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.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
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; corporate profits are setting records."
"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; corporate profits are setting records."
Monday, January 24, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
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?
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 learned to talk.
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 learned to talk.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
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:
"John 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 Joe Scarborough, former congressman and current MSNBC host. Congressional sources say that Boehner likes to knock off early, and that seems to square with his record, which reveals a real passion — for the links. He once went on 180 junkets in six years, most of them golf trips, and reportedly copped to playing 100 rounds a year at a time when he was collecting a six-figure salary, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, to serve in Congress. His political action committee spent almost $83,000 on golf events in 2009, and over the past 18 months he has run up a $67,000 tab at the Ritz-Carlton golf resort in Naples, Florida. He flew on a corporate jet 45 times between 2000 and 2007, and took at least 41 other corporate-sponsored trips in the past decade."
"Then, in the middle of the Bush years, the man who got into office thanks to Buz Lukens' child-groping was enmeshed in his own sex scandal involving minors. When the news broke in September 2006 that Rep. Mark Foley, a Republican from Florida, had been sending sexually suggestive e-mails to a 16-year-old male page, it turned out that Boehner had been sitting on the information for months. Nancy Pelosi called for an immediate investigation into the Foley scandal, but Boehner blocked the resolution. Boehner later claimed that he had told then-Speaker Dennis Hastert about the Foley incident as soon as he found out — and promptly retracted his own alibi. The ensuing scandal nearly toppled Hastert, but Boehner survived mostly unscathed."
"The Troubled Asset Relief Program — the $700 billion bailout of the absurdly irresponsible megabanks that got us into the financial crisis — is a classic example of what Boehner is all about, expressing perfectly his tenuous position vis-à-vis the hard-line anti-spending Tea Party base that thrust him into power. Boehner, who over the course of his political career has collected nearly $4 million from the finance and insurance sectors, backed TARP from the start, summoning his full rhetorical arsenal to argue for the bill."
"Of all the longtime Republican Beltway hacks who are now scrambling to find ways to throw enough sunshine on the Tea Party mob to keep their jobs, Boehner has been the most hilariously transparent. In yet another scene straight out of a screwball comedy — maybe it was an early hommage to the now-departed Leslie Nielsen — Boehner in November 2009 stood up in front of a crowd of Tea Partiers who had gathered to protest the upcoming Obamacare vote, and tried to stroke his audience by holding up a copy of the Constitution. Professing his love for the sacred document, Boehner pledged to "stand here with our Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident.'" The crowd was silent. Boehner had confused the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence."
"John 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 Joe Scarborough, former congressman and current MSNBC host. Congressional sources say that Boehner likes to knock off early, and that seems to square with his record, which reveals a real passion — for the links. He once went on 180 junkets in six years, most of them golf trips, and reportedly copped to playing 100 rounds a year at a time when he was collecting a six-figure salary, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, to serve in Congress. His political action committee spent almost $83,000 on golf events in 2009, and over the past 18 months he has run up a $67,000 tab at the Ritz-Carlton golf resort in Naples, Florida. He flew on a corporate jet 45 times between 2000 and 2007, and took at least 41 other corporate-sponsored trips in the past decade."
"Then, in the middle of the Bush years, the man who got into office thanks to Buz Lukens' child-groping was enmeshed in his own sex scandal involving minors. When the news broke in September 2006 that Rep. Mark Foley, a Republican from Florida, had been sending sexually suggestive e-mails to a 16-year-old male page, it turned out that Boehner had been sitting on the information for months. Nancy Pelosi called for an immediate investigation into the Foley scandal, but Boehner blocked the resolution. Boehner later claimed that he had told then-Speaker Dennis Hastert about the Foley incident as soon as he found out — and promptly retracted his own alibi. The ensuing scandal nearly toppled Hastert, but Boehner survived mostly unscathed."
"The Troubled Asset Relief Program — the $700 billion bailout of the absurdly irresponsible megabanks that got us into the financial crisis — is a classic example of what Boehner is all about, expressing perfectly his tenuous position vis-à-vis the hard-line anti-spending Tea Party base that thrust him into power. Boehner, who over the course of his political career has collected nearly $4 million from the finance and insurance sectors, backed TARP from the start, summoning his full rhetorical arsenal to argue for the bill."
"Of all the longtime Republican Beltway hacks who are now scrambling to find ways to throw enough sunshine on the Tea Party mob to keep their jobs, Boehner has been the most hilariously transparent. In yet another scene straight out of a screwball comedy — maybe it was an early hommage to the now-departed Leslie Nielsen — Boehner in November 2009 stood up in front of a crowd of Tea Partiers who had gathered to protest the upcoming Obamacare vote, and tried to stroke his audience by holding up a copy of the Constitution. Professing his love for the sacred document, Boehner pledged to "stand here with our Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident.'" The crowd was silent. Boehner had confused the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence."
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 hero lurched “from excessive tax cuts to corrective tax increases disguised as tax reform” and “submitted eight unbalanced budgets to Congress in succession.” Reagan made no promise whatsoever of a balanced budget in the document that codified Reaganomics, his White House’s 281-page message to Congress in February 1981. The historian Gil Troy has calculated that spending on entitlement programs more than doubled on Reagan’s watch. America slid into debtor-nation status, and Americans “went from owing 16 cents for every dollar in national income in 1981” to owing 44 cents per dollar in 1988.
In a particularly instructive passage, Cannon tells of Reagan’s habit of endlessly recycling an inspirational World War II anecdote that, as the press discovered, was a movie-spawned fiction. His White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, was only half-joking when he deflected critics with the old saw “if you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”
Reagan never backed off bashing the Democrats and the 30-year Great Society “binge” for the fiscal woes of his America. Reagan got away with it because he never sounded like a whiner, and because he paired his invective with an optimism that bleached out any pettiness. A former Democrat, after all, he wisely chose F.D.R. as his political model.
Among many of these memories and reminders, Rich makes the point that "Obama is less adept at keeping his messages simple, consistent and crystal-clear".
It has surprised me how Obama's gift for communication and speechifying that drew so many of us to him in 2008 are now turned off by how unable he is to be entrance us with clarity and forthrightness on the issues of his current Presidency, such as health care, fighting against tax cuts for millionnaires, creating a bill in support of 9/11 first-responders and on and on. It is possible to be supportive and a leader on issues without demonizing the opposition, which sometimes seems to be his larger goal - to avoid upsetting anyone.
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 hero lurched “from excessive tax cuts to corrective tax increases disguised as tax reform” and “submitted eight unbalanced budgets to Congress in succession.” Reagan made no promise whatsoever of a balanced budget in the document that codified Reaganomics, his White House’s 281-page message to Congress in February 1981. The historian Gil Troy has calculated that spending on entitlement programs more than doubled on Reagan’s watch. America slid into debtor-nation status, and Americans “went from owing 16 cents for every dollar in national income in 1981” to owing 44 cents per dollar in 1988.
In a particularly instructive passage, Cannon tells of Reagan’s habit of endlessly recycling an inspirational World War II anecdote that, as the press discovered, was a movie-spawned fiction. His White House spokesman, Larry Speakes, was only half-joking when he deflected critics with the old saw “if you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”
Reagan never backed off bashing the Democrats and the 30-year Great Society “binge” for the fiscal woes of his America. Reagan got away with it because he never sounded like a whiner, and because he paired his invective with an optimism that bleached out any pettiness. A former Democrat, after all, he wisely chose F.D.R. as his political model.
Among many of these memories and reminders, Rich makes the point that "Obama is less adept at keeping his messages simple, consistent and crystal-clear".
It has surprised me how Obama's gift for communication and speechifying that drew so many of us to him in 2008 are now turned off by how unable he is to be entrance us with clarity and forthrightness on the issues of his current Presidency, such as health care, fighting against tax cuts for millionnaires, creating a bill in support of 9/11 first-responders and on and on. It is possible to be supportive and a leader on issues without demonizing the opposition, which sometimes seems to be his larger goal - to avoid upsetting anyone.
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