Tag: yep

[The GOP members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are issuing their own report, which will lay the entire financial crisis at the feet of] Fannie and Freddie, which somehow managed to cause housing bubbles in Ireland, Iceland, Latvia, and Spain as well as the United States; and the repo market had nothing to do with it.
And bear in mind that this wasn’t one Republican; it was all of them.
I really do wonder how this country can remain governable, when one party insists on creating its own reality. Next thing you know they’re going to reject the theory of evolution. Oh, wait …

Paul Krugman getting all shrill again while noting the invincible ignorance held in seemingly infinite supply by the GOP and their various political enablers.

I really think Senate Democrats should consider taking advantage of their critical numerical advantage in terms of Jewish Senators and just hold a “no Christians invited” special Christmas Day session. In the all-Jewish Senate, Chuck Schumer is the median member. Joe Lieberman, the most conservative Jewish Senator, is the median in the real Senate.

Matt Yglesias. Everyone can go for Chinese. Think of the comity. And the lack of labels.

The end result [of Elizabeth Edwards pushing her husband to make a comprehensive and universal health-care reform plan the centerpiece of his second presidential campaign] was that the three candidates ended up fighting over who would do more to pass a universal health-care bill the fastest, which meant they made repeated promises that, in Obama’s case, he eventually found himself having to keep. Without Elizabeth Edwards’s involvement, the Edwards campaign would likely have come out with a more modest effort, and the Obama and Clinton campaigns would have taken a similarly incremental approach, and none of the campaigns would have made as many promises on the subject as they did, and health-care reform might never have passed.

Ezra Klein remembers.
The Edwards campaign really had an outsize impact on the de facto Democratic platform as a whole, “progressivizing” it much more than Kucinich ever did; presumably because Edderds was seen as a very serious candidate, at least in the early going, and had to be responded to, in detail, in a way that Kucinich just never did.
The old “remarkable woman behind a deeply flawed candidate”…in another era, John would have been the Billy Carter dragging on her campaign.

I can’t help but think that if news organizations put a tenth of the amount of effort into external linking that they do into re-reporting other people’s stories, we’d have a much more vibrant and useful news culture.

Felix Salmon
As he also notes, the real nut is that when they re-report each other, they tend to do it very, very poorly. For some reason, though, the MSM is categorically opposed to providing a link, even when the story is about a specific website.

Since all the evidence says that elections depend on the rate of change of unemployment, not its level, this is actually bad news for Obama: he’s setting himself up for an economic stall in the months leading into the 2012 election.

Paul Krugman, caught in the act of being exactly right. Couple this with the decision to let these Bush tax cuts expire in an election year again, and you’ve got recipe for disaster.
On what planet do these (so called) Democrats live? Do they expect to learn from the messaging disaster they perpetrated in the ten year leadup to this battle? Nothing I’ve seen from anybody, dog catcher up to President, has shown me that they have any chance of even budging the conversation, much less crafting a winning electoral message on this in the face of a still-stagnant economy and ~10% unemployment come 2012.
Obama’s determination to be the “next Carter” is really remarkably strong. I’d say he’s one killer rabbit away from being little more than a punch-line.
Get out there and fight for something, anything. What is so hard to understand about that? Why is it so terrifying for them? This is why they fail.

Right on, Kevin Drum. Implicit here is what nobody ever seems to say: if your taxable income is $250,001, you will see tax increase only on that last one dollar. You still get the tax break on the first $250K, just like every single other American. Compare that to the GOP plan (red portion of bars). Utter and indefensible lunacy.

And yet The Democrat is absolutely getting his clock cleaned on this.

I don’t see any possible repercussions to this fecklessness and timidity in the face of a fight on which you hold the economic, moral, and public-opinion high grounds once we get to the real fight early next year on the debt ceiling.

Right now we have a retirement system that has the great virtue of not being intrusive: Social Security doesn’t demand that you prove you need it, doesn’t ask about your personal life, doesn’t make you feel like a beggar. And now we’re going to replace that with a system in which large numbers of Americans have to plead for special dispensation, on the grounds that they’re too feeble to work for a living. Freedom!

Paul Krugman, shrill as always, and threatening George Carlin…

What Digby Said

Paul Begala: Yes but I do think his point about capitulating [and just offering up a freeze on federal pay] rather than negotiating is a valid one with this president. The pay freeze is probably a good idea but should have come out of negotiation. What do the Republicans give, when the president gives…
Gloria Borger: Why not give something first though? People don’t like government and this is an easy gimme for the president.
Begala: What are the Republicans proposing? Then you get it on the Republicans turf. Why don’t you say I’ll freeze federal pay and cut this in return for this and that program but you guys need to come with taxes on the rich at least say people who make over a million bucks don’t get a tax cut. My Lord …
Borger: Well maybe there’s something else he can negotiate.
Digby: I’m sure there is. Why not throw in debtor’s prisons? It wouldn’t be enough to totally appease [the Republicans], but it would go a long way toward proving they are “responsible.”