Monday Reads

Good Morning!!

I was celebrating my youngest daughter’s 21st birthday last night with the other daughter and her boyfriend in Baton Rouge.  I missed the 60 Minutes interview with the President but FDL put the transcript and video up here. Does this worry any one but Jane Hamsher–who is responsible for the bolding–and me?   This quote is from President Obama.

Well, it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves. We have a long tradition in this country of a desire for limited government, the suspicion of the federal government, of a concern that government spends too much money. You know? I mean, that’s as American as apple pie. And although, you know, there’s a new label to this, I mean those sentiments are ones that a lot of people support and give voice to. Including a lot of Democrats.

And so, the test is gonna be what happens over the next several years, when it’s not just an abstraction, but we have to start making serious choices. I’ve got a deficit commission that I’ve put forward that is gonna be releasing recommendations for how we can start reducing the deficit. And I don’t know yet what they’re gonna say, but I do know what the federal budget looks like. And if you eliminate all the earmarks. If you eliminate all the foreign aid. If you eliminate all the waste and abuse that people, you know, talk about eliminating — you’re still confronted with a fact that the vast majority of the federal budget are things that people really think are important. Like Social Security and Medicare and defense.

And so, you then have to start making some tough decisions about how do we pay for those things that we think are important? And you know, we’re not gonna be able to balance the budget just by slashing the National Parks budget, even if you didn’t think that was a proper function of government. We’re not gonna be able to balance the budget by, you know, eliminating the National Weather Service.

I mean, we’re gonna have to, you know, tackle some big issues like entitlements that, you know, when you listen to the Tea Party or you listen to Republican candidates they promise we’re not gonna touch.

What’s on the table now?  The War in Afghanistan or our social security?  What does the President mean when he says “entitlements”?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working since I was 15 and I’ve paid for those ‘benefits’!  I don’t want them handed over to Wall Street or shot into space as a spy satellite instead.

You may have heard already that Olbermann will be back on the air tomorrow. Was it really his ‘questionable’ political donations that forced the suspension?  Here’s an interesting twist from Alternet: ‘If Olbermann’s Donations Are Bad, What About GE’s?’

If supporting politicians with money is a threat to journalistic independence, we should consider the contributions of NBC, and at NBC’s parent company General Electric.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, GE made over $2 million in political contributions in the 2010 election cycle (most coming from the company’s political action committee). The top recipient was Republican Senate candidate Rob Portman from Ohio. The company has also spent $32 million on lobbying this year, and contributed over $1 million to the successful “No on 24” campaign against a California ballot initiative aimed at eliminating tax loopholes for major corporations (New York Times, 11/1/10).

Comcast, the cable company currently looking to buy NBC, has dramatically increased its political giving, much of it to lawmakers who support the proposed merger (Bloomberg, 10/19/10). And while Fox News parent News Corp’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association caused a stir, GE had “given $245,000 to the Democratic governors and $205,000 to the Republican governors since last year,” reported the Washington Post (8/18/10).

Olbermann’s donations are in some ways comparable to fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s $4,200 contribution to Republican candidate Derrick Kitts in 2006 (MSNBC.com, 7/15/07). When that was uncovered, though, NBC dismissed this as a problem, since Scarborough “hosts an opinion program and is not a news reporter.” Olbermann, of course, is also an opinion journalist–but MSNBC seems to hold him to a different standard.

Okay, good question, if it’s okay for Scarborough why isn’t it okay for Olbermann?  I frankly can’t stand either and don’t watch them, but NBC really messed up with this one.

Mike Kimel at Angry Bear has a some what wonky economic post up today, but it’s worth looking at because it debunks the conservative argument that the Great Depression was solved by war expenditures during WW2 and every thing was just hunky dory after that.  You may recall the bizarre op-ed in WAPO last week by David Broder suggesting that starting a war with Iran would jump start our economy.  Interestingly enough it’s called Very bad economic Theory. Good to see some one tackle yet another canard spread by right wing hopealogues looking for to replace real economic analysis with voodoo doodoo.  There’s links also to this paper which is really odd. It’s a working paper from David Henderson at George Mason University and it’s probably going to stay a working paper just about every where except maybe the AEI or the Club for Growth.  Kimel rips the paper to shreds and does so with some really, nifty graphs!

Finally, it is worth noting – some of the commentators to Tyler Cowen’s post also seemed to incorrectly believe that there was a post WW2 boom, though they tended to attribute that non-existent boom to the fact that the US came out of WW2 intact and went out building up other participants of the war. The fact that there are a variety of incorrect views about what happened in the past is not important. The fact that people believe in things that are demonstrably (and easily demonstrable, at that) not true is vital and unfortunate. As Michael Kanell and I point out in Presimetrics, theorizing based on incorrect facts leads to very poor theory, poor theory leads to abysmal policies, and abysmal policies lead to very unfortunate outcomes that negatively impact the lives of all of us.

US News & World Report–which is no longer being offered in a print edition–has an interesting op ed up by Mort Zuckerman:  ‘America’s Love Affair With Obama Is Over;The administration is running out of time to lower unemployment and fix the economy’.

The last two years have exposed to the public the risk that came with voting an inexperienced politician into office at a time when there was a crisis in America’s economy, as the nation contended with a financial freeze, a painful recession, and two wars. The Democrats were simply not aggressive enough or focused enough in confronting the profound economic crisis represented by millions of ordinary Americans whose main concern was the lack of jobs.

Jobs have long represented the stairway to upward mobility in America, and the anxiety over joblessness became the dominant concern at a time when financial security based on home equity and pensions was dramatically eroding. No great speech is going to change the fundamental fact that millions of people are either jobless or underemployed at a time when only a quarter of the American population describes the job market as good.

Why did Obama put his health plan so far ahead of the economy? To do what the Clintons couldn’t? His rush to do it sparked a broad resistance that has only spread since the bill was passed. The public sensed that healthcare was a victory for Obama, and maybe for the Democrats, but not for the country—and contrary to Democratic hopes, public support for the measure has continued to drop to as low as 34 percent in some polls. A significant majority, some 58 percent, now wish to repeal the entire bill, according to likely voters questioned in a late October poll by Rasmussen.

Let’s see, who have we heard this all from before?

WAPO reports that the U.S. is deploying drones in Yemen now. Are we going to open a third front in the wars in the Middle East now?  How much do those things cost?  Is this yet another example of a sneaking into a skirmish that becomes a war?

The United States has deployed Predator drones to hunt for al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen for the first time in years but has not fired missiles from the unmanned aircraft because it lacks solid intelligence on the insurgents’ whereabouts, senior U.S. officials said.

The use of the drones is part of a campaign against an al-Qaeda branch that has claimed responsibility for near-miss attacks on U.S. targets that could have had catastrophic results, including the recent plot to place parcels packed with explosives on cargo planes.

U.S. officials said the Predators have been patrolling the skies over Yemen for several months in search of leaders and operatives of the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP. After withstanding a flurry of attacks involving Yemeni forces and U.S. cruise missiles earlier this year, AQAP’s leaders “went to ground,” a senior Obama administration official said.

The use of U.S. drones in Yemen underscores the deep U.S. reliance on what has become a signature weapon against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

I think there is probably some things weird in there to say about Biden’s wars and Drone Wars but I can’t seem to do it right now.  All I know is that I’m tired of watching my tax dollars being spent on drones for sale.  Can we buy a few levees and electric grid up grades in the US while we’re at all this?  Maybe they could clean up the Gulf of Mexico?  Keep funding Head Start?  Repave a few bumpy interstate highways?

[MABlue here]
I’m among those who have seen it, but here is the entire interview of President Obama on 60 Minutes. What are your impressions?

Many Democrats are afraid Obama still doesn’t get “it”.
Assessing midterm losses, Democrats ask whether Obama’s White House fully grasped voters’ fears

President Obama‘s failure to channel the anxieties of ordinary voters has shaken the faith that many Democrats once had in his political gifts and his team’s political skill.

In his own assessments of what went wrong, the president has lamented his inability to persuade voters on the merits of what he has done, and blamed the failure on his preoccupation with a full plate of crises.

But a broad sample of Democratic officeholders and strategists said in interviews that the disconnect goes far deeper than that.

Paul Krugman is not happy with QE2. He thinks we didn’t learn anything from a watered down stimulus. [Kat,do we have a problem of multiple personality disorder here? Ben Bernanke, pre-eminent scholar of the Great Depression vs Ben Bernanke, Fed Chair]
Doing It Again

[A]s in the 1930s, every proposal to do something to improve the situation is met with a firestorm of opposition and criticism. As a result, by the time the actual policy emerges, it’s watered down to such an extent that it’s almost guaranteed to fail.

We’ve already seen this happen with fiscal policy: fearing opposition in Congress, the Obama administration offered an inadequate plan, only to see the plan weakened further in the Senate. In the end, the small rise in federal spending was effectively offset by cuts at the state and local level, so that there was no real stimulus to the economy.

Now the same thing is happening to monetary policy.

Oh! And Sarah Palin is unhappy with Ben Bernanke for doing “quantitative easing” at all. She says he should do like Reagan… Or something.
Palin to Bernanke: ‘Cease and Desist’

We shouldn’t be playing around with inflation. It’s not for nothing Reagan called it “as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man.” The Fed’s pump priming addiction has got our small businesses running scared, and our allies worried. The German finance minister called the Fed’s proposals “clueless.” When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it’s time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist. We don’t want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings. We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It’s the only way we can get our economy back on the right track

Mmmkay!!!!

The age of austerity is coming with a vengeance.
Now in Power, G.O.P. Vows Cuts in State Budgets

Republicans who have taken over state capitols across the country are promising to respond to crippling budget deficits with an array of cuts, among them proposals to reduce public workers’ benefits in Wisconsin, scale back social services in Maine and sell off state liquor stores in Pennsylvania, endangering the jobs of thousands of state workers.

The Hindustan Times has a pretty good coverage of Obama in India

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says India is not stealing US Jobs

India on Monday asserted that it was not in the business of stealing American jobs, even as US President Barack Obama said that deals with India to create 50,000 jobs back home were aimed at assuaging citizens’ fears.

“India is not in the business of stealing jobs from the US… outsourcing (work to India) has helped improve the productive capacity and productivity of America,” prime minister Manmohan Singh said at a joint press conference with visiting US President Barack Obama at Hyderabad House here.

For Heaven’s sake! Can this guy/gal make up his/her mind already?
A very peculiar engagement: Charles had a sex change… then hated being Samantha so became a man again. Now he’s getting married

Born Sam Hashimi, the businessman and divorced father-of-two had a sex-change operation in 1987 to turn him into glamorous interior designer Samantha Kane.

He spent £100,000 on cosmetic operations and tooth veneers to create the ‘ultimate male ­fantasy’ and was so convincing as a woman he had no trouble attracting men, and was briefly engaged to a wealthy landowner.

Then, in 2004, after seven years of living as a woman, he decided he’d made a horrible mistake; the result -he believes now -of a breakdown following the acrimonious end of his 12-year ­marriage and estrangement from his children.

What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?

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