Tag: yep

In the coming days we will force members of Congress to vote on the individual proposals in the American Jobs Act. They’ll have a chance to vote on whether they believe we should keep teachers out of work or whether we should put them back in the classroom where they belong. They’ll get to vote on whether they believe construction workers should stay unemployed while our roads and bridges fall apart, or whether we should put these men and women back to work rebuilding America. They’ll be forced to decide whether we should cut taxes for middle class Americans or let them go up next year.

Barack Obama talks tough. Finally. Imagine if we’d had this guy (and every other Democrat) out there saying words like these starting on January 21, 2009 and then continuing to say them every day since, each and every time a microphone turned on. The economic and legislative situation might well be very much the same, but the political situation would be very different indeed.

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage.

Paul Krugman, hosting another edition of Krugman Explains it All in 200 Words or Less. Shrill.
Source: The New York Times

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

Rick Perry’s candidacy is stuck up to its wheel-wells because he once did something decent for people unlike himself and, when challenged about it, on stage, by the rest of lightweights in his party, he told the truth. If you’re attempting to get the Republican party’s nomination for president of the United States in 2012 — or any time in the future, judging by the Triple-A Ostrogoths currently populating the country’s state legislatures — and if there is anything in your background that indicates that you were once decent to people unlike yourself, you should identify that problem immediately and then lie your ass off for the balance of your presidential campaign.

By the way, have you met Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney?

Charles Pierce, getting it exactly right at his still newish blogging perch.

I know that admitting that Barack Obama is already the candidate of centrists’ dreams would be awkward, would make it hard to adopt the stance that both sides are equally at fault. But that is the truth.

Paul Krugman, commenting on the seemingly eternal font of “what we need is a mystical centrist third party to fix everything” pieces from the MSM.
What we have now is a right wing party, the GOP, and a center-right wing party, The Democrat. Obama ran as and is governing as a center-right technocrat… and still can’t get much done in the face of blanket GOP opposition.
Sadly, admitting to or even obliquely referencing this reality is an unforgivable heresy and likely as not to get you run out of Serious Person circles forever.
Source: The New York Times

Trickle Down

Timothy Noah nails it:

You still can’t say [publicly] that Fortune 500 chairmen need to maximize their incomes, but it’s now perfectly OK to say that real estate speculators and day traders who pay taxes as S-Corporations to dodge Social Security and Medicare payments need to maximize their incomes. By God, they built this country!

Yep. Twenty years of message discipline gets you places. The Democrat could learn something from this sort of thing but never does.

Trickle Down

Don’t mince words, Tim

Newish TNR man Timothy Noah weighs in on Politico, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, Obama, and reporting in general (emphasis in original):

The main problem with the Politico piece is that its central example is Daley’s mishandling of the scheduling of Obama’s jobs bill speech. Obama wanted to give it in the House of Representatives on a Wednesday and Boehner said no dice, you have to give it on a Thursday. This somehow became a two-day story and a referendum on Obama’s impotence and the House Republicans’ incivility. I don’t care about how Daley handled this trivial scheduling conflict. I care about how Daley advised Obama during the disastrously drawn-out debt-ceiling negotiations, in which Obama really did look impotent and the House Republicans looked not merely uncivil but bent on destroying the economy. But Politico has nothing on that except a passing reference to Daley cutting Senate leaders out of the loop during the negotiations. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apparently called Obama to complain that Daley keeps him in the dark. That’s interesting.

This simply isn’t done. In one short paragraph, we have Noah pointing out the vacuity of a competitor, sure, but to me this reads as broader indictment of the Beltway style of political “reporting” in general. Noah actually seems aware of objective reality, makes not one “pox on both their houses” hedge, and points out a real point of contention between a Democratic power center (Reid) and the White House, all while noting that none of this gets covered in the “who won the day” obsessed political press and what does get mentioned is not only often plainly wrong but in a different zip code than anything approaching reality. More please.

(h/t Jason Zengerle)

Don’t mince words, Tim

State of the Art

John Cole at Balloon Juice officially wins blogging for the week:

In the long term, assuming [some version of an Obama jobs] plan gets through the House (it won’t), then we get to go through our usual drama of the blue dogs from Red States (Manchin, Nelson, Landrieu, McCaskill, etc.), Lieberman just so he can continue to be the world’s preeminent douchenozzle, and some others I am sure I am missing. They’ll cockblock it on the Senate side, moaning about the program being a deficit buster while conveniently ignoring the fact that each one of them represents a welfare state sucking at the federal teat. Finally, at the 11th hour, Snowe and Collins will swoop in and offer tax cuts for the ultra-rich as a sweetener and they will support it. At this point, Bernie Sanders or whatever progressive hero of the moment will claim he can’t support anything with tax cuts for the rich in it. This will bring things to a standstill for a couple more weeks until another shitty jobs report comes out, and the Senate, acting in the fierce urgency of when-the-fuck-ever will pass some piece of shit that is too small, unfocussed, and does nothing other than provide the left with another opportunity to fracture and start flinging shit at each other. Republicans will have spent the entire time using procedural tricks to slow things down while having Frank Luntz work on the framing of the issue so that by the time it is about to hit the President’s desk, they will already have a cute name, the talking points will be distributed, and we’ll all be hearing about the new “Porkulus” or “Obamacare” or whatever the fuck childish name they come up with. In three months time, when employment hasn’t picked up because we are actually in the same god damned depression we’ve been in since 2007, Rick Perry can claim that Keynesian ideology has once again been disproven. Because everyone hates the bill, Friedman, Brooks, and other members of the Centrist jihad will claim this as proof that the bill is great.

Read the whole thing.

State of the Art

Job Killing Deregulation

Dean Baker, once again, pointing out an inconvenient truth:

… a study by Charles Rivers Associates suggests that the main impact of the regulation would be to hasten the replacement of old polluting power plants. This could help to create jobs in the private sector in the next few years, a period in which all projections show that the economy will still be suffering from substantial unemployment.

In other words, if Obama was interested in an action that he could take unilaterally that would create jobs, supporting the EPA on the ozone restrictions probably would have topped the list. In nixing the regulation, Obama went the job killing route.

This is precisely the sort of thing that happens when you adopt the framing of your opponent. You end up painted into a political corner, rhetorically speaking, and pretty soon it seems reasonable and even advantageous to make boneheaded moves like this one that are not only economically counterproductive, but work to dishearten your supporters and embolden those of your opponents. Well played, Democrat.

Job Killing Deregulation