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Showing posts from January, 2011

Another Train Wreck from the fiscally disastrous Democratic Party. Wait, what?

Dow at 12,000: Obama must really be a socialist now by Jed Lewison (Dailykos.com) Wed Jan 26, 2011 at 08:48:03 AM PST Remember when conservatives (yes, including you Joe Scarborough!) blamed President Obama for crashing the stock market, even though he'd only been president for about two months? Well, now, two years later, the Dow Jones has touched on 12,000 for the first time since the Bush-Republican recession.For those of you keeping score at home, the Dow closed at 7,949 on Bush's last day in office. That means it's gone up 50% since President Obama's inauguration.Clearly, that's socialism run amok...liberal thugism on the loose. Oh, for capitalism's good old days when Bush and the GOP steered it straight to the edge of oblivion.

I don't JUST like this post b/c I like to keep saying "Obamanomics" over and over, but it helps

From Sunday's NYT: "There is a compelling case that Obamanomics has produced results. An economy that was shrinking in size and bleeding more than 700,000 jobs a month is now growing at 2.6 percent and added 1.1 million jobs last year. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, known as the stimulus, produced or saved at least 1.9 million jobs and as many as 4.7 million last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The much-derided Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, started by George W. Bush and continued by Obama, stabilized the financial sector, and the big banks have repaid the money with interest. According to a Treasury Department report sent to Congress this month, TARP will cost taxpayers $28 billion instead of the $700 billion originally set aside. The nearly $80 billion bailout of the auto industry may cost taxpayers only $15 billion, as the restructured General Motors and Chrysler come back to life with strong sales. The stock market has surged; co

Of wrath and rhetoric

I actually wrote most of this letter, and Andrea was kind enough to send it in. http://www.dailylocal.com/articles/2011/01/24/opinion/srv0000010696730.txt A lot of supportive comments, which is nice to see, tho the usual right wing rhetoric-spewers are well represented by the usual 2-3 people.

So, I guess I'll just let things go at their own pace after all

I can remember with some shame that when I was a teenager, I sort of looked forward to the older generation dying off, since they represented so much that was wrong with the world. The "establishment" as we hippie-types called it. The racist, corporate, staid, stuck in their ways old white guys who would never be seen outside their house without a white shirt and tie and leather shoes, and presumably pants as well. I was sure that once they were gone, all us open-minded, progressive-thinking, tolerant kids would change the world completely for the better. And now that I'm of that same age that I scorned and now that I represent the racist, corporate, staid, stuck in their ways old white guys, well, I pretty much still feel that way. Thing is though, if we good guys grew up to be the bad guys, then why bother rooting for us old guys to go?

life and death and fear and joy

There are a lot of things we have been told will happen to us as we get older. There are the obvious physical things, up to and including less control of one's tongue in saying out loud things that were probably better left unsaid. Well, come to think of it, I've always had that problem, to the great detriment of me and my friends and co-workers. But there are some things we weren't told about, or maybe that's because I'm the only one experiencing it. One example is that for the first 54 or so years of my life, I have feared death to varying degrees. And I guess I still do. But more and more I find myself not fearing death as much as I am enjoying life, and looking forward to the rest of it and all that has yet to happen to me and my awesome family. Of course, if I had a choice, I'd pretty much freeze time where we are, but I also realize that I might've said the exact same thing any of the past, well, 54 years. OK, maybe not the first 2, but once I learne

In HIgh School we used to make boner jokes, now the joke is Boehner

Matt Taibbi has a way with words that makes me gasp, makes me chortle, makes my jaw drop, like at sentences like this one: " J ohn Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich." But equally amazing is his grasp and research of facts like these: "In the Nineties, Boehner started weekly meetings with a group of lobbyists, originally known as "The Thursday Group," that helped him develop close ties to companies like Citigroup, MillerCoors, UPS, Goldman Sachs, Google and R.J. Reynolds. And what does Boehner do with these lobbyists? Well, one thing we know he does is play golf — shitloads and shitloads of golf, which he apparently likes a lot more than, well, working. "Lazy" is how one former congressional aide describes Boehner's work ethic. "Not the hardest worker," said J
These are excerpt's from this week's Frank Rich's NYT column and it reminds me of many of the myths and forgotten facts of the Reagan presidency: As the do-something lame-duck Congress’s triumphs were toted up, the White House pointedly floated the news that the president was meeting with Reagan administration veterans (David Gergen, Ken Duberstein) and taking Lou Cannon’s authoritative biography “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime” on vacation. Reagan, of course, was also pummeled (though a bit less so) in his maiden midterms of 1982, then carried 49 states in his 1984 re-election landslide. In January 1983, Reagan’s approval rating was much worse than Obama’s — 35 percent. So was the unemployment rate (10.4 percent vs. our current 9.4 percent) as Americans struggled to recover from what was then the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The present-day radicals donning Reagan drag, led by Sarah Palin, seem not to know, as Cannon writes, that their

But the rest of their budget was apparently directed to improving the quality of their Vodka, so they did have that going for them

Change the word Pentagon to Kremlin and Chinese to American below, and go back 20 years to what bcame of the USSR with all their emphasis on a military buildup, and you'll understand why this story concerns me: BEIJING — The Pentagon is stepping up investments in a range of weapons, jet fighters and technology in response to the Chinese military buildup in the Pacific, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Saturday on the eve of his visit to Beijing. Despite billions of dollars in proposed Pentagon budget cuts that Mr. Gates announced this past week, he said that the Chinese development of its first radar-evading fighter jet, as well as an antiship ballistic missile that could hit American aircraft carriers, had persuaded him to make improvements in American weaponry a priority.

Kind of interesting, but who is this dude named Jaime?

The comments at the end never fail to disappoint, but I'm surprised by how few there are this time. http://www.dailylocal.com/articles/2011/01/10/opinion/srv0000010545425.txt

Can't wait to see how Fox spins this one

From Forbes...yes, THAT Forbes magazine: More Small Businesses Offering Health Care To Employees Thanks To Obamacare Jan. 6 2011 By RICK UNGAR The first statistics are coming in and, to the surprise of a great many, Obamacare might just be working to bring health care to working Americans precisely as promised. The major health insurance companies around the country are reporting a significant increase in small businesses offering health care benefits to their employees. Why? Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working. We certainly did not expect to see this in this economy,” said Gary Claxton, who oversees an annual survey of employer health plans for the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. “It’s surprising.” How significant is the impact? While we won’t have full national numbers until small businesses file their 2010 tax returns this April, the ane

Change, I can believe in. This pick, I can't.

I try to look at things the Dems do and say, Well, if the R's had done that, we on the left would be really upset. And so we have this announcement today: " January 6, 2011 Business Background Defines Chief of StaffBy ERIC LIPTON WASHINGTON — He is a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, where he is paid as much as $5 million a year and supervises the Washington lobbying efforts of the nation’s second-largest bank. He also serves on the board of directors at Boeing, the giant military contractor, and Abbott Laboratories, the global drug company, which has billions of dollars at stake in the overhaul of the health care system. He has been a lawyer in private practice, a bank president, a telecommunications company executive, a political strategist, a fund-raiser and campaign chief, a lobbyist for foreign corporations (he advocated on tax matters for Nestlé and a Canadian petroleum company) a nd now William M. Daley, the son and brother of Chicago mayors and a behind-the-s

Next we'll discuss 4:3 vs 16:9

If you were explaining Television to someone for the first time and told them to watch channel 17 or 29, how would you feel explaining that they can't actually watch either of those channels on those channels? And after spending an hour or so last nght trying to figure out how to optimize the performance on my new set (does anyone call it a TV "set" anymore?), I find myself longing for the days when the biggest adjustment was to the Horizontal Hold.

ESP'n

New York Times: January 5, 2011 Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage By BENEDICT CAREY One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events. The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn. When asked for their comments on how badly some of their peers had reacted, the researchers replied, "We knew they'd say that."

Friend Kristof speaketh my mind

This is such a great article that I want to post the whole thing here, something i rarely do: December 25, 2010 The Big (Military) Taboo By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF We face wrenching budget cutting in the years ahead, but there’s one huge area of government spending that Democrats and Republicans alike have so far treated as sacrosanct. It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo. A few facts: • The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China. • The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade? • The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” cleara

shocking they would disappoint us like this

From Washinton Monthly, with comments in boldface following from today's Dailykos.com: When House Republican leaders unveiled their Pledge to America in September, it included a pretty striking promise to voters -- if elected, the GOP majority would "roll back government spending" by "at least $100 billion in the first year alone." [...] Monday, Republicans started slowly backing away from their $100 billion commitment. Yesterday, the pledge was effectively thrown out the window. Many people knowledgeable about the federal budget said House Republicans could not keep their campaign promise to cut $100 billion from domestic spending in a single year. Now it appears that Republicans agree. Now aides say that the $100 billion figure was hypothetical, and that the objective is to get annual spending for programs other than those for the military, veterans and domestic security back to the levels of 2008, before Democrats approved stimulus spending to end

Big on News Items today

News Item: Michele Bachmann Reportedly Weighing 2012 Presidential Run Can you imagine the ratings they'd get for Presidential Debates involving her and Sarah Palin? They should put it on pay-per-view - I'd pay! Or make it a game show where the viewers have to try to keep a straight face for as long as possible! Where can I send a donation to help pay for her filing fees?

I'm going to make you learn this...so I can understand how it works

From today's Huffington Post: "Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) seems to be a big fan of constitutional history, even if his own legislative history hasn't always lived up to that document. But an appearance on "The Last Word" with Lawrence O'Donnell may have shown that such dedication was lacking in the past. On Tuesday, Goodlatte came on the program to discuss his symbolic reading, and also played up the fact that the "we have, as a part of our new rules of the House, a requirement that all bills introduced in the Congress state the basis in the Constitution -- the section of the Constitution -- upon which that introducer of the bill relies in introducing it." O'Donnell asked Goodlatte for the current Supreme Court justice who "most reflects" his own reading of the Constitution. After Goodlatte heaped praise on Antonin Scalia and indicated that legislation should stick within the framework of the Constitution, O'Donnell pointed out t

Other than those things, we're just thrilled though

When the Obama insiders seem confused as to why we on the Left are so upset with him, maybe no example is easier to show why than this simple display of, well, pussy-ness: "The Obama administration, reversing course, will revise a Medicare regulation to delete references to end-of-life planning as part of the annual physical examinations covered under the new health care law, administration officials said Tuesday." Hard to find many examples where the expression "Grow a pair, willya?!" is more appropriate, unless maybe it was tax cuts for the rich...or a public option...or carbon taxes...or getting the hell out of Afghanistan...or...

And that's the way it's going to be from now on - no exceptions! Well, except this one time.

News Item from the NYT today: Representative John A. Boehner, who on Wednesday will be sworn in as the new speaker, has made serious alterations in the rules. Members will vote on Wednesday on changes that ostensibly increase the transparency of lawmaking, but also consolidate Republican power over the budget process. Mr. Boehner seeks to do away with large omnibus spending bills, preferring to break them into smaller bills, and to allow for more amendments on bills generally, and more extensive debate. Members offering bills for new programs will have to explain how they will pay for them, not by raising new revenues but by finding other ways to cut costs. Each bill introduced will also have to cite the specific constitutional authority for its contents. For the first time under the House rules, all bills will be required to be placed online. Committees will post their rules and their votes, as well as information about testifying witnesses in an effort to make public any

Economy to USA: "I resolve to have a great year!'

In some ways, this is a lame initial entry for a new year, especially after so few postings lately, but in some ways it's perfect too. From Yahoo News today: "All positive indicators: • A key index of activity at manufacturing firms showed that in December, America's factories expanded faster than in any month since May. Within that index, new orders and production were also up, suggesting that future months could see continuing rises. • A Commerce Department report showed that construction spending rose by more than expected in November -- the third straight month that it has risen. The construction industry was hit hard by the housing bust but now appears to be on the rebound. • New jobless claims recently fell to their lowest weekly level since 2008. • And the Dow Jones, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 indexes all rose yesterday, the first trading day of the new year, continuing strong gains from late 2010." And from the Daily Local: INDICATOR: December Supply M