As Atrios says, more like this - a lot more (here...hey teabaggers, nice job on the Patriot Act - you wanna lend a hand here too?)...
...and there are a lot of reasons why it's a good thing that Mubarak is no longer in charge of Egypt, but his criminal treatment of the press (to say nothing of his own people) is certainly one of them (sends a chill up my spine to realize how effective China has been at erasing their own recent past - a heroic one at that - from the memory of today's generation)...
...on a wholly other note, happy 70th birthday to Sergio Mendes (this clip is with his band Brazil 66, later reformed as Brazil 88...this might be my favorite Beatles cover - creates a wholly other mood, an iconic '60s sound for yours truly, including some of the Fellini-esque images of the band members)...
...and here's a whompin' little number to kick-start the weekend (hopefully one with no snow, shockingly enough).
Friday, February 11, 2011
Friday Mashup (2/11/11)
President Obama dramatically understated the level of support the Muslim Brotherhood has garnered in Egypt in his Super Bowl interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, and is most likely wrong to have asserted that the Brothers and their allies do not command majority support in the country.God, how pathetic Schoen and his ilk truly are (more here); citing a crap Zogby poll is more that a bit of a giveaway.
…
Egyptians support Islam, its expanded role in the country's civic life, as well as Shariah.
A broad based analysis of Egyptian public opinion by Lisa Blaydes and Drew Linzerhow bears this conclusion out. They concluded that 60 percent of Egyptians have fundamentalist views, while just 20 percent are secular in their orientation.
Egyptians also support a more expansive role for Islam in Egyptian life. In Pew polling conducted last year, almost half (48 percent) say that Islam plays a large role in politics in Egypt, and an overwhelming majority – 85 percent – say Islam’s influence in politics is positive. Only 2 percent say its influence is negative. Not surprisingly, almost two-thirds of Egyptians told Zogby that Egyptian life would improve when clerics play a more central role in the political life of the country.
Egyptians also support the central elements of Shariah Law. For example, 84 percent say that apostates, or those who forsake Islam, should face the death penalty and 77 percent say thieves should have their hands cut off. A majority (54 percent) says men and women should be segregated in the workplace.
…
What does this mean for the United States? Almost certainly the next Egyptian government will be hostile to the United States and will pursue policies that are inimical to our interests. In the Zogby poll, 85 percent called themselves unfavorable to the United States and 92 percent described America as one of the two greatest threats to Egyptian interests in the world. The Pew polling bears this point out.
In response, I give you the following from here…
Mohamed ElBaradei told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood, which birthed the terror organization Hamas, is an extremist organization is “total bogus” and that the group is “in no way extremists.”And for more on ElBaradei, I would ask that you read this profile; I believe that we’re fortunate in this country that he has emerged as the voice of the opposition (and here is another response to Fix Noise Islamophobia).
Schoen also tells us the utter nonsense that “Young people (in Egypt) use (their satellite dishes) to get their news principally from Al Jazeera, whose interest in and deference to Islamic fundamentalist and extremist views cannot be underestimated.” In response, I give you this.
This, though, is basically consistent with the Repug party line that Muslims are incapable of Democratic governance, as noted here (which makes me wonder what Dubya’s Not-So-Excellent Iraq Adventure was all about, then…and how weird is it that Grover Norquist, of all people, is the voice of reason on this issue, as noted here?).
Nobody knows exactly how events will play out in Egypt. And call me a filthy, unkempt liberal blogger for saying so, but as far as I'm concerned, the Egyptians have earned the right to decide that outcome for themselves (and Atrios says that this is a good point - for what it's worth, I totally agree).
Issa, R-Calif., newly installed as head of the House committee that oversees government regulation, invited nearly 200 industries to send him lists of government rules that "threaten jobs." That's a good place to start. Where it will finish should serve as a test of integrity.Which is particularly devious when considering the following here (and note where reducing the deficit comes on the list, by the way)...
Issa got back responses extending more than 1,900 pages, which were released to the public for review in advance of a hearing today. Many suggestions, no doubt, will turn out to be useful. But among them are a parade of self-serving pleas wholly at odds with the public interest and many barely connected to jobs.
They are a less-than-gentle reminder of recent scandals caused not by regulatory excess but by regulatory laxity in oversight of food, autos, toys, oil drilling, coal mining and — oh, yes — banks.The USA Today editorial also tells us that companies “want relief from a new requirement that they disclose how many times larger a CEO's salary is than the median salary of other workers at the company,” as well as a rule that airlines must enforce “a long-overdue proposal to ensure that pilots get enough sleep before they get into the cockpit,” as well as a proposal that our financial overlords are screaming about that would reduce “swipe fees” for debit or credit card transactions.
Anybody have the world’s smallest violin handy?
This tells us that some of the big banks are complying with the regs on promoting ATM fees, while other banks aren’t (you shouldn’t have to get down on your hands and knees to find out what the fee is if you don’t have an account with that institution). And as noted here, Issa will likely use the hearings to go after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac once more, even though 6 percent of Fannie- and Freddie-sponsored loans made (from 2001 to 2008) were 90 days late at some point in their history, while roughly 27 percent of loans that Wall Street folded into mortgage-backed investments were at least 90 days late at some point, as noted here.
Dem U.S. House Rep Elijah Cummings is noted in the FDL post for calling for a hearing on mortgage foreclosures, though I’m sure Issa will concoct something wholly other than what Cummings has in mind. And as noted here, Cummings has also called for hearings on last year’s Big Branch Mine disaster, while his fellow Dem Carolyn Maloney has sought to emphasize that consumer protections be maintained for children facing dangers from poorly-made cots and playpens, and Dem Mike Quigley “defied anyone not to think about regulation when flying on a commercial airliner or drinking tap water in Chicago.”
Silly Dems – don’t they realize that Issa and his fellow Repug playmates are now in charge of the House (once more, heckuva job, all you who voted for this bunch of frauds last November)?
Here, in a column about parenting where he acts as a moral scold yet again (basically riffing off a theme I’ve encountered from him at least a hundred times already), he says the following…
In grade school, (kids) are taught that the world is filled with bullies and drugs, which is why they must be subjected to anti-bullying and D.A.R.E. lectures.There’s other ripe stuff in this execrable dreck, but I’ll focus on his attack against D.A.R.E. (standing for Drug Abuse Resistance Education) for now.
To begin, D.A.R.E. is a lot more than a “lecture.” It’s a 10-week program that teaches students not just how to avoid drugs, alcohol, and chemical inhalants, but how to make good choices in their lives and avoid behavior that can be destructive and lead to tragic consequences (the young one recently participated in D.A.R.E. training, so I know something about this). The students participate in exercises to reinforce the concepts taught by the police officer who teaches the class (with occasional assistance from other officers), and this way, the students get the benefit of instruction from law enforcement before they become adults so they are less likely to have a detrimental experience with law enforcement later in their lives (with the cost of D.A.R.E. instruction for kids significantly cheaper than the cost of incarcerating them later as adults).
Where we reside, the D.A.R.E. program is paid for by Lower Makefield, PA township; no state or federal monies are involved (the program operates within the Pennsbury School District and is conducted at elementary schools throughout Lower Makefield and Falls Townships).
And yes, I’ve read about some D.A.R.E. programs that were run badly where the kids got the message that they basically should rat out their friends and their parents to the cops. That is very definitely not the case with the Pennsbury program, run by a thoroughly dedicated officer who has conducted the program for 11 years.
Is there evidence that D.A.R.E. programs have failed? Sure (it was founded by LA police chief Daryl Gates in 1983, though I don’t think that’s a reason to automatically discount it). But when somebody thinks that “well, my son or daughter has gone through D.A.R.E., so when it comes to teaching them about drugs, alcohol and other dangerous stuff, my work is done,” what else can you expect? Like everything else, the lessons need to be reinforced over time.
As far as I’m concerned, D.A.R.E. is exactly the type of “small government” local program that does a world of good for the kids, and lets them have a little fun in the bargain. It’s a pity that Mullane can’t descend from his editorial ivory tower long enough to observe that simple fact.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
More Thursday Stuff
"Inspired by true events" as they say (h/t Daily Kos)...
...and in a related story, I never thought I would give those zany teabaggers credit for a thing (including this guy), but I have to for this (I'm afraid the extension will eventually pass anyway under a simple Repug majority - love to be wrong).
...and in a related story, I never thought I would give those zany teabaggers credit for a thing (including this guy), but I have to for this (I'm afraid the extension will eventually pass anyway under a simple Repug majority - love to be wrong).
Thursday Stuff
(Posting is going to be up in the air again - maybe yes, maybe no tomorrow and for a few days.)
I thought this was a good interview Lawrence O'Donnell conducted with Bill Maher recently; I was meaning to say something about Bill Orally's joke of an interview with President Obama last Sunday, but Maher said it pretty well here I thought (and seriously, Elisabeth Hasselbeck thinks Maher is guilty of chauvinism over a joke like that? God, does the well of self-pity for conservatives in general have no bottom?)...
...and here's the nice version of the hit song by Cee Lo Green (and by the way, anybody else besides me notice that, in addition to being totally hot, his all-girl band seriously kicks ass?).
I thought this was a good interview Lawrence O'Donnell conducted with Bill Maher recently; I was meaning to say something about Bill Orally's joke of an interview with President Obama last Sunday, but Maher said it pretty well here I thought (and seriously, Elisabeth Hasselbeck thinks Maher is guilty of chauvinism over a joke like that? God, does the well of self-pity for conservatives in general have no bottom?)...
...and here's the nice version of the hit song by Cee Lo Green (and by the way, anybody else besides me notice that, in addition to being totally hot, his all-girl band seriously kicks ass?).
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Wednesday Mashup (2/9/11)
That way all 23,000 Olbermann viewers will know they're getting the straight KO schtick.This tells us that Keith averaged about a million viewers a night.
In response, I wonder how many people actually read Malcolm’s blog posts each day?
A new election season heats up in Bucks County this month, but a loose end from the last one - a voter fraud investigation centering on 1,600 absentee ballot applications - still has not been tied up.I didn’t know the number of absentee ballots in question had reached 900 – of the 600 noted here, though, 82 percent of those rejected were Democratic voters.
(Republican) Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler said this week that county detectives were still investigating. In fact, he said, they conducted some interviews just last weekend.
"They get regularly interrupted (by other cases) but they're working on it," Heckler said. "They're digging in and we'll see what they come up with."
The Bucks County Republican Committee challenged more than 1,600 absentee ballot applications it deemed suspicious in the weeks leading up to the November election. Board of elections employees rejected almost 900 ballot applications that were incomplete or questionable, an unprecedented number that made elections officials suspicious.
Oh, and did I note that there was no mention in the story at all of the Ciervo/Fitzpatrick voter fraud letter, about which the PA Democratic Party had filed a protest as noted here?
Best of all is this nonsense from Pat Poprik at the end of the Courier Times story (she being the vice chairwoman of the Bucks County Republican Committee)…
"We want to make sure people know that voting is protected in the county," she said. "We want people to have a heightened awareness that if someone comes to their door and says it's OK to sign the name of someone else, it's not. It's critical for the nation that votes are legally cast. It's a sacred trust."Words like that coming from Poprik are absolutely hilarious; as noted here…
- In 2008, the (Republican) Bucks County Board of Election relocated a minority serving polling location, a move that led to a lawsuit from concerned voters. [Philadelphia Inquirer, September 28, 2008]Both the Ciervo letter and the PA Voter Assistance Office stuff need to be investigated by a U.S. attorney. At this point, I wouldn’t expect satisfaction from Corbett, particularly since he’s going to have his lieutenant governor Jim Cawley giving him pointers on how to make this look as incriminating for the Democrats as possible, actual evidence (or the lack thereof) be damned.
- Across the state, Pennsylvania Republicans have engaged in widespread efforts to intimidate and disenfranchise voters. In 2004, Republicans tried to relocate 63 Philadelphia polling places, mostly in Democratic and minority serving areas. [Philadelphia Daily News, October 18, 2004]
- In 2004, Republicans tried to challenge tens of thousands of voters in Philadelphia, a desperate move that was condemned by a legal counsel to the Republican City Committee who said Republicans were being "chicken littles." [Philadelphia Inquirer, October 25, 2004]
- In 2008, Republicans attempted to institute a "dress code" for voters. Republican Party Chairman Rob Gleason worried that voters could wear "musical hats" to the polls. This move was clearly targeted at intimidating voters. [AP, October 5, 2008]
“This debate (on congressional spending) has completely changed,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, in a floor speech on Tuesday. “Two years ago, the president and Democrats running Congress weren’t debating whether to cut spending. They were debating how much to spend…. Today, the only debate is how much to cut.”In response, I give you the following from a conservative Republican on Medicare Part D (here, written two years ago)…
The human capacity for self-delusion never ceases to amaze me, so it shouldn't surprise me that so many Republicans seem to genuinely believe that they are the party of fiscal responsibility. Perhaps at one time they were, but those days are long gone.That quote is debatable as far as I’m concerned, but you get the idea. Continuing…
This fact became blindingly obvious to me six years ago this month when a Republican president and a Republican Congress enacted the Medicare drug benefit, which former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker has called "the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s."
(Arizona Repug Congressman Trent) Franks (who voted for Medicare Part D) is not alone among Republicans for whom fiscal responsibility never consists of anything other than talk. The worst, undoubtedly, is DeLay, who actually went so far as to attack Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., last year for his principled vote against the drug benefit, one of only nine Republican senators to do so. (By my count, there are still 24 Republicans in the Senate who voted for the drug benefit, including such alleged conservatives as Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Orrin Hatch of Utah and Jon Kyl of Arizona.)Also, as noted here, McConnell has flip-flopped on campaign financial disclosure, as well as funding the two wars, $1.3 billion in tax cuts as well as the Medicare expansion, all financed with deficit spending (and McConnell bitched at the Dems for cutting Medicare spending by $500 billion to pay for HCR, when, in ’95, Repugs proposed cutting Medicare by $270 billion over seven years and in ’97 McConnell and McCain proposed cutting it by $115 billion over five years).
On top of that, I got a bit of a laugh out of this from someone named Tony Kondaks at Fix Noise who posits what supposedly are the four questions that liberals must be asked about the budget (I’ll cut to the proverbial chase and tell you that they are as follows: 1) What is total spending of the federal budget?; 2) What is the federal deficit?; 3) What is the national debt?; and 4) What was the most recent interest payment on the national debt?...don’t worry, he has the answers – sorry that I don’t have those figures tripping from my tongue, not being what appears to be a highly self-satisfied member of the “pain caucus”).
For the fifty-thousandth-millionth time, we should be preoccupied with job creation instead of the debt. That’s the way to pay down what we owe, with actual for-real job holders paying taxes (you know, like that baaad liberal Bill Clinton did – remember him?).
In response to Kondaks, here are at least four questions every conservative should be asked: 1) What is the current unemployment rate? (9.0, as noted here, though I don’t attribute that to job gains but people dropping out of the job search…and I’ll be keeping an eye on this number); 2) What was the rate when the Republicans were elected back to the House majority last November? (9.8, as noted here); 3) When looking at Republican vs. Democratic presidents over the last 60 years, which ones have lowered unemployment and which ones haven’t? (Democrats have lowered it and Republicans have raised it, as noted here); and 4) the presidents of which party have added more to the deficit, Republicans or Democrats? (Republicans, as noted here).
I’ll even throw in a bonus deficit question; what is the percentage of federal spending comprised by the interest on the national debt between 1970 and today? 7.3 percent in 1970 and 6.5 percent today, that’s what (here – interesting to yours truly that the latter number is smaller).
Of course, it’s disingenuous to criticize anyone for higher spending now to fix our nearly collapsed economy after our financial markets behaved like the biggest casino the world had ever seen throughout all of recorded history under the watch of a Republican president and a mostly Republican congress (and a Republican vice president who said that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”).
And given the fact that about 98 percent of that deficit would still remain after the cuts proposed by the Repugs (here) – well, “this debate” really hasn’t changed at all, has it, Sen. Mr. Elaine Chao?
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Tuesday Stuff
This is the Rachel Maddow clip I was looking for from last night by the way - I call this case closed (I can do without this guy's narration in the beginning, and the head shots and the un-synched audio, and it craps out with about a minute to go, but it is his clip, I realize...I also don't know where he got those figures about congressional salaries; maybe he's right for some members, but I have a feeling Patrick Murphy, for example, while doing OK as he should have, wasn't pulling in three quarters of a mil...I hope all you dunces who voted Republican last November are happy now)...
Update 2/11/11: Oh yes, the House Repugs are definitely doing the people's business in light of this, aren't they? And by the way, look where the deficit shows up on the issue list.
...and every time I think that Sarah Palin can't possibly plummet to new depths of stupidity, she manages to do it as she did here...uh, Aguilera was born in New York and she grew up in PA - where does Palin want to deport her to? Croydon?
Try watching this video after losing a loved one and tell me how much it matters that she screwed up the national anthem.
Life is short, people, and you-know-what happens.
Update 2/10/11: OK, the Palin/Aguilera thing is satire and I got snagged, so my bad here...but seriously, is it that much of a stretch?
Update 2/11/11: Oh yes, the House Repugs are definitely doing the people's business in light of this, aren't they? And by the way, look where the deficit shows up on the issue list.
...and every time I think that Sarah Palin can't possibly plummet to new depths of stupidity, she manages to do it as she did here...uh, Aguilera was born in New York and she grew up in PA - where does Palin want to deport her to? Croydon?
Try watching this video after losing a loved one and tell me how much it matters that she screwed up the national anthem.
Life is short, people, and you-know-what happens.
Update 2/10/11: OK, the Palin/Aguilera thing is satire and I got snagged, so my bad here...but seriously, is it that much of a stretch?
Tuesday Mashup (2/8/11)
(Note: No updates from yesterday, just fixed the title...)
(Oh, and for the record, let it be known that here and here are the latest examples of how this country's political/media/industrial complex has learned absolutely nothing from the Tucson carnage.)
This post from Michael Grunwald of Time has to do with an amendment that recently passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 96-1; it has to do with laser pointers aimed at aircraft.
And in case you were wondering, the person who voted against this eminently sensible move to punish those convicted of this offense with five-year prison terms was none other than the latest Senator Teabag himself, Rand Paul. And Grunwald heartily agrees with what Paul did…
Besides, Whitehouse is, in part, trying to correct a legal discrepancy with his amendment – as noted here…
And by the way, in response to Grunwald’s snark about enforcement, I give you the following (here)…
And I guess that’s an appropriate transition to John Harwood in yesterday’s New York Times, in the matter of President Obama’s efforts to make nice with the “pay no price, bear no burden” crowd (here)…
Most of Harwood’s article has to do with fluffing Bruce Josten, the chamber’s “top lobbyist,” in the vain hope that he’ll show some sort of conciliation towards Obama, who has done more than meet these selfish asswipes half way, though we also learn the following…
And Heaven forbid that the “U.S.” Chamber come clean on its overseas funding, with Josten fulfilling his role as a Chamber “pit bull” here (and though I suppose it looks good to those supposedly omniscient independent voters out there for Obama to meet these cretins more than halfway, they are still utterly despicable, as noted here).
Next, I give you former loyal Bushie Mitch Daniels, who, as noted in yesterday’s Murdoch Street Journal here, inflicted probably the most full-throated demagoguery against the health care law yet seen, and that’s saying something…
And in response, Think Progress points out the following here…
Which, to me, automatically disqualifies him from any serious economic discussion (at least he isn’t telling baby boomers to apologize, as noted here).
Also, say hello to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Hal Rogers of Kentucky (here)…
And Rogers is indeed a fan of earmarks, to the point that, as noted here, Rogers’ hometown newspaper has dubbed him the “prince of pork.” This includes “the tiny airport that received $17 million in federal dollars but has so little traffic that the last commercial airline pulled out in February (last year – the “airport to nowhere?”). And then there’s the Hal Rogers Parkway, which was formerly known as the Daniel Boone Parkway before being (renamed for you-know-who).”
Rogers also routed funding to his daughter’s nonprofit organization, as the DCCC tells us, and Rogers’ son was hired by a firm for which Rogers helped secure a $4 million contract.
With the death of John Murtha, I wonder if we’re now going to see the same level of animus directed towards another Appropriations committee chair who has been generous with earmark funding towards his congressional district.
Don’t hold your breath.
Finally, I came across this yesterday in the New York Times and was so dumbfounded by it that I felt I had to say something…
I suppose this is typical for Haidt, who has written pap equating liberals with the teabaggers (appearing here in the Journal, of course). And passages like this are more than a little bit of a giveaway as far as I’m concerned…
I’ll tell you what, Dr. Haidt – tell me when liberals are guilty of stuff like this, and I’ll take your bias charge (the conscious or unconscious variety) seriously. Until then, stop making excuses for conservatives, who hasn’t had a new idea about actual governance since a former Tampico, IL sports announcer started peddling investor class hallucinogenic fantasies about “Morning in America.”
Update: The link to Haidt's Journal article is acting up a bit - I think you have to subscribe to read it (heh)...my apologies.
And in case you were wondering, the person who voted against this eminently sensible move to punish those convicted of this offense with five-year prison terms was none other than the latest Senator Teabag himself, Rand Paul. And Grunwald heartily agrees with what Paul did…
I'm not trying to deny the seriousness of this particular problem or the idiocy of these particular idiots. Pilots say they can be temporarily blinded when lasers are beamed into their cockpits, and the FAA says it's happened 2,836 times in the past two years. This sounds like a genuine safety hazard. And it sounds as if the laser-pointer industry needs to do a better job in educating consumers about the dangers of its products. So allow me to start this education process:As I’ve said before, it’s a good thing that people like Grunwald haven’t been calling the shots in this country throughout our history. Otherwise, Paul Revere Grunwald would have said, “Why the hell do I have to ride a horse from Boston to Lexington and warn you people? It’s one if by land and two if by sea! Can’t you just watch the Old North Church yourselves to find out if the British are coming?” Or Theodore Roosevelt Grunwald would have said “What? Construct a canal through Panama? With all of that disease down there? The French already tried that. Forget it!” Or John Augustus Roebling Grunwald would have said, “Build a suspension bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn? HAHAHAHA!!”
Hey, idiots! Stop pointing lasers at planes!
It takes only about five seconds of thought to see that Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's amendment to impose federal penalties — up to a five-year prison sentence — for attempted plane zapping would be completely useless. How exactly would it be enforced? Would pilots who get lasered in the air contact a federal anti-laser-pointer task force on the ground? Would Tommy Lee Jones be recruited to lead the manhunts? And if a local cop somehow caught a 12-year-old goof-off trying to Luke Skywalker a 747 with a laser pointer he stole from his corporate mom, would the kid go to the federal pen? Sure, it's conceivable that someone with truly menacing intentions would point a laser into a cockpit. But does Congress think there's nothing in the existing federal code that would allow him to be prosecuted for trying to blind a pilot in midflight?
The 96 Senators who voted for this silliness would say they're just trying to send a message to the public about a dangerous activity. I support this message, as politicians like to say. But that's not really the message they're trying to send. It's more like the line on George H.W. Bush's teleprompter — message: I care. The Senators are lawmakers, so they feel as if they need to make laws to show concern; they're covering their backsides in case a laser-pointing idiot ever does bring down a plane.
Besides, Whitehouse is, in part, trying to correct a legal discrepancy with his amendment – as noted here…
Interference with commercial airlines is already a federal crime. But current law has a gap that weakens the FBI's ability to investigate laser incidents involving helicopters, said Dave Joly, a spokesman for the FBI in Denver, where 38 laser incidents were reported last year. The law covers mass transportation, but helicopters aren't considered mass-transit aircraft, Joly said.So of course, Paul saw an opportunity to ignore the threat of laser pointers and screw over federal employees at the same time (and by the way, Senator-fake-ophthalmology-certification, the “F” in FAA stands for “federal”; it’s not an “S” for “state”).
There have been many instances of lasers pointed at helicopters, including police helicopters. Helicopters are especially vulnerable because they fly at lower altitudes than planes.
The vote makes the amendment part of a bill pending before the Senate to authorize FAA programs for the next two years. It also would speed up the FAA's transition from an air traffic control system based on World War II-era radar technology to one based on satellite-based technology.
The Senate also rejected an amendment by Paul that would have exempted FAA programs from a federal law that requires government contractors to pay construction workers the prevailing local wage.
And by the way, in response to Grunwald’s snark about enforcement, I give you the following (here)…
SACRAMENTO, CA—United States Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner announced today that a federal grand jury returned a one-count indictment charging Samuel Gregory Liebman, 51, of Roseville California, with interference with an aircraft for pointing a laser at a California Highway Patrol plane.So yes, it is possible to arrest and prosecute someone for this act. And in case either Paul or Grunwald don’t believe me, let’s see how they react went a pilot’s vision is impaired while a plane or helicopter in which they’re a passenger begins its descent (though this is par for the course when it comes to Grunwald’s wankery, as noted here).
The indictment alleges that on August 30, 2010, Liebman struck a CHP Cessna 206 multiple times with a powerful green laser while it was flying.
Export promotion, infrastructure development and support for innovation through improvements in research and education all represent goals that business shares with an administration hungry to spur investment and job creation.Really? Then why, as Bill Scher asks here, has the “U.S.” Chamber done all it possibly could to support those zany teabaggers, who hate any government spending unless it affects their entitlements?
Most of Harwood’s article has to do with fluffing Bruce Josten, the chamber’s “top lobbyist,” in the vain hope that he’ll show some sort of conciliation towards Obama, who has done more than meet these selfish asswipes half way, though we also learn the following…
Mr. Josten dismissed Mr. Obama’s recently announced regulatory strategy, ostensibly intended to reduce unnecessary burdens on business. “It’s a rehash of Clinton’s, which was a rehash of Carter’s,” Mr. Josten said.Actually, I guess the fact that Josten even bothered to acknowledge Harwood’s existence is a bit of a coup for Harwood, given that, as noted here, Josten usually finds a slavishly favorable environment to peddle his propaganda at Fix Noise (with humanoid Megyn Kelly acting accordingly).
And Heaven forbid that the “U.S.” Chamber come clean on its overseas funding, with Josten fulfilling his role as a Chamber “pit bull” here (and though I suppose it looks good to those supposedly omniscient independent voters out there for Obama to meet these cretins more than halfway, they are still utterly despicable, as noted here).
Unless you're in favor of a fully nationalized health-care system, the president's health-care reform law is a massive mistake. It will amplify all the big drivers of overconsumption and excessive pricing: "Why not, it's free?" reimbursement; "The more I do, the more I get" provider payment; and all the defensive medicine the trial bar's ingenuity can generate.Wow, could Daniels paint with an even broader brush here? And this is particularly funny since, as presidential candidate, he of course rails against the health care law, but as Indiana governor, as noted here, he asked for additional Medicaid funding from the Obama Administration.
All claims made for it were false.
And in response, Think Progress points out the following here…
Rather than comparing between comprehensive packages that provide a basic array of essential services — nobody is proposing covering hair plugs, as some conservatives have proposed — this former OMB director suggests that skimpy plans should also be available for purchase. People should be able to “buy what they need,” he argues, ignoring the fact that insurance should not be a grab bag: there is absolutely no way to predict what illness one will develop in the future and that this very real inability has led to widespread undercoverage and bankruptcy. If an individual purchases a very basic plan and then develops cancer in five years, what good is a “consumer driven” plan if it doesn’t cover chemotherapy?And oh yeah, as Dubya’s OMB director, Daniels, as noted here, “displayed a disturbing tendency to make dishonest claims for political advantage on federal budget issues.”
Which, to me, automatically disqualifies him from any serious economic discussion (at least he isn’t telling baby boomers to apologize, as noted here).
Rogers beat Reps. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) and Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) to win the gavel of the Appropriations panel following the midterm elections. But the post is very different than it was last year, when Democrats had control of the House, and very different from when Republicans ran the lower chamber from 1995 through 2006.To begin, let’s dispense with the mythology that Congress has forsaken earmarks; as noted here, “members of both parties requested nearly 40,000 earmarks worth more than $130 billion for fiscal year 2011” (and for the umpteenth time, allow me to say that I could care less about earmarks since they amount to such a tiny fraction of the federal budget anyway, though they should be disclosed).
The goal for Rogers is to cut now, cut later and keep on cutting throughout the 112th Congress. He used to be a big fan of earmarks, like his Kentucky colleague, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R). But amid the Tea Party’s rise, both Rogers and McConnell have embraced an earmark moratorium.
And Rogers is indeed a fan of earmarks, to the point that, as noted here, Rogers’ hometown newspaper has dubbed him the “prince of pork.” This includes “the tiny airport that received $17 million in federal dollars but has so little traffic that the last commercial airline pulled out in February (last year – the “airport to nowhere?”). And then there’s the Hal Rogers Parkway, which was formerly known as the Daniel Boone Parkway before being (renamed for you-know-who).”
Rogers also routed funding to his daughter’s nonprofit organization, as the DCCC tells us, and Rogers’ son was hired by a firm for which Rogers helped secure a $4 million contract.
With the death of John Murtha, I wonder if we’re now going to see the same level of animus directed towards another Appropriations committee chair who has been generous with earmark funding towards his congressional district.
Don’t hold your breath.
SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.Oh, please. So now we’re talking about unconscious indoctrination of conservatives by liberals?
Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
I suppose this is typical for Haidt, who has written pap equating liberals with the teabaggers (appearing here in the Journal, of course). And passages like this are more than a little bit of a giveaway as far as I’m concerned…
In the tea partiers' scheme of things, the federal government got into the business of protecting the American people—from market fluctuations as well as from their own bad decisions—under Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the Great Depression, most Americans recognized that capitalism required safety nets here and there. But Lyndon Johnson's effort to build the Great Society, and particularly welfare programs that reduced the incentives for work and marriage among the poor, went much further.A lot of people just got done celebrating the 100th birthday of a guy who made it his career over the last 40 or so years of his life to tell us over and over again that government can’t do anything right. And now along comes Haidt to re-enforce that message under the guise of fighting some sort of liberal bias.
I’ll tell you what, Dr. Haidt – tell me when liberals are guilty of stuff like this, and I’ll take your bias charge (the conscious or unconscious variety) seriously. Until then, stop making excuses for conservatives, who hasn’t had a new idea about actual governance since a former Tampico, IL sports announcer started peddling investor class hallucinogenic fantasies about “Morning in America.”
Update: The link to Haidt's Journal article is acting up a bit - I think you have to subscribe to read it (heh)...my apologies.
Monday, February 07, 2011
Monday Stuff
(Hopefully back to posting tomorrow...)
Oh, and you can now cue the Bucks County Courier Times to leap to the defense of Mikey The Beloved, claiming that he has the health benefits of his wife, who's a schoolteacher, and how dare Durbin say such things to hurt "bipartisanship" (of course, if you're not a teacher or a member of Congress, you can pound sand as far as Mikey and the Repugs are concerned...Rachel Maddow had a great feature tonight on what the House Repugs are actually doing, which is typical "values" BS, trying to repeal health care of course, and after that, pretty much nothing - I'll try to get the video...and of course, Cantor sends one of his sycophants to tell the media "Well, at least we're not spending money like those Democrats," which is particularly hilarious when you consider this)...
...and I know Patrick Leahy is trying to add judicial oversight provisions to the Patriot Act, but the thing is still a stinking dead dog that erodes our civil liberties by the day, by the hour actually (and the fact that it is supported by a conservative lickspittle like James Jay Carofano is the icing on the proverbial cake)...
Update 2/10/11: I agree with Rand Paul on practically nothing, but if he's serious, kudos to him for this.
...in addition, I suppose it's a good thing that the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl - I really didn't have a rooting interest and am sick of the NFL generally largely because of this, but I have to admit that this was a cool ad...
...and RIP Gary Moore.
Oh, and you can now cue the Bucks County Courier Times to leap to the defense of Mikey The Beloved, claiming that he has the health benefits of his wife, who's a schoolteacher, and how dare Durbin say such things to hurt "bipartisanship" (of course, if you're not a teacher or a member of Congress, you can pound sand as far as Mikey and the Repugs are concerned...Rachel Maddow had a great feature tonight on what the House Repugs are actually doing, which is typical "values" BS, trying to repeal health care of course, and after that, pretty much nothing - I'll try to get the video...and of course, Cantor sends one of his sycophants to tell the media "Well, at least we're not spending money like those Democrats," which is particularly hilarious when you consider this)...
...and I know Patrick Leahy is trying to add judicial oversight provisions to the Patriot Act, but the thing is still a stinking dead dog that erodes our civil liberties by the day, by the hour actually (and the fact that it is supported by a conservative lickspittle like James Jay Carofano is the icing on the proverbial cake)...
Update 2/10/11: I agree with Rand Paul on practically nothing, but if he's serious, kudos to him for this.
...in addition, I suppose it's a good thing that the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl - I really didn't have a rooting interest and am sick of the NFL generally largely because of this, but I have to admit that this was a cool ad...
...and RIP Gary Moore.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Sunday Stuff
(Probably no posting tomorrow, by the way...)
And with all of the Reaganalia in full swing, I thought this was appropriate (God rest Phil Hartman)...
...and here is more humor for the occasion...
...and you're not going to believe the words you're hearing from Reagan here in 1948 when he was a progressive Democrat - can you imagine what this country could be like now had he stayed true to those principles?...
...but he didn't of course, and here is a song that is, in part, a response to his idiotic policy of "constructive engagement."
And with all of the Reaganalia in full swing, I thought this was appropriate (God rest Phil Hartman)...
...and here is more humor for the occasion...
...and you're not going to believe the words you're hearing from Reagan here in 1948 when he was a progressive Democrat - can you imagine what this country could be like now had he stayed true to those principles?...
...but he didn't of course, and here is a song that is, in part, a response to his idiotic policy of "constructive engagement."
Saturday, February 05, 2011
Happy Birthday To The Gipper (updates)
On the occasion of the 100th birthday of The Sainted Ronnie R, I would like to present some recollections of Number 40 mostly from the book “Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error,” by Mark Green and Gail MacColl, published in 1983 (additional material follows)...“This president is treated by both the press and foreign leaders as if he were a child. He earns praise for the ordinary, for what used to be the expected. His occasional ability to retain facts is cited as a triumph when it should, in fact, be a routine occurrence…”Shocking that the Cohen we know now would have actually once said that, I'll admit.
Richard Cohen, WaPo, 6/2/83
On a proposed Soviet grain embargo in 1980, in response to their war in Afghanistan (from the “past is prologue” file)
1/7/80On the 1980 U.S. Olympic Boycott...
“I just don’t believe the farmer should be made to pay a special price for our diplomacy, and I’m opposed to the (embargo.)” (Washington Post)
1/8/80
“If we are going to do such a thing to the Soviet Union as a full grain embargo, which I support, first we have to be sure our own allies would join us on this.” (Claremont – NH – Eagle Times)
“I just cannot within myself now find it right that the President of the United States should now be able to say to Americans who have violated no laws or anything, that they cannot go and cannot leave this country (to compete).” (The boycott was always voluntary, by the way.)In an attempt to downgrade President Jimmy Carter’s initiative on US-China policy, Reagan said, “In the first place, China relations had been normalized by the visits of a previous President from a previous administration (i.e., Richard Nixon). And I am not at all sure that (Carter) added anything to what had already been accomplished.” (WaPo, 5/5/83)
(New York Times, 4/9/80)
“I support the boycott today. I supported it yesterday. And I supported it when the President first called for it.”
(New York Times, 4/11/80)
Carter added, of course, what WaPo columnist Philip Geyelin labeled “the hard part” – the 1979 “normalization” agreement that established full diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Also, speaking in June 1982, Reagan described Syrian missiles in Lebanon as “offensive weapons,” adding, “There’s no question about the direction in which they’re aimed.”Well, naturally, there was some question, since the weapons under discussion were surface-to-air missiles used for anti-aircraft purposes – they were, therefore, aimed in the direction of whatever was flying over them and were entirely defensive in nature. (WaPo, 6/17/82)
Continuing…
“We have never interfered in the internal government of a country and have no intention of doing so, never have had any thought of that kind.” (9/28/82)Never? That’s not what an article on the front page of the New York Times on December 4, 1982 said: “United States covert activities in Central America, which began a year ago with limited aims, have become the most ambitious paramilitary and political action operation mounted by the CIA in nearly a decade, according to intelligence officials.” Nor is it what the President himself said half a year later: “Now, if they (House committee members) want to tell us that we can give money and do the same things we’ve been doing – money giving, providing subsistence, and so forth to these people (anti-Sandinista guerrillas trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua) and making it overt instead of covert – that’s all right with me.” (WaPo, 5/5/83)
Also…
“Well, I learned a lot…I went down (to Latin America) to find out from them and (learn) their views. You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.” (WaPo, 12/6/82)Also…
“Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G.I. Bill of Rights with respect to education or anything.” (Newsweek, 4/21/80)The vets were, in fact, eligible even if Vietnam wasn’t a declared war.
“Up until now (during the Soviet Afghan invasion) the Soviet Union has not used its own military forces in its imperialism. It’s taken over country after country, but it’s done so with proxy troops.” (Des Moines Register, 1/8/80)Soviet troops were used in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
“Now, the Soviets have 945 warheads aimed at targets in Europe with their medium-range missiles. And we have no deterrent whatsoever…” (10/14/82)Uh, no – at that time, the U.S. had, on submarines in both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 400 warheads targeted at the Soviet Union. Also on those subs were an additional 4,500 warheads not officially committed to NATO. Great Britain had 192 warheads targeted at the USSR; France had 98. Reagan also ignored the bomber forces of both the U.S. and NATO, which had the capacity to drop well over 1,000 nuclear weapons on the USSR.
“We then went back into negotiations on their (the Soviets’) terms, because Mr. Carter had cancelled the B-1 bomber, delayed the MX, delayed the Trident submarine, delayed the Cruise missile, shut down the…Minute Man missile production line…” (Presidential debate, 10/28/80)It’s true that the B-1 bomber had been delayed. As for the rest: the Cruise missile and MX were under full-scale development; the Minute Man’s missile production line had been shut down because the production schedule had been met; and the first Trident submarine, the USS Ohio, had been launched on April 7, 1979.
“We’re in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor. Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.” (New York Times, 4/12/80)Spoken like someone who “served” during WW II on a Hollywood back lot, which is pretty much what he did, making 400 training films.
“Incidentally, the first man who proposed the nuclear freeze was in February 21, 1981, in Moscow – Leonid Brezhnev.” (12/10/82)Nope. The freeze idea was first officially proposed by Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Oregon), in 1979, as an amendment to SALT II.
“I was the one who took the lead to begin bringing about the first real arms reduction talks that we’ve ever been able to hold with the Soviet Union.” (2/16/83)Here we go again. Again, remember SALT II? Some people think those were real arms reduction talks, especially since that agreement called for significant reductions in arms between the superpowers. Remember Richard Nixon? Gerald Ford? Jimmy Carter? They all supported SALT II.
On the economy:
“Their lives (the lives of workers and their families) have been shattered by a new depression – the Carter depression. The Carter depression was created and molded by Carter himself.” (8/28/80)Whatever Carter did mold it was not a depression, or at least not according to Reagan’s own economic advisers. Alan Greenspan said, “I wouldn’t have used that term.” Martin Anderson pointed out that most economists believed the nation to be in a “very severe recession” (at that time). Anderson and his aides then went so far as to issue a clarification stating that “the Republican presidential nominee was not using the word ‘depression’ the way economists do.” Oh.
“Real earnings are at last increasing for the first time in quite awhile.” (5/16/82)Try decreasing. The Labor Department reported in June 1982 that real average weekly earnings for American workers declined 1.2%.
“For four quarters we have seen a growth in the GNP.” (9/28/82)Inflation-adjusted GNP had been declining for two of the four quarters under discussion.
Turning to one of Reagan’s pet peeves…
“We reformed welfare in California (when Reagan was governor from 1967-1975) and we saved $2 billion for the taxpayer over a three-year period…” (Washington Star, 3/2/80)There was never $2 billion to save. That figure represents money that would have been spent had the number of people receiving welfare continued to increase, even after the recession ended and the rate of abortion increased. Anthony Beilenson (D-CA) used these same calculations to figure out that by 1978 55% of the state’s population would be on the dole; and that by 1984, everyone in the state including the governor would be on welfare. This claim sometimes appeared as “We returned $2 billion to the taxpayer,” which is even more wrong.
“What Congress, when they finished, gave him (President Kennedy) was 30% (in tax cuts) at the bottom levels of the income earners and 23% at the top levels, and it averaged out to 27%. So…Kemp/Roth (the first disastrous Reagan tax cut) is asking for exactly what, in amount, Kennedy asked for.” (CBS News, 4/3/80)Not exactly. In 1963, JFK requested a tax cut of 18%, weighted in favor of lower-and-middle-income families. After his death, Congress enacted a 19% tax cut.
“History shows that when the taxes of a nation approach about 20% of the people’s income, there begins to be a lack of respect for government…When it reaches 25% there comes an increase in lawlessness.” (Time, 4/14/80)History shows no such thing. Income tax rates in Europe have traditionally been far higher than U.S. rates, while European crime rates have been much lower.
“The percentage of your earnings the federal government took in taxes in 1960 has almost doubled.” (2/5/81)No. As a share of personal income, federal individual income taxes were 10.4% in 1960 and 12.0% in 1981.
“The bipartisan (tax cut) proposal was designed to encourage small businesses…” (7/27/81)If so, the proposal was poorly designed. About 80% of the Accelerated Cost Recovery System cut in corporate taxes went to the top one-tenth of 1% of America’s businesses, or those “small businesses” with assets of more than $250 million. Said William Hardman, a representative of the Small Business Legislative Council, “It would be difficult to write a tax bill better designed to speed the extinction of small business.”
“As a matter of fact, if anyone wants to look closely, our original tax plan did not contain the reduction of the 70% bracket (formerly the high-end rate, believe it or not). That was suggested by the Democrats.” (11/12/81)No it wasn’t. The original Reagan tax plan called for a lowering of the top rates from 70% to 50%, to be phased in over a period of three years. As David Stockman so memorably explained, “Kemp-Roth was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.”
“I would like to have them (the critics of the plan) give a specific on where this is a budget for the rich. The bulk of the personal income tax cut goes right across from the lower income to middle America.” (2/8/82)Well, here are some specifics. According to the CBO, 35.1% of the tax cuts went to the wealthiest 5% of the taxpayers. The National Journal, using CBO and Census Bureau information, estimated that, had the 1983 tax cuts gone into effect in 1981, they would have taken $1.2 billion from the poorest fifth of the income spectrum and added $36 billion to the income of the richest fifth.
“Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, ‘Keep the government poor and remain free’.” (6/15/82)An official at the White House speechwriting office says the President “came up with that one himself. Holmes never said anything point-blank exactly like that…we’re still trying to track it down.” Professor Ed Bander of Suffolk Law School in Boston, a recognized Holmes scholar, didn’t think Holmes “ever said anything that I can see which resembles that quote.”
Oh, and here’s a budget flip-flop…
“We have no choice. This government must get back as quickly as possible to a balanced budget.” (New York Times, 11/21/75)Continuing…
“In the first place, I said that (a balanced budget) was our goal, not a promise.” (12/17/81)
“And already, we can tell you that that $90 billion deficit of 1983 will actually be smaller in proportion to the GNP than the deficits were in 1975-1978…” (3/8/82)Sounds good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the 1984 budget of the US government estimated that the 1983 deficit would be 6.5% of GNP, which made it larger, not smaller, than percentages of GNP for any single year between 1975 and 1978: 3.1% in 1975, 4.0% in 1976, 2.4% in 1977, and 2.3% in 1978. In fact, when the House Budget Committee ranked post-World War II deficits as a percentage of GNP, Reagan’s budgets for his first term in office took four of the top five spots.
“If you’ll remember, there were 2 million who lost their jobs in the last six months of 1980, during the election…” (1/8/82)The number of people employed increased in the last six months of 1980, ending the year with 283,000 more people working than in July.
“I realize there’s been an increase in unemployment. It’s been a continuation of an increase that got underway in the last several months of 1980.” (1/19/82)Still wrong. In the last six months of 1980, unemployment declined from 7.8% to 7.3%. It declined further to 7.2% in 1981, before beginning to climb to double-digit figures.
“We have…in some of the hardest-hit states, extended the unemployment insurance. There’s nothing that strikes to my heart more than the unemployed…”(3/31/82)Then how come the Labor Department estimated that changes in the eligibility formula for the 1981 budget reduced extended benefits for 1.5 million jobless workers? Moreover, changes in the way a state became eligible for the extended benefit program had Michigan – the hardest hit of the states, then pretty much as now – thrown off that program for 13 weeks just prior to the President’s heartfelt speech.
“Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash somewhere has just been laid off?” (3/16/82)Enough said.
“No, I want to be fair. Unemployment is 9.8%. When we took office it was 7.4%. Okay, I’ll take blame for 2.4% of the unemployment. And if, as everybody is worried about, it goes to 10%, well I’ll take blame for 2.6%” (10/6/82)Let’s be fair to (every president to that point in time). In the past 30 years (from 1983), here’s how the unemployment rate changed during each president’s term in office. Republicans: Ike, +3.7%; Nixon, +2.0%; Ford, +3.1%; Reagan, +2.4%. Democrats: JFK, -.9%, LBJ, -2.3%, Carter, -1.0%. It’s hard to see why the Democrats should accept blame for 7.4% unemployment, when Republican presidents have always increased unemployment and Democratic presidents have always decreased it. And unemployment passed the 10% mark just two days after Reagan said that.
“When Chicago burned down they didn’t declare it a disaster area. They just rebuilt it, the people of Chicago, and this is the kind of America we can have again.” (Washington Star, 3/2/80)This is the kind of America we’ve had all along. On October 10, 1871, the Secretary of War, Gen. William H. Balknap, declared the Chicago fire a “national calamity.” The mayor of Chicago gave absolute police authority to the US Army under Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan. Federal rations, tents, and other supplies arrived from all over the country. According to A.T. Andreas, author of History of Chicago, millions of dollars to aid in the rebuilding of Chicago came from all over the US, from the federal government, and from several foreign governments as well.
And in terms of Repugs not being able to cut from the budget today (at least not without getting their stinking tax cuts first), I believe you could consider this to be a prototype…
“What would I cut?...Right now the GAO has furnished the Congressional Budget Office with a list of 41 specific items. All of them are totally unnecessary, spelled out right down to the penny…they total $11 billion (in savings), those 41 items…” (Washington Star, 3/2/80)They totaled zero, those 41 items, as least as far as the Government Accounting and Congressional Budget Offices are concerned – spokesmen for both said they knew of no such list.
“If the figures that I’ve been given are correct, in these last three years the federal government has increased by 131,000 (workers).” (Time, 4/14/80)The figures were not correct. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the average number of federal workers in 1976 at 2,733,000 and in 1979 at 2,773,000 – for a grand total increase of 40,000.
“The federal government did not create the states, the states created the federal government.” (Inaugural address, 1/20/81)The original 13 colonies did get together and create our constitutional system, including the federal government. Yet the federal government “created” the other 37 states. Their land was either bought with federal monies or won at war by federal armies. Of the 37 states admitted to our nation after ratification, only Texas chose to become part of the US while a sovereign entity. The federal government did, however, assume Texas’ debt when it became a state.
“In England, if a criminal with a gun, even if he was arrested for burglary or theft or whatever he was doing, was tried for first degree murder and hung if he was found guilty.” (4/15/82)A New York Times search of English law going back to the 14th century failed to turn up this legal standard. A member of the Law Society of Britain pointed out that there had once been a law that punished by execution the use of a gun that led to death, but never merely the carrying of a gun. After the error was pointed out, Reagan Press Secretary Larry Speakes commented, “Well, it’s a good story, though. It made the point, didn’t it?”
And here is some of Ronnie’s “compassion” on display…
“We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.” (TV speech for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, 10/27/64)Continuing…
“…a faceless mass, waiting for hand-outs.” (Description of Medicaid recipients, 1965)
“There has been a great deal of misinformation and for that matter pure demagoguery on the subject of Social Security…” (Radio address, 9/24/81)The misinformation was on the subject of just how much Reagan wanted to cut. He acted to eliminate Social Security benefits for students who are children of deceased and disabled workers; proposed cutting the minimum benefit for Social Security recipients; and allowed his Health and Human Services Secretary to propose cutting benefits at 62 years of age – a proposal rejected by the Senate 95-0.
During the 1982 election campaigns, a Republican TV advertisement showed a white-haired mailman delivering July’s Social Security check, which contained an automatic cost-of-living increase in benefits. “President Reagan kept his promise to the American people,” the ad proclaimed.Comparing Ronnie to Tricky Dick – pretty low…
In fact, Reagan opposed the increase in Congress, which passed it anyway. Rep. Claude Pepper (D-FL), chairman of the House Committee on Aging, said that for Reagan to claim credit for the increase “lowers the art of deception to depths not explored since the Nixon Administration.” (New York Times, 7/7/82)
“I don’t believe there is going to be any cut (in education funding) that’s going to affect students with true need…” (2/18/82)In fact, the needier the student, the harder he or she would have been hit by Reagan’s student-aid cuts. For example, a college student whose family was unable to make any contribution relied on an aid package that included a maximum Pell Grant, a Supplement Grant, and a Direct Loan or Guaranteed Loan. Reagan’s proposed program would reduce that student’s Pell Grant, take away the Supplemental Grant and the State Grant, reduce the work-study award by 28%, make Direct Loans scarcer, and make Guaranteed Loans more expensive.
“The decrease in poverty I referred to earlier started in the 1950s. By the time the full weight of the Great Society programs was felt, economic progress for America’s poor had come to a tragic halt.” (9/19/82)In 1967, the Field Foundation testified before Congress on hunger in America: “Wherever we went and wherever we looked, we saw children in significant numbers who were hungry and sick.” A decade later, the Field team retraced its 1967 steps and found “far fewer grossly malnourished people in this country…” They concluded that food stamps and other federal nutrition programs, implemented or inspired by Great Society legislation, had made the difference.
And this is shades of Glenn Beck…
“Anyone who wants to take a look at the writings of the members of the brain trust of the New Deal will find that President Roosevelt’s advisers admired the Fascist system.” (New York Times, 8/17/80)Some of the New Dealers made references to the efficiency of the Italian government. So did Winston Churchill. This does not add up to an admiration of fascism. Neither FDR nor the New Deal brain trust ever hinted at adopting that political program.
On the environment…
“Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.” (Sierra, 9/10/80)Talk about the commonsense gap. Trees do emit hydrocarbons, but the EPA does not find that cause for concern. Trees decay into nitrous oxide, which is not an immediate threat to human health. On the other hand, the EPA projected that emissions of man-made oxides of nitrogen – which are harmful and which those “tough emission standards” are intended to control – would increase by about 50% at least by the year 2000.
“As governor of California, I took charge of passing the strictest air pollution laws in the United States – the strictest air quality law that has ever been accepted.” (Presidential debate – 10/28/80)Dead wrong. It was under Governor Pat Brown, who preceded Reagan in office, that California adopted the toughest anti-pollution measures in the nation. Reagan did put his name to some air and water quality legislation, but only under the most intense pressure from California environmentalists. The record shows that during his eight-year reign as governor, Reagan worked to undermine and weaken environmental standards. California Journal reported that by 1973 the Air Resources Board had “faded from national prominence into a strange kind of bureaucratic malaise, in which it inhibits rather than aids the smog-control effort.”
And I give you Ronnie on nuclear energy…
“It takes 12 years to get a nuclear power plant built in America. It only takes four or five in most other countries. The seven or eight years’ difference is not construction time in our country, it is paperwork and the multitudinous permits required by the government.” (Radio, April 1979)Wrong again. It does take ten to twelve years to build a nuclear power plant in the US, but that puts us ahead of India, Spain, Italy and Britain, and behind Japan and France. In fact, the only country to do it in four years is Japan – once. As for the charge of regulatory sabotage, a congressional report concluded these claims “have been grossly exaggerated.” The reasons for the French and Japanese lead are more logistical than bureaucratic. The Japanese work on their reactors around the clock, and the French have maximized efficiency by standardizing design.
And I give you Ronnie on gas mileage…
“Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon.” (Chicago Tribune, 5/10/80)The US Department of Transportation figured that a 14-car train travelling at 80 mph gets 400 passenger miles to the gallon. A 1980 auto with good mileage carrying an average of 2.2 people got 42.6 passenger miles to the gallon.
And this has been in the news a bit lately…
“…first of all – the Hatch Act, there are some fifteen million public employees in the United States. If you grant each one of them only influence over one additional vote, such as a family member, you are talking about a voting bloc of 30 million people who conceivably can have any number of conflicts of interest…” (NBC, Meet The Press, 5/1/77)First of all, that voting bloc already exists. The Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from participating in political campaigns, does not prevent them from influencing the votes of their immediate family.
Pro:Ronnie on the law…
“I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at the point of a bayonet, if necessary.” (L.A. Times, 10/20/65)
Con:
“I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” (L.A. Times, 6/17/66)
“(John Marshall) wasn’t even a lawyer.” (Presidential debate, 3/13/80)The great Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court received his law license in 1780 and set up practice in 1783. According to Reagan aide Martin Anderson, Reagan meant to say that Marshall never went to law school, since his formal training was a matter of a few lectures at the College of William and Mary. Anderson: “He says it wrong. That’s all.”
Ronnie on school prayer…
“The big spenders…even drove prayer out of the classrooms.” (TV commercial, 10/31/82)School prayer was abolished in 1962 by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Engle v .Vitale. The Court does spend money on its operations, but it uses funds appropriated by Congress. When asked by the New York Times to identify the “big spenders,” Mort Allin, an assistant White House press secretary, could not be specific. “They know who they are,” he said.
Elizabeth Drew wrote in the June 21, 1982 New Yorker of a White House meeting in which the President lauded the inventor of Rubik’s Cube as exemplifying the virtues of American free enterprise. Erno Rubik, the inventor of the cube, was a Hungarian professor living in what was, at the time, Communist Budapest.And here’s some telltale “humor” from Ronnie…
2/18/80:And I give you the following from “Tear Down This Myth” by Will Bunch, published in 2009...
“How do you tell who the Polish fellow is at a cockfight? He’s the one with the duck. How do you tell who the Italian is at the cockfight? He’s the one who bets on the duck. How do you know the Mafia was there? The duck wins.” (Washington Star, 2/18/80)
2/19/80:
“I don’t like that type of humor, and in a conversation about stories once, this came about with one of the reporters on the plane and I had given this as an example. And on the bus, he (the reporter) asked me the other day, he said, “What was the sequence of that story,” and I paused and told him, and…I think it’s a cheap shot to use it.” (Washington Post, 2/19/80)
(pg. 3)And by the way, in case you think all I’m going to do here is bash Reagan, I give you this…
…Jim Cramer, the popular, wild-eyed TV Stock guru, and hardly a flaming liberal – was giving a speech at Bucknell University in which he traced the roots of the current mortgage crisis all the way back to the pro-business policies initiated nearly three decades earlier by America’s still popular – even beloved by some – fortieth president, the late Ronald Wilson Reagan. “Ever since the Reagan era,” Cramer told the students, “our nation has been regressing and repealing years and years’ worth of safety net and equal economic justice in the name of discrediting and dismantling the federal government’s missions to help solve our nation’s collective domestic woes.”
(pgs. 9-10)
…there is the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, a name change that was announced in 2000 when friends of the ex-president, then deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease, said they would raise $150 million for the facility. The irony was not lost on some of the staff, who recalled that as president, Reagan sought to cut federal funding for medical research and that he also had become governor of California in 1966 largely by crusading against the hospital’s parent, the University of California, by calling its main campus in Berkeley “a hotbed of communism and homosexuality.” At the time of the announcement, one staffer compared it to “renaming the Federal Reserve for Herbert Hoover” (president during the beginning of the Great Depression)…
(pg. 15)Also, this tells you how the 2008 Repug presidential candidate started out in public life (in opposition to Reagan, as it turned out – not a complaint, just an observation)…
Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which legalized an estimated 2.7 million undocumented workers in the US – an action he never renounced in the ensuing years.
(pg. 16)And here is something else that’s ignored by the Reagan revisionist historians…
….if (John McCain) returned to DC from Arizona as a “foot soldier” in the “Reagan Revolution” in 1983, there were times when he could have been tried for mutiny. Two months after he was sworn in that year, the freshman GOP congressman sounded at times like a Democrat when he told the National Journal that the administration was wasting money on defense, expressed alarm about soaring deficits, and said the GOP needed to reach out to minorities and women, as he urged Reagan to name a commission on equal rights for women. Two years later, he was voting against legislation supported by the Reagan White House nearly a third of the time.
(pg. 17)I realize that this writeup, long as it is I know, barely touches on Reagan’s foreign policy, so this timeline of events should suffice (a laundry list of military misadventures, hostage taking and negotiating with Hezbollah – with Iran playing Reagan and company for utter suckers by engaging in arms deals on the one hand and encouraging a terrorist network guilty of criminal acts against our people on the other – also, Reagan and company kept the Iran-Iraq War going for as long as they could by selling weapons to both sides, and played games in Central America to get around the Boland Amendment with illegal money deals, all followed by the typical denials of wrongdoing).
(Reagan’s) 1981 tax cut was followed quickly by tax hikes you rarely hear about (the ’82 increase was the largest peacetime tax increase in this country’s history), and Reagan’s real lasting achievement on that front was slashing marginal rates for the wealthy – even as rising payroll taxes socked the working class. His promise to shrink government was uttered so often that many acolytes believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George H.W. Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight, which critics have linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the subprime mortgage crisis of the 2000s (Bunch also notes that the ’81 cut passed with “surprisingly little debate”).
(pg. 35)
In 1984, when President Reagan was seeking reelection, reports would surface of two conversations – one with then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and another with famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal – in which Reagan claimed that he personally had filmed the liberation of Nazi death camps during World War II and even saved the footage that he shot as proof that the Holocaust occurred. Clearly such an event could not have taken place, as Reagan never left the country during the entire war.
(pg. 57)
There is one thing about the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 that doesn’t get mentioned during the incantations of the Reagan tax cut mantra today; it was a major unexpected windfall for America’s oil companies. As the AP reported while the bill was awaiting the president’s signature, “The nation’s oil industry hit a small gusher in President Reagan’s new tax-cutting package, with special breaks for both independent producers and the energy giants.” The breaks, inserted into the bill at the last minute, include a repeal of a windfall profits tax that lawmakers would unsuccessfully seek to restore a generation later, adding up to more than $12 billion. One of the few who paid attention was Democratic Representative James Shannon of Massachusetts, who said, “That $12 billion is more than all taxpayers making under $30,000 a year will get out of this bill next year. There’s no way we can justify what we have done for the oil industry…”
Meanwhile, signs that the tax law wouldn’t have the predicted economic impact popped up immediately. Supply-side boosters like (Jack) Kemp and (Arthur) Laffer had said that Wall Street would soar immediately, but a UPI story on the day after the bill signing was headlined “Stocks Go Nowhere In Dull August Week.” In fact, the economy dipped back into a recession in September, one month after the bill was predicted to provide such a great stimulus, and unemployment continued to spike through 1982 until it finally surpassed 10 % by year end.
(pg. 61)
…the federal government grew in size under Reagan. The feds’ civilian workforce increased during his two terms from 2.8 million to 3 million, even though his successors George H.W. Bush and especially Bill Clinton showed that government could be slashed (down to just 2.68 million by the time the budget-balancing Democrat left the White House). While the Gipper rode into Washington with tough talk about wielding an axe that might slash two cabinet agencies (Education and Energy), he left eight years later having added one, Veterans Affairs. Today, Reagan’s biggest mythmakers will insist that she slashed federal spending. But he didn’t. While Reagan was in office, federal spending grew by 2.5 percent per year, even when adjusted for inflation. As a share of America’s gross national product, federal spending barely moved during the Reagan years, dropping just a couple of tenths of a percentage point.
(pg. 63)
That’s not to say that Reagan’s economic policies didn’t have an impact – they did, certainly, and do to the present day. Remember that he rode into Washington promising not only to slash everyone’s taxes and reduce government but to ease up on what he described as oppressive government regulations. The irony is that most experts say that Reagan’s legacy on deregulation is overhyped and that Carter, who deregulated America’s airlines in 1979, and the subsequent Clinton administration accomplished a lot more in this area. But there was one exception: the easing of rules of the financial industry – with disastrous consequences.
“All in all, I think we hit the jackpot,” Reagan said on October 15, 1982, when he signed into law a bill that lifted many restrictions on the savings-and-loan industry, giving thrifts the power to make large real estate loans and to compete with money market funds. Some seven years later, after Reagan was safely out of office, the S&L industry was on the receiving end of the largest bailout in American history, with American taxpayers footing the bill of the $160 billion tab even as the nation was still dealing with the original Reagan federal budget deficits. The “jackpot” that Reagan had spoken of quickly became a fool’s gold rush into high-risk commercial real estate ventures, many of them tarnished by corruption.
(pg. 65)
The United States had been a creditor nation since 1914, fueling its rise as a global superpower, but under Reagan’s watch it quickly reverted to the world’s greatest debtor nation. By 2008, the amount of US debt held by overseas central banks, primarily in China and elsewhere in Asia, had swelled to a staggering $2.3 trillion., leaving America at a grave risk that not necessarily friendly outsiders could determine its financial fate.
(pg. 66)
In many ways, what happened in the early 1980s was a remarkable yet largely unrecognized turning point in American history. As Paul Krugman and other economists noted, the original great divide between the rich of America’s Gilded Age and the poorer masses in factories and on farms was mended, to an amazing extent, in a period called the Great Compassion, triggered at the time of FDR’s New Deal and the industrial buildup to World War II. For the next two generations, America’s growth and prosperity was shared by a broad middle class. Then came the era that Krugman and others call, in contrast, the Great Divergence – of America’s wealthiest and the working class. The economic data that the Reagan mythmakers tout to show America’s economic miracle of the 1980s and beyond don’t reflect how unevenly the nation’s prosperity has been shared, then and since. The median income of an average American family, in real dollars, grew by just 13 percent from 1979 to 2005, but for the wealthiest 0.1 percent the comparable number is 296 percent. That simply didn’t happen in other industrialized Western nations. (Measured another way, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 1991 that incomes during the 1980s rose 44 percent in noninflation-adjusted dollars for people making from $20,000 to $50,000, but 697 percent for those making from $200,000 to $1 million and 2,184 percent for those who earned more than $1 million).
The poorest Americans fared even worse during the decade. The president who is today hailed as the modern savior of the American economy saw poverty actually increase while he was in the White House. The percentage of individual citizens living below the poverty line in this country rose sharply from the tail end of the Carter presidency through the first two years of the Reagan White House, peaking over 15 percent, or higher than when Lyndon Johnson had been moved to launch his War on Poverty in 1964. The numbers only eased down slightly during the rest of Reagan’s presidency, even when those other economic indicators like the Dow took off.
(pg. 217)
In fact (on energy), Reagan even took down the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House. In August 1986, there was some work done on the roof below the panels, and they were never put back. Said a Reagan spokesman at the time: “Putting them back up would be very unwise, based on cost.” This may have been a small gesture with greatly ironic overtones, but there were many other big decisions on energy policy that look extremely unwise today, with the aid of hindsight. The damage that the Reagan administration did to solar energy programs in general was much more severe. For example, Carter had created a Solar Energy Research Institute, which received $124 million in federal funding in 1980, but Reagan slashed that by more than half in just two years, and by 1985 the GOP-led White House had also allowed tax credits for homeowners using solar power to elapse. Reagan made identical moves against research and tax breaks for wind power.
By his second term, Reagan got help for these maneuvers from plummeting oil prices, and for the most part they would remain low for the next generation. Of course, the steep downward spike in oil prices in 1986 had been largely due to the failure of the global OPEC oil cartel to remain united – and a key reason for that had been reduced demand from America and the West, thanks to conservation. It was a story whose moral was completely lost on the Reagan White House. Not only did the administration set back alternative energy research, but it also helped bring gas guzzlers back onto the American highways. Beginning in 1986, the Reagan team worked successfully to roll back the corporate automotive fuel economy standards, or CAFÉ, the federal program that had doubled average mileage on US-built cars to 27.5 miles per gallon; that standard was relaxed to as low as 26 miles per gallon. Reagan’s transportation secretary Jim Burnley later explained that “the whole CAFE scheme is in terms of public policy ridiculous, and has the practical effect of driving U.S. jobs abroad.” The first rumblings of the SUV, or sport utility vehicle, also came during the Reagan presidency. In addition to the fuel economy issues, the Reagan Administration also turned a blind eye in 1986 to consumer safety complaints about SUVs, keeping within the president’s broad mandate that the U.S. auto industry “simply needs the freedom to compete unhindered by whimsical bureaucratic changes in energy, environmental, and safety regulations.”
At the same time, the Reagan White House was ignoring a number of new reports showing that burning of fossil fuels was creating so-called greenhouse gases that were in turn accelerating the warming of the planet. In 1983, two years after leaving the White House, Carter chose environmental issues as the subject for his sharpest attack on the Reagan presidency, stating that Reagan “has stood almost alone in our refusal to cooperate with international efforts” on the new research into climate change, as well as other problems. That same year, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report that said “substantial increases in global warming may occur sooner than most of us would like to believe” was rejected at the White House as alarmist, and Reagan would not increase funding for global warming research until the end of his second term.
Oh, and let us not forget that Reagan once referred to the Nicaraguan “contras” fighting the Sandinista government of that country “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers” here (outrageously disgusting rhetoric about a crew supervised by a bunch of graduates from what was once called the School of the Americas).
And I give you the following from here…
"The election of Reagan coincided with the bloodiest outbreak of Guatemalan death squad actions in history. Almost five hundred deaths a month, almost all attributed to the right, were being reported by the American Embassy, but even that figure was considered low by most other monitoring groups. Piles of mutilated bodies were being discovered every morning throughout the country." President Lucas Garcia, alleged to have personally raised half a million dollars from (Reagan advisor Michael) Deaver's Guatemala businessmen for the Reagan campaign, was said in February 1981 by the New York Times (citing Amnesty International) to be directly supervising the security agency in charge of the death squads."Also under Reagan’s watch, four American churchwomen were raped and murdered by government security forces in rightist-ruled El Salvador, and as a result of this tragedy, we saw Reagan Secretary of State Al Haig testify with grotesque absurdity that the women somehow exchanged fire with security forces and were responsible for their own deaths (here). To be fair, though, Reagan deserves credit for pursuing nuclear disarmament, though he did so to regain his popularity as a result of the blowback from the Iran-Contra scandal.
In addition, on the subject of Reagan and racism, we have the following from George Curry here.
I suppose I owe a debt of thanks to Will Bunch, because it never would have occurred to me that there would be such an effort put into this 100-year Reagan remembrance had I not heard about it from his book a couple of years ago. But after I read about it, I immediately recalled all of the glossy Reagan remembrances at the occasion of his death in 2004, and I felt that it was important to respond (if I heard one more talking head on TV say that we loved Reagan for his optimism, or words to that effect, I would have vomited – it’s really easy to be an optimist when you’re a goddamn millionaire, and as Bunch has noted in his book, everyone remembers the doddering individual with a smile who could make nice speeches, but not nearly as many people remember the image of Reagan as California governor, a guy with a squint, a snarl, clenched jaw, and black slicked-back hair who was itching for a fight).
It’s pretty amazing to me that Jim Cramer, of all people, would have sized up Reagan so well, but I believe he did in that speech noted earlier. Under Ronnie, the “great swindle” began for real, with economic war waged against the middle class that built this country in the pursuit of dismantling government piece by piece on behalf of the “pay no price, bear no burden” investor class in the never-ending pursuit of the consolidation of wealth. And to achieve that foul ends, he crafted better than anyone else the template of the convincing-sounding politician peddling evasions, lies and half-truths with a nod and a wink (and in Reagan’s case, employing years of training as a Hollywood actor to “close the deal”…and his acolytes carrying on the fiction into perpetuity, as noted here).
I wasn’t blogging in 2004, so allow me to articulate what I truly wish for The Gipper on this occasion.
May you roast on a spit in hell forever, you dunce.
Update 1: Think Progress reminds me of some stuff that I forgot about here, and I managed to somehow forget about this as well.
Update 2: And here's another bald-faced Reagan lie about not raising taxes, which he did in 1986 (two years after this debate) after also doing so in 1982 and 1984 (and Walter Mondale didn't have many high points in his 1984 presidential campaign, but zinging Reagan here over his "there you go again" line was one of them).
Update 2/6/11: And somehow I forgot about this also - my apologies.
Update 2/7/11: What Mark Sumner sez here...
Update 3/30/16: Lots of related food for thought here...
Update 3/19/23: And the truth comes out, as we knew it would eventually (here).
Update 4/25/23: I probably should have included this long before now.
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