MARK MY WORDS

UNCIVIL WAR

2011-07-13T06:02:00.000-07:00

You know this is true: there is a ten ton mountain gorilla squatting in your bathroom. It is not about economics, or politics. It is about the Republicans, all of them, being willing to plunge this country into financial chaos (that they created) rather than see a President of complexion succeed. Sometimes those still fighting the Civil War can be very uncivil.

"NEW" ECOnoMICS

2011-07-08T05:54:00.000-07:00

I keep saying this, but the only Republican remedy to the economy is not taxing the rich or Corporations and slashing any program that helps the needly. How does this create jobs? Isn't this the philosophy of pure Capitalism that got us where we are not? Reinstate a Republican to the White House and...the thought is as ghastly as it is couter-productive.

GIVE 'EM HELL, BARRY

2011-07-02T06:25:00.000-07:00

It’s time for the president to get feisty. Call a spade a spade. Republicans don’t give a hoot about anyone not pulling down less than a quarter mil/year. Let the poor eat fries. This is Christianity. Welfare is only meant for Corporations. Hammer this in, Mr. President. Remind the voters what the GOP stands for. Ask the middle class if voting for wealthy politicians who
who sanctify and protect those who with plenty while abandoning the less fortunate (all who don't have a bank account in the Cayman Islands) is what they want. Educate, Mr. President, since the Public already accuses you of being a Professor. Give ‘em hell, Barry!!

WHATEVER IT IS, THEY'RE AGAINST IT...

2011-06-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

How smart is America? How many voters understand that the Republican Congress with disagree with ANYTHING that the president does or proposes for the sole purpose of wanting him to fail. They vote has nothing to do with improving American Life, only in destroying the President's. This has probably happened in past politics, but not in my lifetime. It is racial; it is cultural. A portion of this country is still lamenting losing the Civil War and giving up their slaves. Guess with which Grand Old Party they are affiliated?

GLOOMY, GLOOMY, EVERYBODY'S GLOOMY

2011-06-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

More gloomy headlines. OK, Gloomongers: if you don't like it, give us a plan to fix it or shut up. Maybe Capitalism as we know it only works for the rich and getting richer. This might be the level that water has sought. What then? If you've got yours, you are the best and the brightest. If you didn't get yours, tough. That is Christianity, right?

LET IT BLEED

2011-06-07T06:16:00.000-07:00

As the song from the Great Depression goes, "The rich get rich and the poor get poorer." The only thing that has changed is that the rich are getting massively richer. The poor? About the same. Poor is poor. My point is that while this is happening, all Media, far from being an exclusive tool of the Left actually only plays to its own agenda: becoming massively rich by building up then tearing down those perceived to be in positions of power, thus generating juicy headlines and fleeting but satisfying instant news before moving on to the next prey. There is no agenda but the bottom line. This is Capitalism. Ca-ching!

STIFF-NECKED

2011-05-21T05:30:00.000-07:00

There is no peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Neither will bend; both enjoy the victim role. President Obama spoke the truth and they can blame him for stalling any peace talks. They are both very happy.

AND....?

2011-05-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

Regan's drip-drip economy is slow to recover. So, the solution is to vote the Black Man out and get us a Righteous Republican who will take us back to the economic policies that got us where we are now? Maybe the Federal Government should declare a Secession Day and all the States that want to leave can go form their own imperfect union, or no union at all but just a bunch a squabbling clans shooting at each other across imaginary borders. Those who care and believe it is their humanly responsibility to be of assistance to each other form the true Union and never have to drink Tea again.

IT IS UP TO YOU

2011-04-19T12:40:00.000-07:00

You, me, those guys over there, human beings of every artificial nationality, peoples of diversity who use differences to divide, followers of every religion seemly hellbent on destroying those of other beliefs, terrorists who terrorize for terrorism's sake, haters who hate because it is such a rush, politicians suckle who at the golden calf, the righteous who die for their cause and take everyone with them: STOP IT! You are choosing disaster. There is enough for everyone. Good times are not boring. Bad times are not more interesting. The earth will abide. It is not the end of the world. The sun has enough fuel to last for a few billion more years, enough time to get our act together. Relax. Fix your damned financial systems. They are just elaborate games. Maybe you should learn the rules before you start to play. Feed each other. Look at Americans. There is obviously more than enough edibles to go around. Be nice. Calm down. Things have been worse. Does that make you feel better?

TAKING A BREAK

2011-04-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

,,,from the hate. No news is a revelation (no religious reference intended). Spit your venom. Scratch each other's eyes out. I'm taking a nap...

p s Happy 150th Anniversary of the beginning of the end of slavery. Maybe a hundred and fifty more years...

THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, NEWT.

2011-03-26T08:19:00.001-07:00

RETURNING TO DC: LUKEWARM WELCOME FROM CONGRESS--OH NO!

2011-03-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

Hang in there, Mr. President. Do the right thing. Be pragmatic. Be logical. Be ethical and moral and just. Build your Profile in Courage. Don't be swayed by ideologues on either side of the aisle. They are running to or from something. They want to maintain their Congressional Healthcare and Retirement Plan. Be strong. Remember, Newt was for intervening in Libya before he was against it. Remember, the Left wants you to fail just as much as the Right. Success is not an option for either. MAD (mutual assured destruction) is the goal. Stalemate. Blood Feud. Righteous Defeat. Jousting the Windmill. True leadership is a pain in the tuckus.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

2011-03-23T10:15:00.000-07:00

One year after the Health Bill passes, MSNBC headline says that the nation is still divided. Duh? the US has been divided before and after the unCivil War and little has changed in ancestral hearts and minds. The Blue and the Gray has just become the Red and the Blue. We like to claim we are the one shining beacon on the hill, unlike all countries before or after. If you disagree, we will castigate you like Galileo for claiming the earth went round the sun. To compromise and cooperate is to become French. And they are Catholic. Weak and groveling to the Pope. Stand up for the flag, boys! Stars and Bars forever!

WHAT WOULD SARAH PALIN DO?

2011-03-21T23:18:00.000-07:00

...or Tim Pawlenty, or Newt Gingrich, or Michelle Bachmann, or Donald Trump, or...

OPPOSITES DISTRACT

2011-03-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

Life has always been graded on the curve. You may get an A in one subject and flunk the next. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wisely penned. I would add 24 Hour News. Be it Fox or MSNBC, we are looking for the quick fix, the godless villain, the holy savior. It must be black; it must be white. Conflict sells. Screaming trumps debate. Lies taste fuller than fat-free truth. We drift farther apart, continental plates eventually crashing together in vioilence. Hatred throbs like the exposed core of a nuclear reactor. It's time to cool it!

THE MIDDLE WAY

2011-03-18T15:55:00.000-07:00

It is not the coward's path, the middle way. It is balance. Veer too far to the right, swerve too far to the left and there is only the ditch. In the ditch the wheels of your once speeding vehicle spin without traction, going nowhere. You fume in righteous fury. You know you are right and would rather remain in the ditch than beg for a tow back towards the centerline. Meanwhile, the manmade problems of man clops down the road pulled by a team of oxen. You shake your fist and gun the gas, digging your wheels in deeper.

2011-03-11T09:06:00.001-08:00

STRANGE BUT TRUE FACT

2011-03-10T16:22:00.001-08:00

The United States spends more money each year on military bands than on support for National Public Radio.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

2011-03-10T11:10:00.000-08:00

The GOP is playing the game skillfully. Turn unionized workers into slobs, lazy, long-haired hippy protesters like the ones that kept us form winning in Viet Nam and send Obama packing back to Kenya with his Mau Mau friends.

TOO MUCH MONKEY BUSINESS

2011-03-05T11:25:00.000-08:00

Not being able to help myself, I read comments after politically bent internet articles. They are 90% racial/religious rants (often code-disguised) against a president who is not one of US. Truly, it was not like this when W was president. Guess the lobbies are just lousy at everything, including bigotry.

FAIR AND BALANCED

2011-03-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

The unemployment rate has fallen to 8.9% with 192,000 jobs being added in February. So, Gov. Walker of Wisconsin feels, in his patriotic duty to assure Barak Hussein Obama be a one term president, he must lay off state workers to raise the rate closer to a perfect 10.

WEIGHT LOSS?

2011-03-03T16:07:00.000-08:00

I get it. Hukabee is gaining his weight back on to be one of us, not skinny like that foreigner Obama.

2011-03-03T13:29:00.001-08:00

WHY TEACHERS A SCORNED

2011-03-03T07:19:00.000-08:00

Why are teachers being scorned? That's an easy one.

Your mom drags you to this place called School. You are forced to sit in rows of desks and do what some strange woman (man) tells you. You must only talk in turn and playtime is restricted to this short thing called recess. You are drilled to learn reading-riting-rithmatic like draftees on an Army base, things that have no relevance to your life. They won't even let you bring your dog to prison run my mean looking Teachers who are always pointing out your faults.

Skip ahead from elementary to middle to high and it doesn't get any better. You constantly dream of the day that School is Out Forever! We don't need no education! We don't need no thought control!! Teachers leave them kids alone!!!

You get a real job, pay taxes, register to vote. Teachers have Unions. You probably don't. You know about Unions. They protect the Lazy. Teachers want you to pay for their extravagant pensions and obscene benefit package. Hell No!!!

And teachers wonder why they are scorned.?

CROSS OF GOLD

2011-02-27T10:10:00.000-08:00

When Bush won in '04 he stated that America had given him the mandate to do what he and Cheney and Rumsfeld (Wall Street and the Banks) damn well pleased and went about governing from that supposed mandate. America, think before you vote. Republicans have contempt for the middle and lower classes. It is your fault that you are not rich as they. You are lazy as a State and Federal Employee. You do not deserve collective bargaining. Those who sacrificed to provide you with eight hour days and forty hour weeks, safe working conditions, retirement, medical and dental--they were fools! They were Communists leading you down the path to Socialism and and Totalitarianism. If you like conspiracy theories, what the governor of Wisconsin (while the New Jersey governor cheers him on) by attempting to crush the Unions is the first short fired in a war to return the working class to nineteenth century conditions, the Golden Age of the Robber Barons before Teddy Roosevelt the meddling muckrakers. Reagan is not their anointed saint, it is William McKinley. Yes, they want to crucify you on a Cross of Gold.

RED IS GRAY AND YELLOW WHITE

2011-02-23T10:47:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Wonderland:

" Indeed, many might be surprised to discover that overall employment actually DECREASED in New Jersey in Christie’s first year as governor. Yet that hasn’t stopped Christie from becoming the GOP’s biggest star right now and the inspiration to the new governors in Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The political danger for Republicans is that they aren’t talking about creating jobs right now; in fact, the cuts they’re proposing -- and the infrastructure projects they’re eliminating -- would only increase unemployment.

The Betrayal of Public Workers

2011-02-21T14:03:00.000-08:00

by: Robert Pollin and Jeffrey Thompson | The Nation | Report

Protesters in Wisconsin on February 19, 2011. (Photo: mrbula)

The Great Recession and its aftermath are entering a new phase in the United States, which could bring even more severe assaults on the living standards and basic rights of ordinary people than we have experienced thus far. This is because a wide swath of the country’s policy- and opinion-making elite have singled out public sector workers—including schoolteachers, healthcare workers, police officers and firefighters—as well as their unions and even their pensions as deadweight burdens sapping the economy’s vitality.

The Great Recession did blow a massive hole in state and municipal government finances, with tax receipts—including income, sales and property taxes—dropping sharply along with household incomes, spending and real estate values. Meanwhile, demand for public services, such as Medicaid and heating oil assistance, has risen as people’s circumstances have worsened. But let’s remember that the recession was caused by Wall Street hyper-speculation, not the pay scales of elementary school teachers or public hospital nurses.

Nonetheless, a rising chorus of commentators charge that public sector workers are overpaid relative to employees in comparable positions in the private sector. The fact that this claim is demonstrably false appears not to matter. Instead, the attacks are escalating. The most recent proposal gaining traction is to write new laws that would allow states to declare bankruptcy. This would let them rip up contracts with current public sector employees and walk away from their pension fund obligations. Only by declaring bankruptcy, Republican luminaries Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich argued in the Los Angeles Times, will states be able to “reform their bloated, broken and underfunded pension systems for current and future workers.”

But this charge is emanating not only from the Republican right; in a front-page story on January 20, the New York Times reported on a more general trend spreading across the country in which “policymakers are working behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have promised to retired public workers.”

Considered together, state and local governments are the single largest employer in the US economy. They are also the country’s most important providers of education, healthcare, public safety and other vital forms of social support. Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate is stuck at 9 percent—a more accurate figure is 16.1 percent—a full eighteen months after the recession was declared over. How have we reached the point where the dominant mantra is to dismantle rather than shore up state and local governments in their moment of crisis?

Why States Need Support During Recessions

The Wall Street–induced recession clobbered state and local government budgets. By 2009, state tax revenues had fallen by fully 13 percent relative to where they were in 2007, and they remained at that low level through most of last year. By comparison, revenues never fell by more than 6 percent in the 2001 recession. Even during the 1981–82 recession, the last time unemployment reached 9 percent, the decline in state tax revenues never exceeded 2 percent. These revenue losses, starting in 2008, when taken together with the increased demand for state services, produced an average annual budget gap in 2009–11 of $140 billion, or 21 percent of all state spending commitments.

Unlike the federal government, almost all state and local governments are legally prohibited from borrowing money to finance shortfalls in their day-to-day operating budgets. The state and local governments do borrow to finance their long-term investments in school buildings, roads, bridges, sewers, mass transit and other infrastructure projects. They have established a long record of reliability in repaying these debt obligations, even during the recession. Nevertheless, these governments invariably experience a squeeze in their operating budgets during recessions, no matter how well they have managed their finances during more favorable economic times.

If, in a recession, states and municipalities are forced to reduce their spending in line with their loss in tax revenues, this produces layoffs for government employees and loss of sales for government vendors. These cutbacks, in turn, will worsen conditions in the private market, discouraging private businesses from making new investments and hiring new employees. The net impact is to create a vicious cycle that deepens the recession.

As such, strictly as a means of countering the recession—on behalf of business interests as well as everyone else in the community—the logic of having the federal government providing stimulus funds to support state and local government spending levels is impeccable. The February 2009 Obama stimulus—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—along with supplemental funds for Medicaid, has provided significant support, covering about one-third of the total budget gap generated by the recession. But that leaves two-thirds to be filled by other means. ARRA funds have now run out, and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will almost certainly block further funding.

In 2010 roughly another 15 percent of the budget gap was covered by twenty-nine states that raised taxes and fees-for-services. In general, raising taxes during a recession is not good policy. But if it must be done to help fill deepening budgetary holes, the sensible way to proceed is to focus these increases on wealthier households. Their ability to absorb such increases is obviously strongest, which means that, unlike other households, they are not likely to cut back on spending in response to the tax hikes. In fact, ten states—New York, Illinois, Connecticut, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Oregon, Hawaii, Vermont, Rhode Island and Delaware—have raised taxes progressively in some fashion.

Of course, the wealthy do not want to pay higher taxes. But during the economic expansion and Wall Street bubble years of 2002–07, the average incomes of the richest 1 percent of households rose by about 10 percent per year, more than three times that for all households. The richest 1 percent received fully 65 percent of all household income growth between 2002–07.

One charge against raising state taxes in a progressive way is that it will encourage the wealthy to pick up and leave the state. But research on this question shows that this has not happened. We can see why by considering, as a hypothetical example, the consequences of a 2 percent income tax increase on the wealthiest 5 percent of households in Massachusetts. This would mean that these households would now have $359,000 at their disposal after taxes rather than $370,000—hardly enough to affect spending patterns significantly for these households, much less induce them to relocate out of the state. At the same time, a tax increase such as this by itself will generate about $1.6 billion for the state to spend on education, healthcare and public safety.

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But even with the ARRA stimulus funds and tax increases, states and municipalities have had to make sharp cuts in spending. More severe cuts will be coming this year, with the ARRA funds now gone. These include cuts that will reduce low-income children’s or families’ eligibility for health insurance; further cuts in medical, homecare and other services for low-income households, as well as in K–12 education and higher education; and layoffs and furloughs for employees. The proposed 2012 budgets include still deeper cuts in core areas of healthcare and education. In Arizona, the governor’s budget would cut healthcare for 280,000 poor people and reduce state support for public universities by nearly 20 percent. In California, Governor Brown is proposing to bring spending on the University of California down to 1999 levels, when the system had 31 percent fewer students than it does today.

State and Local Government Workers Are Not Overpaid

Even if state and local government employees are not responsible for the budgetary problems that emerged out of the recession, are they nevertheless receiving bloated wage and benefits packages that are holding back the recovery? Since the recession began, there has been a steady stream of media stories making such claims. One widely cited 2009 Forbes cover article reported, “State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33 percent higher than the private sector’s $19…. Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42 percent.”

What figures such as these fail to reflect is that state and local government workers are older and substantially better educated than private-sector workers. Forbes is therefore comparing apples and oranges. As John Schmitt of the Center for Economic Policy Research recently showed, when state and local government employees are matched against private sector workers of the same age and educational levels, the public workers earn, on average, about 4 percent less than their private counterparts. Moreover, the results of Schmitt’s apples-to-apples comparison are fully consistent with numerous studies examining this same question over the past twenty years. One has to suspect that the pundits who have overlooked these basic findings have chosen not to look.

State Pension Funds Are Not Collapsing

Not surprisingly, state and local government pension funds absorbed heavy losses in the 2008–09 Wall Street crisis, because roughly 60 percent of these pension fund assets were invested in corporate stocks. Between mid-2007 and mid-2009, the total value of these pension funds fell by nearly $900 billion.

This collapse in the pension funds’ asset values has increased their unfunded liabilities—that is, the total amount of benefit payments owed over the next thirty years relative to the ability of the pension funds’ portfolio to cover them. By how much? In reality, estimating the total level of unfunded liabilities entails considerable guesswork. One simply cannot know with certainty how many people will be receiving benefits over the next thirty years, nor—more to the point—how much money the pension funds’ investments will be earning over this long time span. The severe instability of financial markets in the recent past further clouds the picture.

Thus, these estimates vary by huge amounts, depending on the presumed rate of return for the funds. The irony is that right-wing doomsayers in this debate, such as Grover Norquist, operate with an assumption that the fund managers will be able to earn returns only equal to the interest rates on riskless US Treasury securities. Under this assumption, the level of unfunded liabilities balloons to the widely reported figure of $3 trillion. To reach this conclusion, the doomsayers are effectively arguing that the collective performance of all the Wall Street fund managers—those paragons of free-market wizardry—will be so anemic over the next thirty years that the pension funds may as well just fire them and permanently park all their money in risk-free government bonds. It follows that the profits of private corporations over the next thirty years will also be either anemic or extremely unstable.

But it isn’t necessary to delve seriously into this debate in order to assess the long-term viability of the public pension funds. A more basic consideration is that before the recession, states and municipalities consistently maintained outstanding records of managing their funds. In the 1990s the funds steadily accumulated reserves, such that by 2000, on average, they were carrying no unfunded liabilities at all. Even after the losses to the funds following the previous Wall Street crash of 2001, the unfunded share of total pension obligations was no more than around 10 percent. By comparison, the Government Accountability Office holds that to be fiscally sound, the unfunded share can be as high as 20 percent of the pension funds’ total long-term obligations.

A few states are facing more serious problems, including New Jersey, Illinois and California. New Jersey is in the worst shape. But this is not because the state has been handing out profligate pensions to its retired employees. The average state pension in New Jersey pays out $39,500 per year. The problem is that over the past decade, the state has regularly paid into the system less than the amount agreed upon by the legislature and governor and stipulated in the annual budgets. For 2010 the state skipped its scheduled $3.1 billion payment altogether. However, even taking New Jersey’s worst-case scenario, the state could still eliminate its unfunded pension fund liabilities—that is, begin running a 100 percent fully funded pension fund—if it increased the current allocation by about 4 percent of the total budget, leaving 96 percent of the state budget allocation unchanged.

In dollar terms, this worst-case scenario for New Jersey would require the state to come up with roughly $4 billion per year to cover its pension commitments in an overall budget in the range of $92 billion. Extracting this amount of money from other programs in the budget would certainly cause pain, especially when New Jersey, like all other states, faces tight finances. But compare this worst-case scenario with the bankruptcy agenda being discussed throughout the country.

To begin with, seriously discussing a bankruptcy agenda will undermine the confidence of private investors in all state and municipal bonds—confidence that has been earned by state and municipal governments. When the markets begin to fear that states and municipalities are contemplating bankruptcy, this will drive up the interest rates that governments will have to pay to finance school buildings, infrastructure improvements and investments in the green economy.

Then, of course, there is the impact on the pensioners and their families. For the states and municipalities to walk away from their pension fund commitments would leave millions of public sector retirees facing major cuts in their living standards and their sense of security. Something few Americans understand is that roughly one-third of the 19 million state and local employees—i.e., those in fifteen states, including California, Texas and Massachusetts—are not eligible for Social Security and will depend exclusively on their pensions and personal savings in retirement. In addition, public sector pensions are not safeguarded by the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Unlike Wall Street banks, state pensioners will receive no bailout checks if the states choose to abrogate their pension fund agreements.

Getting Serious About Reforming State Finances

Of course, there are significant ways the public pension systems, as well as state and local finances more generally, can be improved. The simplest solution, frequently cited, involves “pension spiking”—that is, practices such as allowing workers to add hundreds of hours of overtime at the end of their careers to balloon their final year’s pay and their pensions. This has produced serious additional costs to pension obligations in some states and municipalities, but it is still by no means a major factor in explaining states’ current fiscal problems.

But states and municipalities also have to follow through on the steps they have taken to raise taxes on the wealthy households that are most able to pay. They should also broaden their sources of tax revenue by taxing services such as payments to lawyers, as well as by taxing items purchased over the Internet. And they have to stop giving out large tax breaks to corporations as inducements to locate in their state or municipality instead of neighboring locations. This kind of race to the bottom generates no net benefit to states and municipalities.

Finally, state and local governments are in the same boat as the federal government and private businesses in facing persistently rising healthcare costs. As was frequently noted during the healthcare debates over the past two years, the United States spends about twice as much per person on healthcare as other highly developed countries do, even though these other countries have universal coverage, longer life expectancies and generally healthier populations. These costs weigh heavily on the budgets of state and local governments, which finance a large share of Medicaid and health benefits for state employees. The problem is that we spend far more than other countries on medications, expensive procedures and especially insurance and administration. We also devote less attention to prevention. It remains to be seen how much the Obama healthcare reform law—the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—will remedy this situation. It is certainly the case that more must be done, especially in establishing effective controls on the drug and insurance industries.

These are some of the long-run measures that must be taken to bolster the financing of education, healthcare, public safety and other vital social services, as well as to support investments in infrastructure and the green economy. If states declare bankruptcy they will break their obligations to employees, vendors, pensioners and even bondholders, which will undermine the basic foundations of our economy. As we emerge, if only tentatively, from the wreckage of the Great Recession, this is precisely the moment we need to strengthen, not weaken, the standards of fairness governing our society.

Robert Pollin is a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts. One of his most recent books (co-written) is A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States.

Jeffrey Thompson is an assistant research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts.

STAND UP!

2011-02-19T15:23:00.000-08:00

Good people, it is time to fight! The Brown-Shirters are out in force. Ignorance is the Evil they spread, poisoned cups of tea instead of Kool Aid. They want you to drink. Do not! Call them out. In they end they will crumble like Joe McCarthy.

WORKERS, UNITE!

2011-02-18T20:19:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Hoffa is dead. It's time to remember the good Unions have done for each and every American who draws a paycheck. Child labor was once the norm. Ten hour days. Six day work weeks. Lethal working conditions. Arbitrary termination without recourse. Racism. Sexism. Agism. Low wages. Zero benefits. The governor of Wisconsin wants to break his state's unions. The Tea Party scoffs and mocks and blames budget deficits on public employees. The Speaker of the House wants to slash federal employees. Putting people out of work is such a logical solution to creating jobs. It is time for all good Democrats and New Dealers to stand up and say, "Hell no!"

DEVALUATION

2011-02-17T14:54:00.001-08:00

First, eloquence became a liability. Now, political pundits are saying that fat is an advantage because it makes you more like the common folk. Obama is to thin, trots around. acts uppity. And his wife is complaining about our kids eating fires. She's uppity too (and has a big butt). All this said, Republican Governor of New Jersey, Christ Christie, is the new golden boy. He claims he's not running for president, but the Republicans want him. He's someone they could share a bag of fries with. He's like a toy in their Happy Meal!

LISTEN TO THEM WHINE, WHINE, WHINE

2011-02-15T10:03:00.000-08:00

Facebook and Twitter may have lead to the overthrow of an Egyptian dictator, but the internet has turned us into a nation of terminal whiners. Nothing, Nothing, Nothing is ever good enough. Common Sense and Tolerance may rhyme, but they are on the endangered species list. Maybe a Moratorium on blabber would be a good thing. Hey, I'll start the ball rolling. Look, I'm signing off...

THERE MUST BE SOMEWAY OUT OF HERE

2011-02-14T05:57:00.000-08:00

The Republicans are disappointed because President Obama's Budget does not call to raise the Social Security retirement age or limit popular tax breaks such as the mortgage interest deduction. Meanwhile, the rich continue their tax breaks and Republican pressure keeps us spending two Billion Dollars per cay in Afghanistan (wouldn't be manly to pull out). Being a pampered State Employee targeted by many Republicans as the Unionized reason for our financial woes, I wonder why I haven't had a raise in years, why I am taking furlough days, why my retirement is being threatened. Now doomsayers are saying if the deficit isn't slashed and burned in five years we will be Greece. I think I miss worrying about the Bomb. Guess it's only human nature to crave drama. How about some comedy tonight?

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

2011-02-10T05:05:00.000-08:00

Prediction: The Dems and the Boehner GOPers will join forces to defeat the Tea Baggers!

BURN, WITCH, BURN!!!

2011-02-09T18:43:00.000-08:00

We haven’t changed much, have we? We are offspring of losers from Europe who, for one reason or other, couldn’t make it back home. Or the gold-seekers willing to destroy any civilization to fill their galleons with nuggets. Or religious zealots intent on conversion by fire. Tolerant? Really? Ask the slaves and ask the slaves’ descendants. It has taken casinos for the Native Americans to get somewhat even--we gave them firewater, they gave us gambling. Communists now Islamics and Obama is a Muslim. Our hate is unlimited/

WATCHING WHAT YOU WISH FOR

2011-02-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

Maybe we should just get out of the way and give the Tea Party control of the country. They muat have a plan besides no federal government. Maybe not. Anyway, let's move to France and see how they improve your life, Mr. & Mrs. America, with the use of biting sarcasm.

THE DARK SIDE

2011-02-04T22:05:00.000-08:00

We learned early the power of no, the art of throwing ourselves to the ground to become obstacles to others’ progress. Our Kindergarten predilection for breaking other kids’ toys translates easily to the world of politics. Sharing is for the weak. Elmo is gay.

CLUTCHING THE REINS OF POWER

2011-02-02T07:57:00.000-08:00

OK, it's getting weird:

CAIRO — Several thousand supporters of President Hosni Mubarak, including some riding horses and camels and wielding whips, attacked anti-government protesters Wednesday as Egypt's upheaval took a dangerous new turn.

OPEN LETTER TO REPUBLICANS

2011-02-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

Republicans, where on the Jobs?

BANG! BANG!

2011-01-31T15:48:00.000-08:00

Republicans are ecstatic because a judge has ruled that the Founding Fathers did not want Americans to have health care. They can have constitutional guns, but not health care. Guess if we shoot enough of each other before we get sick or old then health care would just be one of those Bridges to Nowhere.

COMING HOME

2011-01-30T08:43:00.000-08:00

America: find an alternative energy source, pack your bags and let them try to feed their camels on oil.

RIDICULE

2011-01-28T14:48:00.000-08:00

Ridicule from the Right is what passes for program.

One Op-Eder ridicules the President by pointing out, in his opinion, we have sunk from Big Things being going to the moon to developing solar panels, another he-haw Community Organizer moment. However, to develop a truly efficient solar panel would benefit Humankind more than a million trips to the moon. He-haw!

SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

2011-01-28T08:41:00.000-08:00

Contrary to old school pop culture, the Egyptian Revolution is not only being televised, it is being Tweeted and Facebooked.

BACK AT IT

2011-01-26T14:47:00.000-08:00

January 26, 2011 2:47 PM
My new right hip is two and a half weeks old. I’ve put my walker away and use a cane and sometimes nothing. The pain is subsiding, the range of motion increases and the ankle swelling diminishes when I lie on the bed with my foot above my head. I feel I am getting closer to beginning to write again. Until now I have been tired, if not groggy. The fog is lifting. Now, or soon, is the time to get back to my writing. My finished novel, “The Last Resort” is sitting on top of my printer, waiting to find an agent. I started last year proposing it to a handful possible agencies and even got back a few positive rejects. Then, life intervened. Yes, that darned life that so often gets in the way of living. I stalled. I flooded the engine and have been waiting to turn the key again. I think it’s time. First I need to check the gas tank...

My choices are two: put energy into selling “The Last Resort” or start a new novel. As my stamina increases, I am beginning to feel confident I can do both. Mostly, I need to start the physical act of writing. I miss it. I miss it like I missed my guitar one end of quarter in college I left it home as to not distract myself from studying. The withdrawal was physical and acute. I needed my guitar to vent, to process, to create. The same goes for writing. Writing is like dreaming--it grows the brain brings order out of the day’s chaos.

I have been using this blog for mostly political reasons. Now i believe I’ll use it for a more holistic venture. Yes, politics are important. Yes, raging against insanity makes me feel good. But so does writing. Just typing these few words makes my hip feel better. It’s time to wind the future!

DEAR REPUBLICANS

2011-01-25T19:51:00.000-08:00

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!!

IMPEACH EARL WARREN!

2011-01-25T05:48:00.000-08:00

Republicans gone wild! Now they are after the UN. Barry Goldwater's heart must be warmed.

DEAR EVERYBODY

2011-01-22T14:47:00.000-08:00

Stop blaming Unions for all your woes. They are the ones that got you livable salaries, got your children out of factories and sweat shops, gave you the weekend, protected you against the whims of Capitalistic Bosses. Stop the hands that put food on your table. Read some history.

STATE OF AFFAIRS

2011-01-21T05:03:00.000-08:00

I am a State worker. I am in a Union. I have been in a Union for more than forty years. By comparison to the public sector, my salary is small and being shrunk with furlough days and lack of raises. Now I am being fingerpointed as being the cause of my state's financial woes because I am too greatly compensated. Maybe we should set up "Worth Panels" to determine every Americans salary. Should a software designer who makes video games to train your kids how to kill cops make as much as they do? How about NBA players? Is dropping a ball through a hoop worth millions? How much does Sookie from the Jersey Shore make? Is she worth it? How about those bankers? Wall Street? We the Little People are feeling punished. And those who actually do work for the common good are the most abused. Hopefully, Capitalistic Karma will eventually right things. Just hope it's in time to save my exorbitant State of Washington pension.

DIE!!

2011-01-18T15:13:00.000-08:00

First plan of action for the Majority of House Republicans: repeal and deny health care to kids with cancer. We can afford to destroy and rebuild villages in Afghanistan, but we can't afford the cost of providing health to the sick. Soon they'll be rethinking the entire life insurance industry because statistics reveal that everyone who buys it eventually dies. Where's the profit in that? So, to borrow from Scrooge, it would be better to die now and reduce the surplus...

WHO ARE WE?

2011-01-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

Has anything really changed in the American Temperament? Is hatred and incivility something new? Haven't our Legislators literally bashed each other's brains out with cans on the floor of Congress before? Aren't we still reluctant to provide Women full Citizenship? Aren't the only good immigrants our own family's ancestors? Aren't the members of our Religious Sect the only ones going to Heaven? Don't many of us still, in their hearts, believe negroes are worth two-thirds of a human being, as the Constitution states (the Republicans didn't read that part the other day at the opening of Congress). Will any of this stop while bleeding still leads and 'news' ratings still go to the loudest shouter?

THE GREAT DIVIDE

2011-01-10T15:52:00.000-08:00

It might be time to redistrict our country. All Christian Soldiers on one side of the fence, the rest of us on the other. There will be no great coming together. I'm not being a defeatist, just a realist. America is nothing more than a reflection of the rest of the world. Diversity is acceptable as picking you nose at the table (which, come to think of it, might be acceptable in some quarters). I am still pondering what it means to be an American. If others admire us, what for? Help me with this one.

2011-01-10T08:16:00.001-08:00

Climate of Hate

By PAUL KRUGMAN

When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 — an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.

Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness — but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.

And there’s not much question what has changed. As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line.

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand. Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger.

But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been happening: the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?

If Arizona promotes some real soul-searching, it could prove a turning point. If it doesn’t, Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning.

Op-Ed Columnist: United in Horror

THE HATE JUST KEEPS ON COMING

2011-01-05T12:38:00.000-08:00

Anytime I break down and read readers's comments after an e-article involving the President, I am stunned by the violence towards him, the undiluted hatred of the "Pretender-in-Chief". Sometimes, new technologies just give stupid people a wider varities of ways to express their drivel.

STOP IT, DROP IT

2011-01-03T14:35:00.000-08:00

Yes. Any Republican who votes to deny Americans Health Care by repealing and replacing because it costs too much should give up their Government Health Care, thus aligning money and mouth.

Letters from the Right

2010-12-29T11:45:00.000-08:00

As seen on the Internet; commenting on John McCain being the Grand Old Man of NO:

"mccain would of had a lot better chance of winning the election if obuma had not lies about everything he was going to do, john fought for his country obama stole and smoked crack and if not for mccain Reid would have just spent another trillion dollars.if obama were not black he would have been checked out a lot more before many americans voted for him but the libs would have screamed raceist,obama spent more in two wyears than the every president put together since washington and we are worse off now than befor he took office,mccain has searved his country 100 times more over than obama ever will the lieing sob I hope he goes so far to the middle it makes the libs shi7 thier pants"

2010-12-21T20:25:00.000-08:00

David Horsey's Drawing Power

BLOG: Gregoire confronts the destructive force of Eymanism

Gov. Chris Gregoire dropped by the seattlepi.com newsroom this morning with fire in her eyes.

For most of her political career, she has been known for her cool demeanor, not her emotion. She has won respect for her intelligence but has not garnered a high level of devotion from voters. The state's current fiscal disaster, though, has put her in crisis mode and with it she appears to be finding a tough, passionate, angry side.

Gregoire has said she "hates" the budget she has had to propose to deal with the state government's $4.6 billion funding gap. It is nothing but cuts and more cuts. Talking with my colleagues Joel Connelly, Chris Grygiel and me today, she said, "I don't like the cuts to early childhood education. I don't like the cuts to K-12. I don't like the cuts on the backs of the poor."

She seemed pretty disgusted with voters who apparently prefer making nasty reductions in services to the poor rather than pay an extra two cents on a can of Coca Cola. The repeal of the tax on beverages and candy in the November election dug the budget hole significantly deeper. The simultaneous rejection of an income tax on the very wealthy among us closed off access to a new revenue source. And the reinstitution of a two-thirds vote requirement for raising any taxes in the legislature nailed another door shut.

Those who cast anti-tax votes think they saved money, but Gregoire hopes everyone will finally recognize how much those votes really cost.

For years now, Washingtonians have indulged in what I call "Eymanism." This is a belief unattached to reality that we can have a vibrant economy, good roads, good schools, great universities, effective programs for the poor and elderly and run the nation's biggest ferry system while giving ourselves new tax cuts every year or two through one of Tim Eyman's simplistic-but-alluring initiatives.

Up to this point, the reaction in Olympia has been to cower before each Eyman-inspired tantrum and find gimmicky ways to patch up the damage. That's what happened after Initiative 695 poked a gaping hole in funding of ferries. Gregoire is refusing to try any more gimmicks. The ferry system, for instance, will see fares rise by 10 percent while more than two dozen sailings are discontinued.

Eighty different programs will be eliminated, including subsidized health insurance for 66,000 low-income individuals, disability grants and medical help for tens of thousands of folks with temporary disabilities, general fund money for state parks and money for K-4 class size reduction.

Tuition at the state universities and community colleges will shoot up and higher education funding will be cut. Here, though, Gregoire is drawing a line in the sand. Legislators may want to take a bigger whack at higher ed' when they return to Olympia in January. If they succeed, Gregoire will tell college and university administrators to begin limiting enrollment. The governor insists quality education at our excellent institutions of higher learning must be preserved for better days ahead. In effect, she would prefer putting limits on who can get access to that education rather than let community colleges and universities slide into mediocrity.

Majority Democrats in the legislature seem stunned and paralyzed by the decimation of social services they spent years building up. They will resist Greoire's budget cuts and she will resist the gimmicks they may want to employ to avoid them.

On the Republican side, legislators may finally have to face up to the harsh world they have created through years of anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric. In the non-urban areas of the state where Republicans rule, things will be disappearing -- things like levy equalization money for schools, jobs at state prisons, access to higher education and all those ferry runs. When furious constituents begin complaining, Republicans may wonder if lean, miserly government is really what they wanted after all.

Certainly, Tim the Initiative King up in Mukilteo will not let reality get in the way of his lucrative ballot business. And I'm skeptical that even these terrible times will bring many more people to the realization that there is no free lunch. Still, just enough perceptions may be altered by Gregoire's tough measures to make it a little harder for the destructive anarchy of Eymanism to prevail the next time around.

2010-12-21T20:24:00.000-08:00

David Horsey's Drawing Power

BLOG: Gregoire confronts the destructive force of Eymanism

Gov. Chris Gregoire dropped by the seattlepi.com newsroom this morning with fire in her eyes.

Those who cast anti-tax votes think they saved money, but Gregoire hopes everyone will finally recognize how much those votes really cost.

2010-12-21T20:18:00.000-08:00

I'M SO TIRED

2010-12-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

...of all media (right, left and whatever is in-between) scanning the horizon for signs of storm, for wisps of clouds to be tinted with red, expectant of squalls swirling into typhoons. They're kids in the schoolyard gathered around a fight, egging on the bully, hoping for blood. Peace is boring; good weather doesn't bring ratings: if it bleeds, it leads, and in that, we creep towards societies fed on human sacrifice. How many of your friends are Aztecs?

SOMETHING HAPPENED

2010-12-18T22:21:00.000-08:00

Gays can now officially carry guns and wear camouflage. I'm still processing the significance. Conservatives were against the concept, so it must have merit. However, we need to be even more skeptical when commanders-in-chief decide a cause is worth the sacrifice of his/hers soldiers lives.

BLOWIN' IN THE WIND

2010-12-09T09:33:00.000-08:00

Now, the House Democrats huff 'n puff about the Tax Cut Compromise. Where have they been, O Great Majority Mandaters of '06 , for the past four years?

AMEN, MR. PRESIDENT

2010-12-08T09:44:00.001-08:00

“This notion that somehow we are willing to compromise too much reminds me of the debate that we had during health care,” Obama said regarding complaints over the tax-cut compromise he cut with Republicans. “This is the public-option debate all over again. So I pass a signature piece of legislation where we finally get health care for all Americans... But because there was a provision in there that they didn't get that would have affected maybe a couple of million people, even though we got health insurance for 30 million people and the potential for lower premiums for 100 million people, that somehow that was a sign of weakness and compromise.” He continued, “Now, if that's the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then let's face it, we will never get anything done. People will have the satisfaction of having a purist position and no victories for the American people.”

NOTHING FROM NOTHING

2010-12-07T21:10:00.000-08:00

We take our cues from the Arabs and the Jews--two stiff-necked tribes (Democrats and Republicans) who regard any compromise as surrender. We travel on trains down parallel tracks and throw rocks out the windows at each other. Losing has become winning--better to go down in glorious flames than make a pact with the Devil. So, we stand knee deep in the big muddy smug that we would rather drown than ask for help.

PLEASE, MR. PRESIDENT

2010-12-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

Tell the American Public just one thing: The Republicans will go to all extremes, even denying the unemployed benefits, to get tax cuts for the rich. Tell them and tell them and tell them!!!

THE NAYS HAVE IT

2010-11-30T11:21:00.000-08:00

Randomly reading just about any comment on anything on the internet is a study in the philosophy of Groucho's Professor John Quincy Wagstaff: "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It." I guess the word God-fearing says it all: in a "Christian" country, hate is more powerful than love.

THIS IS A TEST

2010-11-28T17:41:00.000-08:00

Obama was sent to test our national character. So far, we are failing.

Our country was founded on violence: ridding the landscape of pesky natives with bullets and measles; waging war on Mexicans, each other, the Spanish Empire...wars and wars and more wars...

Somehow, an "other" has been elected president. Is is either bringing out the best or the worst in us. Guess which way the scale is tipping?

BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID.

2010-11-26T10:38:00.000-08:00

‘Stunning the Halibut’

If the Democrats think things are bad now, wait until Sarah Palin grabs them by their bleeding hearts.

by Steve TuttleNovember 26, 2010

When Democrats and progressive pundits start whining about how we’re having an anti-intellectual moment, it can mean only one thing: they just got their butts handed to them in an election. It’s not often you see the leftyNew Republic and the righty National Review use the same Obama quote on their covers to describe anything, but they did after the Nov. 2 midterms: “Shellacking.”

It may be good news for the Democrats that many people didn’t seem to get the word about this big event, or even exactly which party is in charge. According to a Pew Research Center poll released last week, “Fewer than half (46%) know that the Republicans will have a majority only in the House of Representatives when the new Congress convenes in January, while 38% can identify John Boehner as the incoming House speaker.” Nancy Pelosi should just keep showing up every day as if nothing has changed, like Milton Waddams in Office Space. She can go cubicle to cubicle asking if anyone has her red stapler, and see how long it takes to get tossed out on her ear.

Then again, you can be sure that a lot of the fired-up Tea Partiers know exactly what they accomplished this election cycle. So some of the 54 percent who don’t understand must be Democrats who aren’t paying close attention, which is one of the reasons the party finds itself in this electoral mess. The paying-attention wing of the party is left to ponder what—to it—are seemingly contradictory thoughts among the voting public. According to a Rasmussen ¨ slightly more than half of Americans (51 percent) say it is possible to achieve a balanced federal budget without raising taxes. But many Democrats believe raising taxes is an absolute necessity to balance the budget and dig out of the $1.4 trillion annual hole we’re in. An increasing number of Americans just don’t trust them to do it right, and with good reason. Most people think the government wastes money.

The Republicans played to this “we can slash our way out” sentiment when they unleashed YouCutthis spring, a Web site designed to let citizens weigh in on what budget items should be axed. The New York Times did them one better with its “You Fix the Budget” online puzzle. It turns out it’s a lot harder than it looks, and not that fun because you can eliminate farm subsidies only one time.

And if the revenge of the Tea Party people weren’t enough to drive Democrats mad during the election, now it seems that the group’s tentacles have reached into the sacred world of reality-TV dance competitions. On Dancing With the Stars,Bristol Palin survived far longer than expected. It’s been whispered—and yelled—that she made it as far as she did only because the Tea Party voted in droves to keep her in the competition. Which brings me to that other reality-TV star and author, the big Mama Grizzly herself. As each day counts down toward the 2012 election, it seems more and more possible to me that Sarah Palin could be president of the United States.

This week I stumbled upon Sarah Palin’s Alaska by looking it up in the TV directory and sitting down on the couch at the time it started so I could view it. I watched Palin take a club to a huge halibut that was flopping around on the deck of a boat, knocking it out cold so it could be thrown into the hold of a professional fishing vessel. She said in her singsong voice, which seems sometimes oddly Germanic, that she was “stunning the halibut.” Not only was I entranced by her awesomeness, but I now have a new favorite catchphrase.

As the fish story unfolded, Palin said, “I wasn’t goin’ to hesitate either, especially when the fish were pilin’ up and they’re slappin’ around. They could do some damage here. We need to calm these boys down real quick.” As the huge halibut flopped about, she cried out, “Sheesh! That hurts like crap!” She explained to the camera that she got slapped across the thigh by one of them: “I realized—yeah, they could hurtcha!” Later, she and her dancing daughter, Bristol, took the halibut’s still-beating hearts and held them in their hands. The harder the Palin gals squeezed, the faster the little panicked hearts pumped. The Democrats need look no further for symbolic harbingers of what could happen in 2012.

MEPHISTO WALTZ

2010-11-20T17:36:00.000-08:00

If Bristol Palin wins Dancing With the Stars does this mean Sarah Palin will be our next President?

MODERN TIMES

2010-11-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

"a recent failure of compassion."

Read this somewhere and it stuck in my mind. A description of Now. How do we stop it? The other side always has a patent on "NO!"

HONEST

2010-11-19T05:51:00.000-08:00

Looks like Abe was wrong again. Not only should he have let the South go, it appears you CAN fool all of the people all of the time.

2010-11-16T19:40:00.000-08:00

So,

2010-11-15T18:21:00.000-08:00

the first thing to come out of Congress after the "People" have spoken, the angry "People" most hurt by the failure of Trickle Down, is to make tax cuts for the rich permanent --like the "People" have been brainwashed into believing that the best cure for a migraine is multiple blows to the head with an expensive hammer.

2010-11-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

Hail to the Chiefs

The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world.

by Daniel StoneNovember 13, 2010

In 1936 Franklin Roosevelt felt overwhelmed. The New Deal had begun to spawn dozens of new agencies, and Roosevelt, fearful of the fragmentation of the executive branch, asked for help. The Brownlow Committee, an independent panel tasked with finding a new model of White House management, proposed offering the president some personal staff. “They would remain in the background, issue no orders, make no decisions, emit no public statements,” the committee explained in a report responding to public skepticism about growing the size of government. Over the next two years, Roosevelt recruited six trusted aides.

Nowadays, six aides is roughly the number Barack Obama has to handle incoming mail—a small fraction of the 469 employees who work in the White House Office and councils for domestic and economic policy, the core staff of the presidency. Other officials include an ethics adviser, a special assistant for “mobility and opportunity policy,” a director of African-American media, and a special assistant for financial markets, to name just a few. Days in the West Wing are a constant, head-spinning oscillation between dozens of domestic, foreign-policy, and political eruptions and concerns.

On the spring day that Obama signed his health-care-reform law, for instance, he also had an economic briefing on unemployment, discussions about financial reform, a meeting at the Department of the Interior, a quick lunch, a meeting with senior advisers and then with Senate leaders on ratification of a new nuclear-nonproliferation treaty with Russia, and an Oval Office summit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on devising a model for Middle East peace. On cable TV, meanwhile, pundits offered nonstop analysis of the holes in the new reform package, while Sarah Palin renewed accusations of Obama’s “government takeover” of health care. A new poll showed that, for the first time, more of the country disapproved than approved of his job performance. In an interview with 60 Minutes that week, the president joked, “If you had said to us a year ago that the least of my problems would be Iraq...I don’t think anybody would have believed it.” Then he laughed. Steve Kroft, the interviewer, asked if he was “punch-drunk.”

More often, Obama projects a demeanor of unruffled cool: he can handle the pressures and demands of the job just fine (how could he suggest otherwise?), and he didn’t run for office “to pass on our problems to the next president or the next generation.” But the issue is not Obama, it’s the office. Aides to George W. Bush make similar complaints about the demands on the executive. “It was a much different place than even during the Bush Sr. administration,” says Joe Hagin, Bush 43’s deputy chief of staff, who also worked for Reagan and Bush 41. “There was much less time [under the second Bush] to catch your breath during the day.” He recalls the constant juggling of issues—from the wars to Katrina—often all at the same time. “There’s only so much bandwidth in the organization,” he says.

Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency? Obama has looked to many models of leadership, including FDR and Abraham Lincoln, two transformative presidents who governed during times of upheaval. But what’s lost in those historical comparisons is that both men ran slim bureaucracies rooted in relative simplicity. Neither had secretaries of education, transportation, health and human services, veterans’ affairs, energy, or homeland security, nor czars for pollution or drug abuse, nor televisions in the West Wing constantly tuned to yammering pundits. They had bigger issues to grapple with, but far less managing to do. “Lincoln had time to think,” says Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University. “That kind of downtime just doesn’t exist anymore.”

Among a handful of presidential historians NEWSWEEK contacted for this story, there was a general consensus that the modern presidency may have become too bloated. “The growth is exponential in these last 50 years, especially the number of things that are expected of the president,” says presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, who had dinner with Obama and a handful of other historians last summer. Obama aides speaking on background say that the president’s inner circle can become stretched by the constant number of things labeled “crises” that land on his desk—many of which, like the mistaken firing of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod in Georgia or the intricacies of the oil cleanup in the gulf, could easily be handled by lower-level staff. “Some days around here, it can almost be hard to breathe,” says one White House official who didn’t want to go on the record portraying his boss as overwhelmed. Another senior adviser says that sometimes the only way to bring the president important news is to stake out his office and “walk and talk” through the hall.

The growth of the presidency has been a sort of Catch-22. Most presidents after Roosevelt, at least until the Vietnam era, got by with only a few dozen advisers. Ted Sorensen, the Kennedy speechwriter who died last month, was actually hired as a domestic-policy counselor, one of only a handful (he wrote speeches in his spare time). Today there are more than 35 staffers devoted to domestic policy, plus more who parachute in on particular issues, like health care or energy. Yet as the president’s responsibilities have grown, the instinct has been to hire more people to help manage the work, including the flow of information. “That’s wrong; the more people you have in the White House, the more problems are sucked into it,” says James Pfiffner, a George Mason University professor of public policy whose 2007 book, The Modern Presidency, examined the enormous growth of the office. Other historians point to the changing role of cabinet secretaries. While Obama has more department leaders than ever before—15, compared with Gerald Ford’s 11 and Lincoln’s 7—many of them have less power and influence, which has required minor decisions about trade, energy, and economic strategy to be handled by White House staffers.

Political scientist Thomas Cronin once credited the period between World War II and Watergate as the “swelling of the presidency.” It was during the Eisenhower administration that historians first asked if the president simply had too many demands. But those were far less cluttered times. “We had a lot to do, and many people were asking questions, but we were never overwhelmed,” says Harry McPherson, who served as counsel, then special counsel, to Lyndon Johnson. Such memories sound quaint to current White House staffers. “There is never a day we come in and there are only a few things we need to do,” says Bill Burton, Obama’s deputy press secretary.

Even though the White House has grown with each successive inhabitant (many of whom, it’s worth noting, vowed to reduce its size), one moment stands out as the most striking expansion of the office in recent years. The 9/11 terror attacks, in some ways, made being president easier. Struggles over education and agriculture that had mired George W. Bush’s first year in office were replaced with just one big expectation: to keep America safe. Bush’s approval rating shot from 50 to 90 percent in one week.

As the toll from the war against Islamic extremists faded from view, however, national security became yet another area for expansion of the bureaucracy. Since 2001, 33 new facilities and several new agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, have been created to monitor and coordinate intelligence, adding hundreds of jobs to the federal infrastructure. A Washington Post investigation this year found most agencies rarely share information, and turf battles are often relegated to the White House.

Administration staffers and historians seem to agree on one point: the news media, often transfixed on tension and triviality, aren’t helping. “Back in the ’80s, people didn’t feel like the press was on you all the time like they have been for the past few years,” says Hagin, the former aide to Reagan and both Bushes. Eager to please their editors, reporters—many from new Internet outlets—constantly compete for whatever scraps they can procure, no matter how evanescent. Several months into Obama’s presidency, The Washington Post jockeyed to land the scoop on the breed of the first family’s new dog. Not long after, the celebrity-news Web site TMZ set up a Washington office, and Politico started a franchise to monitor D.C.’s gossip. Presidential reporters occasionally pose absurd questions—about whether Obama will take a dip in the gulf, or if it’s appropriate for a comedian to call the president “dude”—to drive Web traffic. When Obama does speak, his aides lament that a seemingly infinite army of pundits critiques every line, which, in turn, diminishes the power of the office’s bully pulpit.

The proliferation of news sources has benefits for the country, of course: at their best, journalists ensure transparency. The tools of new media are also useful to the president and his communications staff. “People before us didn’t have blogs or things like Twitter to communicate,” Burton says. “Those things are enormously helpful now to inform the country of what we’re doing.” But the 24-hour cable-news cycle also means the president rarely escapes the media glare. “Now our power to know what the president is up to has massively increased,” says Ted Widmer, a speechwriter in the Clinton administration. “But constant criticism doesn’t make his job easier.” When serious questions do arise, the ease with which minor snafus are billed as scandals can cripple and distract the chief executive. Obama’s foray into the Shirley Sherrod saga may never have happened under Reagan, who got involved in the far more consequential Iran-contra scandal and air-traffic controllers’ strike only after weeks of work by lower-level staff. Moreover, the number of speeches presidents now give—Obama delivered 57 in October alone, (including some fundraisers), written by a staff of seven speechwriters—can dilute the power of each one. Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s speeches often dominated prime time, yet Obama’s weekly YouTube addresses (designed to mimic Roosevelt’s fireside chats) now rarely get more than 30,000 views online.

Obama has hinted at the pitfalls of an overly packed agenda. During a press conference earlier this month, he partially blamed it for his midterm rebuke: “The responsibilities of this office are so enormous, and so many people are depending on what we do, and in the rush of activity, sometimes we lose track of the ways that we connected with folks that got us here in the first place.” Yet despite efforts to meet with ordinary people in backyard campaign events all summer, he hasn’t really acted to alleviate his burden. On the campaign trail, he talked, as all candidates do, about making government more efficient and gutting agencies that weren’t working. Still, although he has proposed several billion dollars in cuts, Obama has yet to make any substantial reductions; instead, he added the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and proposed a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Service to monitor greenhouse-gas emissions. This summer, officials expressed interest in adding 200 employees to the agency overseeing offshore drilling. The new offices are designed to address new problems, yet they also mean more people for the executive to manage.

It’s hard to imagine how the office could sizably shrink, allowing the president to return to a more aloof, strategic role. Academics in Eisenhower’s day imagined two presidential figures, one for serious decision making and one relegated to the office’s ceremonial duties. Modern scholars see other solutions within the Constitution. “Presidents ought to give more thought to their cabinet choices, and then give them a little more deference,” says Marc Landy, a professor of political science at Boston College. The simplest experiment could involve reducing the West Wing staff, thus relying more—by necessity—on outside agencies.

Before he left the White House this fall, then–chief of staff Rahm Emanuel sensed the constant and overwhelming flow of information to the president. Obama’s evening briefing book, which includes everything that wasn’t discussed during the day, was getting bigger. “We need to make his memos shorter,” Emanuel told senior staff, according to someone involved in the briefing process. “Last night we sent the president a phone book.” As a result, memos were slimmed, with just key points up front, followed by a long appendix the president could choose to read if he wanted to. It was a good idea at the time, and still is. In the weeks since, however, the length of the memos has begun to grow again.

2010-11-13T13:48:00.001-08:00

2010-11-12T19:14:00.000-08:00

How to tell if you're French

by Nicolas Duvernois

This list was written in response to my E-Z home test for detecting Americans, and is intended to define by enumeration things shared by the vast majority of card-carrying, native-born French persons.
Nicolas, himself exquisitely French, is an engineer working for Peugeot. He emphasizes that he does not fit the norm in some respects, although he does not say which. And also, mesdemoiselles-- il n'est pas marié.
--Mark

If you're French...

You are familiar with Jean-Pierre Foucauld, Perdu de vue, Lagaf' (for you, the best successor to Coluche), Christophe Dechavanne, Jean-Luc Delarue, Nagui, Patrick Sebastien, Patrick Sabatier, Michel Drucker, Jacques Martin, Mystères, La Chance aux Chansons....
You don't think that the news on TV is reliable, much less so than the radio or the newspapers. And of all TV channels, TF1 is the least reliable. On the other hand, you almost never listen to the radio, don't read newspapers, and get most of your news from... TF1.
You like football (strangely called soccer in some curious countries that call some ugly version of rugby, where players are allowed to attack players who don't have the ball with them, football), tennis (whose players are called tennismen), basketball (no question of the NBA, of course), and Formula One (Indy is only a local championship, no matter what NASCAR thinks). F1 obviously proves that the only type of engines worth talking about are French. You think that the rules of cricket and baseball are incomprehensible.
You do take your 5 annual legal vacation weeks, and you consider yourself fortunate if you don't spend them at home.
You may believe in God; if you do you are, in decreasing order of probability, a Catholic, a Muslim, a Protestant or a Jew. In any case, you believe in the separation of state and church... and you think that a country with a motto of "In God we trust" does not follow this principle.
You think of canned food, McDo and so on as cheap food, and think there is nothing like an open-air market. You find it amusing that American tourists consider a visit to an open-air market as much of a must-see as one to the chateau of Versailles.) You also say that you prefer small shops-- but you mainly go shopping in supermarkets.

Heading for the Boucherie Chevaline

You don't consider insects, dogs, cats, monkeys or guinea pigs to be food-- but snails, frogs and horses are.
A bathroom definitely does not have a toilet in it. Toilets are to be found in Toilettes or W.C. (Water Closet).
It seems natural to you that the telephone system (yes, singular), the power company (yes, singular), the railroad company (yes, singular), and the post office are public companies; they have no reason to be private, since they have missions de service public. In particular, the price should be the same for the same service anywhere in the country, no matter if it is in Paris or in the deepest hole in the Alps.
You expect, as a matter of course, that the phones will work. Getting a new phone is routine. Getting a Minitel too (kind of a network terminal).
Trains are good, especially the TGV (the one Americans won't build in Texas, because they strangely don't want to spend a single public dime on it). But you regret that the SNCF (the French train company) pays less attention to small lines, which cannot make any profit, because there are too few passengers.
There are 6 main political parties in France, and that's a good thing (with plenty of variety among parties, it's easier to find one that reflects your beliefs), even if you don't care for the FN (which receives 15% of the votes, unfortunately). You probably consider that this small world is mostly rotten, and that all politicians quickly forget the separation between the executive and the judicial power (especially as, due to the organization of the French government, ministers can easily intervene to heat up or cool down an investigation into government misconduct).
Socialism is a serious opinion, even if it tends more and more to social-democracy. As concerns communism, if you consider that it is no longer acceptable and if you are politically left-oriented, you are likely to have a certain feeling of nostalgia for the time when communism was an acceptable utopian dream.
You find it very strange that the USA doesn't have any left party.
You may be uneasy with the notion of race. The main difference between races is some physical characteristics : colour of skin, .... The rest is a question of culture, and everybody has a right to his own culture.
You think most problems could be solved if only people would put aside their prejudices and work together.

Gallic realism

You find Americans ridiculous, if not stupid or dangerous, with their primary reflex to sue whenever they can get away with it, even if it is their fault (typical example: trying to dry a dog in a micro-wave oven and suing because there's not warning that it shouldn't be done).
You trust doctors, more or less, but you expect from them obligation de moyens (duty to try to cure by any means), but surely not obligation de résultat (duty to cure without any problems).
You'd respect someone who speaks Spanish, German or Japanese, but you very likely don't yourself speak them well enough to communicate with a monolingual foreigner. You learned bits of English in collège (when you were 12-16), but you've forgotten most of it. You think everybody should speak English. You cannot understand why native English-speaking persons refuse to learn any other language. But, before learning any foreign language, kids should first speak good French.
It is necessary to learn foreign languages, English at least: you can travel and do business in the whole world with English. (It's certainly not worth learning it for its culture.)
You think a tax level over 50% is not scandalous. After all, once those in that bracket has paid, they still have more money left than you.
School is free through the baccalauréat (roughly equivalent to the first year of college for Americans), provided you go to public schools, collèges (French meaning!) and lycées. University (post-baccalauréat) is not free, but it does not cost much.
Higher studies last 2, 3, 4, 5 or 8 years, depending on the degree you are studying for.
The date comes first : 18/6/40. (And you know what happened on that date).
The decimal point is a comma, as in all of Europe. Certainly not a dot, except on computers.
World War II was a quite troubled time for the country, and France has not still gotten past this era. The US helped us to rebuild the country, generously, but in fact, they were no philanthropists.

Marriage Court is in session

You expect marriages to be made for love, not arranged by third parties. Getting married by the mayor is the only legal marriage. As for a church wedding, it's up to you, and it always comes after the marriage in the town hall. You have a best man and a maid of honour at the wedding -- a friend or a sibling. And, naturally, a man gets only one wife at a time (and vice-versa).
If a man has sex with another man, he's a homosexual.
Calling somebody by his/her name implies that you know him/her pretty well.
If you're a woman and pretty enough, you perhaps occasionally go to the beach topless.
You'd rather a film be dubbed than subtitled (but enough people disagree that films are often available both in VF (version française) and VO (version originale).
You seriously expect to be able to transact business, or deal with the government, without paying bribes.
If a politician has been cheating on his wife, that's his private life. In fact, journalists should not bother with it. It doesn't speak of very good personal morals, but if he is a good politician, his career should continue.
Just about any store will take your credit card, provided you owe more than 100FF (about $20).
Firing somebody is not always possible (e.g. the délégué du personnel is pretty much immune). It has to be justified. If it can't be justified, the company may be condemned to pay damages.
Labor Day is on the 1st of May.

What? Nothing about Cyndi Lauper?

You've probably seen La Folie des Grandeurs, Les Visiteurs, Casablanca, ET .... If under 40, add Terminator, Rambo #n, and other Hollywood junk. If not, add several films with Bourvil, Gabin, Fernandel, ..., Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, ...
You know the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, Queen, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Johnny Halliday, Telephone, Eddy Mitchell, Véronique Sanson, Francis Cabrel. If not (or may be even if yes), you know Guy Béart, Jacques Brel, Maurice Chevalier, Georges Guetary, Edith Piaf, Jean Ferrat, Tino Rossi, Charles Trenet, ....
You count on excellent medical treatment. You know you're not going to die of cholera or other Third World diseases. You think dying at 65 would be a tragedy.
In school, you learned the history of antique Egypt, Greece and Rome, of France, bits of European history, French geography, bits of European history, geography and recent history of the USA, China, and the former USSR.
Your country has been conquered by foreign nations (England, Germany, 3rd Reich), but always defended itself and is still free.
You're used to a wide variety of choices for almost anything you buy.
You measure things in meters, kilograms and liters-- as everybody in the whole world does, apart from a few strange countries who refuse to use such a simple system.
You're not a farmer.
Comics typically appear as hardbound books (albums). Comics sometimes but not always appear first in specialized comics magazines.
The people who appear on the most popular talk shows are mostly entertainers, politicians, or rather strange individuals. Authors and artists have special talk shows, generally later in the evening.
You drive on the right side of the road. You stop at red lights even if nobody's around. If you're a pedestrian, you cross streets on the appropriate walkways when cars are stopped at a red light-- but also anywhere at any time, when you think it's safe.

Vive la Nouvelle France

You think of Canada as a pleasant and peaceful country. Quebec used to be called "Nouvelle France". The Québécois are your "American cousins". You suport them in their attempt to protect their difference from English-speaking Canadians. Voltaire's description of Canada as "some acres of snow" (quelques arpents de neige) is stupid and deprived France from an important place in North America. Same comment about Napoleon's selling Louisiane to the USA.
You consider the Volkswagen Beetle to be a medium-sized car.
The police are armed, but not with submachine guns.
The biggest meal of the day is at noon.
The nationality people most often make jokes about is the Belgians (with their famous chips).
There's parts of the city you definitely want to avoid at night.
You feel that your kind of people aren't being listened to enough in the government and the National Assembly.
You wouldn't expect both inflation and unemployment to be very high (say, over 15%) at the same time, but you know that it has happened in France and that it still happens in many countries these days.
You care more or less what family someone comes from (especially when this "someone" wants to marry one of your children).
The normal thing, when a couple dies, is for their estate to be divided equally between their children.
You think of opera and ballet as rather elite entertainments. It's likely you don't see that many plays, either.
Christmas is in the winter. Unless you're Jewish, Muslim, atheist or non-Christian in any way (but in fact, often even if you are...), you spend it with your family, give presents and put up a tree.
You may think the church is too powerful, or the state is; but you are used to not having a state church (since 1905) and don't think that it would be a good idea. (There's no typo there. Till 1905 Catholic clergy were paid by French taxes; and this system still continues in Alsace-Lorraine. Church schools also receive some public support. Proposals to either lessen or increase this support elicit enormous protests.)
You know almost all the capitals and leaders of Europe.

La mission civilisatrice

You are more or less familiar (depends mostly on age) with Mafalda, Lucky Luke, Corto Maltese, Tintin, Astérix, Gotlib, and Moebius.
You've left a message at the beep.
Taxi drivers always complain about something.
You think that Social Security and Assedic (unemployment payments) are good ideas and should continue. You also think that some people profit from them without trying to find a real job, which is deplorable. You hear (or read) that these agencies are always running a deficit; that's a pity, but you are not ready to pay more for them.
If you want to be a doctor, you need to get a bachelor's first.
If you want to be an engineer, you don't go to universities, but to Grandes Ecoles (as far as I know, this is typically French).
As concerns former French colonies, those of Africa and Asia, you consider that it is a good thing that they are independent. However, you think that France's giving them access to modern civilization was a good thing.
Great Britain is a part of Europe. Unfortunately, the (literal and actual) insularity of the British make them difficult to deal with. They have a strange notion of having a special relationship with some transatlantic nation, such that they sometimes forget that they belong to Europe.
Journalists may write about everything but usually avoid the private life of public people. They only speak of private life (I'm not talking about the gutter press here) when people choose to make their private life public.
You are proud of the baguette française. If the baker near your home makes one which doesn't suit your taste, you may buy your bread 10 km away.
You are proud of being able to eat more than 600 different types of cheeses.
With a certain nostalgia for the '60s, you think that intellectuals should have an important place in public life (in fact, it's pretty much the only justification for their existence). Intellectuals act as the mirror of their society.

[Back to Metaverse]

Goose-Steppers

2010-11-12T18:47:00.000-08:00

Bush book not main selection of conservative club

Associated Press

Posted on November 11, 2010 at 1:05 PM

Updated yesterday at 3:00 PM

NEW YORK (AP) — Fitting for a presidential memoir, George W. Bush's "Decision Points" is a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the 84-year-old institution that offers top sellers and critical favorites at discount prices.

Surprising for a memoir by a president whose "base" was more to the right than for any chief executive since Ronald Reagan, "Decision Points" is only an alternate at the Conservative Book Club, a 50,000-member organization founded in 1964 and adhering to the motto of "Conservatives Serving Conservatives."

Editor-in-chief Elizabeth Kantor wouldn't offer a specific reason why Bush was not a main selection, a status granted to former top Bush aide Karl Rove's "Courage and Consequence." She did note, "It is true that conservatives have mixed feelings" about Bush and cited the No Child Left Behind Act and the growth of government during his administration.

Bush's book, released Tuesday, sold at least 222,000 copies through its first day of sale, according to the Crown Publishing Group, and topped the best-seller list of Amazon.com even before release. But his standing in the conservative book club reflects an ongoing hesitation among some of his supposed core followers.

Asked for comment, Crown spokesman David Drake responded: "As the president might say, I'm not going to wade back into the swamp."

Conservatives will see a lot of Bush during his promotional tour. He is giving interviews to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other favorites of the right, and will make a few appearances on the Fox News Channel. But he is not universally praised. Glenn Beck, for example, has called Bush a "progressive" Republican and suggested he helped pull Republicans away from conservative principles.

"What do you think hurt the Republican Party?" Beck said on his radio show last year, referring to the 2008 election. "Do you think it was conservative values? Or do you think it was the progressive side of George W. Bush?"

Marji Ross, president and publisher of Regnery Publishing, a sister company of the conservative book club, said that Bush will eventually rise among the right because of foreign policy and his stands on national security. But she acknowledged that, for now, conservatives fault him for not fighting hard enough to reduce the government.

"That was certainly a weakness of his presidency," Ross says.

"By the time he left office, there were certainly people on the right who were not happy with everything he did," says Adrian Zackheim, who heads the conservative imprint Sentinel at Penguin Group (USA) that next year will publish the memoir of Bush's secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. "But one thing Bush's memoir can do is give everyone a big picture of what he did as president and remind conservatives of the many policies that they supported."

The Conservative Book Club's current selections are far more focused on criticizing Obama than celebrating Bush, with popular works including Dinesh D'Souza's "The Roots of Obama's Rage," Laura Ingraham's "The Obama Diaries" and David Limbaugh's "Crimes Against Liberty." Among Regnery releases, Ross cited Mark Thiessen's "Courting Disaster," a defense of Bush's terrorism policies, but said she wasn't seeing books that offered a broad review of his administration.

"We get proposals for books about conservative governing, but they're much more abstract, about how they want the government to be. They're not about returning to the Bush years or even to a Reagan set of principles," Ross says.

In "Decision Points," Bush strongly backs his fiscal priorities. He refers to major tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 and his efforts to set up overhaul social security, a longtime conservative goal. He includes charts showing reductions in spending and debt as a percentage of the overall domestic economy. He objected to "wasteful earmarks" proposed by Congress, but writes that he lacked a line-item veto — another conservative priority — to prevent them.

But he also writes proudly of No Child Left Behind and his ability to work with a liberal champion, Sen. Edward Kennedy. Bush's book has respectful words for President Obama, finding him well-prepared and thoughtful at a financial crisis summit in 2008 that had been requested by Obama's rival for the presidency, Sen. John McCain. While Limbaugh and others have openly rooted for Obama to fail, Bush told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that aired this week, "I want our president to succeed. I love our country."

Ross said she expected, and hoped for, tougher words in the upcoming memoir of Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney.

"For one thing, Cheney has been more vocal since he left office in defending some of the things he stood for and taking on the Obama administration," Ross says. "I think people expect the president to be more circumspect about criticizing his successor. So in that sense his book may be a little more tame, whereas I think people expect Dick Cheney to come out firing and be a little more aggressive. And that's frankly a little more fun."

POLL DANCING

2010-11-11T16:14:00.000-08:00

Reading various recent polls it is obvious that the electorate is confused by what they want and how to go about getting it. Polls show that they put Republicans in office but don't agree with their policies. It really is personal. Or even deeper than that. We are yet to move on from our tribal ways. We still line up across a gully and throw pig bones at each other.

BLOWING SMOKE

2010-11-07T09:35:00.000-08:00

Watson/Getty

Ohio Rep. John Boehner would make fictional ad man Don Draper (below) of 'Mad Men' proud with his gruffness, chain smoking and conservative suits.

Craig Blankenhorn/AMC

It was a scene straight out of "Mad Men" - chain-smoking Don Draper denouncing "addictive" cigarettes after his ad agency lost a big tobacco account.

Except it was Rep. John Boehner - speaker of the House-in-waiting - on Election Night, enthusiastically ripping into the city that made him what he is.

"For too long, Washington has been doing what's best for Washington, not what's best for the American people," said the man who would be third in line to the presidency.

The sounds of jaws dropping filled the air. Here was a man who epitomized Washington denying he ever had anything to do with the place. The fictional Don Draper would have been proud.

In many ways, Boehner is the Don Draper of D.C. - a chain-smoking, unapologetic Midwesterner in a sharp suit straight out ofAmerica, circa 1962.

"He's not going to change," said Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.). "Everyone told him to stop smoking Barclays cigarettes. He didn't stop until they went out of business. Now he's smoking Camels."

Boehner, King said, "is what he is. He has no problem having a drink with somebody, he has no problem playing golf with somebody and it's all out there. On the other hand, he's a sincere, dedicated guy."

Like Draper, Boehner will do whatever it takes to get the job done. Nowhere is that clearer than comparing some of his old statements to his most recent.

In recent months, the 10-term OhioRepublican has parroted the Tea Party's distaste for Washington insiders and big spending.

He routinely attacks stimulus spending passed under President Obama without mentioning he led the GOP troops to pass a $700 billion bailout for President Bush.

As the Bush bailout passed in October 2008, Boehner declared, "We know if we do nothing, this crisis is likely to worsen and put us in an economic slump the likes of which we have never seen."

Two weeks ago, he derided "a stimulus spending spree that created jobs abroad while "millions of Americans lost their jobs here."

In July, he erupted when Fox News' Chris Wallace noted that continuing Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% could add $700 billion to the nation's deficit.

"Chris, you've been in Washington too long," Boehner said with a trace of a smirk. "That's all a bunch of Washington talk."

As it happens, Boehner has been in Washington 20 years - an insider from the start. In 1996, he got caught handing out checks from lobbyists on the House floor.

He's unapologetic about his ties to lobbyists, people Tea Partiers revile. Many former staffers are lobbyists and he seeks their advice and presses their cases.

ROCKY ROAD

2010-11-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

Listenng to what little Left-Leaning talk radio there is, callers are conceding the presidency for 2012. Obama is nothing more than Nelson Rockefeller with a tan. A closet big business GOPer. Dennis Kucinich should challenge Obama, like Teddy Roosevelt did Taft, or Ronnie Reagan did Ford, or Teddy Kennedy did Carter. All very succesful, for the other Party. Beg Hillary to run. Oh no! She was on the K-Mart board of directors for six years!! Keep it up, fellow 'progressives' and whine some more when President Michelle Bachmann is packing the Supreme Court (check out how many justices are over seventy). Your choice.

UPPITY BAGGERS

2010-11-04T21:12:00.001-07:00

Prediction: righteous Tea Partiers and gloating GOPers will overplay their hands, pushing un-American activities to the point they disgust the electorate, crashing in 2012 like the leaking Blimps they are.

DEMOCRACY

2010-11-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

During the past 234 years the United States of America has rarely been able to bring opposites together in ways constructive to this country. The exception being times of disaster. But even war doesn't help much when we start them for spurious reasons.

Today the Republicans, proclaim they have a MANDATE (somebody define that, when half of the country thinks they are fools). So, they are going to improve your life, Mr. & Mrs. Citizen, proclaiming their first and only goal in the next two years is to destroy Barack Obama to assure him one term. Guess that would create one job.

Look Who's Voting

2010-10-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

TWEETLDEE

2010-10-30T07:30:00.000-07:00

We are tweeting our way back to trickle down. Our attention time is contained in a Facebook chat. Obama didn't deliver economic bliss in twenty-two months. Delete him!

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

2010-10-24T12:26:00.000-07:00

Tradition says that when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, the British band played "The World Turned Upside Down." Time to get out the fifes and drums. To believe the Tea Party, Sarah Palin would now be the star of a Frank Capra production, "Meet Jane Doe", one of the aw shuckers like Gary Cooper, common folk abused by the wealthy. Welcome to the new revolution--poor rich people getting a break. Reagan's deregulations forever! Government, get out of this way!! This is the real New Deal.

COMING HOME

2010-10-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

Democrats, it is time to come home!!!!

STRANGE DAYS

2010-10-20T17:51:00.000-07:00

I finally get it. America is split down the middle like an oak struck by lighting; two open boats on a threatening sea, one captained by William Jennings Bryan and the other by Clarence Darrow and they are both rowing in circles.

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

2010-10-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

Something's happening here. And it's clear the American Inclination is, when the going gets tough, to revert to the comfort of xenophobia. This includes the President, the Ultimate Other. Glen Beck yearns for the Beaver's Fifties. Ike's America. Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter. It makes him cry that Fess Parker is Dead.

The upcoming election: blame the Democrats for deficits that were caused by bad Republican policy. Lie, lie lie. The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.

How did FDR ever get reelected?

CHANGES IN LONGITUDES

2010-09-24T16:45:00.000-07:00

We just spent a week in Paris. We are still adjusting to Everett. Something like the Paris Blues. The past two days I have been having vertigo and an upset stomach. It's either a bug from Iceland or something else. Disorientation. Combined with my crumbling hip that makes a good night's sleep elusive as a compassionate Republican. It was so American that we spent our time in the City of Light in perpetual motion, afraid of wasting our time, not meeting our production quota, avoiding the protesters who were protesting the retirement age being raised from sixty to sixty-two. Mine is already sixty-six. Could go higher. My head is spinning. I need more time to process. I need to start writing again, something I've let slide and something I miss terribly. I am also going to see the surgeon on four October. I must do something, even if I am not old. A new hip could be my sixty birthday present to my self. I'm tired. I'd eat, but I'm not hungry...

IN GOD WE BUST

2010-08-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

More and more Americans believe Obama is a Muslim. They fear he is not one of us. He is intelligent and has a nice tan. Run! He is articulate. He strings sentences into paragraphs. Run!!!!!

HATE AND WAR

2010-07-31T23:40:00.000-07:00

Nixon drowned Love & Peace in a sack like an kitten, tied up with Watergate tapes and tossed into the Potomac.

Since then, it's only gotten worse. The election of an articulate black man was the milk chocolate icing on our devil's food cake. The hounds were loosed. A straw man was hung from a Washington cherry trees to take the blame for all our failures, past, present and forever come. Republicans claim no part in the destruction of our economy. Obama only made it worse with his spend and tax frenzy while he fanned the flames of distrust with his phony birth certificate and snobbish idiot card talk...

I wonder what the hell both right and left were expecting. (Of course, if the Internet and Fox News had existed, FDR would have lost to Alf Landon in '36).What would John McCain have accomplished by now? Sarah Palin? Is that our alternative? Is that what our country is longing for in 2012? I think I'd prefer the Mayan Solution.

CYCLES ON STERIOIDS

2010-07-19T12:24:00.000-07:00

Nothing can happen fast enough. Boredom is the Black Plague. Problems are solved by pointing out new ones. Closure is the death penalty. Change the channel. We're bored. Bored. Bored. Obama is gloomy. We need stimulation. We're voting the Republicans back in. At least they weren't boring...

DINI ROSSI

2010-07-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

Dina says: "Somewhere along the way, liberal Democrats like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Patty Murray corrupted the American Dream,"

Mark says: "I'm going to puke!"

REPUBLICAN CONGRESS

2010-07-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- a right-wing political group representing large corporations -- proposed what it's calling an economic recovery plan. Take a look:

Privatize Social Security
Cut taxes for the rich
Log the national forests
Expand offshore gas and oil drilling
Privatize highways and waterways

Look familiar? That's what the agenda of a Republican Congress looks like and the Chamber of Commerce plans to spend more than $50 million to make it a reality.

2010-07-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

BIZARRE

2010-07-13T14:23:00.000-07:00

From "Superman" comic book (circa early sixties): In the Bizarro World of "Htrae" ("Earth" spelled backwards), society is ruled by the Bizarro Code which states "Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!". In one episode, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: "Guaranteed to lose money for you". Later, the mayor appoints Bizarro No. 1 to investigate a crime, "Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together". This is intended and taken as a great compliment.

...Republicans blame deficits on Democrats for bailing out the economy they destroyed. Bizarro!!

Jul 4, 2010

2010-07-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

2010-06-25T15:12:00.000-07:00

Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it, right? Here's your chance. Everything the president has done has been wrong. Please submit a detailed plan for how you will win the war in Afghanistan, end the Great Recession, cap the oil leak, clean the beaches, save the pelicans and rid the world of Radical Muslims. Have the report on my desk no later than noon tomorrow. Thank you.

PUBLIC OPINION

2010-06-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

More than 60% of Americans think Obama has the country on the wrong track. They want more deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and, what else? Oh yeah. No health care and a privatized Social Security funded by the whims of Wall Street. Guess I don't understand this since I am in the 40% who think the other 60% are #@$%!!! idiots.

Why aren't Democrats 'fired up and ready to go'?

2010-06-18T12:01:00.001-07:00

From NBC's Mark Murray

Over the past few days, prominent liberal and Obama-supporting commentators have asked this question or something similar: Why aren't more Democrats fired up about Obama's presidency or the coming midterms? Indeed, the enthusiasm advantage is perhaps the Republicans' most significant advantage heading into November.

As E.J. Dionne wrote yesterday: "Democrats should feel a lot better than they do. They enacted a health-care bill that had been their dream for more than 60 years. They pulled the country out of a terrifying economic spiral. They are on the verge of passing the biggest reform of Wall Street since the New Deal. The public has identified enemies that are typically seen as Republican allies: oil companies and big bankers. And given the Republicans' past policies, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is at least as much their problem as Obama's."

He added, "Yet it is Democrats who are petrified, uncertain and hesitant -- and this was true before the oil spill made matters worse... Why does it so often seem that Republicans are full of passionate intensity while Democrats lack all conviction?"

And here's the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan on Obama getting BP to set up a $20 billion fund for Gulf Coast relief: "If leftwing populism in America were anything like as potent as right-wing populism ... there would be cheering in the streets. But there's nada, but more leftist utopianism and outrage on MSNBC."

There are a few theories as to why Democrats aren't energized. The first is the liberal disappointment with Obama and his policies (examples: no public option in the health care law, the likelihood that cap-and-trade won't be enacted, the fact that Gitmo has yet to close).
But Michael Tomasky has a response to those criticisms. "Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. It’s good to remember those; they are our lodestars. But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting... The changes we want to see won’t happen in 18 months, or in two years, or four, or probably even eight. Indeed, the entire Obama era, if it lasts eight years, is best thought of not as a culmination, or a self-contained time frame that should be judged a failure if X, Y, and Z don’t happen."

On the comparisons between Obama and FDR, Tomasky adds: "The New Deal was not a seamless narrative of aggressively liberal steps in which conservatives were sent scampering. It was full of starts and stops, and it took a long time. There were many reasons for this, but a chief one had to do with Roosevelt himself–seen by the more impatient reformers of his day as equivocal and adhering to too few core beliefs, exactly the way some see Obama today. Alan Brinkley, in Liberalism and Its Discontents, reminds us that the general historians’ view of Roosevelt, quite far removed from that presented in the sound bites and summaries employed today, was that of 'a man without an ideological core and thus unable to exercise genuine leadership.'"

A second theory -- related to what Tomasky says above -- is the nature of the 24-7 news environment and the impatience of the American public.
A third theory is that Democrats, especially in the blogosphere and on cable TV, have yet to really adjust to a political world without George W. Bush. Indeed, human nature suggests that it's easier to oppose something more vigorously than support it. That could be playing a role here.

AHH, IT'S A GRAND OLD PARTY!

2010-06-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, sets off a flurry of charges and countercharges with his statement apologizing to BP CEO Tony Hayward for being made the victim of a "shakedown" by the Obama administration.

BORING!

2010-06-16T05:47:00.000-07:00

As a culture/society, America has developed the attention span of a gnat with ADD. Blame it on what you will, it is only getting worse. Soon there will be a constitutional amendment to reduce the president's term to six months with a possible six month extension if he/she has discovered a cheap alternative to oil and convinced Apple to come out with a Verizon version of iPhone.

MARK MY WORDS

UNCIVIL WAR

"NEW" ECOnoMICS

GIVE 'EM HELL, BARRY

WHATEVER IT IS, THEY'RE AGAINST IT...

GLOOMY, GLOOMY, EVERYBODY'S GLOOMY

LET IT BLEED

STIFF-NECKED

AND....?

IT IS UP TO YOU

TAKING A BREAK

THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, NEWT.

RETURNING TO DC: LUKEWARM WELCOME FROM CONGRESS--OH NO!

A HOUSE DIVIDED

WHAT WOULD SARAH PALIN DO?

OPPOSITES DISTRACT

THE MIDDLE WAY

STRANGE BUT TRUE FACT

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

TOO MUCH MONKEY BUSINESS

FAIR AND BALANCED

WEIGHT LOSS?

WHY TEACHERS A SCORNED

CROSS OF GOLD

RED IS GRAY AND YELLOW WHITE

The Betrayal of Public Workers

by: Robert Pollin and Jeffrey Thompson | The Nation | Report

STAND UP!

WORKERS, UNITE!

DEVALUATION

LISTEN TO THEM WHINE, WHINE, WHINE

THERE MUST BE SOMEWAY OUT OF HERE

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

BURN, WITCH, BURN!!!

WATCHING WHAT YOU WISH FOR

THE DARK SIDE

CLUTCHING THE REINS OF POWER

OPEN LETTER TO REPUBLICANS

BANG! BANG!

COMING HOME

RIDICULE

SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

BACK AT IT

DEAR REPUBLICANS

IMPEACH EARL WARREN!

DEAR EVERYBODY

STATE OF AFFAIRS

DIE!!

WHO ARE WE?

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Climate of Hate

By PAUL KRUGMAN

MORE IN OPINION (5 OF 22 ARTICLES)

Op-Ed Columnist: United in Horror

THE HATE JUST KEEPS ON COMING

STOP IT, DROP IT

Letters from the Right

I'M SO TIRED

SOMETHING HAPPENED

BLOWIN' IN THE WIND

AMEN, MR. PRESIDENT

NOTHING FROM NOTHING

PLEASE, MR. PRESIDENT

THE NAYS HAVE IT

THIS IS A TEST

BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID.

MEPHISTO WALTZ

MODERN TIMES

HONEST

So,

How to tell if you're French

Goose-Steppers

Bush book not main selection of conservative club

POLL DANCING

BLOWING SMOKE

ROCKY ROAD

UPPITY BAGGERS

DEMOCRACY

Look Who's Voting

TWEETLDEE