Tuesday Mashup (11/29/11)

Some true hilarity from the New York Times here…Adam Nagourney told us last Saturday that California’s light rail project is a “boondoggle” (headline), was full of “brashness and ambition” and faced “what might seem like insurmountable political and fiscal obstacles” (paragraph 3); it would be finished “by 2033,” and “Republicans in Congress are close to eliminating federal high-speed rail financing this year” (paragraph 4); “‘Somebody please stop this train,’ The Washington Post wrote — while Republicans here have denounced it as a waste” (paragraph 5); “This will go down in history as one of the great white elephants in California history,” said Bob Dutton, the Republican leader of the State Senate. “It’s a boondoggle. The state cannot afford it.” (paragraph 6); and “The governor has enthusiastically embraced the plan, no matter that at 73, he seems unlikely to be around for a ribbon-cutting ceremony that is projected to be more than 20 years away” (paragraph 9).

Oh, and do you want to know what we learn in Paragraph 10? That the project is projected to generate about 100,000 jobs.

Talk about burying the lede…

Next, I give you more revisionist history from Ross Douthat (here, using the excuse of a new book by Stephen King on JFK to beat up our 35th president).

See, according to Douthat, JFK was “evasive on civil rights.”

Sure he was (from this 1963 speech)…

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or cast system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

I would say that JFK sounds amazingly “non-evasive” – here is more from Douthat…

(JFK’s) Churchillian rhetoric (“pay any price, bear any burden ...”) provided the (Vietnam) war’s rhetorical frame as surely as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speeches did for our intervention in Iraq.

I consider that observation to be pretty much an obscenity. I honestly don’t recall any speech (certainly not this one) by JFK calling for pre-emptive war against a country that was wrongly alleged to sponsor the worst foreign-based terrorist attack that occurred on our soil.

For the record, here is exactly what JFK said (from here)…

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Or course, as noted here, using any possible excuse, no matter how ridiculous, to fluff Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History is old hat for the Times’ quote-hire conservative columnist (he’s better than Bill Kristol, the guy he replaced way back when, but not by bloody much...two extremes of really bad as far as I'm concerned).

Continuing, former John McCain campaign advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin said the following (here)…

Faster growth is the key and will require a new, disciplined policy approach that does not allow social engineering, a green agenda, union activism or class warfare to trump the need for a vibrant private sector.

I guess there are a lot of ways to respond to the patent absurdity of that remark (our wonderful “job creators” in this economy are taking their sweet time about, I must say), but for starters, allow me to point out that Holtz-Eakin pushed for a corporate tax holiday that doesn’t create any actual jobs here, and earned a Paul Krugman smack down for making “shameful” assertions about health care reform here (and by the way, regarding Holtz-Eakin’s denigration of “green” jobs, it should be noted here that the U.S. exported almost $2 billion in solar technology last year).

Finally, I give you the following from Irrational Spew (here, on the subject of repealing the Independent Payment Advisory Board, part of the health care law)…

Of course, Democrats like Barney Frank and groups like the NCPSSM don’t actually agree with Republicans on what needs to be done with regard to Medicare spending; they live in a fantasy land where Medicare’s $23 trillion in unfunded liabilities can be solved by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” (and massively increasing taxes).

(And by the way, I thought Krugman had some good stuff recently on supposedly "massively increasing taxes" here.)

Hmm, let’s see now…eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.” Now which non-Mitt Romney Repug presidential hopeful spoke out about that?

Why, it would be none other than flavor-of-the-month Baby Newton Leroy Gingrich (here)…

As far as an alternative, Gingrich trotted out the same appeal employed by Obama/Reid/Pelosi — for a “national conversation” on how to “improve” Medicare, and promised to eliminate ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ etc.

Yes, I know, file this under “blind squirrel finding you-know-what,” even though I seriously doubt that this will help Newt to win over his beloved “base.”

And speaking of Barney Frank, I want to wish the Massachusetts 4th-District democrat good luck in his future endeavors (he just announced that he won’t run for another term). Lord knows he’ll be missed, but he’s definitely earned the time to do what he wants.