Month: October 2010

Obama, Bush: What’s the Diff?

By 47 to 45 percent, Americans say Obama is a better president than George W. Bush. But that two point margin is down from a 23 point advantage one year ago.

Wow.

“But that doesn’t mean that Americans regret their decision to put Obama in the White House in 2008. By a 50 to 42 percent margin, the public says that Obama has done a better job than Sen. John McCain would have done if he had won. And by a 10-point margin, Americans also say that Joe Biden has done a better job than Sarah Palin would have done as vice president,” adds Holland.

Well, I guess there’s that. Of course, we also know that only 60% of Americans can correctly identify Biden as the Vice President. Which means Team Obama is in good graces with about half the folks that have any idea who’s actually serving. Go Democrats!

Obama, Bush: What’s the Diff?

What is difficult to overlook is her record of being totally ineffective as a four-term assemblywomen, her inability or unwillingness to work with others, even within her own party, and her extreme positions on issues such as Medicare, social security, education, veterans affairs and many others.

Nevada Senate Minority Leader Bill Raggio ®, in his endorsement of Harry Reid over Sharron Angle. Curious. Honestly don’t know if this helps or hurts a candidate such as Angle. I know Reid can’t mind it, though.

Will the “Real” McCain Please Stand Up?

…the McCain phenomenon has always baffled me. Even back in the glory days of the Straight Talk Express he seemed like a consummate phony to me, sucking up to reporters not because he was being unusually candid, but because it seemed like a good strategy to beat a well-financed guy who was running ahead of him. He’s always been nasty, he’s always been hot tempered, he’s always looked out for number one, and he’s always been willing to take whatever position was convenient at the time.

Yep. The media enjoyed the perception of total access, and thus created the myth of the maverick. As David Foster Wallace showed us (but whose text no longer appears to be online), the truth of “Bullshit 1” was always out there, they just refused to mention it. Too busy talking about Al Gore being told to wear un-American four button suits while discovering the Love Canal and then lying about these and other entirely media-created falsehoods.

Will the “Real” McCain Please Stand Up?

Consider the rationale driving these who object to real trials: it’s vital that the Government be able to use information that it obtained by torturing people. It’s equally vital that the Government be absolutely assured that it will obtain a conviction against anyone it accuses of being a Terrorist. Because this is a “war,” we can waive our usual rules of justice. Any proceeding which imposes limits on the Government’s ability to profit from its torture, or which introduces any uncertainty as to the verdict, is proven to be both inappropriate and dangerous. We can and should simply imprison whomever we want in the War on Terror without the need for any charges, but if we do charge and try them, it should only be in newly invented tribunals (i.e., military commissions) where traditional due process is severely reduced and the rules are designed to ensure a guilty verdict, even it means allowing torture-obtained evidence.

People who think this way, by definition, simply do not believe in the rule of law. A system that guarantees guilty verdicts is not one that operates under the rule of law. Those are called “show trials” — at least they used to be when other countries did that. And the demand that torture-obtained evidence be admissible not only removes one from adherence to the rule of law, but from the civilized world as well. The whole point of a “justice system” is that there are rules that are well-established and which apply equally to everyone. Although the requirement that the Government adhere to those rules will inevitably mean that some very, very bad people are acquitted — including mass murderers, child rapists, and even Terrorists — that’s the price we’ve always been willing to pay to live under what we call “the rule of law” and a “justice system.” Those pointing to Judge Kaplan’s ruling as proof that Terrorists should not be tried in a real court — all because he applied centuries-old legal principles to the Government — believe in none of that, by definition.

Greenwald (via jonathan-cunningham)

Agree completely, but would add that the key part here that always seems to slide by in this discussion is that the rules are set out in advance and we, as a society, agree to live by them (or, alternatively, agitate through similarly agreed upon channels to change the rules instead of merely ignoring them when it suits us and summarily declaring that incident a state secret). It is only through this unspoken covenant that the governors and the governed can coexist. As soon as it becomes allowable (and even expected in “serious” circles) that the rules can be changed by fiat, or for the convenience of one or the other of these two parties, or because of the relative wealth or perceived “importance” of one party, or by a President (or other high official) who is inexplicably deemed intrinsically incapable of breaking any laws, then a democratic society collapses. Thus is the first link of the chains forged.
And I’d say we’re already several links in. But nobody seems to care. Thus dies our Republic while the Tea Klan hollers about whether or not we should all have to pay for fire departments even if our own house is not actively on fire. I mean, that sort of socialistic fire extinguishing arrangement inevitably helps a lot of immigrants who burn their houses down all the time to cover up the rampant decapitations going on in there in accordance with sharia law. Am I right?

I’ve been president at Gap brand for the past three years, and I’ve been living and breathing the changes we’ve been making on our journey to make Gap more relevant to our customers.
You’ve seen this evolution through many of our products, such as the 1969 premium denim and the new black pants, and more modern stores in many locations.

Marka Hansen, President Gap North America, witnessing the remarkable journey of evolution that led her company to 1969 denim and a logo whose little blue box apparently recognizes “corporate heritage.”
I’d say rampant fucktardia like this (and a collective, societal failure to call anyone on it) is a big part of the reason America is falling apart at the (poorly sewn) seams and outsourced one-thread buttons.

Kevin Drum supplies us with a graph that does more to explain the McDonalds thing than anything else I’ve seen. Red bar is current Mini-Med plan. As you can see, under ACA, the vast majority of McDonalds workers get a better deal; those earning minimum wage get a vastly better deal, in that far more comprehensive healthcare is now free for them.
In fact, only those making more than $12/hr, a tiny minority of McDonalds workers, will pay about what they pay now…and but also get a hell of a lot more useful health insurance.

Indeed: what a failure for the ACA. Yet this failure narrative, unintended consequences, and so forth is precisely what we hear from Our Liberal Media. Again and again.

This is just the sort of graph that needs to be trotted out every time this comes up. Simple and easy to understand. But isn’t. And now even self-identified Democrats are turning against a plan they most likely have no idea about other than what they’ve heard on FOXnews. Because those anchors are at least trying to tell the truth of the story, right?
If you don’t think this is a serious problem you haven’t been paying attention. This is why they fail.

Christie to cancel the region’s most crucial infrastructure project; refusing $3B in fed money, cutting 6,000 potential new jobs

ohhleary:

When you’re still stuck on a train stalled on the tracks in New Jersey twenty years from now, blame this grandstanding fatass.

How, though? Democrats, as currently figured, inevitably claim they are only interested in “looking forward.” This stance means that, in 20 years when the bill comes due, the Democrat sitting in the corner office trying to unwind the mess he/she inherited will take the blame for problems created long ago by policies that the GOP will still be pitching (and winning elections with) and a voter-at-large who remains utterly uninformed but sure likes the sound of all those never-ending tax cuts.

The only solution is careful messaging, right across the board, for decades, that informs the public, slowly but surely, about each of these decisions and their inevitable consequences. But, when handed somebody’s house burning down for lack of a $75 annual fee to use fire services, we are instead greeted by the sounds of Democratic silence. When a bridge collapses: sounds of silence. When people get sick because food is production isn’t being inspected and is thus contaminated: sounds of silence. When people die in the streets of the richest nation in the world because they can’t afford food anymore or caught a (fucking) cold: sounds of silence.

This is why they fail.

Christie to cancel the region’s most crucial infrastructure project; refusing $3B in fed money, cutting 6,000 potential new jobs

It’s easier for [Democrats] to believe that their liberal and progressive base is naïve than to acknowledge that we are not alienated for their failure to pass appropriate legislation, but for their failure to fight for such legislation. And our upset with Obama is not that he didn’t accomplish what he couldn’t accomplish, but that he didn’t do the one thing he could do: consistently speak the truth, tell us and the country what was really happening in the corridors of power and what the constraints are that he was facing.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Daily (via brooklynmutt)

Yep, yep, yep, a million times: YEP.

There’s a trap, and it’s the same thing that happened with fiscal stimulus. You do something in the right direction that’s inadequate, and then people say, well, that didn’t work, and instead of increasing the dosage and proving it right, you give the thing up altogether.
All of this is very familiar if you studied Japan in the ‘90s. In fact, we’re doing worse than the Japanese did. Our monetary policy is a bit more aggressive, but our fiscal policy has been less aggressive. We have a larger output gap than they did, and we’ve had a surge in unemployment that they never had, and our political will to act has been exhausted much faster than theirs was. On the current track, we’re going to look at Japan’s lost decade as a success story compared to us.

Paul Krugman bringin’ the optimism.