Hi there, come on in.  It's been a long and eventful week, hasn't it?  So much to celebrate, so much to remember.  Emotions that have been hard to describe even as they flowed from each of us to the other.  Some things need no words.  All right, get in here and find a seat.  The sofa is still open, as is the ugly blue chair.  Someone's already happily in dreamland while consumed by the beanbag ...  shhh.  Luckily they're in the corner, won't be disturbed by the music.  Speaking of which, what are you in the mood to hear tonight?  Care for a glass of Zin?  On my way to refill my glass, so just let me know.

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John Kemp has a great take on the the debt disaster facing the
US and UK and the rest of the world.

To understand the scale of the problem, and
why it leaves so few options for
policymakers, take a look at Chart 1
which shows the growth in the real economy
(measured by nominal GDP) and the financial
sector (measured by total credit market
instruments outstanding) since 1952.

In 1952, the United States was emerging from
the Second World War and the conflict in
Korea with a strong economy, and fairly low
debt, split between a relatively large
government debt (amounting to 68 percent of
GDP) and a relatively small private sector
one (just 60 percent of GDP).

Over the next 23 years, the volume of debt
increased, but the rise was broadly in line
with growth in the rest of the economy, so
the overall ratio of total debts to GDP
changed little, from 128 percent in 1952 to
155 percent in 1975.

The only real change was in the composition.
Private debts increased (7.8 times) more
rapidly than public ones (1.5 times). As a
result, there was a marked shift in the debt
stock from public debt (just 37 percent of
GDP in 1975) towards private sector
obligations (117 percent). But this was not
unusual. It should be seen as a return to
more normal patterns of debt issuance after
the wartime period in which the government
commandeered resources for the war effort
and rationed borrowing by the private
sector.

From the 1970s onward, however, the economy
has undergone two profound structural
shifts. First, the economy as a whole has
become much more indebted. Output rose eight
times between 1975 and 2007. But the total
volume of debt rose a staggering 20 times,
more than twice as fast. The total
debt-to-GDP ratio surged from 155 percent to
355 percent.

Second, almost all this extra debt has come
from the private sector. Take a look at
Chart 2.Despite acres of newsprint devoted to
the federal budget deficit over the last thirty
years, public debt at all levels has risen
only 11.5 times since 1975. This is slightly
faster than the eight-fold increase in
nominal GDP over the same period, but
government debt has still only risen from 37
percent of GDP to 52 percent.

I remember when certain American corporations
decided not to compete in the market place and
can pinpoint the era on these charts. But I cannot
in all honesty blame just the management or
the stock holders for the decline in American
products. The designers and engineers share a
good part as well. Instead of being competitive with
the rest of the world, corporate America chose to
"take the money and run" or produce cheesier and
cheesier products giving consumers the choice
between junk make here or made in Japan.

Then outsourced the junk all together while paying
their workers less and less.

At the same time the carrot of easy credit was waved
in the faces of these self same consumers. Now the
bill has come due and everyone is tapped out.

As has been stated here and elsewhere, the
nationalization of the financial institutions will have to
come to pass and as is stated here..

The solution must be some combination of
policies to reduce the level of debt or
raise nominal GDP. The simplest way to
reduce debt is through bankruptcy, in which
some or all of debts are deemed
unrecoverable and are simply extinguished,
ceasing to exist.

Bankruptcy would ensure the cost of
resolving the debt crisis falls where it
belongs. Investor portfolios and pension
funds would take a severe but one-time hit.
Healthy businesses would survive, minus the
encumbrance of debt.

But widespread bankruptcies are probably
socially and politically unacceptable. The
alternative is some mechanism for
refinancing debt on terms which are more
favorable to borrowers (replacing short term
debt at higher rates with longer-dated paper
at lower ones).

Unfortunately raising the GDP will require the changing
of corporate attitudes and get away from this monetary
ends justify the means way of doing business that has
been the center of American capitalism for far too long.

C

Unfiltered and without the MSM pundits' spin and opinions . . .


The President speaks of the priorities and specific details of the plan that is now being hashed out by the members of Congress.

Enjoy . . .

 

Download video as high-quality .mp4

[UPDATE: Download the Recovery Plan Metrics Report (PDF)]

---

Remarks of President Barack Obama

Weekly Address

Saturday, January 24th, 2009
 

We begin this year and this Administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action. Just this week, we saw more people file for unemployment than at any time in the last twenty-six years, and experts agree that if nothing is done, the unemployment rate could reach double digits. Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. And we could lose a generation of potential, as more young Americans are forced to forgo college dreams or the chance to train for the jobs of the future.

In short, if we do not act boldly and swiftly, a bad situation could become dramatically worse.

That is why I have proposed an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to immediately jumpstart job creation as well as long-term economic growth. I am pleased to say that both parties in Congress are already hard at work on this plan, and I hope to sign it into law in less than a month.

It's a plan that will save or create three to four million jobs over the next few years, and one that recognizes both the paradox and the promise of this moment - the fact that there are millions of Americans trying to find work even as, all around the country, there's so much work to be done. That's why this is not just a short-term program to boost employment. It's one that will invest in our most important priorities like energy and education; health care and a new infrastructure that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century.

Today I'd like to talk specifically about the progress we expect to make in each of these areas.

To accelerate the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and biofuels over the next three years. We'll begin to build a new electricity grid that lay down more than 3,000 miles of transmission lines to convey this new energy from coast to coast. We'll save taxpayers $2 billion a year by making 75% of federal buildings more energy efficient, and save the average working family $350 on their energy bills by weatherizing 2.5 million homes.

To lower health care cost, cut medical errors, and improve care, we'll computerize the nation's health record in five years, saving billions of dollars in health care costs and countless lives. And we'll protect health insurance for more than 8 million Americans who are in danger of losing their coverage during this economic downturn.

To ensure our children can compete and succeed in this new economy, we'll renovate and modernize 10,000 schools, building state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries, and labs to improve learning for over five million students. We'll invest more in Pell Grants to make college affordable for seven million more students, provide a $2,500 college tax credit to four million students, and triple the number of fellowships in science to help spur the next generation of innovation.

Finally, we will rebuild and retrofit America to meet the demands of the 21st century. That means repairing and modernizing thousands of miles of America's roadways and providing new mass transit options for millions of Americans. It means protecting America by securing 90 major ports and creating a better communications network for local law enforcement and public safety officials in the event of an emergency. And it means expanding broadband access to millions of Americans, so business can compete on a level-playing field, wherever they're located.

I know that some are skeptical about the size and scale of this recovery plan. I understand that skepticism, which is why this recovery plan must and will include unprecedented measures that will allow the American people to hold my Administration accountable for these results. We won't just throw money at our problems - we'll invest in what works. Instead of politicians doling out money behind a veil of secrecy, decisions about where we invest will be made public, and informed by independent experts whenever possible. We'll launch an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov.

No one policy or program will solve the challenges we face right now, nor will this crisis recede in a short period of time. But if we act now and act boldly; if we start rewarding hard work and responsibility once more; if we act as citizens and not partisans and begin again the work of remaking America, then I have faith that we will emerge from this trying time even stronger and more prosperous than we were before. Thanks for listening.

~OGD~
.

Originally posted as a comment in another TPM blog thread.  I'm saving it here.  If it seems raw, see the context:

Some of Bush's early Pres. speeches were very nice examples of drawing distinctions in very simple terms. I was impressed at how compelling the simplistic [good/evil] rhetoric was, and hoped for Democrats and others to learn to employ the method as well to better ends. I've heard Obama draw more nuanced distinctions in somewhat more flowery terms.

"Either A or B" is (can be) also a False Dichotomy. The difference between a dichotomy and a distinction is largely a matter of fine distinction. Polemics casts issues in stark contrasts, but we are supposed to understand the caricatures as such, only illustrations to guide "distinctional" thinking not attractors to capture and lock in prejudices (of course the rhetorically minded sophist might exactly desire the latter). As such we practice mindful distinction making, an essential aspect of dialectic(al) thinking.

In the "real world" there is often an excluded middle or an overlap. This is generally understood in quantum physics as well as in politics.

Related comment in [yet] another thread on polarization.

I know...on line dating services....sorta plays into the contention by one unnamed person that the new demographics here are older, female and, from the Midwest, so the content is getting to be a little irrelevant, but since many of us TPMers post on non-politcal subjects, I'm going to take the chance.

But, first, I need to do a little prefacing...

1. I 've been married for going on 37 years, so I've never actually USED one. That means that an argument could be made that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I've never let that keep me from having an opinion, so why start now? :-)

2. I'm a Christian, so THAT means an argument could be made, by some, that I have nothing of value to contribute to the conversation, even if I did know what I was talking about. Rest assured, I have not been a Christian my whole life, and DO have some experience as a "heathen."

So, if you are still with me, I'd like to explore the benefits of on-line dating services. I was discussing them with a friend a couple of nights ago. She was frustrated by her inability to find a good man, and in my self-appointed capacity as a "fixer of friend's problems," I threw out the suggestion that she try e-harmony, which was summarily rejected as not a very good idea (in not exactly those words...)

Somehow dating services can be considered a desperate measure, suited only for those losers who are incapable of forming relationships in the traditional fashion.

I disagree, and here's why...

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Last month, before the inauguration, I asked how long it would be until a wedding party or sleeping family were blown up by a remote-controlled aircraft on Obama's watch. We didn't have to wait long. Just three days into his presidency, two drone attacks occurred in Pakistan. The first found its target, "four Arab militants" including a "senior al Qaeda operative." The second missile, apparently intended for a "Taleban commander," instead killed "a pro-government tribal leader...and four members of his family, including a five-year-old child." Obama is now officialy responsible for his first civilian casualties.

The bailout appears poorly managed because there's little understanding why banks -- as a supplier of capital -- are getting priority; but the real priority -- food -- seems to have been lost in the shuffle. The time to debate this issue is now, not after the bill has been passed.

Not ready: "Check back after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to see how and where your tax dollars are spent." [Emphasis added]

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That creepy picture of Bush appointee / Stepford GOPer, Kathie Olsen has become a fixture of TPM's front page ... (Her eyes seem to follow you wherever you go in the room and from whatever angle you view her image! Just like Uncle Sam's finger on those old recruiting posters!) 

Be careful, TPM, she may be embedded in your website!!  Arrrrggghhhh!!!

Perhaps there are some who have questions about the commenting policy at TPM and wonder just how far free speech is allowed to go.  Here it is all on one page.


Copied and pasted from the faq page...


1. Does TPM have a comment policy?

Yes! TPMCafe and the TPM Media network follow a simple set of rules for acceptable commenting. 1. All political viewpoints are welcome. However, hate speech of any kind, libelous statements or threats to fellow users or others will be deleted and may be grounds for suspending or terminating a users account. 2. Four letter words are not banned, but we ask that they be used sparingly as overuse coarsens and undermines the debate. 3. TPMCafe is a venue for lively and passionate debate. But insults, personal attacks and the like make that sort of enlivening exchange impossible. If you just want to scream and taunt, please go somewhere else. If you have any question about what is and what's not acceptable, follow this rule: If you wouldn't use a certain word or talk to someone a certain way in a real-life political discussion at a Coffee House, don't do it here either. (my bold)

HATE SPEECH:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech

http://www.answers.com/topic/hate-speech

http://www.spectacle.org/freespch/musm/hate.html  

libel:  definition per American Heritage Dictionary--NOUN:

1. a.  A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation.
    b.  The act of presenting such material to the public.

2. The written claims presented by a plaintiff in an action at admiralty law or to an ecclesiastical court.


obscenity:  definition per American Heritage Dictionary--NOUN:
 
pl. ob·scen·i·ties
1. The state or quality of being obscene.
2. Indecency, lewdness, or offensiveness in behavior, expression, or appearance.
3. Something, such as a word, act, or expression, that is indecent or lewd.
4. Something that is offensive or repulsive to the senses.

FIGHTING WORDS: as per USLegal Definitions--

http://definitions.uslegal.com/f/fighting-words/

Fighting words are words intentionally directed toward another person which are so venomous and full of malice as to cause the hearer to suffer emotional distress or incite him/her to immediately retaliate physically. Fighting words are not an excuse or defense for a retaliatory assault and battery. However, if they are so threatening as to cause apprehension, they can form the basis for a lawsuit for assault, even though the words alone don't constitute an assault.

The utterance of fighting words is not protected by the free speech protections of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The words are often evaluated not only by the words themselves, but the context in which they are spoken. Courts generally impose a requirement that the speaker intended to cause a breach of the peace or incite the hearer to violence. (my bold)

Certain racist innuendos have been made and I'm not really sure where they fit in all of this.  I am not of a lawyer-ly bend so I don't know if the response to this comment would be considered an admission of racism.  And I don't know if an admission of racism is something that can be overlooked by the higher ups.  I'll leave it up to individual readers to decide.  It bothers me, though.  A lot.

As an added note, I truly enjoy the spirited discussions, the well structured arguments (and the not so well structured), the glorious array of personalities and the humor expressed here at TPM.  The racist/insulting comments I could really do without.  But, that's just me.






 

By all rights, this week should be a celebration of the return of our nation to its role as the beacon of liberty and freedom throughout the world. We all know people, or stories of people, born in other countries who yearned for a life in this country of hope and opportunity, but it has not always lived up to those dreams.

Somewhere in the midst of the wrenching changes of the 1960s, the war that was being fought in Vietnam and the parallel war in our streets, and the murders of symbols of hope and progress including the President of the United States and his brother, candidate for the same office as well as Dr. King and Malcolm X, the symbols of one of the key struggles of our time, half the country went in one direction and the other in the opposite. Finally, for the first time since 1965 or so, we seem have that behind us and our new President signals that new age as well anyone could.

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Get Afghanistan Right aims to ensure that progressive voices are well-heard in the debate on US policy in the region.  Looks good to me:

For years, many progressives have argued that the real war on terrorism is in Afghanistan as a rhetorical bludgeon to argue against the Iraq war, and relatively few criticized Obama's plans for escalation. ... [big snip] ...  Currently, Get Afghanistan Right doesn't take a position on Afghanistan beyond arguing that the troop increase is a poor course of action.

... which brings me to the title point:

The arguments hosted on the website itself contended that ...  and that Afghanistan itself is no longer a just war.

"a just war"?  I am one of apparently few who supported attacks on AQ camps and leaders but were not happy with the methods Bush used to get us into Afg..  It was never a just war to me.  Afghanistan was and remains a "justified war" at best, another costly and largely failing military adventure otherwise. 

While I do often appreciate the notion of "kill two birds with one stone", the maxim of course assumes that it is right to kill each bird and that the stone is the way to achieve the ends.  While it is easy to point out the flaws of the Taliban, we must ask *ourselves* about the differences between justification and justice.

The important moral difference is that justice is moral and non-partisan.

The important practical difference is that the US with wide support from NATO and others used AQ as an excuse for what has been called elsewhere, "regime change".  The resistant Taliban were removed militarily, Karzai and Company sorta replaced them, Bin Laden and other leaders were effectively allowed to escape, and after about 8 years of being mildly terrorized by Terror Alert Status warnings here we are hearing about Taliban resurgence, with any pretense that getting Bin Laden was priority one now long officially abandoned, and a nominally progressive if pragmatically centrist new President talking about military buildups.

Afghanistan is just another nation building exercise done poorly and at great expense, built on a failure of will (I won't go so far in this post as to call it "evil").  True progressives need to be clear on this as they wage political "battles" to offer the new Administration the correct open doors its campaign said it needed.

President Barack Obama exudes confidence and it is contagious.  He is quickly becoming the president of the people.  Americans are really excited about the positive energy that he is generating and despite hard economic times, people are optimistic about the future.  President Obama faces high expectations.  However, with a smile on his face, the President has said that he is eager to get started in his quest to get the country and yes even the world back on the right track.  And it appears that the people are committed to helping.

Some critics will try to focus on little things when trying to define the success of the Obama presidency.  But Obama represents an American success.  He is already on the mountaintop and America sits there with him.  There are no more blue or red states or liberals or conservatives or special interests.  Instead, President Obama is leading the charge for a United States of America much as he communicated during his presidential campaign.  He wants a country where it's okay to disagree but advocates doing so without being disagreeable.

That's why it's okay to have Rev. Rick Warren pray at his inauguration and that's why it's okay for the good reverend to invoke the name of Jesus.  We don't all have to be on the same page or walk in lockstep to avoid dismissal as not relevant.  That's the old way.  The election of Barack Obama was the beginning of a new way and the movement which he is leading now has wheels. Persons like Rush Limbaugh who are slow to accept this fact that change has come to America will have a hard time.

Rush does not stand alone as an obstacle to a better America.  He has teammates, because many who perceive change as a loss of power or influence will stand with him.  So President Obama shouldn't be surprised when he encounters resistance from the so-called political Right and the Left, Republicans and Democrats, White and Black Americans, the media, and countless others who will insist on skinning their cats the same way.  However, right now the nameless masses who are heeding the call to help President Obama make positive change a group effort, appear to have the advantage.

Last night, succumbing to pressure from my grown kids, I finally sat down with my husband and watched the latest Batman movie, "The Dark Knight."

I'd been putting it off because I knew it would make me sad.  A longtime fan of charismatic young star Heath Ledger, I believed that the extraordinarily difficult nature of the part and the physical demands of incessant night-shoots had caused the habitual sleeplessness that led to his accidental death from a mix-up of perscription drugs.  That we will be denied his considerable gifts in future performances is tragic not just for his fans, but for all lovers of good movies.

Full disclosure: I've long been a movie-junkie, but it is our daughter who has taught me so much about the craft of acting, ever since I first saw her perform in a high school play when she was fifteen.  Since that time, she's done summer theater-camps, gotten a degree in performance art, studied theater for a year in London, acted in New York off-off Broadway for three years, and is now in Los Angeles, pursuing The Dream in film. 

Watching Jessica's hard work and sacrifice and spending time with her bright, beautiful, talented, funny actor-friends has given me a respect for the profession that most people don't share because they have no idea just how hard it really is, not just to DO it, but to succeed at it.

Recently, David Letterman pointed out to 15-Oscar-nominations Meryl Streep that two of her daughters have followed her into the profession.  He asked her if she'd wanted her kids to pursue acting, and she replied, "God no!  I'd rather they be nuclear physicists!  Anything!  It's just so hard."

Needless to say, there are a sufficient number of no-talent airheads who get cast in big parts that it undermines the efforts of those who are more deserving, but don't blame the whole profession on bottom-line studio heads and casting directors.  Those who want to ACT, and not just be movie stars, throw everything they've got into every performance, even if they have to do it five nights a week and twice on Saturdays.

Heath Ledger was one of those actors; he was never comfortable with the movie-star shtick.  My comic-book nerd kids say that his rendition of The Joker is actually true to the intention of the original comic character, not the clownishness of previous movie Jokers like Jim Carrey.  Ledger's Joker is sinister, quite mentally disturbed, and sadistic--which makes the freakish smile painted on his face that much more menacing.

Ledger "disappeared into the part," said my son, which explains his Oscar nomination.  Though some would say he does not deserve an Oscar for that particular performance, I do believe he should have won for "Brokeback Mountain," and it's not as if he'll ever get another chance.  I hope the Academy recognizes his gifts on Oscar night.

But "The Dark Knight" didn't just make me sad because of the death of its young star.  The entire movie was grim, from start to finish, and even darker than most Gotham City movies.  By "darker," I don't just mean the subject matter and mood--I mean the lighting, as well.  It takes place almost entirely at night, and almost every setting is shadowy and murky.

There is very little humor, save between the Bruce Wayne character, played by Christian Bale, and his faithful butler, Alfred, played by Michael Caine.  Nor are there very many redeeming characteristics for many of the characters, including the populace of Gotham City.

This version of Batman explores the theme that the public, weary of and disgruntled by the high body-count of Batman's rescues, reject him as a hero and can only approve of him if he is a villain.  This is not peculiar to Batman alone.  A similar theme was explored in "Hellboy II" this past year, and by the Will Smith anti-superhero flick, "Hancock."

These movies put me in mind of the "Terminator" series and other apocolyptic stories, in which there seem to be no redeeming characteristics of the human condition.  Take away our cushy lives, it seems to say, and we will turn on one another in an orgy of crime, terror, and lawlessness.  There will be no kindness, no neighbors helping neighbors, no Doctors Without Borders or Red Cross, if you get my meaning.

But these themes have been resonating in Hollywood for several years now, and not just in comic book movies.  Dan Zak explores this in a recent piece in the Washington Post called, "No Country for Upbeat Films":

In February, the Oscar for Best Picture went to "No Country for Old Men," a highbrow slasher movie, the bleakest contender to take the top prize since -- well, since the year before, when "The Departed" won. Further cementing the notion that bleak movies get made in order to strike gold, three out of four acting Oscars were given to people who played villains: Daniel Day-Lewis as the monstrous oilman in the nihilistic "There Will Be Blood"; Tilda Swinton as the sniveling attorney in "Michael Clayton," a movie in which every person has mortgaged his soul; and Javier Bardem as the dead-eyed killer Anton Chigurh, who cattle-gunned the entire cast of "No Country" save for Tommy Lee Jones, whose character ended the movie on a note of despair, not death.

This year, that might count as a happy ending.

Big movies have tent-poled 2008 with a tarp of cruelty. No resolution, no absolution. Just the raw misery of the human condition. Buh-leak. We expect this of fringe foreign films, the confounding subgenre of torture porn, and most documentaries, but not the biggest hits and highest-praised movies of the year.

What does it mean that Pixar set its latest family-friendly movie, "WALL E," on a dead planet Earth, trashed and abandoned by the human race?

The Batman franchise, which started as a kitschy carnival, morphed this summer into a dystopian nightmare in "The Dark Knight." The Joker's metier is large-scale terror and chaos. The movie is a series of agonizing moral dilemmas, capped by the conclusion that, for order to be maintained, people must view the hero as a villain. "The Dark Knight" is the highest-grossing movie of the year, and one of the best-reviewed.

Even James Bond has a case of the bleaks. In "Quantum of Solace," he has hardened into a morose assassin "blinded by inconsolable rage." Bond's jesterlike tech guru Q does not make an appearance. He is no doubt busy designing a smile for 007.

Permit me to posit an answer to Zak's question.

Hollywood responds to the mood of the country.  After years and years of the abuses of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove and Iraq/Katrina/9-11/Guantanamo, the nation's collective psyche has been beaten down into a mass sense of helplessness, powerlessness, and hopelessness.

I have long maintained that the only reason Bush actually won re-election was because the whole country was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder following 9-11.  Rove and his minions completely comprehended this, which explains why they kept up a hysterical FOX-fueled frenzy of fear-mongering, color threat-alerts, and attacks on opponents who "didn't seem to understand" all those threats the way our Fearless Leader did, who, after all, Kept Us Safe all these years, if, of course, you don't count 2001.

But Hollywood has reflected that sense with such previously unthinkable trends as the one in which all the lead characters are destroyed at the end of the movie, as in "Cloverfield," and the complete destruction of most of the planet in "War of the Worlds" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still," and (though I haven't seen it; I'm guessing), millions of people die, as in "The Happening."

To my way of thinking, the recurrent theme of populace-turning-on-superhero reflects recent political battles, in which, say, a bright young charismatic man who talks about "hope" is attacked as a closet Muslim terrorist bent on the destruction of the United States.  Or, say, a brilliant, hard-working female candidate is attacked as a ball-cutting shrew harridan who only wants to punish the rest of us because her husband fooled around.

But something happened on the way to all of our mutual self-destruction: Real-Life Catastrophe--in the form of an economic and social meltdown--and yanked the world's attention to the common business of plain, raw survival.

Suddenly, nobody has time anymore for such empty triteness as fire-breathing preachers and flag lapel-pin bullshit.

We had to turn our attention to REAL WORLD, REAL PROBLEMS.

And it was in that moment that the Emperor Who Had No Clothes was seen in all his naked un-glory at last, and all his enablers exposed as equally nude.

Oh, most of us already knew, of course, but the media, responding to what it perceived as What the Public Wanted, had remained obsessed on minutia such as preacher-gaffes and candidate's wardrobes long past the actual satiation of that interest.

The joyful global celebrations that occurred on election night with the election of Barack Obama, and the unprecedented outpouring of the same thing on Inauguration Day, is not really about just the man.  It's about a basic human reaction to a cultural sickness--a national depression, if you will--that has been dragging on now for more than seven or eight years. 

It's about a hunger, a real desire to feel hope again.

And it's not just HOPE.  What Obama tapped into was this sense of powerlessness, and what he offered voters was empowerment, a chance to take hold of the controls of one's own destiny.  Getting involved in a grass-roots campaign was part of it, but the chance to actually be HEARD by one's government now through inter-active websites, to have a voice, and to sense that somebody somewhere is actually LISTENING, has contributed to the euphoria we've witnessed this past week.

It's not just about American voters, either.  Worldwide, this phenomenon has been repeated.  In one piece I read recently, Muslims the world over have literally dissected every word of the Inaugural address, searching for hope that, at last, they will no longer be treated as across-the-board enemies, but will be afforded a certain measure of respect.

Hollywood--and the box office receipts--have caught the first breeze of those changing winds.  For example, in spite of all the dreary Oscar contenders released in the past few months, two of the biggest box-office hits was a kid movie with the improbable title, "Beverly Hills Chihuahuas," and a musical based on a band from the 80's called "Mama Mia!"

And even though more than a few depressing movies made it to Academy Award nominations, two of the biggest hits remain "Slum-Dog Millionaire" and "Happy-Go-Lucky," which are both upbeat, inspiring, feel-good movies.

People are tired of what "Happy-Go-Lucky" director, Mike Leigh, referred to as "miserablism."

The thing is, when your own life is fairly miserable, you don't want to scrounge up a chunk of money to go to the movies and watch the story's hero die of cancer or get rejected by a hostile unbelieving populace or get killed by the bad guys or lose out to a triumphant evil. 

After eight solid years of real-life war, you don't want to watch movie-soldiers you admire commit atrocities, or characters you've come to love wind up crushed by the Holocaust or some other evil or a monster.  You don't want the good guy you've become invested in turn out to be the serial killer. 

In short, you don't want to come out of the movies more depressed than you were going in.

And when you, yourself, have witnessed--in real life--incredible acts of kindness and generosity (such as what we saw with the recent near-tragic crash of the U.S. Airways jet into the Hudson River)--you don't want to pay good money to watch a movie in which every single human being on-screen is reprehensible and depraved.

While there is certainly evil in the world, it is not all there is.  All humans have the capacity for evil but they also have the capacity for great good.  Some choose to be bad, but many choose to be good.  It's only fair that both be represented on-screen.

What we witnessed, collectively, on our TV screens this past week reflects a true hunger within our national psyche to feel GOOD again, good about our country, good about ourselves, and good about our leaders.

We still love a good thriller and we know not all endings come out happy, but times are tough and many of us are struggling, and we want to walk into a darkened theater and lose ourselves in the sheer exhuberance of being human. 

And we want to come out feeling uplifted, like maybe--just maybe--we can win one once in a while, too.

Watch movies from the depths of the Great Depression and you'll see a similar trend--romantic comedies, musicals, adventures with rugged heroes who could be admired.

Because movies, like books, go into production a year or two before they are released, there will be a line-up of depressing downer-movies that will come out during this year and part of the next, I predict, but I also think we will see a much more upbeat trend at the cinema in coming years.

I'm no Pollyanna, but I think powerful stories can be told that can thrill us but still manage to uplift, inspire, educate, and entertain as well--with profit-margin to spare.

I'd like to see Batman have a little fun once in a while.  (Robert Downy Jr.'s Iron Man had his problems too, but he managed to have a good time nonetheless.)

As the Hollywood mood ring catches on to this and begins to change color, I hope that all of us can relax a little, joke around, have a little fun now and then--especially at the movies.

Real life is tough enough, after all.

A lot of people have been attacking Kirsten Gillibrand for being a member of the Blue Dog Coalition and getting a high score from the NRA.

But it's important to look at her overall voting record, which it seems like most people on this blog and others are kind of ignoring.

Here are her 2008 scores from several important liberal interest groups:

100%-NARAL/Pro-Choice America
100%-American Civil Liberties Union
95%-Americans for Democratic Action'
100%-Children's Defense Fund
95%-League of Conservation Voters
96%-NAACP
89%-SEIU
96%-Mean Score

I wouldn't exactly call someone with those kind of numbers a conservative...

She sounds pretty liberal to me!

I've yet to see a television show or news outlet come up with a way to report on what the online websites and blogs are saying or doing.  Have you seen something?  If so, let me know where it is please.

Oh sure, the 24 hours news programs will show a screen (most of the time you can't even read it) of what bloggers are saying about a specific issue of the day; but there's no show out there discussing things that online folks (Internet) are doing.

We've all seen reports where newspaper and magazines are losing money every day now because people get their news or ideas from television or the Internet.  Newspapers are more like magazines now.  They report on 'yesterday' or 'what's coming up' events.  So, why don't they 'change'?  Perhaps they should get into the 21st century and report on blogs and the internet instead.  Research a website.  Find out how it started, by whom and why.  Report where those sites get their news from.  Report the facts.  If the site is posting false information, tell your readers.  If the site is reporting accurate information - tell the readers that too.

Television is moving in that direction with their little sketches of what 'bloggers' are saying today.  Perhaps they too should provide a show just to talk about the Internet?  They could interview webmasters of the websites.  They could be the "Meet the Press" of the Internet.

If I were a millionaire, I'd be investing in this 'big time'.

 

Consider the following (lifted from a web site dealing with logical fallacies) in light of Pres. Obama's reference to  "...a false choice..." in his Inaugural Address, and in FINAL eulogy to the buzz-words and empty, repetitive slogans that have dominated public discussion these last eight years:

 

Fallacy of False Alternatives

Definition of FA: The reasons of an argument mention two (sometimes, more than two) alternatives, but there is pretty obviously at least one other alternative that the arguer should have considered, but didn't; this failure to consider a plausible alternative produces an incorrect conclusion.

Terminology: In an FA argument, it is false that the alternatives mentioned in the reasons are the only  alternatives. This is the only one of the fallacies presented here in which the mistake is that the argument has a false reason. For all of the other fallacies considered here, it doesn't matter whether the reasons are true or false, because the problem is with the relationship between the reasons and the conclusion.

Example FA argument:  Senator Blather was either telling the truth, or he was lying, and we know that what he said wasn't true. Therefore he was lying.

Explanation: FA because telling the truth and lying are not the only two alternatives that should have been considered. The Senator might have made an honest mistake (which isn't lying because lying has to be deliberate), or he might have been misinformed by his staff.

FA explanations: To give an acceptable explanation of why an argument involves the FA fallacy, you must include the following: 1) state the the two (or more) alternatives are that are mentioned in the argument, and 2) say that there is another alternative that should have been considered, and describe that missing alternative!  Of course the missing alternative is not in the argument you are criticizing -- you have to think it up for yourself.  It should be a reasonable, plausible alternative, not a wild or extremely unlikely one. If you can't write out a reasonable missing alternative, then you have no basis for saying that the FA fallacy is present.

 

Here is the REAL enemy, our Conservative nemesis from 1980 forward. How many times and in how many different forms has our Republic fallen for it?  Low taxes OR poverty. The Constitution OR be blown to bits by terrorists. Genesis OR evolution. A clean environment OR economic ruin. By the simple-minded rhetorical device of first, reduce every possibilty to only two, and then, exaggerate the effects of both the preferred and the lesser of the remaining options, the GOP has channeled and controlled the debate. It's exactly what Bush was getting-at when he so often disparaged 'nuance'.

 I think Pres. Obama is signaling that we no longer intend to 'think' that way -  to which I (for one) say, "Thank God, Hallelujah throughout the land!" We have reached a point (finally!) where the LAZINESS of so much of our thinking is a luxury we can no longer afford. Our problems are large, dangerous, and complicated. Their solution is certain to require hard study, careful choices, and a lot of REAL input from people who KNOW things, and know how to communicate these compexities and inevitable difficulties to the larger public in a way they can understand.

Obama needs to drop William Lynn, the Raytheon lobbyist and strategic planner whom Obama has nominated for Deputy Secretary of Defense.  If the famous Obama rule against lobbyists is canceled and granted an exception when it comes to the greatest government procurement program of them all, the Pentagon, then the rule doesn't mean anything.   This is a flat-out broken promise, but it is not too late for Obama to fix the problem.

Republicans apparently are at loggerheads with President Obama over provisions in the economic stimulus package that would provide a tax cut to workers who do not earn enough to pay income taxes. According to John Kyl of Arizona, this would not be tax relief but a government handout.

"Handouts," according to the Republican Bible of Economic Darwinism, are the cornerstone of the dreaded "welfare society," which is inherently evil because it provides, among other things, a disincentive to work. The optimal solution, of course, is to eliminate taxes, regulations and other burdens that prevent the glorious free market from solving the problem on its own.

So far, the glorious free market's contribution to economic freedom has been two million layoffs. And counting. I don't see it stepping forward anytime soon.

But what if it did?

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had once done a back-of-the-cocktail-napkin calculation of the economic stimulus that would be provided if Wal*Mart increased its average hourly wage to $16 from the current poverty-level $9.68. Even holding its average workweek constant at 34 hours (which of course allows our economic titan to avoid providing hundreds of thousands of low-income workers with health care and other benefits), this would provide $15.6 billion of direct stimulus to the economy where it is needed most.

This wouldn't come cheap, of course. By my accounting Wal*Mart, which earns about $9 billion a year, would have to cough up about $548 million in profits. A portion of this money would come back to the retail titan as happy shoppers used their new economic prowess to buy its cheap Chinese-made clothing and toys.

But hey, maybe ceo Lee Scott could peel a few Benjamins from his $17 million in foldin' money to help cover the difference.

And maybe the govmint could carve off a nice tax credit for payroll expansion. You know, in recognition of the sacrifice America's Superstore made for the common good.

Oops, strike "common good." Them's code words for socialism.

Wal*Mart employs a million and a half people. These are the good, hardworking people our consumption economy needs to get spending again while we try to sort out a sustainable future that includes tens of millions more jobs that pay a living wage. It just might put enough pressure on the labor market to boost pay for convenience store clerks and frycooks. It would certainly return some of the luster to our glorious free market.

The stupidity, dishonesty and downright mean-spiritedness of an ideology that defines prosperity as the mass migration of wealth to the wealthy is a topic for another time.

But what say ye? Think shareholders and the suits in Bentonville are equal to the task?

The Party of Lincoln and Herbert Hoover finds itself in a pickle, so to speak.

According to the National Republican Congressional Committee's Web site,"Thanks to Republican economic policies, the U.S. economy is robust and job creation is strong," the site says. (HuffPo, The Plumb Line 1/23/09)

Plum Line was confused over this posting and therefore contacted the NRCC.

NRCC spokesperson Ken Spain sends over a response: "The site is currently under construction. We are looking forward to relaunching the site and fostering a discussion on how Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues' proposal to spend their way out of this recession is absurd at best and financially ruinous at worst."

All I could think of was "What's a mother to do?" Your son has just burned down the barn, killed the neighbor's dog and ran over the sheriff, and now you are applying to the country for a foster parent's license.The opinion posted by the reps was sitting there for all to see yesterday, six months, eight months and twelve months ago. And of course, certain 'experts' agree that the recession began some 13 months ago.

What is the opinion of that liberal bastion, The Wall Street Journal's take on all of this today?

Now that George W. Bush has finally left office, here's a challenge to a nation famous for its proud tradition of invention: Can somebody invent a machine capable of fully measuring the disaster that was the Bush presidency? (WSJ, Nick Gillespie)

And what about the hope that one day w will be recognized for the accomplishments noted by Karl Rove just two days ago? (See my blog)

There are, I'm sure, still a few William Henry Harrison dead-enders around, convinced that the 31 days the broken-down old general spent as president will someday receive the full glory they deserve.

My guess is that WSJ is being a little tongue in cheek here. I do not think that it believes that w will ever really someday receive the full glory that he deserves. Gillespie goes on with his depiction of the titular leader of the GOP for the last eight years.

At the same time, he constantly flashed signs of secrecy, duplicity, ineffectiveness and outright incompetence.Mr. Bush's legacy is thus a bizarro version of Ronald Reagan's. 

Now in case there are some out there who had more to do with their preteen time than read comic books, Luther, the criminal mastermind of the Superman Comic's fame got a hold of some special Kryptonite and somehow exposed Clark Kent to it.  Rather than destroying the man of steel (no to be confused with some porno kings), he was duplicated.  The result was Bizarro Superman, an experiment in cloning that somehow went wrong. As strong as Superman, BS was dumber than a door knob and really never grasped the concept of Truth Justice and the American Way. In Gellespie's view, BS would not be a very good choice as head of the Republican Party, as Commander in Chief or as the municipal officer in charge of local porto potties.

George W. Bush has certainly taught us that government really can't be trusted to be very effective, or open, or smart. He has also taught us that government can always get bigger on every level and every way. It's a sad lesson that we'll be learning for many years to come.

Rove's had just depicted w as one of America's great presidents , single-handedly creating 52 full months of economic growth, keeping all of America's enemies off shore, so to speak, preventing all possible and serendipitous attacks on America, instilling family values and preventing frozen cells from corrupting medical labs dedicated to finding cures for a number of crippling disorders. After a careful review of both rove's take on the last eight years and Gillespie's take on the same administration, it appears that they somehow do not mesh, so to speak. They, in fact, seem to contradict each other.

One purporting that w was one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States of America. The other depicting w as somehow worse than William Henry Harrison.

My take is kind of in between the two opinions. If w had only had a chance to govern our nation for 31 days, this country would be in a lot better shape today.

In conclusion, I believe that the NRCC and WSJ are suffering from shitsophrenia. Our favorite son has burned down the barn, killed the neighbor's dog and run over the sheriff, but we, the GOP would appreciate the opportunity to try our hand at foster care, one more time.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gives most private sector employees three rights by law. 1. The right to organize. 2. To be able to engage in collective bargaining. 3. And to be able to take part in a strike. For anyone to form an argument that would make any of this unfair to employers would be baffling to me. My opinion would be that it's an argument that would never be able to be substantiated.

The most common metaphor I use when describing the historical relationship between American employers and employees is a "seaworthy" one. Think about a Great White Shark. Think about a Harbor Seal. One represents the employer and one represents the employees. Smart people follow this web site; I don't need to explain further.

Employers have had a historical and chronic unfair advantage over American labor. And they have surely exercised that advantage. The plight of many to most American workers in much of our history was worse then that of slaves. Slaves could be worth as much as $15,000 in 19th century money; the usual American worker was " a dime a dozen" to the average employer.

But rather then try to argue for the American worker , who I do support , I will just give a general history of some American workers.

1806
The union of Philadelphia Journeymen Cordwainers was convicted of and bankrupted by charges of criminal conspiracy after a strike for higher wages, setting a precedent by which the U.S. government would combat unions for years to come.

27 April 1825
The first strike for the 10-hour work-day occurred by carpenters in Boston.

3 July 1835
Children employed in the silk mills in Paterson, NJ went on strike for the 11 hour day/6 day week.

July 1851
Two railroad strikers were shot dead and others injured by the state militia in Portgage, New York.

1860
800 women operatives and 4,000 workmen marched during a shoemaker's strike in Lynn, Massachusetts.

13 January 1874
The original Tompkins Square Riot. As unemployed workers demonstrated in New York's Tompkins Square Park, a detachment of mounted police charged into the crowd, beating men, women and children indiscriminately with billy clubs and leaving hundreds of casualties in their wake. Commented Abram Duryee, the Commissioner of Police: "It was the most glorious sight I ever saw..."

12 February 1877
U.S. railroad workers began strikes to protest wage cuts.

21 June 1877
Ten coal-mining activists ("Molly Maguires") were hanged in Pennsylvania.

14 July 1877
A general strike halted the movement of U.S. railroads. In the following days, strike riots spread across the United States. The next week, federal troops were called out to force an end to the nationwide strike. At the "Battle of the Viaduct" in Chicago, federal troops (recently returned from an Indian massacre) killed 30 workers and wounded over 100.

5 September 1882
Thirty thousand workers marched in the first Labor Day parade in New York City.

1884
The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, forerunner of the AFL, passed a resolution stating that "8 hours shall constitute a legal day's work from and after May 1, 1886." Though the Federation did not intend to stimulate a mass insurgency, its resolution had precisely that effect.

Late 1885/Early 1886
Hundreds of thousands of American workers, increasingly determined to resist subjugation to capitalist power, poured into a fledgling labor organization, the Knights of Labor. Beginning on May 1, 1886, they took to the streets to demand the universal adoption of the eight hour day.

Chicago was the center of the movement. Workers there had been agitating for an eight hour day for months, and on the eve of May 1, 50,000 workers were already on strike. 30,000 more swelled their ranks the next day, bringing most of Chicago manufacturing to a standstill. Fears of violent class conflict gripped the city. No violence occurred on May 1 -- a Saturday -- or May 2. But on Monday, May 3, a fight involving hundreds broke out at McCormick Reaper between locked-out unionists and the non-unionist workers McCormick hired to replace them. The Chicago police, swollen in number and heavily armed, quickly moved in with clubs and guns to restore order. They left four unionists dead and many others wounded.

Angered by the deadly force of the police, a group of anarchists, led by August Spies and Albert Parsons, called on workers to arm themselves and participate in a massive protest demonstration in Haymarket Square on Tuesday evening, May 4. The demonstration appeared to be a complete bust, with only 3,000 assembling. But near the end of the evening, an individual, whose identity is still in dispute, threw a bomb that killed seven policemen and injured 67 others. Hysterical city and state government officials rounded up eight anarchists, tried them for murder, and sentenced them to death.

On 11 November 1887, four of them, including Parsons and Spies, were executed. All of the executed advocated armed struggle and violence as revolutionary methods, but their prosecutors found no evidence that any had actually thrown the Haymarket bomb. They died for their words, not their deeds. A quarter of a million people lined Chicago's street during Parson's funeral procession to express their outrage at this gross mis-carriage of justice.

For radicals and trade unionists everywhere, Haymarket became a symbol of the stark inequality and injustice of capitalist society. The May 1886 Chicago events figured prominently in the decision of the founding congress of the Second International (Paris, 1889) to make May 1, 1890 a demonstration of the solidarity and power of the international working class movement. May Day has been a celebration of international socialism and (after 1917) international communism ever since.

The Bayview Massacre also took place at this time (for more detailed information visit http://www.execpc.com/~blake/rollin~1.htm), where seven people, including one child, were killed by state militia. On 1 May 1886 about 2,000 Polish workers walked off their jobs and gathered at Saint Stanislaus Church in Milwaukee, angrily denouncing the ten hour workday. They then marched through the city, calling on other workers to join them; as a result, all but one factory was closed down as sixteen thousand protesters gathered at Rolling Mills, prompting Wisconsin Govorner Jeremiah Rusk to call the state militia. The militia camped out at the mill while workers slept in nearby fields, and on the morning of May 5th, as protesters chanted for the eight hour workday, General Treaumer ordered his men to shoot into the crowd, some of whom were carrying sticks, bricks, and scythes, leaving seven dead at the scene. The Milwaukee Journal reported that eight more would die within twenty four hours, and without hesitation added that Governor Rusk was to be commended for his quick action in the matter.

23 November 1887
The Thibodaux Massacre. The Louisiana Militia, aided by bands of "prominent citizens," shot at least 35 unarmed black sugar workers striking to gain a dollar-per-day wage, and lynched two strike leaders.

25 July 1890
New York garment workers won the right to unionize after a seven-month strike. They secured agreements for a closed shop, and firing of all scabs.

6 July 1892
The Homestead Strike. Pinkerton Guards, trying to pave the way for the introduction of scabs, opened fire on striking Carnegie mill steel- workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In the ensuing battle, three Pinkertons surrendered; then, unarmed, they were set upon and beaten by a mob of townspeople, most of them women. Seven guards and eleven strikers and spectators were shot to death.

11 July 1892
Striking miners in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho dynamited the Frisco Mill, leaving it in ruins.

1893
The first of several bloody mining strikes at Cripple Creek, Colorado.

5 July 1893
During a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company, which had drastically reduced wages, the 1892 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago's Jackson Park was set ablaze, and seven buildings were reduced to ashes. The mobs raged on, burning and looting railroad cars and fighting police in the streets, until 10 July, when 14,000 federal and state troops finally succeeded in putting down the strike.

1894
Federal troops killed 34 American Railway Union members in the Chicago area attempting to break a strike, led by Eugene Debs, against the Pullman Company. Debs and several others were imprisoned for violating injunctions, causing disintegration of the union.

21 September 1896
The state militia was sent to Leadville, Colorado to break a miner's strike.

10 September 1897
19 unarmed striking coal miners and mine workers were killed and 36 wounded by a posse organized by the Luzerne County sherif for refusing to disperse near Lattimer, Pennsylvania. The strikers, most of whom were shot in the back, were originally brought in as strike-breakers, but later organized themselves.

1898
A portion of the Erdman Act, which would have made it a criminal offense for railroads to dismiss employees or discriminate against prospective employees based on their union activities, was declared invalid by the United States Supreme Court.

12 October 1898
Fourteen were killed, 25 wounded in violence resulting when Virden, Illinois mine owners attempted to break a strike by importing 200 nonunion black workers.

29 April 1899
When their demand that only union men be employed was refused, members of the Western Federation of Miners dynamited the $250,000 mill of the Bunker Hill Company at Wardner, Idaho, destroying it completely. President McKinley responded by sending in black soldiers from Brownsville, Texas with orders to round up thousands of miners and confine them in specially built "bullpens."

1899 and 1901
U.S. Army troops occupied the Coeur d'Alene mining region in Idaho.

12 October 1902
Fourteen miners were killed and 22 wounded by scabherders at Pana, Illinois.

23 November 1903
Troops were dispatched to Cripple Creek, Colorado to control rioting by striking coal miners.

July 1903
Labor organizer Mary Harris ("Mother") Jones leads child workers in demanding a 55 hour work week.

23 February 1904
William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Chronicle began publishing articles on the menace of Japanese laborers, leading to a resolution of the California Legislature that action be taken against their immigration.

8 June 1904
A battle between the Colorado Militia and striking miners at Dunnville ended with six union members dead and 15 taken prisoner. Seventy-nine of the strikers were deported to Kansas two days later.

17 April 1905
The Supreme Court held that a maximum hours law for New York bakery workers was unconstitutional under the due process clause of the 14th ammendment.

1908
The Erdman Act was further weakened when Section 10 was declared unconstitutional. This section had made it illegal for railroad employers to fire employees for being involved in union activities (see 1898).

22 November 1909
The "Uprising of the 20,000." Female garment workers went on strike in New York; many were arrested. A judge told those arrested: "You are on strike against God."

25 December 1910
A dynamite bomb destroyed a portion of the Llewellyn Ironworks in Los Angeles, where a bitter strike was in progress.

1911
The Supreme Court ordered the AFL to cease its promotion of a boycott against the Bucks Stove and Range Company. A contempt charge against union leaders (including AFL President Samuel Gompers) was dismissed on technical grounds.

25 March 1911
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, occupying the top three floors of a ten-story building in New York City, was consumed by fire. One hundred and forty-seven people, mostly women and young girls working in sweatshop conditions, lost their lives. Approximately 50 died as they leapt from windows to the street; the others were burned or trampled to death as they desperately attempted to escape through stairway exits locked as a precaution against "the interruption of work". On 11 April the company's owners were indicted for manslaughter.

2 December 1911
A Chicago "slugger," paid $50 by labor unions for every scab he "discouraged," described his job in an interview: "Oh, there ain't nothin' to it. I gets my fifty, then I goes out and finds the guy they wanna have slugged. I goes up to `im and I says to `im, `My friend, by way of meaning no harm,' and then I gives it to `im -- biff! in the mug. Nothin' to it."

24 February 1912
Women and children were beaten by police during a textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

18 April 1912
The National Guard was called out against striking West Virginia coal miners.

11 June 1913
Police shot three maritime workers (one of whom was killed) who were striking against the United Fruit Company in New Orleans.

5 January 1914
The Ford Motor Company raised its basic wage from $2.40 for a nine hour day to $5 for an eight hour day.

20 April 1914
The "Ludlow Massacre." In an attempt to persuade strikers at Colorado's Ludlow Mine Field to return to work, company "guards," engaged by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and other mine operators and sworn into the State Militia just for the occasion, attacked a union tent camp with machine guns, then set it afire. Five men, two women and 12 children died as a result. Additional web resources are catolged at www.holtlaborlibrary.org/ludlow.html#Web%20Sites.

13 November 1914
A Western Federation of Miners strike is crushed by the militia in Butte, Montana.

19 January 1915
World famous labor leader Joe Hill was arrested in Salt Lake City. He was convicted on trumped up murder charges, and was executed 21 months later despite worldwide protests and two attempts to intervene by President Woodrow Wilson. In a letter to Bill Haywood shortly before his death he penned the famous words, "Don't mourn - organize!"

On this same day, twenty rioting strikers were shot by factory guards at Roosevelt, New Jersey.

25 January 1915
The Supreme Court upholds "yellow dog" contracts, which forbid membership in labor unions. 22 July 1916
A bomb was set off during a "Preparedness Day" parade in San Francisco, killing 10 and injuring 40 more. Thomas J. Mooney, a labor organizer and Warren K. Billings, a shoe worker, were convicted, but were both pardoned in 1939.

19 August 1916
Strikebreakers hired by the Everett Mills owner Neil Jamison attacked and beat picketing strikers in Everett, Washington. Local police watched and refused to intervene, claiming that the waterfront where the incident took place was Federal land and therefore outside their jurisdiction. (When the picketers retaliated against the strikebreakers that evening, the local police intervened, claiming that they had crossed the line of jursidiction.)

Three days later, twenty-two union men attempted to speak out at a local crossroads, but each was arrested; arrests and beatings of strikebreakers became common throughout the following months, and on 30 October vigilantes forced IWW speakers to run the gauntlet, subjecting them to whipping, tripping kicking, and impalement against a spiked cattle guard at the end of the gauntlet. In response, the IWW called for a meeting on 5 November. When the union men arrived, they were fired on; seven people were killed, 50 were wounded, and an indeterminate number wound up missing.

7 September 1916
Federal employees win the right to receive Worker's Compensation insurance.

12 July 1917
After seizing the local Western Union telegraph office in order to cut off outside communication, several thousand armed vigilantes forced 1,185 men in Bisbee, Arizona into manure-laden boxcars and "deported" them to the New Mexico desert. The action was precipitated by a strike when workers' demands (including improvements to safety and working conditions at the local copper mines, an end to discrimination against labor organizations and unequal treatment of foreign and minority workers, and the institution of a fair wage system) went unmet. The "deportation" was organized by Sheriff Harry Wheeler. The incident was investigated months later by a Federal Mediation Commission set up by President Woodrow Wilson; the Commission found that no federal law applied, and referred the case to the State of Arizona, which failed to take any action, citing patriotism and support for the war as justification for the vigilantes' action.

15 March 1917
The Supreme Court approved the Eight-Hour Act under the threat of a national railway strike.

1 August 1917
IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched in Butte, Monatana.

5 September 1917
Federal agents raided the IWW headquarters in 48 cities.

3 June 1918
A Federal child labor law, enacted two years earlier, was declared unconstitutional. A new law was enacted 24 February 1919, but this one too was declared unconstitutional on 15 May 1922.

27 July 1918
United Mine Workers organizer Ginger Goodwin was shot by a hired private policeman outside Cumberland, British Columbia.

26 August 1919
United Mine Worker organizer Fannie Sellins was gunned down by company guards in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania.

19 September 1919
Looting, rioting and sporadic violence broke out in downtown Boston and South Boston for days after 1,117 Boston policemen declared a work stoppage due to their thwarted attempts to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor. Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge put down the strike by calling out the entire state militia.

22 September 1919
The "Great Steel Strike" began. Ultimately, 350,000 steel workers walked off their jobs to demand union recognition. The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee called off the strike on 8 January 1920, their goals unmet.

11 November 1919
The Centralia Massacre. Violence erupted when members of the American Legion attempted to force their way into an IWW hall in Centralia, Washington during an Armistice Day anniversary celebration. Four Legionnaires were shot dead by members of the IWW, after which IWW organizer Wesley Everest was lynched by a local mob.

22 December 1919
Amid a strike for union recognition by 395,000 steelworkers (ultimately unsuccessful), approximately 250 "anarchists," "communists," and "labor agitators" were deported to Russia, marking the beginning of the so-called "Red Scare."

2 January 1920
The U.S. Bureau of Investigation began carrying out the nationwide Palmer Raids. Federal agents seized labor leaders and literature in the hopes of discouraging labor activity. A number of citizens were turned over to state officials for prosecution under various anti-anarchy statutes.

19 May 1920
The Battle of Matewan. Despite efforts by police chief (and former miner) Sid Hatfield and Mayor C. Testerman to protect miners from interference in their union drive in Matewan, West Virginia, Baldwin-Felts detectives hired by the local mining company and thirteen of the company's managers arrived to evict miners and their families from the Stone Mountain Mine camp. A gun battle ensued, resulting in the deaths of 7 detectives, Mayor Testerman, and 2 miners. Baldwin-Felts detectives assasinated Sid Hatfield 15 months later, sparking off an armed rebellion of 10,000 West Virginia coal miners at "The Battle of Blair Mountain," dubbed "the largest insurrection this country has had since the Civil War" by The Battle of Matewan Home Page.

1920 and 1921
Army troops were used to intervene against striking mineworkers in West Virginia. Details of these events can be found in the extensive and excellent article at www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh50-1.html.

22 June 1922
Violence erupted during a coal-mine strike at Herrin, Illinois. Thirty-six were killed, 21 of them non-union miners.

2 June 1924
A child labor ammendment to the U.S. Constitution was proposed; only 28 of the necessary 36 states ever ratified it.

14 June 1924
A San Pedro, California IWW hall was raided; a number of children were scalded when the hall was demolished.

25 May 1925
Two company houses occupied by nonunion coal miners were blown up and destroyed by labor "racketeers" during a strike against the Glendale Gas and Coal Company in Wheeling, West Virginia.

1926
Textile workers fought with police in Passaic, New Jersey. A year-long strike ensued.

21 November 1927
Picketing miners were massacred in Columbine, Colorado.

3 February 1930
"Chicagorillas" -- labor racketeers -- shot and killed contractor William Healy, with whom the Chicago Marble Setters Union had been having difficulties.

14 April 1930
Over 100 farm workers were arrested for their unionizing activities in Imperial Valley, California. Eight were subsequently convicted of `criminal syndicalism.'

4 May 1931
Gun-toting vigilantes attack striking miners in Harlan County, Kentucky.

7 March 1932
Police kill striking workers at Ford's Dearborn, Michigan plant.

10 October 1933
18,000 cotton workers went on strikein Pixley, California. Four were killed before a pay-hike was finally won.

1934
The Electric Auto-Lite Strike. In Toledo, OH, two strikers were killed and over two hundred wounded by National Guardsmen. Some 1300 National Guard troops, including included eight rifle companies and three machine gun companies, were called in to disperse the protestors.

1934
International Longshoremans and Warehouse union strike of 1934. Two longshoremen, Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry, were shot to death by the San Francisco Police. May 1934
Police stormed striking truck drivers in Minneapolis who were attempting to prevent truck movement in the market area.

1 September - 22 September 1934
A strike in Woonsocket, RI, part of a national movement to obtain a minimum wage for textile workers, resulted in the deaths of three workers. Over 420,000 workers ultimately went on strike.

9 November 1935
The Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) was formed to expand industrial unionism.

11 February 1937
General Motors recognizes the United Auto Workers union following a sit-down strike.

26 May 1937
The 'Battle of the Overpass'. Walter Reuther and a group of UAW supporters, fresh from having organized GM and Chyrsler, attempting to distribute leaflets at Gate 4 of the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant, and were beaten up (together with bystanders) by Ford Service Department guards.

30 May 1937
Police killed 10 and wounded 30 during the "Memorial Day Massacre" at the Republic Steel plant in Chicago.

25 June 1938
The Wages and Hours (later Fair Labor Standards) Act is passed, banning child labor and setting the 40-hour work week. The Act went into effect in October 1940, and was upheld in the Supreme Court on 3 February 1941.

27 February 1939
The Supreme Court rules that sit-down strikes are illegal.

20 June 1941
Henry Ford recognizes the UAW.

15 December 1941
The AFL pledges that there will be no strikes in defense-related industry plants for the duration of the war.

28 December 1944
President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the Army to seize the executive offices of Montgomery Ward and Company after the corporation failed to comply with a National War Labor Board directive regarding union shops.

1946
Workers in packinghouses nation-wide went on strike.

1 April 1946
A strike by 400,000 mine workers in the U.S. began. U.S. troops seized railroads and coal mines the following month.

4 October 1946
The U.S. Navy seized oil refineries in order to break a 20-state post-war strike.

20 June 1947
The Taft-Hartley Labor Act, curbing strikes, was vetoed by President Truman. Congress overrode the veto.

20 April 1948
Labor leader Walter Reuther was shot and seriously wounded by would-be assassins.

27 August 1950
President Truman ordered the U.S. Army to seize all the nation's railroads to prevent a general strike. The railroads were not returned to their owners until two years later.

8 April 1952
President Truman ordered the U.S. Army to seize the nation's steel mills to avert a strike. The act was ruled to be illegal by the Supreme Court on 2 June.

5 December 1955
The two largest labor organizations in the U.S. merged to form the AFL-CIO, with a membership estimated at 15 million.

5 April 1956
Columnist Victor Riesel, a crusader against labor racketeers, was blinded in New York City when a hired assailant threw sulfuric acid in his face.

14 September 1959
The Landrum-Griffin Act passes, restricting union activity.

7 November 1959
The Taft-Hartley Act is invoked by the Supreme Court to break a steel strike.

1 April 1963
The longest newspaper strike in U.S. history ended. The 9 major newspapers in New York City had ceased publication over 100 days before.

10 June 1963
Congress passes a law mandating equal pay to women.

5 January 1970
Joseph A. Yablonski, unsuccessful reform candidate to unseat "Tough Tony" Boyle as President of the United Mine Workers, was murdered, along with his wife and daughter, in their Clarksville, Pennsylvania home by assassins acting on Boyle's orders. Boyle was later convicted of the killing. West Virginia miners went on strike the following day in protest.

18 March 1970
The first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the Post Office Department began with a walkout of letter carriers in Brooklyn and Manhattan, soon involving 210,000 of the nation's 750,000 postal employees. With mail service virtually paralzyed in New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia, President Nixon declared a state of national emergency and assigned military units to New York City post offices. The stand-off culminated two weeks later.

29 July 1970
United Farm Workers forced California grape growers to sign an agreement after a five-year strike.

3 August 1981
Federal air traffic controllers began a nationwide strike after their union rejected the government's final offer for a new contract. Most of the 13,000 striking controllers defied the back-to-work order, and were dismissed by President Reagan on 5 August.

October 1982
A boycott was initiated by the Industrial Association of Machinists against Brown & Sharpe, a machine, precision, measuring and cutting tool manufacturer, headquartered in Rhode Island. The boycott was called after the firm refused to bargain in good faith (withdrawing previously negotiated clauses in the contract), and forced the union into an unwanted and bitter strike during which police sprayed pepper gas on some 800 IAM pickets at the company's North Kingston plant in early 1982. Three weeks later, a machinist narrowly escaped serious injury when a shot fired into the picket line hit his belt buckle. The National Labor Relations Board subsequently charged Brown & Sharpe with regressive bargaining, and of entering into negotiations with the express purpose of not reaching an agreement with the union.

6 October 1986
1,700 female flight attendants won an 18-year lawsuit (which included $37 million in damages) against United Arilines, which had fired them for getting married.

24 October 1987
The 35-member executive council of the AFL-CIO decided unanimously to readmit the 1.6-million member Teamsters Union to its ranks. The scandal-ridden union had been expelled from the federation in 1957. President Jackie Presser was awaiting trial at the time, and the U.S. Justice Department was considering removal of the union's leadership because of possible links to organized crime.

17 September 1989
Ninety-eight miners and a minister occupied the the Pittston Coal Company's Moss 3 preparation plant in Carbo, Virginia, beginning a year-long strike against Pittston Coal. While a month-long Soviet coal strike dominated U.S. news broadcasts, the year-long Pittston strike garnered almost no mainstream press coverage whatsoever.

I enjoy liberal bloggers.  Let's be clear about that.  But even as I adore my wife, there are some minor perturbations that pop up from time-to-time.  As in any relationship, communication is vital, so I figured I'd air a minor grievance about some of my favorite liberal blogs.

They report and repost far too much of the worst rightwing banter.  I believe that in doing so, liberal bloggers are unwittingly spreading the reach and notoriety of truly vile scumbags.  I don't even like to mention their names in posts because it returns another Google hit on the un-named asshats.  This extends to the entire Faux News crew and anbody with a name that rhymes with Cannity, Rimbaugh or Molter.  I do not like these people and I do not want them intruding on my space.   I gave up watching television news to avoid these idiots.   Leaving a television on Faux News is akin to sleeping in a low-rent hotel with the door wide open and a bag of money in plain sight.  No good can come of it.  

I've lived long enough to see technological achievements that were considered science fiction in my youth, but there is at least one more thing I hope to see before I die.  To that end, is there some beneficent code jockey out there that can design a sort of internet pop-up blocker that precludes my browser from showing posts which include any mention of the aforementioned asshats?

As I sit patiently waiting for the godsend of such a humanitarian, I promise that my posts will be as free from mention (and Google notoriety...what else is there these days??) of these goons as possible.  I won't listen and report on them so you don't have to.  You'd don't have to either.

Enjoy.

This recession came on rather quickly with a sudden steep drop off in GDPs around the world.  Reflecting on the different "shapes of a recession, BBC World News America noted tonight the hopes of government leaders that the recession would be shaped like a V.  Fat chance.  Apparently, economists, such as those quoted in their news program, predict a slower U shaped recession, with more time spent at the bottom of the economic downturn just because so much has gone wrong.

Also, as a much needed reassurance, the news program tonight noted that even with the downturn, most major world economies are still producing about the same, meaning that we are not looking at the beginnings of a crash.

 

Well, here we are again, another year has passed, a new beginning is on the horizon and all is not well in the world. We seem to start each year with the bestest of intentions, we resolve to do better by our families and friends, we promise to take time out for ourselves and embark on that self revelatory journey we have hope will lead us to that spiritual awakening we know is just around the next bend, just beyond that next hill, just on the other side of that cloud.

I'm going out on a limb and make my do or die projections for the year. I have a very scientific, data driven process that can only be describes as such, I bend over and with my nose touching my knees reach back and pull them out you know where...this being a family show and all, I won't go any further into detail; suffice to say my process is as accurate as all other psychics, clergy, soothsayers and the like. Although I must admit I missed that whole 'let's elect a black guy to the highest office in the land'...and for disclosures sake, I voted for the guy.

So here it is:

• The Republican Party will continue to self-destruct. They will insist that the only remedy that will work is one where only the right people get hand outs and the rest be damned. Sort of a return to the middle nineteenth century or as Scrooge would put it and I paraphrase; are there no poor houses, are there no debtor's prisons.
  

  
   

• The right wing of the right wing party will of course claim that all this Sturm und Drang is affecting us because we have not given the gods their due.
  

  
   

• Gay folks will be able to get married. Yep! It's going to happen, although I can't for the life of me figure why they would want to enter into a failed institution. Let's face it; marriage offers little benefit other than a tax break and making your parents proud, or not... What I believe should happen is to change the laws in order to allow homosexual and heterosexual couples to benefit from their commitments to each other. Allow the partners to make decisions concerning their children, their health care and all other decisions made daily by people who define their partnerships by whether someone in clerical vestments or dark suits bless their union. So let's be clear, Gay people will gain the right to marry, unfortunately they will also have the right to divorce, but that's another story for another time.
  

  
   

• Although we voted for the black guy from Chicago (and before anyone gets a little too wound up...he and I are very similar in complexion) no one should even begin to think that racism is dead in America, or the world for that matter. The ugly truth is that people will, and still are, judging folks by 'the color of their skin and not the content of their character'. We can count the number of Black and Latino elected officials at the local level and come up short.
  

  
   

• The issues in the Middle East are so far from any equitable solution that I expect it to get worse rather than get better. Israel believes that it has the divine right to this territory and the Palestinians believe that they too have the same right. The Palestinians are living, if you can call it that, hand to mouth, amidst rubble and privation, parents burying their children and children burying their parents. The cradle of the three great religions is becoming, or rather, has become a cauldron of bitter recriminations that must surely sadden Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The two state solution proposed by the Western Powers will not see fruition in 2009. It is my opinion that the only solution is a one state democratic Israel with a negotiated repatriation of displaced Palestinians, after all, they too have a historic claim to the land.
  

 

• In 2009, France will be cool once again. Seriously, they have the best food in Europe and some of the best chocolates too.
  

 

• In 2009, Microsoft will attempt to re-invent the wheel. Windows 7 will make Vista look cool. They still haven't learned the lesson that people will pay for upgrades to their Operating Systems, but they don't want to have to buy new PC's every time Balmer hiccups. It makes no sense.
  

 

• Apple will survive even if Steve Jobs does not. Too many talented people there.
  

 

• So begins another year, lessons learned and some ignored; fret not though; the ones we did ignore have a nasty habit of coming round again
  

  
   

 

On a personal note...I will try very hard to...aww the heck with all that...I will continue to love my wife...my sons and daughter...my beautiful grandchildren...and follow the doctor's orders.

 

 

I would just like to point out that after Obama called for bipartisanship, met with the Republicans, and altered the stimulus package in order to please them, they are attacking him and the bill. Now he has two alternatives: One, he could further alter the bill, making it less effective after already allowing it to be tainted by Republican horsecrap. Two, he could tell the Republicans TFB, take out all the tax cuts, jack it up to a trillion dollars like he should have in the first place, and pass it without them.

I suppose he could also do something in between those options. But the point is, what did Obama gain from trying to work with Republicans? Attacks and delays, that's all. These are not sane, decent people. They see compromise as weakness and will never stop trying to make the world a lousier place. We'll see how long it takes Obama to figure this out.

Just got this from the NC Justice Center:

PLEASE CALL SENATOR KAY HAGAN, D-NC and ask her to vote for the SCHIP (State Children's    Health Insurance Program) reauthorization legislation.  Senator Hagan is a strong supporter of this program but we have learned that she is hearing from    many tobacco advocates in our state who are opposed to the increased tax on tobacco as a means of financing SCHIP.

You can read the following Progressive Pulse blog post on how North Carolina stands to gain more than $100 million in federal funding if children's health insurance is reauthorized.

You can call    Senator Kay Hagan at 202-224-6342 or visit her website to send her an email at Senator_Hagan@hagan.senate.gov.

What would be a real wow about this is that this is one of those things -- voting against SCHIP -- that made Liddy Dole so vulnerable.

Now that Obama has submitted a stimulus package I am struck by the fact that the Republican in have returned to their standard of trying to stimulate business through tax breaks and tax credits. They use the excuse that businesses will hire more people if government would only give businesses tax credits for every additional person they hire. The problem is that this is pure bull shit. The demand for labor is derived from the demand for the goods and services businesses sell. When businesses get stimulus credits they are only applying for money based upon people they would have hired anyway. They believe that they are not doing anything wrong because they feel that the money is going for hiring people and since they're hiring, why shouldn't they get the stimulus money. The forms that are completed merely move numbers around to prove that the stimulus got them to do the hiring. It is a shell game on a massive scale.

 

To understand what I'm talking about you only need to look at the CFO.com article of Sept. 24, 2005 entitled "Tax Breaks Don't Boost Investment." This article looked at the effect of tax credits on business investment and found that the companies with tax breaks cut their investments by 22%. The article concluded that investment was based more on the demand for a company's goods than on the cost of making the investment. In other words, the demand for any production input is based  upon the demand for the goods and service the inputs produce not on an artificially reduced price of the input.

On June 9, Virginia Democrats will vote for the gubernatorial nominee to take on presumptive Republican candidate Bob McDonnell in the top statewide race of 2009. There will hopefully soon be some head-to-head numbers for the primary now that the inauguration has passed. While Terry McAuliffe is planning to spend 9 gazillion dollars, at the end of the year the cash-on-hand numbers were pretty even. So where do things stand now?

Brian Moran It was a big week online with a warm reception at the Netroots Nation party, Joe Trippi coming on board ("Moran embraces a politics powered by the people, empowering supporters, not relying on millions of high-dollar donations and the status-quo party establishment"), and Kos saying, "The Virginia Governor's race is definitely shaping up to be a Big-Money Establishment (McAuliffe) versus Grassroots (Moran) battle." But that wasn't the big news for Moran. The big news was today's stories in the Virginia Pilot, the Washington Post, and Richmond Times-Dispatch on another bold move to protect the environment.

Staking his claim as an environmental champion, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brian J. Moran said yesterday that he opposes the construction of a coal-fired power plant in Surry County.

Moran recently came out against drilling for oil off Virginia's coast.

Standing up to the Old Dominion Electric Cooperative is, shall we say, rarer than is to be desired. Moran is not just seizing the earned media for the move, but is list-building online. With the plant expected to harm the Richmond area, Hampton Roads, and the Chesapeake Bay, beyond philosophical environmentalists there are a ton of people who should be applauding this move out of self-interest.

Terry McAuliffe "The Macker" had a different kind of big week, "double-fisting champagne flutes while standing next to Martha Stewart" and raising huge Park Avenue money as part of his big money plan. While this black tie strategy will line his pockets, when it comes to a newbie candidate with carpetbagger issues, there is the expected backlash (read the whole piece, it was recommended at Daily Kos today):

I reject utterly that the mere idea that Terry McAuliffe is going to be such a financial rainmaker is the SOLE reason that he should just walk away with Virginia's Democratic Governor nomination.

The problem for McAuliffe is that the more he spends, the more bitter the taste in the mouths of meritocracy focused progressives. How this could influence electability will be a concern until McAuliffe can lead in head-to-head matchups. Till then, the enthusiasm gap and backlash problem will be a point of discussion.

Creigh Deeds Senator Deeds' potential advantage in that he is the only candidate who could legislate right now, but under Virginia law this is also a liability as he can't raise money during the session. So Deeds is stuck treading water while the race solidifies as a contest between Moran and McAuliffe. Banking on a split NoVa vote is only a smart strategy as long as Deeds is viewed as a viable candidate. If he becomes viewed as only having spoiler potential, smart voters will want to be part of deciding the nominee as Virginia Democrats don't want to turn back the clock on recent successes.

Dee Doo Dee Doo Dee Doo Dee Doo ...

From the folks at Crooks and Liars

Due to Boyd Reeds request . . .

WARNING WARNING WARNING : So as not to upset one's own sanity, individuals with a modicum of what's left of their sanity from living through the last 8 years are hereby advised to watch and or read the following only after placing bullshit goggles firmly in place.

Oh and... Hip-waders may be needed also.

Ol' Rushbo on Hannity's show . . .

It has all the usual Limbaugh bullet points.

White Identity Politics:

Limbaugh: The Republican Party is making a big -- the Conservative movement, too, making a big, big mistake in planning for the future. You hear things like, well, the Republican Party needs to identify the middle class, the Wal-Mart voters, and come up with policies for them. And then we've got to come up with policies for Hispanics, because they hate us because of illegal immigration. That's the way the Democrats do it. You put people into groups and then you victimize them. And give the victims power over the majority. Because they then have grievances that are nonexistent, and the majority gets cowed into fear, because they don't want to be complained at, they don't want to be blamed, so 'OK, OK, you want health care, fine, we'll go get it."

Malarkey Mythos:

Limbaugh: Self interest is different than selfishness. People working in their own self-interest benefits the family, the neighborhood, the community, the state, the city, the whole bit. And this is what I think the Republican Party and Conservatism has lost. The blueprint for landslide electoral victories right there, and the Republican Party and the Conservative movement has just -- they've washed it away.

Planet Bizarro-Style Projection:

Limbaugh: And the reason they [the GOP] lost huge is because in a contest of group politics, the experts are gonna always get group votes before the pretenders will. And we were pretenders trying to get the groups. We gotta get the Hispanics, we gotta be moderate, we gotta prove we can walk across the aisle, the era of Reagan is over.

I never hear Democrats talk about walking across the aisle, never see any of them praise each other or brag about the fact that they do it. They brag about the Republicans that they destroy. They brag about the Republican bills, legislation that they defeat.

Hatred of Youth/Pop Culture:

Limbaugh: The culture -- we've lost the culture, Sean. We have lost pop culture. It is unrealistic to expect the people watching MTV, going to see the rot Hollywood's putting out, listening to the rot music is today, every four years to go into a voting booth and vote Republican or conservative. And this isn't even something we have addressed in an electoral way, or a strategic way, but that's gonna have to be done as well.

Historical Revisionism:

Limbaugh: I get into arguments with people about this. To this day, FDR is a hero. And Hoover is the idiot -- Hoover is the guy that broke the country. If the media wants to prop somebody up, they will do so. Liberalism in the media -- a series of myths. ... Liberalism cannot deal with the light of truth.

Crass Hypocrisy:

Limbaugh: 'Everybody does it.' That's the constant excuse. 'Everybody has sex with their intern. Everybody leaves a stain on a blue dress. Everybody -- '

Hannity: If Rush Limbaugh did it, it would be a different story.

Outright Delusion:

Limbaugh: He [Bush] is a decent man. He had a reverence for the office. That's why he didn't get partisan. He thought it was irreverent to turn the Oval Office, or the office of the Presidency, into a partisan strategic battleplace. He just didn't want to do it, he was content to let history be the judge. I think -- I heard Rove say, I think on your network, that they miscalculated in not firing back on some of these things often enough.

If there was ever a minister of hate and propaganda to spew for the paternalistic authoritarians... then Joseph Goebbels wouldn't hold a candle to Ol' Rushbo . . .

-Al-

Note: Edited at 16:20
.

We have seen a great deal of purposeful activity by the Obama administration since the start of business on Tuesday. What can we take from what we see and hear, both explicitly and implicitly? How is our new President doing, so far?

Calm -- One of the best newspapers in the business, The Financial Times, described President Barack Obama's "calm authority of a born leader." Speaking about his Inauguration day speech,

He was politically encompassing, reaching out to sceptics and opponents. He touched admiringly on US history and traditions, but without vainglory and not without reminding his listeners of its errors. Addressing his nation's enemies, he was measured but stern. He did not disguise the difficulties that face the country; he addressed them with quiet confidence.

There is no bombast or chauvinism or phony sentiment in Mr Obama's oratory. He inspires, yet his appeal is always to the intellect; still he holds an audience of this size spellbound. It was the performance of a born leader.

Decisive -- In a move designed to reinforce a commitment to governmental openness and transparency, it was reported in ProPublica that, "Obama Reverses Bush Executive Privilege Claim Over Documents" (1/21/09). To quote:

. . . President Obama issued an order rolling back the former administration's restrictive FOIA policies. And now, we learn President Obama has signed another order reversing President George W. Bush's controversial order that gave ex-presidents and their heirs broad authority to stop release of White House records. . .

Team-style governance -- The second day emphasis on the diplomatic side of the house is an effort to return balance to U.S. foreign policy. By enlisting a number of well-know, competent and high profile people to help with foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, it brings up the possibility of confusion about who is heading that enhanced emphasis. Typically, Politico asked Thursday, "who is in charge of foreign policy?" Author Ben Smith concluded, at least in the Middle East, "all of them," meaning Obama, Clinton, Biden, Mitchell and Holbrook. Each of these people understands who the leader is, and how much trust President Obama has in all. Every one of them has the capacity to know what the policy positions are and sit at the table with the authority to handle negotiations, to communicate policy and to bring back the views of the foreign leaders.

After a good Transition, what then -- Will the same things that worked well before the President was sworn in be effective during actual governance? The Democratic Strategist (1/16/09) spoke to some of these same questions recently.

Note: this is a special guest post from Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. . . .

We'll find out soon enough whether President-elect Obama is as adept at governing as he is at campaigning. But this much is already certain: Barack Obama has presided over a spectacular presidential transition - maybe the best in modern times.

In picking a crew of political heavyweights to run his administration, Obama has radiated both self-confidence and seriousness about governing. And in recent weeks, he has crystallized the key dilemmas facing the country with greater candor and specificity than ever before.

But, wait a minute -- How do we know it will be successful? Given the financial crisis, two wars, energy issues, global warming, etc., etc., what are the realistic chances? The following piece is recommended reading on this: Yahoo! News & Politico.com: "Seven reasons for healthy skepticism#" (1/21/09). To quote:

Here are seven reasons to be skeptical of Obama's chances -- and the Washington establishment he now leads: 1) The genius fallacy. . . 2) The herd instinct . . . 3) We are broke . . . 4) Words, words, words . . . 5) He rarely challenges the home team . . . 6) Everyone is winging it . . . 7) The watchdogs are dozing.

Perhaps not everyone will dutifully fall in line -- Another Politico list includes "Ten Dems Obama should look out for." To summarize (the full story is a good read): Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich), Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif), VP Joe Biden, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif), Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla), Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont), Rep Barbara Lee (D-Calif), Senator Jim Webb (D-Va), and Michelle Obama.

Press relations not all roses -- Politico.com (1/22/09) reveals more information about what President Obama's relating style with the press could be. Headlined, "Obama flashes irritation in press room," The vignette describes the inevitable tension between Press, wanting individual access to the president and the President wanting to make information public as he chooses.

Trivia -- It has only been a few days since power changed hands. On balance the leadership looks good. It feels nice to the adults back in charge. In conclusion here are a few miscellaneous fun facts, just to keep things light.

• ProPublica: "Who Runs Departments Before Heads Are Confirmed?" (1/22/09)


• Many Americans are still unable to spell "Barack," according to John Brooks Pounders, CEO of gooseGrade.com


• McClatchy: "Obama photographer got started at K-state*" (1/16/09)

Hat Tip Key: Regular contributors of links to leads are "betmo*" and Jon#.

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.)

My "creativity and dreaming" post today is at Making Good Mondays.

Technorati tags: news obama leadership press foreign policy

As the nation's eyes are riveted on Washington, D.C., where on Tuesday millions will gather to watch Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, only one Marin official will be packing his cold weather gear for the journey.

Assemblyman Jared Huffman and his wife, Susan, are heading east and have taken lodgings in nearby Alexandria, Va.

"This will put us about10 minutes outside of the madness," says Huffman. "I was on the ground floor with Obama, and now we need to finish the ride."

But the San Rafael lawmaker is not only there for fun.

"I plan on making good use of my time," he says, intending to meet with several of his congressional counterparts to discuss water issues and the economicstimulus package.

Supervisor Hal Brown will take in the proceedings on television at his home with a few friends. "It should be quite a show," says Brown, who thinks some of the focus was diverted by the miscues involving Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy F. Geithner's tax problems, and by the selection of Leon Panetta as CIA chief, which drew initial fire from U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

"The senator seems mollified," adds Brown, "and I don't see any of this as fatal."

Brown thinks the Obama team needs to be more concerned about the mounting debt the government plans on incurring which, Brown says, is "going to be around $800 billion dollars and counting and that could have significant repercussions down the road."

Huffman also is worried about debt, but his mind is on California's, which is approaching $40 billion with no signs of any budget settlement among the squabbling legislators as the state could soon run out of cash. On this one point he agrees with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who said, "The only thing we should be focusing on right now is solving the budget crisis."

Does Huffman see any economic relief with Obama at the controls?

"After eight years of California being a stepchild when it comes to federal funding and cooperation, I'm hoping for major changes to help us address the current fiscal crisis as well as advancing our longer term policy goals," Huffman says.

He would like to see President Obama sign the federal Children's Healthcare bill within his first days in office as well as a recalculation of the Federal Medical Assistance Program, which could mean new money for the states chronically under-funded Healthy Families and Medi-Cal programs.

"My primary hope is that the administration stays focused on stimulus strategies that are good for the environment and create new jobs instead of the Bush-style strategy of mailing everyone a few hundred bucks and hoping they go to Wal-Mart," says Huffman.

State Sen. Mark Leno will be busy at home on Inaugural Day, making the rounds of several high-profile events, including stops in Marin City where Martin Luther King will be honored at a Democracy for America gathering in Sausalito.

"This is an historic occasion and the need for change is now more than ever," says Leno.

Leno, who has just been appointed to a coveted post as chair of the Senate budget subcommittee on health and human services, will be authoring a bill on single-payer health insurance - a gnarly topic soon to occupy the Obama Administration.

The senator favors fast federal action on the infrastructure bond measures which the voters approved to rebuild crumbling highways, dams and levees, but questions whether bonds can be easily sold given the state's current fiscal emergency.

With traffic in gridlock and temperatures in Washington expected near freezing when Obama takes the oath of office, armchair observers like Supervisor Brown may have made the most sensible decision.

Dmitry Orlov has a flashback:

Perestroika 2.0 Beta

Congratulations, everyone, we have a new president: a fresh new face, a capable, optimistic, inspiring figure, ushering in a new era of responsibility, ready to confront the many serious challenges that face the nation; in short, we have us a Gorbachev. I don’t know about you, but I find the parallel rather obvious.

Update: Tom Whipple looks to the year ahead:

What of 2009?

Our wish has been granted for we are indeed living in interesting times. The world’s economy is either collapsing or is putting on a very good imitation of doing so.

Production of cheap, abundant fossil fuels is peaking and will soon be withering away, yet gasoline for our cars has almost never been inflation-adjusted cheaper. Around the world, numerous sovereign governments are close to becoming dysfunctional — likely with very bad consequences. We are pumping so much of the wrong kinds of gases into the atmosphere that the poles are melting, the seas are rising, the land is drying out and some day soon this planet is going to be very tough to live on. On top of all this, the world seems to be acquiring a fair number of people who are convinced that only they understand God properly and that the rest of us deserve to be done in. The only good news is that, so far as we know, there are no large meteors heading towards earth that would render the foregoing problems irrelevant.

Floyd Norris notes that the recent collapse of Wall Street may lead to a reduction in pay for bankers of all stripes.

I would further add that this is a very good thing.

He cites a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry, 1909-2006, which notes that wages in the financial industry are at an all time high.

One of the authors the recent runup in wages to, "A new era of financial innovation," and so the "The financial sector became once again a high-skill, high-wage industry."

Talk about not getting the point. The stock brokers and bankers in 1929 were not highly skilled or intelligent, they had just figured out a scam that allowed them to get paid for putting the rest of the poor house, and the same applies to the investment bankers in 2007.

Banking and investment exploded as a portion of the economy in the late 1920s and 2001-2005 because it became an easy way to take people's money. There was no real innovation, there was a simply pursuit of personal gain at the expense of the real economy.

Simply put, if you made robbing banks legal, the activity formerly known as robbing banks would explode.

Certainly, there was some additional talent attracted by this money, but the real attraction was that this was easy money for stupid people to make.

And anyone with half a brain, as Andrew Lahde so eloquently stated in his resignation letter could take them to the cleaners:

..... I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America. .....

But the important thing to remember here is that the, "low hanging fruit," continued to make excellent wages, and obscene bonuses anyway.

Too many people have been failing upward for years because who their daddy and mommy were, and a disproportionate number of them seem to be Harvard MBAs, like this guy.

People on wing pic courtesy of The Big Picture.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Pardon my pickiness:

This oxymoronic notion as seen in the NYT isn't all bad.  It proposes to support "volunteers" with Federal funds.  Well, ... paying people to do good deeds makes them not volunteers

And it misses key points about "the economy".  The economy is widely measured by income (GDI=GDP).  Doing good deeds for free, or super cheap, puts one outside the economy, it arguably even decreases measured economic output. 

"Volunteer to save charity" is more like it -- many non-profits are short on funds and faced with growing demands.  Maybe it's about time for a National Service Decade (after Tom Wolfe's Me Decade; also see Generation Jones).

So, what is being "saved"?  There are other attempts to describe and measure what we can loosely call "standard of living".  See Gross National Happiness for instance.

It's clear that Obama and an apparent wide consensus of economists believe that "spend spend spend" is the way to at least cushion the economic contraction.  And they would borrow or counterfeit money to spend spend spend!

Can we be happier with less?  If we settle for (or embrace) "less is good" do we run the risk of effectively killing the economy altogether?

(Your Tax Dollars at Work in the Middle East)

The state of Israel is facing charges of war crimes following the slaughter of innocent civilians including hundreds of children in its recent campaign against Palestinian militants on the Gaza Strip. Israel's powerful ally, the United States, also faces charges of complicity in the slaughter as Palestinians declare: "This Damage Made in USA."

UN human rights expert Richard Falk said on Thursday that the recent Israeli military operation on the Gaza Strip "raises the specter of systematic war crimes" and needs to be investigated. Falk told journalists in Geneva from his home in California that he had little doubt as to the "unavoidably inhuman character of a large-scale military operation of the sort that Israel has initiated... against an essentially defenseless population." Charging that "unlawful targets have been selected" by Israeli forces during the fighting, Falk insisted that Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip including children and the wounded were effectively trapped in a war zone and prevented from fleeing.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has issued demands for a full explanation of "outrageous" Israeli attacks on UN facilities on the Gaza Strip including a school used as a refuge for civilians, killing dozens. The UN chief noted that Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert had promised to provide results of an Israeli inquiry into the attacks "on an urgent basis" and said he would then decide on "appropriate follow-up action." On January 12, the 47-member UN Human Rights Council voted by a large majority to launch an investigation into "grave" human rights violations by Israeli forces against Palestinians. Israel is also facing questions from human rights groups regarding the use of illegal weapons, including white phosphorus munitions, against Palestinian civilians on the Gaza Strip.

These charges come amid renewed calls for a global boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel from groups such as the Global BDS Movement. Recently, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein wrote in support of such a boycott: "The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa." Some are also calling for a boycott of US exports for its continuing support of Israeli actions against Palestinians.

The Palestinian death toll from Israel's recent war on Gaza currently stands at around 1300, most of whom were innocent civilians, and around a third of whom were children. Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians were killed in Israel during the same period, an indicator of Israel's massively disproportionate response to Palestinian attacks on Israelis. A total of twenty-eight Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip since 2001, a tiny fraction of the number of Palestinians killed in Israel's recent Gaza actions alone. These numbers echo casualty figures from the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict which consistently show innocent Palestinian dead including children massively outnumbering Israelis.

Rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip deserve both condemnation by the international community and a proportionate response by Israel. The killing of one Israeli in a rocket attack does not, however, entitle Israel to respond by slaughtering twenty, thirty, or forty innocent Palestinian civilians. Such slaughter, furthermore, will no more stop Hamas' rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip than it stopped Hezbollah's rocket attacks from Lebanon in 2006. Just as Hezbollah could declare victory in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war simply by surviving to fight another day, so Hamas can declare victory in Gaza this day. Meanwhile, Israel increasingly becomes a pariah state in the eyes of the world, as does the United States for its complicity in the slaughter. Ever-growing anger particularly in the Arab world serves America's national security interests no better than it serves Israel's.

Behold, America: Your tax dollars at work in the Middle East.

Out of the tragedy of Gaza, perhaps, will come renewed opportunity to hold Israel accountable for its actions, to press for a new US policy on the Middle East, for peace, and for an end to Israel's long and bloody occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Boycott, divestment, and sanctions efforts such as those promoted by the Global BDS Movement have a proven track record of success as in the case of South Africa, and deserve our support. UN efforts to hold Israel accountable for its actions also deserve our support, but are likely to require UN Security Council action of the type America with its power of veto most often and most notoriously obstructs. Pressure, therefore, needs to be applied to the White House and Congress for a new US approach to the conflict and a new US attitude in the UN Security Council. Whether our new ambassador to the UN offers active support with a "yes" vote or passive permission by abstaining on UN efforts to hold Israel accountable for its actions, our message to the new administration regarding these efforts can be stated clearly and briefly as follows: NO VETO!

Sources: Agence France Presse, Time, Los Angeles Times, Haaretz, New Straits Times, Bay Area Indymedia, B'Tselem, Human Rights Watch.

Slide show: Gaza Massacre by Sabbah.

Photo gallery: Child victims of Gaza violence.

Contacts:

The White House

US Mission to the UN

Contact your US Senators

Contact your US Representative

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

Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com

Cross-Posted at Project Vote's Voting Matter's Blog

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

by Erin Ferns

As we predicted last December, legislation designed to prevent so-called voter fraud has dominated election law debates in several states this year. Last week alone, Georgia's controversial voter ID law was upheld by a federal appeals panel, the Texas Senate "sparked deep partisan tensions" by eliminating the majority rule in order to aid the passage of a voter ID law, and nine more states introduced numerous voter ID bills.

Read more »

 

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/01/two-minute-nostalgia-sublime_23.html

 

The end of the gag rule worldwide on abortions and the actual mention of human trafficking and other abominations (except when used to bolster the need to go to war). Rather interesting kickoff to her tenure. Issues that affect half the world's population are no longer peripheral. Economic justice and tackling violence against women - things could get quite interesting.

In related news, Congonese rebel leader Laurent Nkunda was arrested yesterday. While it's hard to say who's most to blame for atrocities in the Congo, hopefully this will be a turning point to kill off the horrid civil war that as usual inordinantly affects women civilians.

Disclaimer: I gave another $100 to her 5 days ago to retire her debt. I already feel I got my money's worth.

Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar....?

A long time ago, I ran across a review of a play or book about chronically-unemployed Irish men and their infidelity and violence towards their families. The reviewer asserted that the men were trying to prove themselves sexually or physically to compensate for having failed economically. I have no particular expertise in psychology, but recent discord on TPM reminds me of the idea that people, particularly men, might react very badly to unemployment. A quick Google brought me to this rather dry abstract :

Predicting self-esteem during unemployment: the effect of gender, financial deprivation, alternate roles, and social support.

… Arguably one of the most damaging, and certainly one of the most commonly reported, of all the psychological consequences of unemployment is a loss of self-esteem (Sheeran & Abraham, 1994; Waters, 2000; Winefield, Tiggemann, & Winefield, 1992). Among others, Amundson and Borgen (1987) and Amundson (1994) have characterized unemployment as an experience that leads to self-doubt and an internal struggle with confidence.
…
… the bulk of evidence suggests that gender is an important factor in psychological reaction to unemployment. More particularly, the results often show that during unemployment, men report poorer psychological health than do women (Najam, Ashraf, Nasreen, Bashir, & Khan, 1996). For example, Shamir (1985) found that unemployed men experienced lower morale and higher anxiety than did unemployed women.
…
Loss of role identity has been shown to be a major contributor to lowered self-esteem during unemployment (Bolton & Oatley, 1987). Hence, one factor that may reduce the impact of unemployment on self-esteem is the availability of alternate non-employment-related roles (Dilnot & Kell, 1988; Fielden & Davidson, 1999). Jahoda (1982) and Warr and Parry (1982) argued that roles such as spouse, parent, and community worker can be used as psychological compensations for the loss of one’s role as employee.

Now we seem to be headed towards a period of high unemployment, both here in the US and in the world. The knee-jerk response to massive economic deprivation seems to be survivalism: Get yourself some guns and lots of freeze-dried goods because the world will soon resemble (pick one):

Lord of the Flies
Mad Max
Zardoz
Children of Men
The Road

I know which one I’d pick:

… but whenever I think about owning a gun, I recall one history professor, who pointed out that during the great American Westward expansion, more settlers were killed by the accidental discharge of firearms than by actual conflict with each other or with the native peoples they encountered.

Rather than jumping the gun on survivalism, I’m more worried about what happens during the transition away from what we think of as a normal society. Orlov described Russian men who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, methodically drank themselves to death. Others were killed in black market squabbles. Crime is of course a concern, political turmoil may be a concern, but getting along with the people in your safety net is probably the more immediate concern.

How are your father, husband, boyfriend, brothers or sons going to handle losing their jobs?

How are you going to handle it?

It's really too bad the press didn't grill President Bush and his press secretaries like they are currently grilling Obama's press secretary before they allowed Bush to go into Iraq.

The nastiness of the comments on this post about the Gillibrand designation have spurred me to write my first post of the Obama Administration. 

I realize everyone is anxious to get on with the civil war and cannibalism that Democrats traditionally associate with being in power.  However, in keeping with "Christ, grow the fuck up, already" message of the inaugural address, I'd like to ask a different question.  Did anyone happen to notice what happened on the Ledbetter Bill vote in the Senate yesterday? 

 61 - 36.  

This bill is one of the leading bugaboos of the revaunchist Republicans. Opposition to this bill is woven into the DNA of the fossilized dogma "last-bullet, last-man, last-ditch save your Confederate money, boys" ideologues who are keep the Republican Party on the straight and narrow path to extinction.   McConnell smugly insisted on 60 votes to let this one out. 

100% of the Democrats (including Bernie and Lieberman) present voted for it and yet, between Teddy's illness and the open seats, that only got us 56 of the votes we needed.  Those 56, however, included 100% of the Senate equivilant sof the House Blue Dogs, all the Democrats and quasi-Dems we love to hate: Lieberman, Landreiu, Rockefeller,  the Nelson Twins, the whole lot.  Where did we get the other five?

Collins (R-ME), Hutchinson (R-TX), Murkowski (R-AK, Snowe (R-ME), and Specter (R-PA).

Stop and think about that for a minute.  On what a month ago would have been a divisive litmus test vote, we got 100% of the ones we used to expect to sell us out, the ones most joined to the hip of the kleptocrats, and McConnell couldn't hold on even to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, much less the four senators who constitute what passes for the moderate of his caucus. 

My point here is that, as someone, can't quite recall who it was just now, but someone said recently, the ground has shifted beneath the feet of the Repub . . ., er, I mean the cynics. 

The Blue Dogs have realized that not only do they not need to act like red dogs to keep their seats, and that, in fact, they had damn well better start acting more Blue and less dog-like.   What passes for "moderates" in the Republican Party understand that they have all the room they want to vote their consciences or their self-interest.  Rove, Armey, DeLay, the Club for Growth, the K Street Project and the whole stinking apparatus of reward and retaliation that used to keep potentially reasonable Republicans in line with the crazies are cold ashes.  Obama has a sixty something percent approval rating in Texas, for God's sake. 

And, for once, for perfectly understandable reasons, our politicians are ahead of us. 

There's a lot of recrimination here about how the Kossite Better Democrats faction torpedoed Schlossberg and opened the door to a Blue Dog.  Frankly, I agree that its a lesson in unintended consequences that the Kossites would do well to take to heart, but probably won't. 

But both sides of the fight are missing the point.  They are still fighting the last war.  Indeed, they're still refighting the war before last, the Clinton War. 

On one hand, the "Better Democrats" crowd deplores the lack of integrity that keeps the "Bad" Democrats from voting in a politically pure and orthadox fashion, but on the other they fail  to acknowledge that that supposed lack of integrity works both ways.  If the problem is that we have politicians who turn with the prevailing winds, changing the prevailing winds accomplishes the mission just as well as replacing the politicians.  Indeed, in some ways, it works better because it lets us concentrate on the real enemy rather than dissipating our energy on ugly little civil wars that leave behind the kind of bitterness and division that could truly turn those winds back against all of us, orthadox and apostate alike. 

Likewise, however, those berating the "Better Democrats" faction for opening the door to a Blue Dog are also missing the point: the Blue Dogs are well aware that the prevailing winds are such that staying in office requires more Blue and less dog.  However obsolete and misguided the urge to purge of the Kossites, they were and are crucial to changing the direction of the winds and keeping it changed.   (Yes, I'm aware my metaphor is becoming increasingly problematic, but work with me dammit, I'm almost done.) 

The paradigm has shifted.  We're seeing it in real-time.  If we're going to fight, can we at least fight the current war rather than the last one, or the one before that?  And can we at also maybe consider the possibility that the paradigm has, in fact, shifted when we analyze current events?  Can we, for example, stop always assuming that this or that action was taken because our leaders are still gripped by terror of the Dark Powers of the Omnipotent and Infinitely Wily Republicans and are consumed with a need to placate them?  Can we consider the possibility that that's our own trauma talking, rather than any particular concern of the people who are actually counting the votes and doing the governing? 

David Kurtz noted that Madoff made off with the ACLU's money.  Another of his victims:  Kevin Bacon and wife Kyra Sedgwick.  They lost everything but their houses and what was in their checking account.  Now, he's desperate to work as much as he can.  I'm going to guess no more pet projects and indie films for them.

Yes, I read celebrity gossip columns.  And I am not ashamed!  I knew John Edwards was boinking someone not his wife before a lot of you yahoos did.  ;-)

Has the 4th Estate just grown a pair after 8 years of kowtowing to the previous ineptitude?

Instead of giving away money to companies and banks, lets have a COUPON event!

Washington mails out coupons to every household.  Coupons for discounts on appliances, clothing, furniture, cars, and food.

For example, you will get a coupon for $2000 off on any new car that you buy or a coupon for $150 off any new appliance you buy or $500 off on food for over a year's span.

Companies would be reimbursed by Washington D.C., 80% of the coupon/discount that is used.  This would allow the company to sell items for a profit, albeit a smaller one; but at least they are making a profit.

That car dealer that sold you a car for $25,000 minus $2000 = $23,000, actually only sold it for $23,400, but at least they SOLD it and the customer saved $2000 by using the coupon.

Washington would also send out coupons for taking out loans for home repairs, car repairs or medical bills.  Each coupon would take 10-15% off the value of the loan asked for.  For each loan a bank provides using one of the coupons, Washington would reimburse them 80% of the coupon. 

For example, you go to the bank to borrow $5000 using one of the coupons for 10% off.  This means you actually only have to pay back the principle of $4500.  The bank made the loan for $4400.  They take a loss of $100 but STILL, they made a loan keeping their bank going.

Banks and companies benefit getting the business and it's a sure way of keeping tabs of where the money goes that taxpayers loan them.

Customers tend to buy things when they think they are getting a bargain, these coupons give that incentive.

Of course all the 'details' could change, but you get the drift of my idea --- right?

Opinions?

The Obama administration asks Federal Judge to stay ruling, takes position that President can bypass Congress to 'listen in' on Americans' communications?

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/obama-sides-wit.html

 Another Wired article last week - "Obama to Defend Telco Spy Immunity" reported that the incoming Obama administration would "vigorously defend" (Holder) Telecom Immunity for spying.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/obama-to-fight.html

In light of the comments made by former NSA agent Russell Tice on "Countdown" the last two nights, this merits more than the "almost no" attention it's been getting both here and in the MSM. Ironically enough, these two stories share the same sidepanel on Wired's "Threat Level" blog with "Obama promises New Era of Openness."

The current nominee for Secretary of the Treasury is Timothy Geithner.  Geithner is almost universally lauded as one of the nation's foremost economic and monetary experts.  He has been described as perhaps the only person in Washington who completely understands the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).  His resume and endorsers place his professional qualifications beyond rational objection.

However, I don't think Tim Geithner should be the next Treasury Secretary.

The current nominee for Deputy Secretary of Defense is William Lynn.  Lynn has decades of experience in defense issues, with the government and private sectors.  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has personally requested Lynn be installed in the Deputy Secretary's office.  Many in the government have praised his knowledge and ethics.  He enjoys an excellent professional reputation, and like Geithner, possesses a resume that places him beyond reasoned reproach in terms of his qualifications.

However, I don't think William Lynn should be the next Deputy Secretary of Defense, either.

It is in the two disagreements outlined above that I have my first cause for serious pause with the Obama Administration. 

Let us begin by examining Geithner.  Of course, he is part of the scandal du jour in the Cabinet installation.  As we all know now, Geithner failed to pay self-employment taxes a while back, and also had some issues surrounding a housekeeper whose authorization expired three months before she left Geithner's employ.

Now, Geithner's knowledge of TARP - and his commitment to overhaul the program to ensure more protection and better use of taxpayer dollars - is exactly what we need right now. 

However, I don't like the fact that many Cabinet-level designates have had their nominations sacked - some for far less than what Geithner's done.  Aside from Geithner's frankly implausible explanation for his missed tax payments (TurboTax?  Is THAT the best you can do?), the simple fact is that he is guilty of tax evasion.  Exacerbating the ethical issue is the fact that he paid about $26,000 of his back taxes only after Obama picked him to be Secretary. 

None of this calls his professionalism into question.  What troubles me is the questions this raises about Geithner's basic honesty.  The legendary poker player Amarillo Slim once said that he'd never lent a man $200 who had repaid him.  If Geithner can't be trusted on such (relatively) small sums, should he really be given the debit card for what is expected to be a trillion-dollar stimulus fund?

However, even Geithner's case pales next to William Lynn's.  One of the things Obama trumpeted about his Presidency - and that he emphasized on his first full day in office - was this.

Lobbyists will be subject to stricter limits than under any other administration in history.  If you are a lobbyist entering my administration, you will not be able to work on matters you lobbied on, or in the agencies you lobbied, during the previous two years.

The trouble with this unequivocal (and heartening) statement is that Lynn was, as late as spring 2008, a registered lobbyist for Raytheon, a major Department of Defense contractor. 

Now, in mitigation, several things need to be pointed out here. 

There has always been a discussion of a "waiver process" that would allow certain highly qualified individuals, who might run afoul of certain Administration rules, to serve in the Administration.  Any recipient of such a waiver would need to coordinate with White House legal counsel and the general counsel of his department to ensure that this person did not work on any matters covered in his lobbying.  And Lynn is well respected and scandal-free.

The trouble with this workaround is that Lynn is up for Deputy Secretary of Defense.  The Deputy Secretary is, in effect, the chief operating officer of the DoD.  The Deputy Secretary handles all day-to-day affairs at the Pentagon.  As such, this person is, in some ways, just as important as the SECDEF.  More to the point, this person HAS to touch on EVERY area of Defense operations. 

Of course, neither of these picks is likely to cause a major disaster.  In fact, both would be giving up some very lucrative private work to join the Administration.  Both are considered experts in their fields, and in most Administrations, the President would be lucky to have people with their resumes.

However, Obama has made a different, more stringent set of guidelines and commitments.  He has specifically pledged to reverse the cronyism, criminality and secrecy that were hallmarks of the Bush Administration.  One of the most important steps in ensuring the erasure of said hallmarks is making sure your people come into office with as few ethical blemishes as possible.

Of course, I still place my faith in Obama's intellect and desire to achieve the lofty goals he's set out.  I believe that a strong executive can ensure that all top officials are upholding his directives and properly implementing his visions.  I further believe a President should be able to pick his Cabinet, with the caveat that he is responsible for their action (or inaction).

Either of these picks, individually, would not give me too much pause.  After all, if you dig hard enough, you find contentious issues with any major nomination.  However, the fact that they are both happening at the same time, and the apparent willingness to waive such an important restriction, leave me feeling uneasy about Obama's promise of clean government. 

Perhaps I worry too much.  (An early onset of DEAD, perhaps.)  For my money, though, I would much rather have someone with perhaps a slightly less glitzy resume, but with unimpeachable history and a background that would not violate Obama's lobbyist rules at all. 

It appears President Obama is living up to his word, and striking inside Pakistan when there is actionable intel, and Pakistan is "unwilling or unable" to respond. http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2009/01/23/asia/OUKWD-UK-PAKISTAN-MISSILES.php

What do we think of this? On the same day as he orders a process for Guantanamo to close, he takes ruthless offensive action against enemies of the Unites States.

This is evidence of an intelligent and a strong Foreign Policy, "carrots and sticks", as Candidate Obama would often refer to it last Fall. Now, President Obama is delivering on his promises, handing the World a carrot by closing Gitmo, and smacking some troublemakers with a unmanned stick in Pakistan. It is this sort of nuanced policy that has been missing the past 8 years.

It is an odd feeling. It is terribly sobering to this moment of joy and expectation knowing that we must take lives in far-off places to protect ourselves, and that our young president is ultimately responsible. But it is at the same time heartening to know that this young president, in whom we have placed so much trust, is ultimately responsible. The hopes and dreams, and fears, of this Nation are weighing on his shoulders, and though slender, they have so far proved to be firm.

Muammar Qaddafi, yes, the Libyan colonel, writing in the IHT.

He suggest a unitary state encompassing Israel and the territories, which he dubs "Isratine".

I disagree with him, I think that this became impossible some time in the 1990s, and that today it is as nonsensical as suggesting a reconstruction of the USSR or Yugoslavia, actually more so than suggesting the reassembly of the USSR, as that separation was mostly non-violent.

There has been too much blood spilled in the last 1½ for it to work, and the trend world wide is toward the division of countries over roughly the same period.

That being said essay is well written and reasonable, so he, and/or whoever wrote/translated it with him, did a good job.

He is remarkably genteel and diplomatic.

There is an interesting nugget here, and it says something about the Arab view of the Palestinians, he is talking about the complete return of Palestinians to the region:

Further, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would do little to resolve the problem of refugees. Any situation that keeps the majority of Palestinians in refugee camps and does not offer a solution within the historical borders of Israel/Palestine is not a solution at all.

This reflects, in an off hand manner the fact that the Arab nations with significant Palestinian populations expect most of them to simply leave if the opportunity arises.

It's been 60 years, and the idea that most of these people will want to leave what has been their home for all , or the overwhelming portion, of their life is unrealistic.

Even if Qaddafi's vision were realized, you would not see quite the mass migration expected, unless we saw the institution of something rather more extreme than the "genteel ethnic cleansing" that happens to non-Francophones in Quebec and Russian speakers in the Baltic Republics.

The truth is that, with the exception of Jordan, these sorts of policies are largely in place with things like prohibitions on owning land (Lebanon) and a denial of citizenship to Palestinians by virtue of being born in country (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and IIRC Syria, at least).

One interesting thing here is how, unrelated to his commentary, is the provision of aid and support has distorted the conflict, much as it has in Eastern Congo, where they have provided a base of operation for the remnants of the genocidal militias from Rwanda. (It's a pet peeve of mine)

Without the UNRWA providing free ghettos, many of the Palestinians would be full citizens of these countries, because it would simply have untenable to maintain refugee camps as such for so long, and they would be leading better lives today.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Woody Allen did a movie many decades ago where is character found himself in the future.  Usual stuff. Quick punch lines. Like standing outside of a McDonalds where a sign states: Over 10 billion sold--or some such number.  Probably have been 10 billion sold by now. One of the worst hamburgers I ever ate.

WSJ notes today in its Tech section:

This will be a big year for new operating systems. Apple plans a new version of its Macintosh operating system, to be called Snow Leopard. Palm plans an all-new smart phone operating system called Palm WebOS. But the new release that will affect more users than any other will be Windows 7, the latest major edition of Microsoft's dominant platform.

Microsoft hasn't announced an official release date for Windows 7, but I would be surprised if it wasn't available to consumers by this fall. The company has just released the first public beta, or test, version of the software, and I've been trying it out on two laptops. One is a Lenovo ThinkPad lent me by Microsoft with Windows 7 already installed, and the other is my own Sony Vaio, which I upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows Vista.

Now we have the confirmation of what many millions of nuanced Americans had already known. That the NSA was spying domestically. That they were spying on us Americans. So they treated us Americans like the terrorist they told us they were after. Well they never did catch the "Ghost" did they. That would be Bin Laden; were they really ever after him anyway?

The fundamental problem with spying is that it's usually the case whereby it's the people that spy are the ones that most need to be spied upon. It was never "Ghost" that I was ever worried about. I'm a sixty year old American Black man who was raised in a American inner city. And I love my country and stand up for it and fight for it. I went to Viet Nam for my country; did George Bush? But the fact is Black Americans have always been acquainted with the politics of what the NSA did to Americans. Our communities have always suffered under this type of treatment. The NSA and their "bullshit" is nothing new to us.

George Bush and the American government he ran did this because they could. Very few people stood against him. Even though their was much evidence and history to expect that people like George Bush , Dick Cheney , and Donald Rumsfield would break the law. I was very proud that our Senator from Minnesota , Paul Wellstone , stood against Bush and voted no on his initial war proposition. Paul Wellstone then died in a "plane accident" didn't he! So we had very few people stand against the tyrants of the George Bush administration even though many , who were at the upper levels of administration of our government , really knew what was happening.

The people that spied upon the American people should have never been allowed to have this much power. Hitler should have been stopped before 1933 and George Bush should have never been "given" the Presidency of the United States in 2000.

The precepts and credos of our America are sound. And the idea of what our America should and could be will always be greater then the reality of it. And a price will have to be paid to get closer to that great American idea. The stiff price that Black Americans and other free thinking Americans paid to get Barack to the White House involved shedding blood in many cases; people in my family were hung in the early 20th century while fighting against "Jim Crow" in Texas; it's why my family is in Minnesota today.

Our leaders "Bullshited" us and didn't follow the law; they broke it. So it was them that skewed the reality and the laws of America. The American people did not. The American people deserve better leadership and oversight and we do not deserve just to be treated like the lemmings that they obviously thought we were. The American people are great not because of our leadership but in spite of it.

KILLING OF UNARMED CIVILIANS - MEN WOMEN AND CHILDREN, IS A WAR CRIME. 

Today, instead of pontificating, I'd like to ask readers opinions and conclusions after perusing the maps that I've stuck on here below. They are a map of the 2008 election results, county by county, a map of "purple America" from 2004 and a map of American's median income from 1999 (I haven't found more recent maps, but I imagine they wouldn't be dramatically different). Please take a look:

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Readers who had been wondering why TPM Café's M.J. Rosenberg had no follow up on his early report http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/19/great_news_george_mitchell_to_be_middle_east_speci/ that renowned peacemaker George Mitchell would be named MidEast Envoy, grew concerned when a what seemed to be a mere rumor-of-the-day as to Rosenberg's having gone missing was not promptly denied.  Rosenberg, who had been strongly expected to further comment but did not do so Wednesday or Thursday, had instead, some sources indicated, been abducted by extraterrestrials.

 

A source close to the TPM Editor & Publisher, speaking in an impatient-sounding voice and requesting anonymity, at first cast doubt on the swirling speculation, then gave rise to new questions in suggesting that even if Rosenberg had been kidnapped by space inhabitants, the seizure might only be temporary and the commentator could well be soon repatriated to USA.  Mitchell had put on a brave face at Thursday's State Department appointment ceremony, projecting a confident image that suggested he knew nothing of either Rosenberg's reported intergalactic travails, or the failure of TPM Café to comment on his absence.  A spokesman for Mitchell later referred inquiries to the U.S. Air Force, which declined comment.

Britain's bailout of its financial institutions has currency markets dumping the pound, which some now expect to reach parity with the (relatively) strong dollar.

In the opening days of his administration it appears that Obama has stared a diplomatic revolution in the Middle East. Obama has stated that Israel must cease its blockade of Gaza and allow humanitarian supplies and that the Americans need to help the Palestinian people rebuild. Also Obama has named George Mitchell, an Arab American, to be in charge of seeking a two state solution in Middle East. Mitchell is a far superior choice than Dennis Ross, who was seen by the Palestinians as being too much on Israel's side. Mitchell along with James Jones makes it appear to the moderate Arabs that at least Obama is willing to take a impartial stance in any future Israeli-Palestinian talks.

In his inaugural adress, Obama stated that the American people and politicians should be more reponsible in their own lives. However the current wiretapping revalations make more neccessary than ever that Obama needs to prosecute those in the previous administration, who broke the law. On both the Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow shows it was revealed that the NSA wiretapped journalists and organizations that disapproved of Bush's policies. If Obama wants to set an example of responsibility in his administration, he needs to presecute those whe were acted carelessly in regrards to the constitution and American democracy.

Now that we're living in a "postpartisan" world, there have been many calls to end the current era of polarization. Older generations recall that there was a time when the country wasn't so defined and divided by political party. On inauguration day, I heard Tom Brokaw describe a version of old Washington I've heard time and again: Democrats and Republicans were rivals by day, friends by night - sparring in political gamesmanship on the floor of Congress, coming together to get things done whenever they could, throwing back whiskeys together afterwards. People often sigh wistfully at this description, hoping we can recapture that spirit.

Not me. At least, not until we re-establish some ground rules.

For starters, the clubbiness of Washington has long been decried as one of its great faults: there's so much back-slapping and quid pro quo and friendly rivalry that eventually our representatives can't tell whom they're representing anymore. So you know things must be bad when we find ourselves wishing that our representatives - who are after all there to protect our interests - would be more friendly and accomodating to their policy opponents.

But let's put that aside for now. What is it that's brought us as a nation - not just elected officials but ordinary citizens - to be so polarized along political party lines? I've heard countless people of the baby-boom generation say that when they were younger, they didn't even know or care what party their friends voted for...but in the last eight years many have had irrevocable fallings out with old friends over the Bush administration. Fewer young people I think have had such fights - but that's largely because they've already self-selected into politically homogenous groups.

The mainstream, moderate, respectable pundit answer to why we're so polarized is that the most radical elements of both parties have gained the loudest voices, for instance through talk radio and the Internet, maximizing differences at the expense of common ground. Indeed, over at Daily Kos, Hunter points to an instance of this common wisdom in yesterday's column from the WaPo's voice of reason David Ignatius:

Obama's speech showed us, once again, that the new president really means it when he says that he wants to create a new kind of politics for a "postpartisan" America. This has been difficult for some of his supporters to accept, in their rage against the Bush presidency and their understandable desire to settle scores with those who took the country into a dark and painful time. But Obama wants none of it. "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics." Did that cause a moment of self-reflection at Rush Limbaugh's offices, or at the Daily Kos? I doubt it, but one can always hope.

Hunter's affecting response, asking what exactly he and the rest of Daily Kos did that equates with Rush, deserves reading in full. Here's a bit:

Which were [the petty grievances]? Was it speaking too loudly of the devolution of the United States into unapologetic torture? Was it complaining of the lives lost in Iraq, or making petty noises that even the president should follow the Constitution when it came to spying upon certain Americans, or making the case for their internment?
... When Rush Limbaugh was playing "[Barack] the Magic Negro", all in good fun, of course, what abominable slight was it precisely that makes David Ignatius think of him and me as cut from the same cloth?
What were the worn out dogmas, the ones I should avoid? The insistence that energy policy be rational, or scientific fact be given plain acknowledgement regardless of ideological convenience?...The staggering assertion that competence should be not only be expected of government, but that it could and should be judged?...Is it my fury at the plainness with which powerful men can avoid the law, was that the bridge too far...?

It is ludicrous to suggest an equivalence between Rush Limbaugh and Daily Kos, as anyone who reads Daily Kos regularly - or at all - knows (there is probably an equivalency to be made between the more virulent spectators who post comments on Daily Kos, which is an open community, and the more virulent callers to Limbaugh's show...but this is a distinction lost on nearly all press commentators). But Hunter's comments serve as an important reminder of something far deeper: there is no radical left in this country.

I do not, of course, mean that there are no people in this country who hold radical left-wing views. We are a diverse nation, and if you want to find Marxists, anarchists, pacifists, people who believe that farming is eco-rape, or that one guy who's on a life-long legal quest to get the word "God" removed from the pledge of allegiance and our currency, you can certainly find them - and conservative media has found them in abundance.

But there is no organized radical left that has any kind of political currency in America in the 21st century - and it certainly has no pull on the Democratic Party, which by any objective measure has operated in Washington over the last eight years as a center-right party. Perhaps Ignatius and all the other commentators and politicians who talk of "extremists" on both sides are still thinking of the Left of the Vietnam era, which certainly was full of Marxists, anarchists and pacifists who marched on Washington by the hundreds of thousands, and who derided returning American troops as war criminals.

There is, however, a radical right - and it has taken over the Republican party. Here are just three tenets of the modern Republican party:

1) It is permissable, even necessary, for the American government to kidnap and torture people.
2) The President is above the law.
3) Preventive war - the invasion and occupation of a country that may at some future point pose a threat - is justifiable.

Those things are so radical, so repugnant, so un-American, and so non-negotiable that yes, I am polarized in opposition to those stances. I do not find these things to be policy differences over which we can politely disagree, then go have a drink together. If you support these tenets, and especially if you play a part in enacting them, I think you are complicit in the loss of innocent lives; in the justification of one of the most despicable crimes against humanity, torture; and in the moral undermining and degradation of the ideals and principles of the United States. I emphatically do not seek compromise with you, because there can be no compromise on these things.

This is not the case for the vast majority of policy that is debated and enacted in Washington. Liberals and Conservatives of all shades of the ideological spectrum can have genuine, strenuous disagreements amongst each other about the right economic policy to get us out of the current mess, about the best way to fix the health care system, about how best to engage diplomatically with Israel and the Palestinians, or with Pakistan. We can all go have a beer together afterwards because though we disagree, we all are trying to do what's best for the country. But there are some things we must find polarizing or we've lost our way entirely.

I know that placing blame is supposed to be counter-productive in our new postpartisan age. I know we're supposed to admit that we all got carried away and it's time to come together again. But like Hunter, I'm just not clear what it is I'm supposed to be apologizing for. We must remember that a nonpartisan analysis of what went wrong doesn't necessarily lead to a bipartisan diagnosis, in which we're all equally at fault. There's simply no extreme left wing of the Democratic party that's been advocating a socialist government, or unilaterally laying down our arms and letting terrorists roam free, or bringing all American troops up on war crimes charges, or making our President get approval from the U.N. for his actions.

Rather, even the most liberal wing of the Democrats has been holding the reasonable middle ground on almost every issue: a market economy, but properly regulated; stopping terrorism and hunting down terrorists with all the tools at our disposal, not just military, and within the law; honoring and supporting our troops by making sure they have the best benefits and keeping them from serving endless tours; insisting that the President of the United States be bound by the Consitution. Have we, in our anxiety, advocated these things vociferously, angrily, stridently, employing humor and satire and sometimes name-calling? Absolutely.

But make no mistake: it was the radicalism of the Republican Party that polarized the country. We didn't all just let policy differences get personal. Torture is not a policy difference. The Constitution is not a policy difference. The Republicans have been messing with the fundamentals of American law and decency. Someday, if we get back to genuine policy differences, I stand ready to buy a Republican a beer and toast the great American tradition of disagreement and debate. But as long as the opposition party continues to propagate its current radical vision, I plan on staying polarized.

Keith Olberman, appearing on his home show on MSNBC, had as his guest yesterday one of the NSA officers who knew first hand about the domestic spying program.  Russell Tice gave the horrific announcement that the domestic spying program does not encompass just select groups of the American populace but every citizen of this country.

This does come with some caveats: spying was concentrated on certain organizations, such as the news media, and (obviously,) not every phone call, email, text, and blog post was reviewed by a human being.  Rather, the NSA looked at the so called meta-data of the communiques; terrorists typically have 1 to 2 minute conversations.  But then again, so does a call to order to a pizza.

The problem with finding someone who wants to do society harm is that it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Want an example?  Here's one from former National Counterterrorism Director, Richard Clarke.  He talks about a conflict between US and Israeli intelligence and the airstrikes that didn't even know the target existed.:

"Israeli intelligence analysts had come to Washington and sat in my office in 1989, adamant that Iraq was well along in making a nuclear bomb.  The CIA analysts sitting opposite them were equally convinced that the Iraquis had only the beginnings of a program, an aspiration.  When the [Iraq] war came in 1991, the first phase was a sustained  U.S. strategic bombing campaign...Toward the end of the bombing campaign, it grew difficult for the Air Force officers who...were running out of things to bomb...[after the war] the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency...shockingly, found evidence that Irqaq had a full-scale nuclear weapons development program that was only months away from creating its first nuclear weapon...Only two of twenty sites had been known and attacked during the war."

-Your Government Failed You (98-99)

The US, having gone to war on this country, was not able to spot what Clarke refers to as "facilities [that] were on the same scale as the sprawling campuses that had been built in the 1940s for the U.S. Manhattan Project" (Clarke 99).

How are they going to spot some terrorists phone call?  The problem, as Clarke notes over and over again is not that there is insufficent information, it is that there is too much for anyone to really process.

So let's take another example, something that every American REALLY wants to prevent: 9/11.  Would the current domestic spying program have prevented this?  Yeah, but even without the program the US government already knew.  There was:

1. The Hart-Rudman comission, which issued a report on February 15, 2001 that warned of "mass-casualty terrorism directed against the U.S. homeland" and urged for the formation of a "National Homeland Security Agency" 
2. Richard Clarke's report on terrorism threats that was delayed continuously
3. A report filed by FBI agent Kenneth Williams in Phoenix about a group of Arizona flight school students who were concerned with flying a plane, but not learning how to takeoff or land.
4. The August 6 memo delivered by CIA Director George Tenent entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." that warned that airplanes might be hijacked.

But that's just a kind of greatest hits list.  Americans were rightly scared after 9/11 and they still to some extent are.  I'm not saying that pre-9/11 protections are inappropriate; they worked.  It is going beyond that, to the point where we forfit the civil liberties that the founding fathers fought to give their children.

Remember John Adams:
"It is when the stakes are the highest and when tempers run the hottest that we must work doubly hard to keep a check on our government and prevent it from trading in our values for visceral and political motives...it is suring the most challenging situations that our country's values are most intensely tested"

This on inauguration day from the most recent edition of The Carrboro Citizen, a weekly newspaper in Orange County, North Carolina:

Obama sworn in as community, world bear witness

By Kirk Ross, Susan Dickson, Taylor Sisk, Margot Lester and Jasmina Nogo
Staff Writers

Barack Obama took the oath of office Tuesday morning before a crowd on the National Mall estimated at more than two million and with many thousands here in the community watching on TVs and computers.

At noon, Obama, who won more than 72 percent of the vote in Orange County, became the 44th president of the United States and the first African-American to win the office.

For those who made the trip to Washington D.C. and those here who tuned in at home or crowded around televisions in downtown businesses, the historical importance of the moment was clear.

Eugene Farrar, president of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro chapter of the NAACP, was on a rise on the mall near the Washington Monument. Farrar boarded a bus to the event right after services at First Baptist Church in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. ended on Monday. On Wednesday morning, after a long bus ride home, he was exhausted and inspired.

"In my 65 years, I've never seen anything like that -- the magnitude of it," he said.

Farrar, who volunteered last February with the Obama campaign in the early and critical South Carolina primary, said he was confident then that Obama would be elected, but didn't know that he would be at the inauguration. The bus ride up and back and seeing the millions assembled have left him charged and ready to continue the work, he said.

"If we're willing and able to stand up for change, then change will come," Farrar said.

A few hundred yards from Farrar's vantage point, at the top steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton, his wife, Quaker Harmon, and their two sons, Alex and Samuel, also witnessed the event.

Chilton said getting around was a lot easier than portrayed in media reports. Though they were at first reluctant to go, watching his sons experience the enthusiasm of the moment and seeing them understand the importance of it was a special joy, he said.

Especially among the African-Americans in the crowd, Chilton said, "you could see this was a very emotional moment. You could see the pride on people's faces."

Fourth District U.S. Congressman David Price had a close-up view of the proceedings, seated along with other members of Congress on the steps of the Capitol.

"We were cold, but we were also very excited," he said. "This was a huge watershed event in our history."

Looking out over the crowd, Price said, it was obvious that this was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. "It was not just the view," he said, "but the echoes coming from the far reaches of the crowd."

Obama's inauguration speech marked more than the passing of the torch to a new generation, Price said, but also was clearly meant to signal the new president's intention to make a "sharp break from the past."

Price, who recently introduced legislation to close the detention center at Guantanamo as well as revamp interrogation procedures, said he has hopes the new administration will act quickly in those areas.

Here at home, with an overnight snowstorm leading to all kinds of changes in plans, the moment was equally powerful.

"The snow made sure we were all at home watching together," said Moses Carey, who served on the Orange County Board of Commissioners for two decades and was recently named head of the state's Employment Security Commission.

Carey took in the changing of the country's leadership with his wife, Peggy Richmond, and two grandchildren.

"I was able to talk about it with my grandchildren and it gave me an opportunity to talk with them about the future of our nation and their future," he said. "The significant thing for me was that he asked us all to be responsible again as a nation and as people."

Thomas Mills, a Carrboro-based political consultant and a Democrat, watched the inauguration at home with his wife and two little ones. The semi-steady fall of snow sealed the excuse to just sit put and savor this historic moment with family.

Asked to describe his thoughts on the day, Mills responded, "I was thinking that the change Barack Obama embodies is truly remarkable. An African-American man with a very short political resume has captured the imagination of the American people by describing a very different country than the one we've been living in."

Having his younger kids bouncing about the house, clearly feeding on their folks' energy - and thrilled, of course, with the snow, new snow suits, snow angels and hot chocolate - made this moment more special still.

"My wife and I both felt a renewed sense of patriotism," Mills said, "something we haven't felt in a long time. My 19-year-old daughter was raised hearing me complain about the misguided actions of our government. I hope my 3-year-old and 9-month-old can be proud of what our country is doing and where it's headed, not just what it's done in the past."

Of Obama's speech, Mills said he felt that it "repudiated the failures of the Bush administration while outlining Obama's vision for the future," which embodies "leading by example, not force, and reclaiming our moral authority in the world."

Stephen Murtaugh, of the band Transportation, watched at his Chatham County home with wife, Emily.

"It's great to finally say the words I almost feared to speak because I'm superstitious and didn't want to jinx it: 'President Obama,'" he said. "I thought he gave a great speech, and struck the right tone for the occasion, optimistic but with a clear sense of the challenge.

"I particularly dug the Valley Forge reference. It really brought home the historic nature of this day, to compare it to that time."

Murtaugh also said the snow helped make the day special.

"Being snowed in really made it that much more special, a bonus day off with snow angels and snowball fights and just hanging out around the house. I think I will remember this day for a long time."

Eliza Liptzin DuBose of Carrboro celebrated with family and friends: "One person felt it was easier and cleaner to breathe. One felt like they had to keep checking their reality perimeter. Another felt relieved. Many cried. I put on my Mardi Gras mask and walked up to the Weave to do my volunteer hours and buy champagne."

Those not at home set up televisions and tuned in radios at work or made their way out to the clubs, restaurants and other spots to watch the ceremony.
Hundreds of UNC students bustled into the student union between classes to pack the Great Hall, where a large screen was set up for viewing the inauguration.

Outside the hall in the entryway to the union, more students - many of them first-time voters - crowded around a small television to get a glimpse of the new president's address, and hushed one another as the ceremony began.

The atmosphere was overwhelmingly celebratory, and cheers echoed throughout the union as Obama and Vice President Joe Biden took their oaths of office. When the crowd at the ceremony was directed to stand, the students in the union stood with them; and when Rev. Rick Warren over-enunciated Obama's daughters' names - Malia and Sasha - the union erupted with laughter.

Sophomore Sally Turner ducked out of the snow into the union between her classes to watch the president's address.

"It's the first election I could vote in," she said. "I'm excited."
When asked what excited her about Obama, Turner replied, "The idea of change and hope.

"It's just so historic."

Tuesday's weather didn't deter many students; and though some classes had been canceled, many came to campus just to watch the inauguration.

Kita Blackmon, a freshman, said she felt the inauguration was a turning point for America.

"This is a step for change. This is the beginning," she said.

Blackmon made it to campus to watch the inauguration with her fellow students, despite the cancelation of all of her classes.

"I just think it shows how far America has come," freshman Miranda Patterson said, adding that she had called her grandmother that morning, who was "so excited."

"I just think it's amazing," Patterson said.

Disha Gandhi, a junior, said that with Obama being the first person of color to be elected president of the United States, "Now you know kids have hope."

In downtown Carrboro, the Orange County Social Club was packed and broke into cheers at noon when CNN announced that even though the swearing in had not taken place, Obama was officially president. Other huzzahs went out for the new president's pledge to not compromise the country's values in the name of security and for Aretha Franklin's hat.

Down the street in Chapel Hill, people huddled at the plastic benches of the Italian Pizzeria III on Franklin Street drinking beers and staring eagerly at the two big-screen TVs projecting the ceremony.

When Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, the bar erupted in a pandemonium of cheers. Beer glasses were raised in toasts and congratulations.

"Progress. He is a symbol of the progress our country has made over the years and the progress that will be made," said Jennifer Elander of Durham.

Others saw the speech as a call to continue the efforts.

"I think this event will also open our eyes to the changes that still need to be made to embrace our country's diversity," said Elyse Keefe of Asheville.

While our media endlessly covers Flight 1549 and Obama’s second oathtaking, the world’s finances are imploding:

Britain offers the most colorful phrasing:

The tone towards the banks is becoming more aggressive. Gordon Brown and a phalanx of ministers will say they share the frustration of the public at the irresponsibility of past lending practices, the slowness with which they have revealed their debts and their stubborn refusal in the past few months to release credit.

Privately, something close to desperation is starting to develop inside government. After watching the slide in bank shares on Friday, one cabinet minister did not altogether joke when he said: “The banks are fucked, we’re fucked, the country’s fucked.”

Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and yes, Latvia

Events are moving fast in Europe. The worst riots since the fall of Communism have swept the Baltics and the south Balkans. An incipient crisis is taking shape in the Club Med bond markets. S&P has cut Greek debt to near junk. Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish bonds are on negative watch.
…
A great ring of EU states stretching from Eastern Europe down across Mare Nostrum to the Celtic fringe are either in a 1930s depression already or soon will be. Greece’s social fabric is unravelling before the pain begins, which bodes ill.
…
This week, Riga’s cobbled streets became a war zone. Protesters armed with blocks of ice smashed up Latvia’s finance ministry. Hundreds tried to force their way into the legislature, enraged by austerity cuts.
“Trust in the state’s authority and officials has fallen catastrophically,” said President Valdis Zatlers, who called for the dissolution of parliament.
…
In Lithuania, riot police fired rubber-bullets on a trade union march. Dogs chased stragglers into the Vilnia river. A demonstration outside Bulgaria’s parliament in Sofia turned violent on Wednesday.
…
Spain lost a million jobs in 2008. Madrid is bracing for 16pc unemployment by year’s end.
…
Private economists fear 25pc before it is over. Spain’s wage inflation has priced the workforce out of Europe’s markets. EMU logic is wage deflation for year after year. With Spain’s high debt levels, this is impossible.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/22/AR2009012202550.html

What must happen going forward according to Obama: Israeli forces must withdraw; Hamas must stop its rocket attacks. What about the Israeli blockade of Gaza Mr. President?

Peggy Noonan, November 4, 2004:

I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama.

Let us savor.

From Rising Hegemon, one of the few blogs I wish I could wrangle an invite to contribute to...

These arguments about Gitmo prisoners are bogus. It's disingenuous to suggest there are no precedents.

For example, from Wikipedia:

Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman (born May 3, 1938) is a blind Egyptian Muslim leader who is currently serving a life sentence at the Butner Medical Center which is part of the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, United States. His inmate registration number is 34892-054.[1] Formerly a resident of New York City, Abdel-Rahman and nine others were convicted of "seditious conspiracy",[2] which requires only that a crime be planned, not that it necessarily be attempted. His prosecution grew out of investigations of the World Trade Center 1993 bombings.

We even controversially prosecuted and convicted his defense lawyer Lynne Stewart for facilitating his communications with Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya in Egypt..

Another example, wikipedia again:

Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian living in Canada, planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). He was arrested at Port Angeles, Washington after crossing by ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, on December 14, 1999. Customs officials then found nitroglycerin and four timing devices concealed in a spare tire well of his automobile. He and three other Algerians stood trial for the crime. Ressam began cooperating with investigators in 2001. On July 27, 2005, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Then there's that other oldie but goodie, United States of America. vs. Usama bin Laden et.al., defendants (PDF here and fascinating reading) and all that followed it.

That's not to say we haven't ruined cases against some of them nor to dismiss the problems associated with foreign nationals being picked up by military on foreign shores. But we have dealt with this in other ways.

 

 

John Barry recently wrote an article in Newsweek called, "The Politics of Vengeance", saying that "Obama should avoid the blame game on Bush's security failings."  In nearly 1,500 words, Mr. Barry managed to both dismiss the debacle of the Bush presidency and attempt to belittle Representative John Conyers' attempts to shed some light on who could be responsible for at least a portion of the problems currently facing our country.

 

With his pen pointed squarely at Conyers, Barry refers to the Judiciary Committee's report as a "scattershot 486-page condemnation," looking to point out "virtually everything controversial the Bush administration did."  Rather than being a "scattershot condemnation," the Committee's report points out the literally hundreds of errors - many either criminal or on the edge of being so - made by the Bush administration.  Unfortunately for Mr. Barry, the charges levied against the former administration are not simple cases of jaywalking or unpaid parking tickets.  Barry's approach is strikingly similar to that of many Republicans, who would prefer to simply sweep everything under the rug, without even offering a simple mea culpa.  It's in the past, certainly, even if the past is fresh and sharp in the memory or nearly every man, woman and child.

 

Admittedly, I do agree with Mr. Barry at least on one point: Obama should not personally be the Crusader of Justice to shed light on What Went Wrong and Why.  The President has far too many things on his plate just in trying to slow the economic, military, and moral slide that Bush and his administration put into action.  But I believe that Mr. Barry is wrong that everything should simply be ignored.  In reality, and contrary to Barry's thinly-veiled assertions, Conyers himself is not trying to take the role of Crusader of Justice.  Instead, he is pushing for a Special Prosecutor to investigate the claims that range from abuse of power to possible criminal negligence.  Although the investigation itself is absolutely partisan - in the tough political environment the Republicans have found themselves, few if any want to further tarnish their brand - the appointment of a Special Prosecutor would help to keep the eventual findings non-partisan.

 

The most interesting part of Barry's piece rested not in what he tried to deny, but rather in his reasoning for not pursuing any investigation.

 

"What we know:" Barry writes, "President Bush authorized everything."

 

Unfortunately for history books (along with the possibly hundreds or thousands of individuals tortured during the Greater War on Terror), knowing something to be true does not always make it a fact.  Without proper investigation - and possible prosecution - those of us who "know" of many crimes or grievous mistakes make by the Bush administration can be dismissed as "holding a grudge" or being part of some leftist conspiracy.

 

Look at even the most common of criminals, and remember that we still require investigation.  Just because someone is caught on video in the commission of a crime, thus almost clearly proving their guilt, we don't simply let them walk away because, "well, everyone knows they did it."

 

While mentioning harsh interrogation techniques, Barry rightly points out that despite briefings to top members of both parties, "None of them took substantive steps to object," adding "(Private letters don't count.  They paper the files for subsequent backside covering.)"  Now that Conyers, at least, is willing to stand up and not only object, but push for a veritable Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Barry is dismissing his efforts as a "lust for vengeance."

 

Looking to make his point by drawing comparisons to Iran-Contra, Barry does gain some footing in pointing out that "the prime mover," President Reagan, "was judged too popular to attaint."  Contrary to Iran-Contra, President Bush was not too popular by any measure when Congress fell into Democrats' hands in 2006.  Instead, bowing to pressure from within the party as well as the media, Democrats chose not to pursue investigation of the Bush Administration over the concern that it would further polarize the country.  Now a scant two years later, there is certainly an increase in polarization between Republicans and Democrats, though this has been tempered on the Left in part by Obama's victory.  Anyone who believes that the whole of Republicans are okay with President Obama need only look to the recent gift given to Republicans by Chip Saltsman, then-candidate for RNC Chairman: a CD containing the songs "The Star Spanglish Banner" and "Barack the Magic Negro."

 

Should Conyers and his Judiciary Committee risk further polarization, not just to find the answers that Barry insists we already know, but to have them documented for historians and pundits alike?  If everything is already "known," what purpose then would investigation serve?

 

Representative Conyers sees inquiries as essential if America is to regain "our moral authority". Really? Is the rest of the world waiting for some bloodletting? No. Obama's election is seen, joyfully, as evidence that America has turned the page. Let us do the same. Leave the new president to restore America's standing by his actions--actions hopefully overseen by a more vigilant legislative branch."

 

Maybe the rest of the world isn't waiting for some bloodletting, just as we don't expect Conyers to insist the Bush administration endure a "Perp Walk" through the media spotlight, but it's too tough a pill to swallow that the former President be allowed to simply ride off into the sunset.  Now that Democrats control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives - taking office with oversight and limits of power having been drastically eroded over the past four years - there is one belief that Republicans and Democrats aren't polarized on.  Barry agrees with the calls on both sides that power needs to be reigned in, and oversight restored.

 

Now that we, as a whole, have let one administration run amok either through complacency or fear, everyone expects the Democrats to relinquish powers enacted by a Republican administration and play fair.  It's morally telling that the Democrats are both willing and eager to restore the type of government that made our country a beacon of freedom.

 

As the Obama administration sweeps into office bringing with it both hope and transparency, it is still vital that we allow Conyers and the investigative arm of our government to do its job in both uncovering and documenting the various crimes and missteps of the Bush administration, even if everyone does indeed "know" about them.  I believe this would be a very important step in showing the people of America, as well as the world, that despite the best efforts of the Bush administration our justice system and investigative bodies still possess the ability to find the truth, and maintain the rule of law.

I personally dislike gossip, but a juicy rumor of the type Maureen Dowd loves the most (sexually related and concerning a female Democratic New York figure) just went mainstream, prompting me to e-mail Maureen Dowd, as she may consider it potential material for her column.

The New York Post noted today that rumor has it that Caroline Kennedy, who has had a rocky relationship with her husband for a long time, has been "linked" to New York Times' publisher Arthur Sulzberger. The reference to the rumor appeared earlier this afternoon in the New York Post, but has now been deleted from the most recent update of the article; however, NBC in New York picked it up:

A source told the Daily News that "she was facing some potentially embarrassing personal issues"  regarding her tax history and employment of a nanny. Another potential problem involved her marriage to Edward Schlossberg, who decided he didn't want her to move to Washington, according to a source quoted by the News.

"He basically said it would destroy the marriage if she moved to D.C.," said the source.

The New York Post also raised the marriage issue, saying that gossip columns have reported for more than a year that Kennedy's marriage to Schlossberg was essentially over. The Post also pointed out that the gossip site Gawker.com has reported rumors linking her to New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger.

Can't wait to read more details in Dowd's next column.

"Trickle-down economics" and "trickle-down theory" are terms of political rhetoric that refer to the policy of providing tax cuts or other benefits to businesses and rich individuals, in the belief that this will indirectly benefit the broad population. ^Wiki

I always feel that the best way to analyze a theory like trickle down economics, is by looking at an example.  See how the theory applies to events in real time and space.I think a fine example to examine would be John Thain, just 'let go' by Merrill Lynch as its CEO. Charlie Gasparino at The Daily Beast examined one of our finest examples of Wall Street genius.

Thain was tapped to run Merrill Lynch as the firm suffered massive losses from investments tied to the depressed real estate market under his predecessor Stan O'Neal, who was ousted in late 2007.

I wrote Mr. Gasparino for clarification because I wondered if the star of Omen III as well as Jurassic Park and that 65 hour spectacular about Merlin, would have had the time to run such a huge commercial conglomerate as Merrill Lynch and he responded thus:

              THAT WAS SAM O'NEIL YOU IDIOT. DO NOT EVER WRITE ME AGAIN!!!

That issue disposed of....Bank of America, following 'unexpected losses' (Have you noticed how many financial set backs of late have been unexpected? After all, economics is a science and science is used to predict things.  You would think that economists would be better at predicting things.  I mean astronomers are experts and they can tell you when the next solar eclipse of the sun will hit Australia, or when the Sun will burn all its fuel or when it would be a good time to add an extra day to February.  But all the economists except for Kruger were completely flummoxed by the recent events reflected in the markets. Oh well)

At any rate BOA, seeing its chance, purchased Merrill Lynch while the iron was hot, or while the assets were low....

Just last week, Bank of America announced that Merrill has suffered an unexpected loss of $15 million for the fourth quarter of 2008, nearly collapsing BofA's purchase. Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis said that without $138 billion in government assistance, including the infusion of $20 billion from the federal government he would have pulled out of the Merrill deal, which was approved by BofA shareholders in early December.

Before we get to trickle down issues, this paragraph alone calls for some type of analysis.If I have these numbers correct (And that is why I cut and paste while in my pajamas) because of a shortfall of 15 million, BOA needed 158 BILLION  in governmental assistance.  SO THEY COULD BUY MERRILL LYNCH.  First, am I to deduce that if Merrill (after you do several important essays on economic issues, you get to use more familiar monikers) had had say, a 15 million dollar surplus, would that mean that BOA would not need 158 Billion in aid? Or if there had been only a 5 million dollar shortfall, BOA would only need 52 or 53 billion in aid?

One might very well ask:  WHY IN GODS NAME DO YOU NEED A 158 BILLION DOLLAR bailout for only a 15 million dollar shortfall?  But, then again, that is why most of us are called "lay people".  That means we, as part of the masses, must lay down and give up when we do not understand the scientific diagnostics necessary to understand these things. Oh well....

"(as) early 2008, just as Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain was preparing to slash expenses, cut thousands of jobs and exit businesses to fix the ailing securities firm, he was also spending company money on himself, senior people at the firm say. 

According to documents reviewed by The Daily Beast, Thain spent $1.22 million of company money to refurbish his office at Merrill Lynch headquarters in lower Manhattan. The biggest piece of the spending spree: $800,000 to hire famed celebrity designer Michael Smith, who is currently redesigning the White House for the Obama family for just $100,000.

We need to examine this last note.  You send human beings out the door and back to their families with no job in a market that is calling for very few workers.  And you go ahead and spend 1.2 mill making your office look better.  Maybe that was Thain's idea of fixing infrastructure.  So if he had not redecorated, Merrill might have shown less than a 14 million dollar shortfall for last quarter 2008.

 At the time, Thain was preaching the virtues of cost control, telling employees to reduce expenses including car services, entertainment and travel. In addition to the personal expenses on his office, documents show Thain paid his driver $230,000 for one year's work, which included the driver's $85,000 salary and bonus of $18,000, and another $128,000 in over-time pay, documents show.

At last we come to the point of this essay.  You pay yourself 25 mill.  And then, since you must show up at functions and stuff like that, you have your company pay your driver a quarter mill.  Because, otherwise you would be close to one percent out of pocket and with deduction issues, I suppose.  But the driver takes his quarter mill and buys his children swell toys from Walmart (from China) and his children then get lead poisoning and then the ER makes money by treating the children and they get paid from the driver's great health care coverage paid by the company that had a 15 million dollar short fall in 2008.

The driver also buys his girl friend a $3,000.00 necklace that he got off the street from a less than honorable 'trader' when the necklace is really worth ten thou and he gets the deal because the necklace had been stolen and that the owner of the necklace received fifteen thousand dollars from his insurance company.  See, everybody wins.

Except of course Merrill, but who cares. But there is something about Thain that reminds me of something. Someone from another time. Now who could that be?

"If this is accurate it has shades of Dennis Kozlowski's $6,000 shower curtain," said investor Doug Kass of Seabreeze Capital Management, in a reference to former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski who was convicted of fraud and is serving prison time for improperly spending millions of dollars on personal items. While there is no evidence that what Thain did is either illegal or of the magnitude of the spending by Kozlowski, Kass said "Merrill was on the fence and Thain came into save the company. It's still a lot of money and there is no rationalization for something like this."

  Does that not say it all?  It's still a lot of money and there is no rationalization for something like this.  By the by, cable news is reporting that Thain sent out a bunch of bonus checks to his minions in December unbeknownst to BOA.  You know, first you gotta think, how many millions did that come to and maybe the 15 million dollar short fall would have been wiped out by tearing up the bonus checks? But it reminds me of someone else. Someone with tens of millions of dollars in his desk discovered after he was arrested.

Oh yeah. I remember, Madof.  Now we have really scraped the bottom of the barrel.

The meltdown in the financial sector has brought forth lots of pontificating about the need to restructure the economy or, at least, the financial sector. But before this is done, one has to figure out what the present system is.

Here are some indicators:

All large business sectors get economic support from the government. These fall into two broad categories, tax breaks and purchase support. The aerospace industry is kept afloat because of the purchase of military hardware, as is the US shipping industry. Agricultural commodities receive subsidies and tariff support. Surpluses are bought by the government or their sale is facilitated to foreign states. Transport is subsidized through road construction, airport construction and passenger rail subsidies. Broadcast and telecom firms get radio spectrum and contracts for communications services including contracted wiretapping.

The extractive industries get depletion allowances, cheap land leases, and various other tax breaks. Newspapers and broadcast stations are allowed to restrict markets through joint ownership exemptions. Mortgage and student loans are handled through quasi-governmental firms. Now the big financial institutions have received funds to allow them to keep operating as have the auto companies. Even retail stores get real estate and sales tax breaks as an inducement to them moving into a new locale.

During this downturn the government has been explicitly pushing for the consolidation of financial firms. This is a complete reversal of the policies for most of the 20th Century where "trust busting" and anti-trust legislation was the norm. There isn't even a mention of excessive industry consolidation these days no matter how concentrated markets become. Bulk agricultural products in the US are controlled by three firms, meat processing by about five, etc.

What we have is state sanctioned enterprises which are monitored indirectly by means of the subsidies they get from the government. In addition there is a revolving door between business and government which ensures that the mindset of those in both areas are the same. There is no concern about monopolies, since the government is managing them anyway.

The fuss in the US and the UK at the moment is whether to allow this symbiotic relationship to be made explicit. If the government "takes over" a bank then we are seeing "socialism" which has been the ideological bogeyman of capitalism for 150 years. The fact that we have had something similar for decades is the dark secret.

Bailout plans amount to little more than deciding which pocket to take the money out of and which to put it in. Is there any real difference between the Federal Reserve lending a firm some money based upon "assets", taking preferred stock as collateral or "taking over" the firm? The only thing that changes is the name of the CEO. The present bailouts have all been outsourced to management firms to handle because the Treasury department doesn't have the "expertise" or staff to do it on its own.

I'm stuck with what to call this system. The Chinese seem to call it state controlled capitalism, but maybe we should call it pseudo-socialism or invent a new term altogether. Whatever it is, it isn't capitalism. That only exists for the small players who continue to fail at the typical rate of 80% within five years. This churn makes it look like free enterprise is the basis of the economy, but is more like background noise.

State sanctioned oligopolies have their benefits. They provide high profits at low risk, they provide good earnings to those fortunate enough to get on the inside and they ensure that workers can't push their cases effectively. In other words they benefit the select.

They also have their drawbacks. They stifle innovation and prevent new firms or technologies from entering markets as easily as otherwise. They keep prices high and choices limited. They are inefficient in their use of resources. The allow their economic power to influence political events, that is the are anti-democratic. In other words they benefit the select.

Is there any chance that a new era of trust busting and the elimination of the  alliance between business and government can happen? Have you heard Obama or anyone in his team mention monopolies?

So estimates Nouriel Roubini's RGE recent newsletter:

Nouriel Roubini and Elisa Parisi-Capone of RGE Monitor release new estimates for expected loan losses and writedowns on U.S. originated securitizations:

• Loan losses on a total of $12.37 trillion unsecuritized loans are expected to reach $1.6 trillion. Of these, U.S. banks and brokers are expected to incur $1.1 trillion.

• Mark-to-market writedowns based on derivatives prices and cash bond indices on a further $10.84 trillion in securities reached about $2 trillion ($1.92 trillion.) About 40% of these securities (and losses) are held abroad according to flow-of-funds data. U.S. banks and broker dealers are assumed to incur a share of 30-35%, or $600-700 billion in securities writedowns.

It goes on with more, but I want to point out the second bullet point.  It is my strong view that these "losses" should be treated as gambling.  They should not be covered in any way shape or form by government bailouts or investments.  Every dollar "lost" was "gained" by someone else.  Broker dealers or banks which speculated or over-leveraged must pay the piper.

As for the first point, just what are these "unsecuritized" loans?

• Back in September, Nouriel Roubini proposed a solution for the banking crisis that also addresses the root causes of the financial turmoil in the housing and the household sectors. The HOME (Home Owners' Mortgage Enterprise) program combines a RTC to deal with toxic assets, a HOLC to reduce homeowers' debt, and a RFC to recapitalize viable banks.

No support for toxic assets!!

Within an hour of the Mitchell announcement today, J Street hit my box with a Thank You Mr. President" email

I looked to see where MJ was

Asleep at the switch?

Will his lies, arrogance, sense of entitlement, undercut the sense that Obama's stimulus efforts aren't just for the insiders?

What else are you going to say about Treasury Secretary nominee Tim Geithner's laughable claim that TurboTax software errors caused him to miss paying more than $30,000 in FICA taxes he should have?

First, TurboTax is a simple program, and very much GIGO driven. If Geithner input garbage, whose fault is that?

And, the lie is so transparent, to boot. For 'winger blogs, this baby was far easier to check than claims that Bush National Guard documents aired by Dan Rather were possibly typed on a computer rather than a typewriter or early word processor. And, they've blown it out of the water.

So, too, did TurboTax maker Intuit.

Besides, the "Turbo Tax ate my tax preparation" excuse ignores the two years Geithner had a preparer due his taxes. The only way Geithner got those years wrong was if he lied to his preparer about being considered self-employed, despite the IMF telling him he was considered self-employed for tax purposes.

Beyond that level of bald-faced transparency in a lie, to me, there's often a grain or two of arrogance. It's as if Geithner is nonverbally telling Congress, "Yeah, I lied. But, I'm the indispensable man, so, what are you going to do about it?"

The country's top financial man, including being the ultimate boss of the IRS, skipped paying part of his taxes for years. That's bad enough. Now, he's lying about why he did it.

Let's let San Francisco Chronicle columnist Kathleen Pender have a few words on the importance of this all:

 I believe that hiring a man who failed to do his taxes right will set a terrible example. Our tax system is built on the premise of pay when due, not pay when caught.

As for people who say we can't afford to do without a Treasury Secretary right now, I counter:
1. Obama knew all this a month ago or more; he could  have nominated somebody else;
2. If you accept that argument, you're accepting Geithner's "indispensible man" arrogance;
3. We can't afford to do WITH Tim Geithner running the Treasury;
4. Obama's "common man" popularity runs SERIOUS risk of early trouble, re the stimulus plan, more TARP bailout, etc., if a "one set of laws for me, another for  you" guy  is running the show.
5. Obama's appearance of fallibility grows the longer he stays with Geithner.
That said, as I noted, nobody forced Obama to stay with Geithner after Obama's vetting team first became aware of the problem.

Instead, unless he changes his mind, President Obama is determined to inflict a serial liar upon the United States as chief point man for as much as $1 trillion of economic stimulus work. Unfortunately, at least one "yes" vote on the Senate Finance Committee bought into the "indispensable man" argument.

And, given the new report that Caroline Kennedy withdrew her Senate seat seeking because of her own tax and housekeeper problem, this is not a mild matter.

Updated, per a TPM post, and first commenters here:

If Obama REALLY wanted change at the Treasury, he would have excluded anybody with any of the following taints:
1. Worked for Goldman Sachs.
2. Works for Citigroup.
3. Worked for Larry Summers.
4. Worked for Robert Rubin.
5. Worked for the NY Fed.
6. Worked for The Fed.
7. Taught econ at either Chicago or Stanford.

That's just for starters.

Meanwhile, TPM reporter Elana Schor, whether on her own or "carrying water," is trying to compare a relatively minor donor misfiling by the political action committee of Sen. Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, and the attempt is almost as laughable as Geithner's own laughable lies, but not surprising.

Here's why it's laughable:
1. Apples and oranges, comparing this with Geithner.
2. The fact that Schor, or the webmaster or whomever, said "go look for it yourself" rather than posting the actual PDF, indicates its small taters what Grassley's PAC did.
3. It was Grassley's PAC; we don't know if he knew anything about it.
4. It was, apparently, a one-off deal, not four years of malfeasance.

I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you that this is somehow supposed to make Geithner look better, or not so bad. I'm sure this will be a MSLB talking point; Steve Benen has already linked it at Washington Monthly.

And, if Ms. Schor wants to report on something related to this issue, why didn't she contact Intuit, for starters? Or a CPA? And do some reporting on Geithner's claims?

And, there's more YET to think about.

Cabinet nominees are coached and prepped for their confirmation hearings. Don't tell me the "TurboTax defense" came out of nowhere. Why doesn't Ms. Schor start asking around about that, too?

I really liked Gibbs on the campaign trail, one of the few Obama spokespersons who actually could dish it out.  However, I'd only give him a C+ on his first press conference today.  He obviously weaseled out of several questions and obfuscated unnecessarily on a few others.

Memo to Gibbs:  If you don't know the answer, say so and move on.  Blathering just makes you look like one of Bush's lackeys.  For example:  admit that you should have allowed the second swearing in to be filmed and move on.  Admit that the Raytheon lobbyist appointment does present a problem and move on.  Do not obfuscate when asked about Gitmo leftovers.  Say the commission will report back and that until they do, you have nothing further to say on it. 

Respond to rhetorical questions (which are most of them anyway) with something like "Really???, huh, well, we don't see it that way".  Just because a reporter asks a question doesn't mean it is legitimate.  (In response to the Faux News Reporter:  "Yes. We have no intention of torturing Osama Bin Laden if we capture him".)    You looked like you were actually apologizing for the "No Torture Policy".  President Obama and the United States Government do not have to apologize for complying with the Geneva Conventions. 

If you stick to facts, stand firmly behind principle, admit obvious mistakes, and say "I don't know" when you obviously don't know or care, you'll do yourself and your boss and the country a big favor. 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up for her first day on the job in Foggy Bottom. She made a big hit with her flock. Her boss, Barack Obama - the POTUS, and the new Veep, Joe Biden, are not taking very long to come and check up on her. They are visiting the State Department this afternoon. Their second day on their jobs focuses of Diplomacy and Development, not Defense. Like all of the brand new administration's initial acts, it makes a statement about priorities.  Our two new diplomats to the Middle East, George Mitchell and Richard Holbrook were formally announced.  And President Obama made his first significant statements on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, tough, balanced and even handed.  Mitchell will be the Peace Envoy for the Middle East.  Holbrook's role will be to coordinate all the diplomatic and aid efforts for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

The Constitution is being dusted off . Gitmo is going to close within a year; it began yesterday with an executive order and the suspension of trials. International crises will be seen through different eyes from now on. (HT to CQ Behind the Lines). Memeorandum headlines that President Obama is also going to shut down the CIA prisons, known as "black sites."  And a special high-level panel of administration officials will take some time to determine the statuses of the detainees, and how to proceed with each category of those now held.

The military will be making adjustments to its new Commander In Chief. The Army is reviewing its weapons systems. President Obama is also having to adjust -- rapidly, to the foreign policy issues on the U.S. front burner, Gaza, for example. But his team is beginning to take hold of the reins of government. And just in time, it is:

********** Middle East & Military Round-up **********

Israel --

Buzz Flash: "Doctor's raw pain shakes Israelis*"(1/21/09)

Buzz Flash: "Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis*" (1/20/09)

Common Dreams: "Israeli FM confronted at National Press Club*" (1/19/09)

Buzz Flash: "Israel to keep tight grip on Gaza reconstruction*" (1/19/09)

Think Progress: "Israel prepares post-war battle for public opinion*" (1/18/09)

Informed Comment: " Israel Should Stop the War and Let US Enjoy the Inauguration*" (1/17/09)

Alternet: "Why Did Congress Shamelessly Pander to Israel?*"(1/17/09)

truthdig: "Who's in Charge -- Obama, the Pentagon or Israel?*" (1/15/09)

Gaza --

Informed Comment: "They even killed the cats*" (1/20/09)

Buzz Flash: "Gaza Hospital, Tons of Food, Medicine Set Ablaze*" (1/16/09)

truthout: "Israeli Forces Shell UN Headquarters in Gaza*" (1/15/09)

Iraq and Iran --

Yahoo! News: "Iraqi guards said to throw party for shoe-thrower*" (1/16/09)
Washington Post: "Iran Using Fronts to Get Bomb Parts From U.S.#" (1/11/09) To quote:

Despite multiple attempts by the Bush administration to halt illegal imports -- including sanctions against several Dubai-based Iranian front companies in 2006 -- the technology pipeline to Tehran is flowing at an even faster pace. In some cases, Iran simply opened new front companies and shifted its operations from Dubai to farther east in Asia, the officials said.

More on the Military --

Buzz Flash: "How to Sell 'Ethical Warfare' *" (1/18/09)

truthout: " 'War on Terror' Was Wrong*" (1/15/09)

truthout: "Future Shock at the Army Science Conference: Eco-Explosives, a Bleeding BEAR, and the Armani-Clad Super Soldier*" (1/15/09)

Memeorandum: "Top Officer Urges Limit on Mission of Military" from NYT's Thom Shanker. (1/13/09)

BuzzFlash: "Army Suicides Rise as Time Spent in Combat Rises*" (1/12/09)

ProPublica: "Quick Picks -- Friendly Fire . . . " (1/15/09) To quote:

Today, Salon questions the Army's statistics on friendly fire deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army cites improved technology to explain the shockingly low rate compared to other wars, but an extensive Salon investigation earlier this year suggests an Army cover-up. Army responds See Army spokesman John P. Boyce, Jr.'s response to ProPublica here.

Hat Tip Key: Regular contributors of links to leads are "betmo*" and Jon#.

(Cross-posted t The Reaction.)

My "creativity and dreaming" post today is at Making Good Mondays.

Why is it that so many people with more money than God have a seeming inability to pay their fair share of taxes? It's almost as if when your bank balance reaches a certain level, the integrity portion of your brain just goes away!

Be it CEO's, politicians or just plain folks, money seems to have a corrupting influence on many people's morals. The old saying is "money is the root of all evil." I always thought it was more like the "lack of money was the root of all evil." Now I'm thinking I was wrong.

The New York Times is now reporting that Caroline Kennedy has "housekeeper" tax problems. This seems to be a big problem and why? Let's assume for the sake of discussion she's paying her housekeeper $150K (and what are the chances of that?) we're talking no more than $15K in taxes...Is that REALLY such a huge amount of money for her?

Even if this particular story turns out to be untrue, there seem to be more and more stories about the rich avoiding taxes, and I just don't get it.

I'm trying to figure out why this is news to anyone. It has been
my belief that all used car sales are Ponzi schemes.

U.S. regulators sued a used-car
salesman from West Texas for touting a
$45 million hedge fund that they said
was actually a Ponzi scheme.

Rod Cameron Stringer misappropriated
millions of dollars from investors
since 2001, the Securities and Exchange
Commission said in a federal lawsuit
filed in Lubbock, Texas. The resident
of Lamesa, 60 miles south of Lubbock,
said he generated annual profits as
high as 61 percent, according to the
suit.

One would think that a used car salesman would be good
enough at this not to get caught.

C

MSNBC is looking to add to their nightly lineup of Chris Matthew's Hardball, Keith Olberman's Countdown and Rachel Maddow's show.  The following are my top choices for commentators:

Norah O'Donnell - she's got an international affairs degree and well known already
Ronald Reagan Jr - Well known, likable and he's an Independent
Stephan Colbert - add a little humor to the interviews
Eugene Robinson - well known and liked - trusted

MSNBC is looking to add to their nightly lineup of Chris Matthew's Hardball, Keith Olberman's Countdown and Rachel Maddow's show.  The following are my top choices for commentators:

Norah O'Donnell - she's got an international affairs degree and well known already
Ronald Reagan Jr - Well known, likable and he's an Independent
Stephan Colbert - add a little humor to the interviews
Eugene Robinson - well known and liked - trusted

 

By Nezua Media Consortium Blogger

Welcome to the new White House administration, in which we move forward with purpose. On President Obama's very first day in office, immigrants and allies marched on ICE headquarters to signify their for change. Racewire reports that yesterday, "hundreds gathered in DC, a day after inaugurating our new president, to demand A New Day for Immigration." George W. Bush waved goodbye by commuting the sentences of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two former border guards who shot a man trying to escape arrest and then tried to cover their deed up. Bush claimed Ramos and Compean had "suffered enough" after serving a fifth of their sentence and set them free, though he did not pardon them. Air America reports on the controversial decision in Bush Commutes Border Agent Sentences (video).
I understand Bush's reasoning for mercy. But I dare say that the only way you'll see two Chicanos set free so dramatically is if they shoot a Mexican national. And a note: the victim was not an immigrant, as implied with articles that call him an "illegal alien," but a smuggler. They are not the same thing. But never mind my cynical humor at a time like this. Let's take a lesson from a Salvadoran immigrant, whose words about the new administration sparkle with beauty and optimism in New America Media's Immigrant Worker at Latino Inaugural Ball Shares Hopes for Obama Era:

Maria Perez speaks little English. For more than 20 years now, she has worked as a cleaner at Union Station [in Washington, DC], six days a week, earning slightly more than the minimum wage. She is proud to be among the millions of Latinos who voted for Barack Obama and helped to make him the 44th U.S. president. [...] "I am a Latino. My soul is a Latino, and I am happy I am support Barack," Perez said in broken English. "Tonight I like it. All people here is happy and beautiful."

Maria goes on to talk about specific issues such as health and education for her children, both areas that President Obama has pledged to devote attention to. Many people are aware of how false the stereotypes concerning the undocumented population can be. But some might be surprised by the tenacity and work ethic of Maria, or the inspiring story of Prerna, a friend and colleague of mine whose recent organizing accomplishments are chronicled in New America Media's Undocumented Students Raise Voices Online for DREAM Act.

Welcome to Web 2.0 undocumented student activism. Youth in the usually-somber waiting rooms of history are bustling with renewed enthusiasm and energy. Trapped in marginal status, ignored by the mainstream media, with their backs to the wall and everything to loose, undocumented youth are emerging as leaders in their own movement for passage of the DREAM Act.

Let me emphasize that: Anyone interested in the power of online organizing ought really read this article. And if you are interested in learning more about the DREAM Act, Change.org is a good place to get the specifics. Jim Hightower serves up a spirited and informative rant on the "charm" of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in Why The Homeland Security Department is so Beloved. Hightower defines DHS's charm as "swaggering lunacy" and reveals plans for a 40 ft. high wall in the middle of a "unique 1,000-acre preserve along the Rio Grande."

The most critical part of the wildlife habitat, and even the home of the preserve's manager, would be cut off by the wall, effectively destroying the park, which is home to two kinds of endangered wildcats and a rare palm forest.

Read on. It gets worse. I think we can agree that a 40 ft. tall fence is not going to fix the strained relationship between the US and Mexico. The Economic Populist veers from its normal reporting, alarmed by news of violence down south. In Trouble at the Mexican Border, we read about the possibility of Mexico as a failed state: "The violence, corruption and drug cartels are now so out of control in Mexico, analysts are saying, not only is Mexico one of the world's security threats but Mexico itself might collapse." The drug cartels are, by and large, the focus of these types of discussions. But we have to examine how government oppression, corruption and laws that do not serve the greater population create systemic problems for a society.

The United States is completely ignoring what is going on in Mexico but if one compares the daily beheading stories, murder, kidnapping and corruption....if one didn't know the story was about Mexico one would swear they were reading something about Iraq in 2003/2004 time frame.

I've been following news from Mexico for a few years now, and I agree that most US media ignores Mexico to our detriment. This is baffling to me because our cultures, our land, our labor, and our peoples are so intertwined as to be two parts of one whole. It is easy to forget this in the midst of much rigid talk of maps, borders, and walls. But reality is knocking at our door. President Obama has put Bush on notice. Change is at hand and a sizable portion of Obama's constituency has made their needs clear, as New America Media reports in Immigrant Activists March on ICE on Day After Inauguration.

The post-inaugural march is only a beginning. [...] Across the country, advocates plan for more actions, coordinated through an increasingly sophisticated communications network, to build a groundswell in favor of reform.

Good morning, America!

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.

It would seem that the two people who tried to make their
milk appear better than it was are going to be dealt with
rather harshly.

Two men have been given the death
penalty for their involvement in China's
contaminated milk scandal.

The former boss of the Sanlu dairy at
the centre of the scandal was given life
imprisonment.

They were among several sentences handed
down by the court in northern China,
where Sanlu is based.

The scandal, in which melamine was added
to raw milk to make it appear higher in
protein, led to the deaths of six babies
and made some 300,000 ill.

It led to product recalls across the
globe, and further damaged China's
reputation for producing safe and
reliable products, the BBC's Quentin
Sommerville in Beijing says.

At home, the scandal left parents
terrified and caused outrage across the
country, coming only four years after an
earlier milk powder scandal which left
13 babies dead, he adds.

Not sure if their punishment is appropriate but you have
to admit it is effective. Sometimes I feel that the way we
here in this country deal with such people is a bit too
lenient. And the ideal of hauling their respective rear ends
out of the fire to be the hight of cynicism.

C

Update: Thain Resigns From Bank of America

Media reports Thursday said former Merrill Lynch & Co. CEO John Thain has resigned from Bank of America Corp. following news that Merrill had moved up its yearend bonuses, paying them just before BofA’s government-brokered acquisition of Merrill was completed.

Executive compensation

Here are some numbers for the compensation received in 2006 by some of the folks who helped get us into our current mess:

-Bear Stearns: $34 million for CEO James Cayne. The acknowledged direct cost to the taxpayers from Bear’s demise so far is $2.7 billion; ten times that number may be a more reasonable assessment of the actual cost.

-Lehman Brothers: $27 million for CEO Richard Fuld. The financial freeze that followed the collapse of Lehman is seen by many as the key event that turned the recession of 2007-08 into the frightening freefall currently under way.

-Citigroup: $25 million for CEO Charles Prince. Citi’s stock price has since fallen from $50 a share to $3.50.

-Countrywide Financial: $43 million for CEO Angelo Mozilo. According to Ashcraft and Schuermann, Countrywide was at that time the nation’s leading issuer of subprime mortgage-backed securities and the third biggest originator of subprime mortgages.

That these individuals should have profited so richly from running their companies into the ground, and bringing the rest of us down with them, offends anyone’s sense of justice. But it also raises a profoundly important question from the perspective of economic efficiency, in that the above numbers constitute a prima facie case that there were powerful economic incentives for these individuals to make decisions that were in fact not in their companies’ or society’s best interest.

That the incentives for CEOs need not necessarily coincide with those of the shareholders is a well understood phenomenon that is a special case of what economists call the principal-agent problem. This arises in situations when an agent (in this case, the CEO) has better information about what is going on than the principals (in this case, the shareholders) who rely on the agent to perform a certain task. One way to try to cope with these problems of asymmetric information is to tie the agent’s compensation directly to performance.

….
My interest in this issue is not so much to exact revenge on those who created our current problems, but instead to ask, how can we change the incentives so that this kind of problem is not repeated again? And that in turn leads me to wonder, why limit the proposals above only to a handful of companies?

Comment:

Hourly worker here. I have lost a large sum of my retirement savings, my home value has fallen, I am not out of work yet but I went from 40+ hours to a forced 32 hours starting this week. I have not consumed more than I can afford, my only debt is my mortgage which is not subprine, and I am sure there are millions like me.

And just so the record is clear, many of us DO want “to exact revenge on those who created our current problems”! We want them hanged.

I ran across this from my seldom-updated TPM blog:

Bush says we're not heading for recession. Right.

You know, if George W. Bush says we're not headed into recession, it's time to update your resume.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080228/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_11

Man, did I hit that nail right on the head and bury it in the plank.  Left a dimple, too.

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

Revs. Lowery, Wright, and the Black Church

It was about 3:00 in the morning, and I was somewhere between browsing the Internet and dozing into never-never land when I read the following post from one of my more conservative White friends regarding his interpretation of Rev. Joseph Lowery's benediction at President Obama's inaugural:

"Please dear Lord, make those white pricks embrace what is right.
Amen"

Suddenly I was wide awake and laughing until tears came to my eyes. I was laughing harder than I'd laughed in years, because I knew exactly what, "Sawdust", the poster, was referring to. But I don't know whether it struck me so funny more because of Sawdust's good humored, but bottom-line take on Rev. Lowery's benediction, or more because of the seeming inability of a stately old war-horse to mask his past experience with White people even through, what I'm sure, was his deep appreciation for what they had helped to bring about.

But as funny as the situation seemed to me at the time, it also points back to an issue that needs to be clarified from the campaign. You see, while Rev. Lowery was actually being conciliatory, his words clearly demonstrated that Jeremiah Wright didn't exist in a vacuum. The fact is, with all the battles that Rev. Lowery has fought in his close to ninety years of life, if that old man really wanted to get loose up there during the inaugural, he undoubtedly could have made Jeremiah Wright sound like a Christian conservative. What much of America fails to understand is that in Lowery's day, Black people didn't just go to church to here the word of god, they also went there to vent, so through tradition, the hot and passionate sermons of a Jeremiah Wright are routine in the Black community.

The bitterness attendant to racism didn't just go in one direction. In Rev. Lowery's America, Blacks would go all week having to smile in the face of White people while being treated like a dogs, so what kind of preacher do you think was most popular and brought in the most money to the collection plate on Sunday? That's right-the one's who were most effective at draggin' the behavior of White folks through the mud-and back then, they had some real superstars in that art, and Rev. Joseph Lowery was one of the best.

Rev. Lowery was born Joseph Echols Lowery on Oct. 6, 1921. He's a Methodist minister and was the pastor of the Warren Street United Methodist Church in Mobile, Alabama from 1952 through 1961. When Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955, Lowery helped to lead the Montgomery bus boycott, and headed the Alabama Civil Affairs Association, which was dedicated to the desegregation of buses and public places. He, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., Founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and he served as its president between 1977 and 1997. Also, at the behest of Martin Luther King, Lowery headed the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, and was among the first five African Americans to be arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. during the Free South Africa Movement.

Now don't get me wrong, Black preachers like Rev. Lowery didn't just rant, rave and protest, they were quite dedicated to preaching the word of God, and they were also quite emphatic in discussing the virtue of loving thy neighbor. But in addition to that, they were both profoundly and prolifically eloquent when it came to graphically describing the "evils" of racist White behavior-they had to be, in order to be effective in organizing against it.

In that regard, Americans should ask themselves, where do they think Jesse and Al Sharpton learned their craft? When it came to preaching the evils of racist behavior, some of those old Black preachers could put Jesse, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright to shame, and all on the same Sunday morning and without bustin' one sweat bubble-and that old man that you saw up there giving that inaugural benediction was one of the best of them. In fact, he was so good at fighting and preaching the evils of racism that in Georgia, they have streets named after him.

But political campaigns are all about political positioning and sound bites, so Obama couldn't take the time to try to explain to the nature of the Black church to America. If he could have, he would have explained that Jeremiah Wright was just one of a community full of preachers that not only preached the word of God, but also the realities of being Black in America .

So when conservatives asked how Obama could sit up and listen to Rev. Wright spew hatred against America for twenty years, there was two answers to that question. The first is, Rev. Wright wasn't spewing hatred against America--he loves America--he was spewing reality. After all, Rev. Wright served this nation in both the United States Marine Corps, and the Navy, while Bush and Cheney did everything in their power to avoid any military service at all, and Cheney succeeded. And the second is, the only way that Obama could have avoided the realities of Rev. Wright's message in the Black community was to stop going to church altogether.

The fact is, preachers like Jeremiah Wright, and that stately old man that you saw up there at the inaugural, actually performed a public service by helping their congregations to vent their frustrations. If it weren't for preachers like them, there would have been a lot more violence coming out of the Black community, so the nation actually owe them a debt of gratitude. Yes, they deal in hyperbole, but if you closely examine that hyperbole, you'll find that it also contains, often painful, but unmitigated truth.

That said, I must also admit that Jeremiah Wright did crossed the line-but not in the way that many White folks think. Initially he was a political victim, because it wasn't his fault that political operatives dug up thirty seconds of hyperbole out of a lifetime of dedicated service. When Rev. Wright crossed the line was when he allowed his vanity to jeopardized the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans across this country, both Black and White, in order to pursue his ten minutes of fame.

But Rev. Lowery wasn't going to make that mistake. While he comes from a tradition of speaking his mind, he had worked too long and too hard for that moment, and probably recognized better than any of the millions of people watching and in attendance, the awesome significance and gravity of the moment.

But on the other hand, knowing that old Black preacher's background, in spite of how appreciative I know he was to all of the White people across this land who contributed to making his life's dream a reality, I was virtually certain that he had a second sermon in his pocket and at the ready, just in case Rick Warrne decided to act a fool.

That's what was funny.
   
Eric L. Wattree

wattree.blogspot.com
A moderate is one who embraces truth over ideology, and reason over conflict.

This is a "what if" post, not a defense of George W. Bush's record.

But clobber me if you're the kind that thinks I shouldn't be allowed to ponder out loud. Call me a troll, though a quick review of my posts will demonstrate my unwavering opposition to W's policies and my unwavering support for Barack Obama since before the day I joined this board.

Here's the thought experiment:

A. The following ARE true:

1. "Excluding the 19 hijackers, 2,974 people died in the attacks. Another 24 are missing and presumed dead." -- wikipedia entry on 9/11
2. Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed admitted he planned the attacks in a 2002 Al Jazeera interview prior to his capture, imprisonment and waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

B. IF all of the following are true:

1. Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed was suspected to have intimate details of other Al Qaeda operations that, if not stopped, could result in the deaths of several thousand Americans.
2. Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed refused to divulge details of these operations under normal interrogation methods.
3. Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, whereupon these operations were thwarted by law enforcement.

C. THEN (Remembering all the above are considered facts in this experiment):

Which choice should a U.S. president make?

1. Consent to the waterboarding of Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed
2. Risk the death of American lives on a scale approaching or surpassing the nearly 3,000 killed on 9/11

No arguing with the presumed facts. No changing the scenario. Just answer the question before you present an opinion.

Yesterday I tuned in to Marketplace on my NPR affiliate and caught the American Enterprise Institute's David Frum opining on Obama's economic plan. His mournful lament began as expected, but midway through the stanza on the evils of government spending he abruptly launched into improvisation.

Frum smartly identified -- drumroll, please -- wage stagnation as one of our chief economic ills. To me, this seemed akin to playing Epistrophy at a Salieri concert, or uttering "Voldemort" before the Hogwarts assembly. But my man was just getting warmed up.

Emboldened, Frum then chided Republicans for not leavening their obstructionism with substantive ideas. For example's sake, he added, he'd proffer a few of his own. 

I was intrigued. But just momentarily.

For at this point the soloist terminated his renegade riff and returned to the AEI songbook. His "ideas" were not substantive at all, but musty, dusty conservative standards. Deport all the immigrants and give those low-wage jobs back to the Americans that deserve them. Drive down health care premiums by attacking regulation, the medical insurance industry's version of irritable bowel syndrome.

Aside from the fact that these "novel ideas" would do little to address wage stagnation, much less expand access to affordable health care, Frum didn't finish where he should have started -- with the total inability the previous administration and its economic policy to create jobs.

Even according to (gasp) the Wall Street Journal, the Bush administration's performance on this score is among the lamest on record. Only 3 million net jobs were created during the Bush years. This is just a fraction of the 23 million jobs created during the Clinton administration. At 2.3 percent, payroll expansion was equally abysmal.

Yes, David. Government was the problem. Republicans, who with few exceptions haven't been real adept at increasing employment, tried to swap easy credit for good jobs and sustainable incomes. Result? Endemic underemployment, and household debt  that is now 130 percent of income.

The Bush tax cuts made another run at trickle-down economics. But the money didn't trickle down, it trickled up. Result? Spurning the old-fashioned notion of investing money to create economic value, wealthy money managers and unregulated investment banks  instead tried to make money out of money.

There has to be a better way.

To me, one of the more memorable lines in what I thought was a powerful and compelling inaugural address was this: "The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous."

Words to the wise. It's about jobs, stupid.