Month: August 2011

As settings go, [addressing a joint session of Congress] is in the swing-for-the-fences category. Presidential speeches to joint sessions of Congress are not for routine issues. And if Obama intended to aim low with his plan, throwing out a few tax credits and warmed-over ideas, he would not pick this venue

Steve Benen reads the tea leaves on the venue choice for the upcoming Obama “jobs” speech.
I hope Steve realizes this is the very same spot the annual State of the Union address is given. Seems to me the admittedly august podium there in the House is precisely the place for warmed-over ideas presented in yawning succession and interspersed with meaningless boilerplate, all packaged amidst plenty of applause breaks that can be further analyzed by pundits and party faithful alike once even the boilerplate platitudes have been well and truly exhausted. Sound and fury signifying nothing.
I’m not sure what makes me sadder, that the administration’s key advisers and experts uniformly still think that “aiming low” will make any Obama policy acceptable to the House, that they will then use the “passable” argument as an excuse for their perennially low aim, or that they’ll then express surprise when even that meager proposal fails to get anywhere near passing (and probably won’t even be taken up by) the House. Then it’s straight into “you dirty fucking hippies out there on drugs just don’t understand that even this tepid package didn’t get taken up. We never could have gotten anywhere with the GigantorJobs 3000 Plan that you’ve all been screaming at us about” time… Newsflash, Axe: you won’t get anything taken up. Would you rather fail small or large? Appear to hide in your safe and comfortable yet utterly feckless defensive crouch –or– go down fighting the good fight and showing America that you actually give a shit? Sadly, I think we all know the answer currently sitting on the tip of all tongues belonging to crack Strategists for The Democrat who happen to be reading Lemkin right this very second.
It’s go big or go home time, Obama. If you don’t realize that by now then the country’s in even bigger trouble than it was before you took office. Start with the basics. Use your oratorical capability to explain in the simplest terms possible what you want to do, why that approach would be effective, how it has worked in the past, why you won’t be allowed to do it now, and how that situation can be changed in the very near future. And then hammer the GOP with that every day from now until November 2012. They are teeing it up for you, sir. Why not take a swing? Just this once.

Perry’s Millions

Rick Perry has quite a nose for land speculation:

Discharged from the Air Force in 1977 aged 27, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives seven years later, in 1984. At that time, the Perry family reported income of $45,000, largely from Mrs. Perry’s work as a nurse.

[…]

in 1993, there was a piece of ground that computer billionaire Michael Dell needed to connect his new house near Austin to city water mains. Dell neglected to appreciate the land’s importance. But Perry did discern it. He bought the land for less than $120,000 – then sold it to Dell two years later for a $343,000 profit. Uncanny.

[in the 2000s] A Texas real estate developer sells land to a Texas state senator – the senator who happened to represent the development’s district. The state senator sold the land to Gov. Perry. Gov. Perry then sold then land – back to the real estate developer’s business partner. Perry scored a profit of $823,000.

These are his real GOP bona fides: living the concept that political power is only to be used for enrichment of self and then, where possible, your richest and therefore most generous supporters, be they actual biological persons or the frequently GOP-personified corporate interests. The policy outcomes of this stance, whatever they may be, are entirely beside the point beyond their utility in enriching self or key supporters.
After all, the GOP goes out of its way to prepare the populace for the repeated failure of government, it delights every time a corruption scandal comes to light, and it uses said failures and scandals to further weaken the operation of government, sand the legislative gears, and generally hamstring government oversight, all to better enable their preferred uses of political power: enrichment of self and key supporters. There is no third thing. Anybody not already in on the deal can kindly go die in the streets.

Perry’s Millions

Results [matter]. If I were the one in charge of this pop stand, I’d direct my economics team to come up with the “If I were a prime minister instead of a president, this is what we would do” plan. And if all they came up with was minor tax breaks for hiring, “patent reform,” and “trade deals,” I’d, you know, fire them.

Duncan Black, being exactly right. The key thing that needs to happen in the immediate future (e.g. the imminent “jobs speech”) is for Obama to set the stage such that the eventual legislative outcome makes very clear exactly who is obstructing economic growth and recovery efforts.
The only way to do this is to swing for the fences and wait for the GOP to obstruct it. Not only does this paint the GOP as the party of economic obstruction, it also allows the eventual compromise to be closer to your “dream plan” than it is to whatever constitutes a GOP “go die in the streets” policy outcome. By taking the traditional “sensible Obama” defensive crouch approach and starting with the bar set at the lowest possible level (e.g. what they think might pass the House) all in the vain hopes that this time the GOP will suddenly start playing along for America, you’re actually only working to guarantee an outcome that favors the GOP in every way, politically, economically, and (most importantly for Obama) in 2012.
Once again: This is why they fail.

On the bright side.

ilyagerner:

A world without functioning traffic signals is preparing me for Ron Paul’s America. So far, lots of accidents, not much in the way of the emergent order that I’ve been promised.

I feel like this is almost certainly a confidence issue. The emergent order knows, deep down, that an alphabet soup of government regulatory agencies will soon descend upon said nascent and entirely beneficent order and smother it with numerous laws, storm taxes, and a litany of entirely new regulations, each of which are longer than War and Peace and several other books people have likely heard of. Thus, unwilling to pay taxes on purchases of new windows and fresh carpet and power lines and so forth, people will simply sit there and pine for Our Galtian Overlords to get on with it already. Ergo: It’s just the rationality of markets you are witnessing.

Not so much, Neil

danielholter:

“There is an asteroid, discovered in December 2004, called Apophis. Named for the Egyptian god of death and darkness. It was named only after its trajectory was identified to intersect that of Earth… Turns out, in the year 2029, in the month of April… Apophis will come so close to Earth that it will dip below our orbiting communications satellites. And it is the size of the Rose Bowl. It will be the largest, closest thing we have ever observed to come by Earth. The orbit we now have for it is uncertain enough—because these things are hard to measure and hard to get an exact distance for—that we cannot tell you exactly where that trajectory will be. We know it won’t hit Earth, but we know it will be closer than the orbiting satellites. There is a range, a 600-mile zone, called the keyhole. If the asteroid goes through the middle of the keyhole, it will hit the Earth 7 years later. It will hit the Earth 500-kilometres west of Santa Monica. Now, that’s if it goes through the centre [of the keyhole]; if it goes through the centre, it hits the Pacific Ocean, plunges down into the Pacific to a depth of 3 miles, at which point it explodes, cavitating the Pacific in a hole that’s 3 miles wide, three 3 deep. That will send a tsunami wave outward from that location that’s 50 feet high. 5 storeys.”

—

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Revolving & Evolving  (via cocknbull)

um.

NASA begs to differ:

Using criteria developed in this research, new measurements possible in 2013 (if not 2011) will likely confirm that in 2036 Apophis will quietly pass more than 49 million km (30.5 million miles; 0.32 AU) from Earth on Easter Sunday of that year (April 13).

Much more at the NASA link.

Not so much, Neil

What kind of man are you? You’re weak, spineless, a man of temptations. But what tempts you? You’re a porky fellow, long in the waistband. Yours is a sweet tooth. You may stray, but you’ll always return to your dark master: The cocoa bean!

Cosmo Kramer derives George’s ATM code.
Cut to Kramer, P.I., in which the perennially rumpled detective is employed by an apparently wealthy but forever shadowy figure who generally leaves Kramer with plenty of free time to wander around figuring stuff out as it pleases him.
Pitch it as TV’s first show-within-show spinoff; every episode transpiring slightly off to the side of a Seinfeld episode and forever going to commercial when Kramer finds a key clue or wraps up the case… just in time to make his crazy entrance back into Seinfeld’s apartment.

The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t. I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time.[…] These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.

But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

Steve Jobs, talking to Wired in 1996.

Fallows on the GOP and Taxes

James Fallows weighs in on the GOP finally finding a tax hike they love, the elimination of the Obama-initiated payroll tax “holiday” that would affect every employed individual in the country:

I had thought that Republican absolutism about taxes, while harmful to the country and out of sync with even the party’s own Reaganesque past, at least had the zealot’s virtue of consistency. Now we see that it can be set aside when it applies to poorer people, and when setting it aside would put maximum drag on the economy as a whole. So this means that its real guiding principle is… ??? You tell me.

You answered your own question, James. The increase would not impact the core constituency of the GOP, the top 2% of all earners. Most of their income isn’t touched by payroll tax rates anyway. Likewise, dumping this temporary and stimulatory tax break on January 1, 2012 puts “maximum drag on the economy as a whole.” The GOP sees that as a feature of this stance, not some arbitrary outcome. That such a position comes from the unitary “we pledge allegiance to no tax hikes of any kind, ever” club is also unsurprising. They only expressed interest in extending the Bush tax cuts if and when said extensions protected the cuts for the wealthiest 2%, who had already benefited asymmetrically from said imminently expiring tax policies.

The GOP has been working with single-minded focus towards the worst possible policy outcome(s) for more years than Obama has been in office. They dislike government. They want it to fail, and barring that outcome at best appear grossly ineffectual. Holding a lesser fraction of the total DC power structure only makes it easier to sand the gears and mutter “wha happened?” to an all too pliant media, the most popular outlet of which is firmly in their corner. The GOP machine is most certainly not going to stop now, especially not when they can needlessly prolong the economic suffering of millions of Americans for years in exchange for some short-term political gains and do that in a way that minimally impacts their core constituency: the top 2%. This is who they are.

Fallows on the GOP and Taxes

…first a Keynesian observes that fiscal stimulus can increase growth in a depressed economy. Second, as an attempted reductio, a conservative says “if that was true, then you could increase growth by breaking a bunch of windows.” Third, the Keynesian accurately points out that you could, in fact, increase growth by breaking windows. Fourth, the conservative accuses Keynesians of wanting to break windows or believing that window-breaking increases wealth. But nobody ever said that! The point is that we have very good reasons to think smashing windows would be a bad idea—there’s more to life than full employment—and that’s why Keynesians generally want to boost employment by having people do something useful like renovate schools or repair bridges.

Matt Yglesias, leaving out the next line in the exchange; the one where the conservative screams “that’s socialism,” makes a lot of unfounded claims about runaway spending, and then says government initiated stimulus has never worked, and most especially never worked in the guise of the colossal stimulatory effect of government spending to fight WWII. That recovery was the either “power of the markets” or “the markets anticipating Reagan and ‘morning in America.’” As usual.

This is true: It is not clear how George Pataki would win over Republican voters with his pro-choice views or record of tax and spending increases. Or his lack of a national political network. Or his lack of charisma. (He once pointed out to Maureen Dowd that he prefers his soda flat.)

Apart from that I don’t see how this can fail.

David Weigel ponders Patakimentum.
America is not ready for a President who prefers flat soda. Ten years, maybe; 2012, no way.
Source: Slate