Koch power-plant sale clause slipped back into budget bill between Senate and House in WI:
- SALE AND CONTRACTUAL OPERATION OF STATE-OWNED POWER PLANTS
Governor: Allow the Department of Administration (DOA) to sell any state-owned heating, cooling, or power plant or contract with private entities for the operation of any such plant,
with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount the Department determines to be in the best interest of the state.
Shocking, I know…
[Tea Party activists and junior lawmakers] literally think you can just balance it, you know, [by cutting] waste, fraud and abuse, foreign aid, and NPR. And it doesn’t work like that.
Shortly after the Democrats’ “shellacking” last November, I phoned a friend in the White House who had served in the Clinton administration. “It’s 1994 all over again,” he said. “Now we move to the center.”
Digby nails it…and gets the result into The Hill, where the intended audience might actually have to face the facts:
Even worse […] is the common assertion by these millionaire pundits that “we all” must sacrifice for the greater good and allow Social Security to be slashed. This is usually spoken with such a tone of lugubrious forbearance that one imagines they would like us to believe that while they might be forced to become Wal-Mart greeters in their elder years, patriotic duty demands we all pitch in. They seem to have no idea that the median wage in this country in 2009 was $26,261 — sadly, lower than it was in the year 2000. (Even when you average in the billionaires, it was only $39,269.) Clearly, the average political TV host takes home many times that wage, so this idea that “we” are all “sharing” in the proposed sacrifices is a bit much, particularly in light of the recent extension of the Bush tax cuts, hailed in the media as the greatest piece of legislation since the founding of the republic.
Read the whole thing.
Jonathan Chait: Right, if you imagine that the most important thing [Rumsfeld] did was a huge success rather than a huge failure, then he’s be remember [sic] as a huge success. Not as a huge failure. Likewise, if Lee Harvey Oswald had killed someone who was about to assassinate President Kennedy, rather than assassinating President Kennedy himself, he’d go down in history as a hero.
John Podhoretz: You can be sour about Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Defense Department all you like, and plenty of people are. But offering a cutesy analogy between Rumsfeld and Lee Harvey Oswald has lowered Chait to a base level of rhetorical crassness to which even his questionable standing as an exceptionally graceless writer and amazingly crude thinker had not yet fallen. Now it has. Congratulations.
Jonathan Chait: Podhoretz is betraying here a common confusion between comparisons and analogies. An analogy between A and B does not imply moral parity between A and B. So, for instance, the statement “John Podhoretz rules Commentary with the ruthless style of Kim Jong-il,” would be completely unfair. Kim Jong-il is responsible for the death and brutality of millions, whereas Podhoretz has only brutalized the English language. On the other hand, the statement, “John Podhoretz is to Norman Podhoretz and Kim Jong-il is to Kim il-Sung” would imply that John Podhoretz, like Kim Jong-il, acquired his job in nepotistic fashion and has performed miserably, without drawing any moral parallel between him and the North Korean dictator.
Bloomberg delivers some shocking, shocking stuff:
“The U.S. government is not broke,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy for Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. “There’s no evidence that the market is treating the U.S. government like it’s broke.”
The U.S. today is able to borrow at historically low interest rates, paying 0.68 percent on a two-year note that it had to offer at 5.1 percent before the financial crisis began in 2007. Financial products that pay off if Uncle Sam defaults aren’t attracting unusual investor demand. And tax revenue as a percentage of the economy is at a 60-year low, meaning if the government needs to raise cash and can summon the political will, it could do so.
Print out in the largest type possible and stick to the teleprompter of every Serious Person currently inhabiting the media. Likewise, Obama and his proxies need to be talking about this. A lot. So often that we can’t stand it anymore, and then a few million more times on top of that. Then you can start a serious discussion about revenue, which is the only truly serious way out of this mess. Sorry, but it is.
Bill Simmons writes a little fable:
I am addicted to making money. I have lost any and all perspective. I don’t care if I lose my readers in the short term; they will come back. I don’t care if I lose my staff; I can always find new people. I don’t care about the health of my employees; as far as I’m concerned, they knew the risks. I don’t care if my website is gravitating toward quantity over quality, or that we chase page views with shorter, Google-friendly stories instead of posting the same top-notch content that got people reading us in the first place; I want only to generate more revenue than the previous year.
Technically speaking, it’s all about the NFL ownership and their ongoing labor talks; whatever it’s specifically about it is definitely required reading.
Jozsef Szajer, a Hungarian politician and member of the European Parliament, wrote an enthusiastic blog post last week detailing how he’s using Apple’s tablet device to flesh out Hungary’s new constitution, the country’s first since 1949. Not only is Szajer using the iPad to churn out new constitutional drafts, but he’s also using it to review new draft proposals. Apparently all aspects of the new Hungarian constitution are being vetted via the iPad in one form or another.
Don’t these people know that iPads are for consumption only? There is no creation on an iPad. Silly Hungarians.
Premiere On Call is our new custom caller service,” read the service’s website, which disappeared as this story was being reported (for a cached version of the site click here). “We supply voice talent to take/make your on-air calls, improvise your scenes or deliver your scripts. Using our simple online booking tool, specify the kind of voice you need, and we’ll get your the right person fast. Unless you request it, you won’t hear that same voice again for at least two months, ensuring the authenticity of your programming for avid listeners.
The report notes that the “service” is part of the overall operation that syndicates Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity among many others. I keep thinking that one day one of these “shocking revelations about the conservative message machine” will stick, but then we’ve long known that W. Bush and his administration planted editorials, basically employed journalists to run preferred stories, and openly bragged about controlling various “mainstream” media outlets and programs (notably Meet the Press, but also obvious ones like Hannity and etc…). None of those seemed to register with people and the MSM has an obvious vested interest in letting such stories drop. Quickly . This one probably won’t register either, though it does get at their precious, precious two hours hate…and we certainly can’t have that.
Anyway and once again: they are lying to you with malice aforethought. Your entire media construct is bought and paid for with the express intent of fucking you out of what is yours so that the folks at the top can extract an additional fractional percent at your expense this quarter. They call that “shared sacrifice.” There are more of you; one would think the center could not hold. Not forever, anyway. Thanks for consistently proving me wrong on this. It’s really made my day. Over and over and over again. That is all.
(via militantagnostic)
Lemkin 