Do you Believe in Magic?
Posted: November 22, 2010 Filed under: Democratic Politics, Surreality | Tags: Nancy Pelosi-0bama Rift 95 CommentsOkay, put this under the heading of I’ll believe it WHEN I see it even though I just read it at The Hill.
When President Obama meets with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi next year, he may face a lot more resistance than he’s used to from his longtime ally.
The shift from Speaker to opposition leader will undoubtedly change Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) relationship with the White House, and may force her away from a president she has rarely abandoned in the past two years.
As Obama decides whether and how much to compromise with the new Republican majority in the House, Pelosi is facing pressure from empowered liberals in her caucus to take a harder line with the administration.
Those liberals, led by a group of four lawmakers who tried unsuccessfully to delay caucus leadership elections last week, say House Democrats were led astray by their allegiance to a flawed White House political strategy during the 111th Congress.“We’re going to have to really push the White House and the Senate,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said. “I think the greatest failing in this Congress was that the House … enabled the White House, and the White House was not always right.
“We’ve got to push them harder from our position,” he added, “to do what Democrats need and what’s expected by Democrats.”
The article is just chock full of little tidbits like Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) from California suggesting that not standing up for Pelosi will she was being used as a target of right wing attacks has created ‘tensions’. There’s even old stories of how Pelosi was unhappy with Clinton triangulation in the 90s. It also answers the age old question of whatever happened to Dick Gephardt that promising man from Missouri.
All I can visualize is her demeanor when she’s around the President. It may be just the contacts or the botox or both, but the word ‘starstruck’ always comes to my mind. Is she really over him?
What is the Sound of Styrofoam Columns Collapsing?
Posted: November 22, 2010 Filed under: Diplomacy Nightmares, Team Obama, The Media SUCKS | Tags: foreign policy, Middle East Peace Process, START 20 Comments
I suppose that I really don’t need to remind any of you of all the triumph of the Dauphin de Chicago that we endured during 2008. In fact, I don’t want to go there any more. I am going to mention that aspirational Nobel Peace Prize from a year later. And, okay, one more inkle of all that 2008 hoopla in Germany when Der Speigel asked “Where is Germany’s Obama”? Do you honestly think they’d really ask that question now and want an answer?
How the worm has turned and the facades have fallen. The one area where Obama was supposed to excel was in the world forum. If the world was expecting something different, they are sure realizing they didn’t get it. But just as in 2008, they trumped up Obama into some mythological sun god shining wisdom upon the world, we’re now seeing every one peel the paint off styrofoam and skin. What is it about the Villagers?
Do they all really want to write heroic epics and tragic endings rather than just report the damned news?
This tidbit is from Politico. Well, let’s just say I’m going to start with Politico. There will be more coming than this headline: ‘View from Middle East: President Obama is a problem’. A problem? Isn’t that a little different tale than alt that “this is the one we’ve been waiting for” spin a few years ago?
He was supposed to be different. His personal identity, his momentum, his charisma and his promise of a fresh start would fundamentally alter America’s relations with the Muslim world and settle one of its bitterest grievances.
Two years later, he has managed to forge surprising unanimity on at least one topic: Barack Obama. A visit here finds both Israelis and Palestinians blame him for the current stalemate — just as they blame one another.
Instead of becoming a heady triumph of his diplomatic skill and special insight, Obama’s peace process is viewed almost universally in Israel as a mistake-riddled fantasy. And far from becoming the transcendent figure in a centuries-old drama, Obama has become just another frustrated player on a hardened Mideast landscape.
…
The political peace process to which Obama committed so much energy is considered a failure so far. And in the world’s most pro-American state, the public and its leaders have lost any faith in Obama and — increasingly — even in the notion of a politically negotiated peace.
Even those who still believe in the process that Obama has championed view his conduct as a deeply unfunny comedy of errors.
“He’s like rain,” said a top Israeli official involved in diplomacy with the U.S., speaking of Obama’s role in negotiations. “You can do all kinds of things to cope with it.”
Some fret that not only has Obama failed to move the process forward but he and his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts may have dealt it a setback that will leave it worse off than when they began.
Obama has moved from the man that can do nothing wrong to the man that cannot do anything right. His failures since the mid term “shellacking” have been failure on the world stage. China, South Korea, Brazil, and now both Israel and The Palestine Authority are telling unfavorable tales.
How could any one be less respected than a President who thinks massaging the shoulders of a German Chancellor is acceptable behavior?
The Politico narrative is a long one and is peppered with items like this.
But the American president has been diminished, even in an era without active hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians. His demands on the parties appear to shrink each month, with the path to a grand peace settlement narrowing to the vanishing point. The lack of Israeli faith in him and his process has them using the talks to extract more tangible security assurances — the jets. And though America remains beloved, Obama is about as popular here as he is in Oklahoma. A Jerusalem Post poll in May found 9 percent of Israelis consider Obama “pro-Israel,” while 48 percent say he’s “pro-Palestinian.”
Other polling in Israel shows a growing gap between aspirations for peace and the faith that it can happen. One survey last month found that 72 percent of Israelis favor negotiations, while only 33 percent think they can bear fruit. (Palestinians show a smaller gap, primarily because a smaller majority favors negotiations.)Obama has resisted advisers’ suggestions that he travel to Israel or speak directly to Israelis as he has to Muslims in Egypt, Turkey and Indonesia.
“Israelis really hate Obama’s guts,” said Shmuel Rosner, a columnist for two leading Israeli newspapers. “We used to trust Americans to act like Americans, and this guy is like a European leader.”
Many senior Israeli leaders have concluded that Hillary Clinton and John McCain were right about Obama’s naiveté and inexperience.
So, it may be expected that Israel misses some cowboy swagger and doesn’t want any more “European-style Leaders”. The article does spend most of its virtual ink on the I side of the I/P equation. As we know from experience, any conversation about that topic tends to escalate into more than discussion; even among friends. There’s just one P in there to 9 I’s. Where’s the balance in that? Has every one in the U.S. bought into the new paradigm of what “fair and balanced” represents?
But, Politico isn’t the only one in the process of toppling the Styrofoam columns today. WAPO’s Jackson Diehl also examines Obama’s Foreign Policy today and suggests Obama may need an update . He timetrips back to the 80s as a way to talk about the new START treaty process. Diehl looks for clues in that, the I/P negotiations, and the recent tour of Asia’s nascent democracies. The bottom line is not flattering. Diehl concludes that Obama is stuck on the 80s. (Let’s hope that doesn’t include the Presidential taste in hairstyles and clothing.)
Still, this administration is notable for its lack of grand strategy – or strategists. Its top foreign-policy makers are a former senator, a Washington lawyer and a former Senate staffer. There is no Henry Kissinger, no Zbigniew Brzezinski, no Condoleezza Rice; no foreign policy scholar.
Instead there is Obama, who likes to believe that he knows as much or more about policy than any of his aides – and who has been conspicuous in driving the strategies on nuclear disarmament and Israeli settlements. “I personally came of age during the Reagan presidency,” Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope.” Yes, and it shows.
Of course, the Conservative Blogosphere is having a hey day with both of these pieces. Why wouldn’t they? What’s lacking is a thoughtful liberal response to all of this. What is also lacking is any mention of the Secretary of State who has been receiving some pretty glowing reviews and must be seen as carrying out an entire White House policy. If the foreign policy is visionless, wouldn’t that reflect on Hillary Clinton also?
Hidden away on Project Syndicate is an article on START by Radosław Sikorski. Sikorski is Poland’s Foreign Minister. Poland is a country that has not forgotten the 1980s at all.
The US remains the world’s most powerful state, however, and the senators’ decision will inevitably have an impact beyond their country’s borders. It will be particularly significant for Poland, a staunch ally of the US in NATO. So it is important to make clear: my government supports the ratification of New START, because we believe it will bolster our country’s security, and that of Europe as a whole.
President Barack Obama’s nuclear-disarmament efforts have gained wide support in Poland. The country’s first democratic prime minister, along with two former presidents, including Lech Wałęsa, the legendary leader of Solidarity, published a joint article last year in support of Obama’s bold disarmament agenda.
For almost a year now, since the expiration of the original START treaty in December 2009, no US inspectors have been on the ground in Russia to verify the state of its nuclear arsenal. The START verification provisions provide crucial information that is essential for the force-planning process.
Without a treaty in place, holes will soon appear in the nuclear umbrella that the US provides to Poland and other allies under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the collective security guarantee for NATO members. Moreover, New START is a necessary stepping-stone to future negotiations with Russia about reductions in tactical nuclear arsenals, and a prerequisite for the successful revival of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE).
While we in Poland do not perceive an immediate military threat from Russia, most of the world’s active tactical or sub-strategic nuclear weapons today seem to be deployed just east of Poland’s borders, in speculative preparation for conflict in Europe. The cataclysmic potential of such a conflict makes it essential to limit and eventually eliminate this leftover from the Cold War.
The START treaty is area where the U.S. should and could succeed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has indicated that it is deal that should be ‘beyond politics’.
U.S. President Barack Obama said Saturday that ratifying the treaty is a “national security imperative” that cannot be delayed. He called on the Senate for quick passage of the deal.
Ratification requires support from 67 of the Senate’s 100 members.
Senator Jon Kyl, the chief Republican negotiator on the issue, has resisted the president’s efforts to hold the vote before the new Congress takes office in January with a stronger Republican presence. Kyl has voiced concerns that the new START treaty would harm U.S. missile defense efforts.
I’m very much with Clinton on this one and with the President. For a press that seemed eager to believe that those Styrofoam columns were the real deal two years ago, they now stand as eager to push them over and point to an emperor with no clothes. This is evident even when the topic is something that should be above politics and not highly debatable like the value of START.
Why can’t we get some reasonable attempt at holding people accountable rather than these all in or all out approaches? You don’t make up for the sins of 2008 by committing equally egregious but different sins in 2010. Let’s not lose sight that the START treaty is good policy.
Just sayin’.
Monday Reads
Posted: November 22, 2010 Filed under: Diplomacy Nightmares, Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, Human Rights, just because, morning reads | Tags: DADT, GLBT rights, internet freedom of speech, monetary policy, quantitative easing, Web neutrality 88 Comments
Good Morning!
First up is something that is one huge step back for civil rights and humankind. I can’t believe this outrageous motion was adopted by the UN. The US and its allies need to object vigorously.
The UN has removed a reference to sexual orientation from a resolution condemning arbitrary and unjustified executions.
The UN General Assembly resolution, which is renewed every two years, contained a reference opposing the execution of LBGT people in its 2008 version. But this year’s version passed without any reference to gay rights after a group of mostly African and Asian countries, led by Mali and Morocco, voted to remove it.
Gay rights groups fear the move — which passed in a narrow 79 to 70 vote — will act as a signal that persecuting people for their sexual orientation is internationally acceptable.
“This vote is a dangerous and disturbing development,” Cary Alan Johnson, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, said in a statement. “It essentially removes the important recognition of the particular vulnerability faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people — a recognition that is crucial at a time when 76 countries around the world criminalize homosexuality, five consider it a capital crime, and countries like Uganda are considering adding the death penalty to their laws criminalizing homosexuality.”
Johnson was referring to a bill introduced in Uganda’s legislature last year that would mandate the death penalty for multiple acts of gay sex or for any gay person carrying HIV. Though the bill appeared to be shelved after an international outcry, its principal supporter said last month the bill would be law “soon.”
Thankfully, we’re moving closer to repealing DADT. The Marines have stated that they stand ready to remove enforcement of the provision. Semper Fi!!!
The head of the U.S. Marine Corps will fully cooperate with a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring openly gay and lesbian soldiers from the military, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mullen said there was “no question” that Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos, an opponent of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy at this time, would implement all necessary changes to allow openly gay Marines to serve if Congress passes a repeal measure.
“He basically said that if this law changes, we are going to implement it, and we are going to implement it better than anybody else,” Mullen said of comments Amos recently made at a townhall-style meeting with Marines.
The U.S. Senate is expected to vote on repealing the policy in coming weeks. The House already has passed a repeal measure, and President Barack Obama says he supports repeal under a process worked out with Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates that includes a review of what the change would entail for the military.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared on Fox News on Sunday . Clinton told Chris Wallace that she believed the 
‘vast majority’ of Gitmo detainees should be tried in civilian courts.
We do believe that what are called Article Three trials, in other words in our civilian courts, are appropriate for the vast majority of detainees,” Clinton told Fox News’ Chris Wallace.
This week, a civilian trial convicted Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Ghailani on one count and acquitted him of more than 280 other counts.
“The question is do you have any choice now except to hold all of the terror detainees at Gitmo or either give them military trials or hold them indefinitely?” Wallace asked Clinton.
“The sentence for what he was convicted of is 20 years to life,” Clinton replied. “That is a significant sentence. Secondly, some of the challenges in the courtroom would be the very same challenges before a military commission about whether or not certain evidence could be used.”
Clinton also appeared on Meet the Press. She expressed reservations about the intrusive pat down procedures adopted by the TSA.
The Secretary of State also branded the procedure as ‘offensive’ and called for officials to make the new airport security measures less intrusive.
Speaking on CBS’ Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press, Mrs Clinton said she recognised the need for tighter security but said there was a need to ‘strike the right balance’ and ‘get it better and less intrusive and more precise.’
When asked if she would submit to a pat-down, she replied ‘Not if I could avoid it. No. I mean, who would?’
Mrs Clinton added she understood ‘how offensive it must be’ for passengers forced to endure the measures.
Another economist–Professor James Hamilton–is incensed about that stupid bunny cartoon with it’s outrageous lies on QE. There’s some more take down of the stupid thing on Econbrowser. Hamilton explains why ‘the Goldman Sachs’ is one of the agents used by the Fed when it does Open Market Operations. Basically, it’s the law and this is true if it’s in the name of QE or just regular monetary policy. He also takes down some of the other ones so that I don’t have to do it. He tackles the inflation fallacy as well as the stupid comment about QE being the equivalent of printing money.
Goldman Sachs is one of 16 different dealers from which the Federal Reserve Bank of New York solicits competitive bids. That’s the way it’s been done for a century, and it would be illegal for the Fed to do as the bunnies propose. From U.S. Monetary Policy and Financial Markets, 1998, Chapter 7:
The Federal Reserve makes all additions to its portfolio through purchases of securities that are already outstanding. The Federal Reserve Act [of 1913] does not give the [Federal Reserve] System the authority to purchase new Treasury issues for cash. Over the years, a variety of provisions had permitted the Treasury to borrow limited amounts directly from the Federal Reserve. Options for such loans existed until 1935. Temporary provisions for direct loans were reintroduced in 1942 and renewed with varying restrictions a number of times thereafter. Authority for any kind of direct loans to the Treasury lapsed in 1981 and has not been renewed.
The reason that the Fed has always been required to buy bonds from private dealers rather than the U.S. Treasury is that the process of money creation needs to be institutionally separated from the process of financing the public debt. In fact, the potential blurring of those boundaries is one of the most important legitimate criticisms of quantitative easing.
Another topic that confuses a lot of people is the Social Security Trust Fund. Does it exist or not? John Holbo at Crooked Timber takes on Matt Yglesias and a Planet Money podcast. He explains it in terms of a parent (the government) borrowing a future allowance from a child (Social Security).
If the US government completely and unrecoverably collapses, as a going economic concern, then the Social Security Trust Fund will be bust – and there will be no United States, too! (The latter is the more consequential concern, I should think.)
If the US government falls on seriously hard times, economically, there may need to be belt-tightening. Maybe the US government will have to break the deal it made, not making good on the IOU’s in the Social Security Trust Fund. Likewise, if our family falls on hard times, I may be driven to spend my daughter’s back allowance money on food for our table, in the sense that I may never pay her that money. (Hope not!) But if that happens I won’t describe the logic of the situation in terms of my daughter’s back allowance having turned out not to have been ‘real’, all along. If I don’t pay her, it won’t be because I don’t owe her – nor because that specific money ‘doesn’t exist’, whereas the money to put food on the table ‘does exist’. Talking that way just takes the minor accounting fiction that starts us out, and inflates it into a major fiction.
If the US government doesn’t fall on seriously hard times, but just finds financial life a bit tight – as it often is – the same point applies, only more so.
Scientific American has an important piece up on the Web with an important call for continued Open Standards and Net Neutrality. They also have taken a strong stand against snooping and protecting free speech on the web. You can see in this article just how far ahead our European cousins are in protecting individual rights over corporate rights on the Web and the internet. They even quote Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s firm stand on internet freedom.
Free speech should be protected, too. The Web should be like a white sheet of paper: ready to be written on, with no control over what is written. Earlier this year Google accused the Chinese government of hacking into its databases to retrieve the e-mails of dissidents. The alleged break-ins occurred after Google resisted the government’s demand that the company censor certain documents on its Chinese-language search engine.
Totalitarian governments aren’t the only ones violating the network rights of their citizens. In France a law created in 2009, named Hadopi, allowed a new agency by the same name to disconnect a household from the Internet for a year if someone in the household was alleged by a media company to have ripped off music or video. After much opposition, in October the Constitutional Council of France required a judge to review a case before access was revoked, but if approved, the household could be disconnected without due process. In the U.K., the Digital Economy Act, hastily passed in April, allows the government to order an ISP to terminate the Internet connection of anyone who appears on a list of individuals suspected of copyright infringement. In September the U.S. Senate introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which would allow the government to create a blacklist of Web sites—hosted on or off U.S. soil—that are accused of infringement and to pressure or require all ISPs to block access to those sites.
In these cases, no due process of law protects people before they are disconnected or their sites are blocked. Given the many ways the Web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty. Looking back to the Magna Carta, we should perhaps now affirm: “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence.”
When your network rights are violated, public outcry is crucial. Citizens worldwide objected to China’s demands on Google, so much so that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. government supported Google’s defiance and that Internet freedom—and with it, Web freedom—should become a formal plank in American foreign policy. In October, Finland made broadband access, at 1 Mbps, a legal right for all its citizens.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Sunday Reads
Posted: November 21, 2010 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Afghan Women, robots, shinwakan, Tax cuts for the rich, TSA horror stories 33 Comments
Good Morning!!!
I’ve always been fascinated with robots. I’m not sure how it got started. It may have been the first time may grandparents took me to Disneyland to see the Lincoln speech. I found this article on robots and shinwakan at The Economist and it’s fascinating!! There’s evidently a threshold we have for animation and robots for how real they should look. It’s called “the uncanny valley” and evidently the best example of animation that’s over board and creepy is “The Polar Express“. Robot scientists are trying to learn how to avoid “the uncanny valley” when working on their creations.
The idea of the uncanny valley was originally proposed by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, in 1970. Though he had no hard data, his intuition was that increasing humanness in a robot was positive only up to a certain point. Dr Mori drew a graph (see chart) with “human-likeness” on the horizontal axis and a quality he called shinwakan (variously translated as “familiarity” and “comfort level”) on the vertical one. As an object or image looks and behaves more like a human, the viewer’s level of shinwakan increases. Beyond a certain point, however, the not-quite-human object strikes people as creepy, and shinwakan drops. This is the uncanny valley. Only when the object becomes almost indistinguishable from a human does shinwakan increase again.
The horror stories from TSA pat-downs continue. This one is awful as it involves a bladder cancer survivor whose pat down left him soaked in urine after the pat-down punctured his urostomy bag. Sixty-one year old Thomas Sawyer is a retired special education teacher that recounted his tale to msnbc.
“One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants.”
The security officer finished the pat-down, tested the gloves for any trace of explosives and then, Sawyer said, “He told me I could go. They never apologized. They never offered to help. They acted like they hadn’t seen what happened. But I know they saw it because I had a wet mark.”
Humiliated, upset and wet, Sawyer said he had to walk through the airport soaked in urine, board his plane and wait until after takeoff before he could clean up.
“I am totally appalled by the fact that agents that are performing these pat-downs have so little concern for people with medical conditions,” said Sawyer.
The Florida Sun Sentinel reports that you can possibly be fined $11,000 or arrested if you refuse a nudie scan or grope session. Evidently, you give your consent to both should you decide to fly. At least that’s what the TSA is saying.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is warning that any would-be commercial airline passenger who enters an airport checkpoint and then refuses to undergo the method of inspection designated by TSA will not be allowed to fly and also will not be permitted to simply leave the airport.
That person will have to remain on the premises to be questioned by the TSA and possibly by local law enforcement. Anyone refusing faces fines up to $11,000 and possible arrest.
“Once a person submits to the screening process, they can not just decide to leave that process,” says Sari Koshetz, regional TSA spokesperson, based in Miami.Koshetz said such passengers would be questioned “until it is determined that they don’t pose a threat” to the public.
Well, that is unless your are John Boehner, Speaker-Elect. Then, you can wave them off and tell every one else to eat cake. His Oranginess is evidently above the rest of us. Feeling better about your status in the Banana Republic now?
As he left Washington on Friday, Mr. Boehner headed across the Potomac River to Ronald Reagan National Airport, which was bustling with afternoon travelers. There was no waiting for Mr. Boehner, who was escorted around the identification-checking agents, the metal detectors and the body scanners, and whisked directly to the gate.
The Republican leader, who will become the second person in line to assume the presidency after the new Congress convenes in January, took great pride after the midterm elections in declaring his man-of-the-people plans to travel home as other Americans do. In a time of economic difficulty, it was a not-so-subtle dig at Ms. Pelosi, who has access to a military jet large enough to avoid refueling for her flights home to San Francisco.
But he is not giving up all the perquisites of power.
Mr. Boehner, who was wearing a casual yellow sweater and tan slacks, carried his own bag and smiled pleasantly at passengers who were leaving the security checkpoint inside the airport terminal on Friday. Among the travelers not invited to bypass the security line was Representative Allen Boyd, Democrat of Florida, who lost his re-election bid two weeks ago.
Only Congressional leaders or members of Congress with armed security details are allowed to go around security. The same privilege is afforded to governors and cabinet members if they are escorted by agents or law enforcement officers.
Prime U.S. Mortgage Foreclosures have hit a record high amid increased reports of irregularities in mortgage processing by originator Country Wide. What a horrible growth industry! The reason? High, prolonged unemployment. Good thing we’re focused on the right priorities! Let’s see, I did mention the obsession with extending tax cuts for the very rich, right? Oh, right, I do that right after this.
Foreclosures on prime fixed-rate mortgages in the U.S. jumped to a record in the third quarter as unemployment strained household budgets of the most creditworthy borrowers.
The inventory of homes in foreclosure financed by prime fixed-rate loans rose to 2.45 percent from 2.36 percent in the previous three months, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a report today. New foreclosures rose to 0.93 percent from 0.71 percent. Both numbers were the highest in the 12 years since the Washington-based trade group started tracking the categories.
Homeowners are falling behind on their mortgage payments as job cuts make it difficult for them to cover their bills, said Michael Fratantoni, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s vice president of research and economics. The unemployment rate has stayed above 9 percent for 18 consecutive months, the longest stretch since 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The increase in these plain-vanilla type of loans to the highest numbers ever show us it really is being driven by the economic environment,” Fratantoni said in a telephone interview. “It’s not going to turn around until we get more significant job growth.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has gone on record calling for President Obama to stand up to Republican demands to extend the tax cuts to wealthiest Americans. Will Democrats finally show some spine now that they’ve lost their supermajority?
Speaking on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Friday, Brown said Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker-elect John Boehner (R-Ohio) have shown they have no interest in anything but the failure of the Obama administration, which is why he shouldn’t make major concessions to them on the tax cuts.
Brown argued GOP leaders have done nothing but say no to President Obama since the day after his inauguration despite his much larger electoral victory, which is why the Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to respond in kind.
“I’m not saying no to the Republicans, but I’m also not — I’m also saying we’re not going to do more tax cuts for the rich, more deregulation of Wall Street, more job-killing outsourcing free trade agreements,” Brown said. “Those things don’t work for the American public. They don’t work in Cleveland or Toledo or Mansfield or Dayton, and they don’t work for the whole country.”
You’ve probably heard that the Celtic Tiger is in trouble. Thought I’d share the front page of the Irish Star with you to put a smile one your face. No smiling Irish eyes for Irish banksters–sorry, wanker banker buddies–or gouger-pols these days. And you thought we were disgusted with our lot? The Star is known for being a lot like New Orleans Levees. They don’t hold anything back !!
Brad DeLong is taking aim at the Republican detractors of Ben Bernanke. He does so by explaining some of the rationale behind the QE2. Oh, and he doesn’t have to use cute little talking cartoon characters to bedazzle you either. This is also an extension to the Paul Krugman op-ed and the Collender article I wrote about last night in a thread on economic sabotage by republicans. DeLong appears to be considering a similar vein of thought. That is, Republicans are objecting to everything that will improve the economy.
Indeed, it is now clear that the right-wing objection to the policies of the Obama administration was not an objection to fiscal policy as an inappropriate policy modality for stabilizing nominal spending. It was, instead, an objection to the very idea that the government should try to serve as a stabilizing macroeconomic balance wheel.
The flow of economy-wide spending is low. Thus Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is moving to boost the flow. It is doing so by changing the mix of privately-held assets as it buys government bonds that pay interest in exchange for for cash that does not.
That is totally standard.
There is only slightly nonstandard thing. The bonds that pay interest the Fed is buying are not the usual three-month Treasury bills but seven-year Treasury notes instead. The Federal Reserve has to do this, because those are the shortest-duration Treasury bonds that now pay interest. It cannot reduce short-term interest rates below zero, and so it is attempting via this policy of “quantitative easing” to reduce longer-term interest rates.
And the right wing objects to this.
I really cannot figure out why the Republicans are making such an issue out of this. They either don’t understand it or they are purposefully trying to create subterfuge so they can stop any attempt to heal the economic woes of the country. This makes no sense to me.
One of the most striking covers of The National Geographic was the one with a young Afghani girl with piercing green eyes. The National Geographic has a feature on Afghan Women with lots of pictures in a piece they’ve called “Veiled Rebellion”. It’s worth a look and a read.
The Afghan Parliament recently drafted a law intended to eliminate violence against women, who are beginning to reject old cultural practices and assert themselves in public and in private. I went to the Kabul home of Sahera Sharif, a Pashtun and the first female member of parliament from Khost. “No one knew a woman could put up campaign photos and posters on the walls in Khost—men didn’t allow women to even have jobs in Khost,” she said.
As a girl, Sharif stood up to her father, a conservative mullah, locking herself in a closet until he allowed her to go to school. She lived through the civil war between competing mujahideen groups, who ravaged Kabul before the Taliban conquest in 1996. She witnessed unimaginable cruelty and many deaths. “Much of the violence and cruelty you see now,” Sharif said, “is because people are crazy from all these wars.”
After the Taliban fell in December 2001, Sharif started a radio station to educate women about hygiene and basic health. More radically, she volunteered to teach at the university in Khost (a first there). She took off her burka (another first) and stood before the male students teaching them psychology. They blushed. And so she began to reeducate them.
And so the process of knowledge and change begins… with an exchange between one person and another.
[MABlue’s Sunday picks]
This is getting personal: Terrorists seem to “hate me for my freedoms” everywhere I happen to be.
Terrorists Believed to Be Planning Attack in Berlin
It would be an attack on the very heart of democracy. SPIEGEL has learned that terrorists may have been planning an attack on the Reichstag, the home of the German parliament and one of the most popular tourist destinations in Berlin. Two suspected culprits are already believed to be in Berlin.
That is really where I live. The Bundeskanzleramt(German Chancellery) and the Amt des Bundespräsidenten(German President Offices) are also in the same area. I still believe this is the safest spot in the city, along with the area in the vicinity of the US Embassy.
So far, Germans have remained calm, which is good to see.
Even with all the progress we have made, there is still so much we don’t understand about the human body.
Doctors Mystified by Case of World’s Thinnest Woman
Texas native Lizzie Velasquez, 21, is thinner than anyone thought possible. She spends her days wolfing down burgers, fries and cake, consuming more than three times the normal calorie requirements. Doctors can’t explain how she can be so underweight and still alive.
Here are some people Obama is certainly not going to listen to:
Millionaires to Obama: Tax us
More than 40 of the nation’s millionaires have joined Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength to ask President Obama to discontinue the tax breaks established for them during the Bush administration, as Salon reports.
“For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you allow tax cuts on incomes over $1,000,000 to expire at the end of this year as scheduled,” their website states. “We make this request as loyal citizens who now or in the past earned an income of $1,000,000 per year or more.”
For Heaven’s sake! What is it with Obama constantly adopting right-wing myths and revisionism and then propagating them? Many observers deplored this inclination during the campaign of 2008, but were quickly dismissed. However, that attitude hasn’t changed. Maybe there’s a something more to the madness. Krugman has the latest:
FDR, Reagan, and Obama
Some readers may recall that back during the Democratic primary Barack Obama shocked many progressives by praising Ronald Reagan as someone who brought America a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” I was among those who found this deeply troubling — because the idea that Reagan brought a transfomation in American dynamism is a right-wing myth, not borne out by the facts. (There was a surge in productivity and innovation — but it happened in the 90s, under Clinton, not under Reagan).
All the usual suspects pooh-poohed these concerns; it was ridiculous, they said, to think of Obama as a captive of right-wing mythology.
But are you so sure about that now?
And here’s this, from Thomas Ferguson: Obama saying
We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.
As Ferguson explains, this is a right-wing smear.
I’m sure BostonBoomer will spend the entire day playing this game.
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