.

R: Certainly sir. Have you been here before?

M: No, I haven’t, this is my first time.

We just got our copy of Depletion and Abundance. I assumed that Sharon Astyk was too busy making an Abundance of food for Thanksgiving to post about Depletion, but George Monbiot roused an article out of her. And a good one.

George Monbiot is Arguing with Me…That Has to be Good

In the Guardian, Monbiot writes:

The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on the second world war when adjusted for inflation. Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people “to make short term, radical sacrifices”, cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years.

There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale.

Astyk replies:

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Yesterday I posted how the Government could solve the credit crisis

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/resistance/2008/11/the-government-could-end-the-c.php

Interesting article tells you why they won't.

An excerpt

DJ: Why isn't anyone listening to these ideas?
CC: The point is that they have made huge errors in the design of their assistance plan and they were forecastable errors.

For instance, Paulson doesn't want there to be a stigma [around capital injections.] Does he really believe that by getting J.P. Morgan to participate, he creates the perception that JPM and Citi are the same?

Does he really believe that injecting preferred stock into banks is socialism but buying assets at above market price isn't? Does he really believe that?

There actually is a stock of knowledge about this. The scandal is that when Congress has been considering this, not one independent economist has been allowed to testify. Do you know why they weren't? Paulson and Bernanke didn't want anyone causing problems.

DJ: Wait, that sounds like a conspiracy.
CC: Democrats didn't want anyone [economists] testifying because it was before an election and no one was willing to stand before that bulldozer known as Paulson. No one wanted to make tough political decision before the election. They didn't empower any experts to come in and testify. Why is that? They were playing politics, too. That's what we're dealing with-a complete leadership failure in Congress and the administration.

Don't underestimate the role of politics in the decision not to fix things.

Permalink | Trackback

 

 URL: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2008/11/25/the-paulson-plan-truly-idiotic/trackback/

I heard that Obama has been making his picks of Hillary Clinton to the State Department, and a center right economic team in order to appease the establishment so that they won't strongly oppose his policies. But is the economic and foreign policy establishment really that powerful in the eyes of the American people? The economic establishment has been discredited through deregulatory policies that has led to the current financial meldown. While the foreign policy establishment has lost legitimacy with the American public by the war in Iraq. However those who want a change in both foreign and economic policies were powerful enough to allow the Democrats regain control of the house in 2006 and control the presidency in 2008. Is Obama overestimating the power of the Washington establishment while ignoring the voting strength of those who want a true change in policies?

Barack Obama is extraordinarily intelligent and yes he probably is the best man to be president right now... but that probably wont make a bit of difference. It is the system and the ideology on which it rests that are in a blind alley. When the people of a huge and powerful country think that the solution to their problems is a leader, that makes me very nervous.

The United States is in a systemic breakdown and people think that Obama is going to fix it. It reminds me about how people in the West viewed Gorbachev before the USSR collapsed. Not Lincoln, not Gandhi, not FDR: Gorbachev.

Gorbachev was and is a very decent and intelligent man who just happened to be standing on the bridge when the Titanic went down.

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

Malik Rahim is running for Congress in Louisiana's Second District against incumbent William Jefferson, the latest in a long line of indicted or convicted Louisiana political shady characters. You can learn more about Rahim here and contribute to his campaign here.

Wtih real change unlikely to come from either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, this is a chance to get an independent, third-party voice in Congress!

Malik Rahim is running for Congress in Louisiana's Second District against incumbent William Jefferson, the latest in a long line of indicted or convicted Louisiana political shady characters. You can learn more about Rahim here and contribute to his campaign here.

Wtih real change unlikely to come from either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, this is a chance to get an independent, third-party voice in Congress!

Since Mr. Brennan doesn't know the difference between "lie" and "lay", we're well rid of him.

This 2nd chance post was a great tool when the boards were nuts and the archives weren't working, but now that there's a major lull and the archives are back functioning, it seems to have outlived its usefulness.

Thank you all so very much for your support day after day! It was fun...see you on the boards!

Hi there, come on in.  Give me your coat and find a comfortable seat somewhere.  While I gather some drinks together, I'd like to share a part of my day with you.

Some of you may remember my friend who passed away recently and now resides in the Moon.  He was a wonderful man.  An older gentleman who made the world better simply by being a part of it.  He and his lovely wife graced my particular world first through the motel at which I work, then as true and valued friends on a more personal basis.  I knew him for twenty-five years and loved him with all of my heart.   

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If we learned one thing from last week's meeting of the well-heeled and the well-jowled, it would that it's not always easy to tell the two apart. If we learned anything else, it would be that CEOs of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors love their private jets -possibly more than they love their businesses.

"It would be insane if this country stopped designing and building automobiles and trucks," said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA). "It would also be insane if the top executives from the three automakers came here on private jets. I'm going to ask the three executives here to raise their hand if they flew here commercial. Let the record show no hands went up. Second, I'm going to ask you to raise your hand if you're planning to sell your jet in place now and fly back commercial. Let the record show no hands went up. I don't know how I go back to my constituents and say the auto industry has changed if they own private jets which are not only expensive to own but expensive to operate and expensive to fly here rather than to have flown commercial."

"There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses," Rep. Gary Ackerman, (D-NY) told the CEOs.

"It's almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious...couldn't you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it."

Watch full video of CEO testimony before the House here and the Senate here.

Click image for better quality.

For more art and politics visit:
www.indepublica.com

So if I'm correctly understanding this thing about the bailout, its proximate origin, and Obama's solution, it goes something like this:

Clinton hires Rudin, who is apparently in possession of either a magic wand that rivals the clenis, or a sound grounding in basic economic theory. For the nonce, I'll assume the latter. So Rudin implements a (sufficiently or relatively) sane economic policy, and voila! something once described to me as "the largest postwar economic expansion, ever"...now I have no idea if the quote is accurate, but I do have to say that the Clinton era policies helped me. So far, so good.

But if I understand the totality of Rudin's behavior (for instance, this:  http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/245520.php) his work is also the proximate cause of the current crisis, since it allowed these institutions (like Citi) to engage in behavior that has led them straight to the bottom....behavior they were disallowed prior to Rudin's advocacy for loosening protective legislation; which, in retrospect, seems to have been a bad idea. Sort of like handing out sympathomimetics as Halloween treats. Sure, we have lots of pretty pills; and we  keep them locked up for a reason.

Now here we are, fifteen years later (more or less) and Obama's solution is to hire Rudin; a guy out of a group of people addicted to financial instruments of dubious quality and suspect origin. Sort of like drugstore cowboys, only not sartorially handicapped. (And what is up with Milken? Still seeking a pardon? He's still guilty. Get a life, give it up, move on.)

With Rudin, I'm trying to see something other than a seventy year old guy wearing creased blue jeans and a pink polo shirt in a Karaoke bar after casual Friday; justifying his life by trying to talk his way through "Rehab".

Of course, the punchline is " They tried to make me go to rehab but I said no, no, no...." Or maybe "the invisible hand tried to make me go to rehab but I said no no no...."

Is anyone out there up for a New Economy?

I can't believe that congress is actually considering this.
to bail out the very builders who were complicit in this
whole economic debacle. 

Extending the "net operating loss carry
back" provision "would benefit home
builders, financial firms, and other
companies which have suffered losses
that exceed their prior two years of
earnings," Seiberg said.

CORPORATE HANDOUT?

But the Laborers' International Union of
North America criticized the measure,
labeling it a $33 billion "handout for
corporate home builders who helped cause
the housing crash and the mortgage
crisis."

They've got to be kidding. Listen I've seen some of these
(and I use the term loosely) houses going up here in Fl.
and believe me, they aren't worth the wind that it would take
to blow them over. Many built on swamp land that returns to
same the minute it rains.

And these same congress critters have the unmitigated gall
to consider this while telling Detroit to take a hike ??

I'm mortified.

C
 

Why isn't Congress going after Angelo Mozilo?  He made almost $500mm during the sub-prime heyday.  Will Frank and Dodd have the guts to go after scumbags like Mozilo?  I doubt they want to risk their political careers, which is really unfortunate.  It might jeopardize their future campaign contributions from the housing industry

I don't expect this post to get read very much, but I have to rant.

Why is it that every time Obama does one tiny thing we don't like, we have to go in a frenzy and demand our campaign contributions back?  Have we not learned anything from the campaign?  Well, I learned something: trust the guy.  It seems to me that he knows what he's doing, so I'll give him a chance if he does something that may not sit well with me from the beginning.

Maybe I'm only saying this because I haven't achieved political geek-like status like most TPMers.  Besides, I'm just a 21-year old snot-nosed college kid, so I haven't lived through as much history as most of you (or know as much in general).  However, dealing with a nation in financial crisis requires seeing things from all viewpoints, even those with which you most vehemently disagree with.  It's not like he's actually going to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely because he's keeping Robert Gates at Secretary of Defense, and he's not going to send the economy spiraling further because Lawrence Summers is part of his economic team.  This may not seem like change to you, but last time I checked, there hasn't been much listening to opponents over the past eight years in the White House.  He will be the President; therefore, he's the one that sets the agenda and I'm pretty sure it will be from as far away from Bush's policies as reasonably possible.

We all hate FISA, but I'm sure Barack did what he did was best in compromising and I'm sure he'll fix what's wrong with it as President.  Many of you thought he was nuts for going on The O'Reilly Factor (and thought I was nuts for suggesting he go on the show).  And a lot of you probably didn't like his VP pick, his lack of anger on the campaign trail, his decision to not attack McCain the same way that McCain attacked him, his poor choice of tie during his DNC speech...I could go on with the nit-picky criticisms given to Obama during the campaign.  Hell, I admit to it myself--and if you can honestly say you have trusted the President-elect's decisions every step of the way up to now, then I'm volunteering to replace Alan Colmes.  Let me know if you think of something more painful to go through than sitting alongside Hannity. 

So before you scream that there are Clinton people on his staff, consider that this is still a change from the past eight years and that this guy is (gasp) still inexperienced and it would help to have people who have been in the White House before.  Before you complain that Obama isn't doing anything progressive yet, let him get sworn in first at least.  Before you complain that Rahm Emanuel isn't a liberal,  take a look at ratings that imply that he's more liberal than you think (of course, they're ratings which don't mean everything).  And before you start whining about Obama not being liberal enough, consider what are (or should be) left-wing ideals: helping the middle class and spending on infrastructure and green jobs.  I think he will  govern pragmatically, but I also don't think he will give in to the center-right meme that's been played ad nauseam in the media.

I won't blog as much as I did during the summer since this was really just something to do to pass the time, but I'm going to try to post only when I have something meaningful to say.  I've written some good posts in the past, but some have just been dumb.

I'm also not going to act like I know more than the guy I voted for. I'm sure some of what is seen on the blogs is earnest discussion and not of the "OMG WTF IS HE DOING" category, but I felt the need to calm everybody down and let the man do his job.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Because it's been such an appalling failure in most senses of the word, it's hard to remember that the Bush administration has failed so seriously by succeeding. It looks like a shambles to us, but to a diehard core of Republicans, the effect of the Bush presidency is completely deliberate.

It is the perfect expression of a political ideology that seeks to undermine your faith in government by demonstrating that it doesn't work and providing another example of absolute id.

So it isn't just a matter of being strident about crushing egalitarian dreams and the Constitution, which limits the powerful much more than it limits the normal. And it's not just about taking money to enrich a few people. It's money taken from the treasury to prevent things from happening like prosecutions of mine owners who don't install safety equipment.

So when Senator McCain goes to Georgia and preaches the RNC CounterMandate, there are real people who think it's a good thing that the popularly elected President Obama will be hamstrung as he tries to pull us out of the mess the RNC has enabled.

 

The story is that the banks need 1/2 of our GDP becuase of bad mortgages.

Do we have to assume the truth of this?

Does it even make sense?

Or is there some hidden corruption going on that we need to know about?