No name on this pup, who was mailed in during the flurry of pet-blogging emails. If this is yours, claim it.
At any rate, I am off to some meetings. Fill me in on the gory details of the events of the day below. According to the Times, the European markets stabilized today, so maybe the same will happen here.
This Radley Balko post was worth reading, explaining why, even though he believes Obama is a flawed candidate, he still supports him over McCain:
One reason is that I’ve found McCain’s campaign to be nastier, more blatantly dishonest, and more insulting to the collective intelligence than the Obama campaign. When I see Obama campaign commercials lamenting that women make only 70 cents on the dollar of what men make, or that “all of our jobs are going oveseas,” I roll my eyes. But though Obama may be wrong, I at least think he believes his own bullshit. That isn’t nearly as insulting to my intelligence as claiming that because a mostly barren corner of Russia can be seen from a remote Alaskan island, Sarah Palin has the foreign policy cred to be president, or that she’s the foremost expert on energy in the country.
***But we’ve had eight years of a GOP administration, and before that eight years of a mostly GOP Congress. The result has been an explosion in the growth of government that by every measure has been the largest since at least the Johnson administration, and by some measures since FDR. I see no reason why a McCain administration would be any different, particularly given that he has made bipartisanship and deal-making the hallmark of his career (and let’s face it, “bipartisanship” is rarely a case where the parties come together to shrink the government–it almost always results in more government). In other words, the GOP has consistently been worse than the Dems even on the issues where they’re supposed to be better.
Worth a read.
DrDave
That is Koda, my Australian Shepherd, when he was 8 weeks old.
Thanks for posting him.
bootlegger
If by "stability" you mean the European Union flying apart at the seams, then yes, very stable.
TheFountainHead
Open Thread, so I thought I’d share a wingnut story:
My uncle is a Republican, and though he’s not a social or theological conservative, he’s still kind of a wingnut. I have been engaging him via e-mail on the state of his party. He seems to be under the impression that Bush = Obama. His reasoning, if you want to call it that, is that where Bush went wrong was that he leaned too far left, and Obama is a leftist, ergo Obama = Bush BUT WORSE.
I swear to you, I could not make this stuff up if I tried. After spending a few pages laughing at that notion, I got the balls to ask him what he thinks of Sarah Palin’s notion that the Dinosaurs walked the Earth 6,000 years ago. You see, my Uncle’s a geologist. I’ll let you know how he responds.
Comrade Incertus
Though it sort of goes without saying, I said it anyway–David Brooks is a tool.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Koda is a beautiful dog, and Balko is absolutely correct.
greynoldsct00
Beautiful dog DrDave.
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
What a gorgeous pup. But that’s a wise old man expression on a wee fluffy thing. How wonderful and jarring.
aimai
Balko’s perspective is ok, but his commenters are a piece of work. Especially the guy who fails to grasp why libertarians are "left" on social issues and "right" on fiscal conservativism–because , you know, that whole "freedom from government intervention" thing *requires* it. He wants to be considered a libertarian while also wanting the government to police other people’s private lives for his benefit.
aimai
Brian J
I don’t think he believes in the "jobs going overseas" nonsense in the sense that he’s a protectionist. I think it’s mostly a political stunt.
However, I do wonder about the effects of the change in the tax code that subsidizes. John Kerry ran on changing this in 2004, and at the time, one liberal commentator said it was actually the free market position, because it didn’t discourage companies from moving jobs overseas. Instead, it stopped giving them taxpayer money for doing so. I don’t know if his idea of "rewarding companies that create them here" would result in some sort of reverse policy of subsidizing, or if it would simply define "rewarding" these companies as eliminating the subsidy that encourages the companies to move the jobs overseas. The only time I’ve really heard any Democrat say something about this was Chelsea Clinton at some rally at a college, where she said if a company wanted to move jobs overseas, that was its choice, but that we shouldn’t be paying them to do it. That seems like a reasonable position to me.
We can also look at his advisers. For the most part, they seem to be moderately liberal economists.
As for the equal pay for women, maybe he does believe that. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but that doesn’t bother me that much. His heart is in the right place.
Stuck in the Fun House
It’s just mind blowing listening to the contrived nonsense wingnuts are throwing out there, to essentially distance themselves from themselves. It’s one Fraudian slip after another.
Comrade Peter J
Developing.
bootlegger
I almost blew cereal all over my keyboard reading Matt Taibbi’s piece on Palin.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
I saw what you did there, and I liked it. ;)
harlana pepper
You really harshed the cute of the puppy with this. Maybe Obama should have been a little more specific. "All our jobs that pay a living wage with benefits are going overseas and manufacturing jobs have been all but decimated which is one major reason everybody’s is defaulting on their mortgages."
As a 3-year pink collar worker plebe, I can personally attest to the crushing pain of being unemployed and I resent this fellow, whoever he is, calling this tragic set of circumstances a ‘bullshit’ Obama fantasy.
Let’s just be thankful that we still have all these low-paying, PT service jobs left! Yay.
Piffle
bootlegger
Here’s the thing, Obama’s facts and inferences are correct but it isn’t entirely due to the direct effects of gender wage discrimination. The "but" explanation is rather complicated and still comes back to the same conclusion so you can either have Professor Obama explain it to you in its entirety, and we all know how much the public likes campaign lectures, or you can have Candidate Obama deliver the short version.
Comrade Peter J
BBC News:
Developing.
Comrade Nixon Hailfire Palin
FYI, when I share BJ to Facebook (top level, not a permalink), I get the old gray logo and the server move announcement. Weird.
Brian J
I know this.
TheFountainHead
Now THATS writing.
gbear
John, If you’re still around, I think I broke the previous thread. I tried to post a link before I’d had any caffine.
Cute cute pup, DrDave.
Comrade Peter J
From BBC News:
Developing.
Nikki
What a beautiful puppy, DrDave!
Forge
Just ran across this today:
http://www.baghdadpups.com/ – Group that helps troops who’ve rescued animals while in Iraq.
geemoney
Since I asked for it in earlier open threads, let me take this opportunity to thank you for the handy dandy Prev Post and Next Post links at the top.
One more comment, since it is an open thread. As I was watching the bailout vote on CNN, the ticker on the bottom kept scrolling the general quote, "Lawmakers believe that bill is better than doing nothing.", or some such. The only thing I could think was, if someone stabs you in the heart, putting a band aid on the wound is better than doing nothing, but still not likely to get to the root of the problem, or even fix anything. Given what I have read here, and in other places over the past few days, I am still highly skeptical about how effective this bill will be. I also have trouble getting over how Palin supporters square her statements about government getting out of the way and the problems in the market caused by a lack of regulation.
AkaDad
As far as i know, manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, and in some cases, women are payed less than men.
Am I wrong?
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
It wasn’t the Pentagon, it was a plane belonging to a close friend of McCain and Bush, of course.
r€nato
Photo from recent McCain/Palin rally
Laura W
I can not wait for the authorized account of Obama’s campaign to be released in big old thick hardcover form. I want to read the specifics about every decision made at every step of the way, primary by primary, ad by ad.
Who said what in the strategy meetings? What did Obama offer, and how/what/when/where did he decide the final actions to take?
I hope someone who was there for most of that is authorized at some point to let the country in on how this exceptional (and assumed, winning) campaign was crafted.
I know it’s a lame comparison, but my feelings of wanting to know every detail that made up the phenomenal outcome are very akin to how I felt while reading Petrocelli’s riveting account:
Daniel Petrocelli is the attorney who represented Fred Goldman and his family in their civil suit against O.J. Simpson for the death of their son Ron. (As such, he also coordinated the simultaneous prosecution of suits brought by Ron Goldman’s biological mother and by the estate of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson.) In Triumph of Justice, Petrocelli tells readers how he was able to succeed where Marcia Clark and Chris Darden failed, convincing a jury that Simpson was indeed liable for the deaths of Goldman and Brown Simpson.
Petrocelli takes us behind the scenes, revealing how he got–and almost lost–the job soon after Simpson walked out of the criminal trial. He goes through rigorous depositions and cross-examinations in nearly complete detail, poking holes in Simpson’s ludicrous alibi. Although he has very little good to say about Simpson (whose football exploits he admired before taking on the case), Petrocelli does have professional compliments for his legal adversaries. It’s an important element to note–unlike other books from Simpson trial insiders, Triumph of Justice doesn’t have aggrandizement or apologies for its author as the top priority. The mission here is simple–to tell the story of how justice was done–and Petrocelli achieves his objective nobly.
Cutest Puppy!!!
(3 exclamation points not showing?)
r€nato
You know, when all the headlines are screaming about the horrid state of the economy… (damned liberal media!)
…and all your campaign is talking about is old character smears about your opponent, you pretty much begin to reek of flop sweat and being completely out-of-touch.
Four weeks of this to go…
jcricket
Balko has done brilliant work on the overuse of SWAT groups and no-knock raids in the pursuit of our "war on drugs". He’s right up their with Dave Neiwert in terms of the level of insight he’s provided in a single area (Dave’s work is in the area of hate groups, but same thoroughness).
And he does appear to be a "true libertarian" (small government both fiscally and socially). How he could ever vote Republican is beyond me. Frankly, how he could vote for anyone is beyond me with that stance :-)
But, there’s limits to my Balko "love". I feel strongly that the fundamental thesis of libertarianism – small government is the goal – is not some axiom that requires no proof. In fact everything I’ve seen shows me there’s lots of need for government, in most of the areas it’s already in. Maybe some reform is needed, but mostly the problems stem from lack of transparency, systemic funding problems, etc. – not that the free market would do it better.
Libertarians always require a lot of hand-waving when they say we need "small government" and that the "free market will take care of the rest". Show me the free market does anything more than enrich itself at the expense of the rest of us when we substitute it for government functions? Sure, there’s the "true libertarianism has never been tried" trope that gets trotted out, but it’s crap just like when communists trot it out.
The facts (not just in the US) show there are areas where government does a better job than the private sector, and as we’re seeing right now, lots of areas where the government needs to get bigger and better (regulation of banking, environment, etc).
I’d be more than happy to have a discussion about what the government should/not do, how it should be accomplished, whether there’s a role for the private sector, how it should be funded. But I’m not willing to cede the argument that fundamentally the government should try and disband and hand over most functions to the private sector. That’s just fantasy, and people who espouse that should be forced to "show their work" like anyone promoting universal/single-payer healthcare also has to.
SGEW
As I’ve said before, when the Three Ring Binder of Justice that Plouffe, Axelrod, and Obama put together to plan the general election campaign is displayed in the Smithsonian, it will have to be put behind leaded glass in order to protect us from its radioactive waves of awesomeness.
jcricket
But for Libertarians this is the private sector working just fine. No need to look behind the curtain, it’ll all work out. World is Flat, dontcha know. Rising tide of globalization will bring untold benefits to the displaced American worker. Ya, you betcha.
The Other Steve
I read Patterico, so you don’t have to.
Apparently the wingnutosphere is all up in outrage over something posted on youtube. They’ve decided to publish some guys contact info so he can receive death threats, and they want to check his countertops out.
To get the real nasty stuff, you gotta go to Jawa but I refuse to sink that low.
Punchy
I’m convinced the Pentagon could lose a plane in a crash at a Loolapalooza concert and they’d deny that a plane ever crashed. Damn fucking hippies making up shit again, they’d proffer.
Since Iran has zero motivation for making this up, I have to go with Occam’s here: A plane landed in Iran.
bootlegger
Ok, just chatting.
But since I can’t resist making the point:
The Right latched on to some research showing that if you control for the type of employment the gender wage gap is far less than 30%. The remaining gap is then accounted for, statistically, by job experience. Their conclusion is that women earn on average 30% less than men because women choose occupations that pay less and choose to interrupt their career trajectories to have babies. There is some evidence for this argument in the data.
However, it does not explain why women choose occupations with lower salaries or why those occupations pay less to begin with. Some very good research on this shows that "women’s occupations", jobs that have more women than men, pay lower salaries despite the fact that they require just as much education and are just as much in demand as other careers: nursing and teaching for example.
So the wage gap is the result of gender wage discrimination, just not so much at the individual level but at the occupational level. Free market my ass.
And I know you all know this, but the professor in me just couldn’t resist the spasm.
ArtV
Not adding anything to the discussion above, but I just caught this… couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
SGEW
Here’s another thing I’m really looking forward to in an Obama administration: reasoned debate and disagreement. Can you imagine being able to take issue with certain policies, and then have the administration defend them with ideas, facts, and figures instead of empty "fantasy" rhetoric? Contrast:
with
Joy!
I’m going to greatly enjoy protesting Obama*. But, instead of the message being things like "Stop Torture!" or "Obey the Rule of Law!" or "Restore the Geneva Conventions!" or "Fight Global Warming!" or "Gay People are People Too!" it’ll be more like: "Lessen Ethanol Subsidies!" or "Expand Health Care Mandates!" or "Work Faster to Repeal DADT!" or "Take a Stronger Stance on Fair Trade!" or "Clean Coal Isn’t Clean!" or "Decrease Funding for Manned Space Flight and Increase Funding for NASA’s Unmanned Missions!"
Not as snappy, I’ll grant you. But boy howdy, it’ll be a nice change.
*Yep. I’m gonna protest him. I protest everyone in power: it’s good for the country.
Not My Fault
@r€nato: I hates me my John McCain as strong as the next guy.
Using a photo of an actual lynching to smear him is … disrespectful of everyone and everything.
OriGuy
Auntie Beeb is now saying:
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
From ArtV’s link:
They may have been missionaries, but those were no Christians.
bootlegger
Corsi will of course claim that he was run out of Kenya because he was getting to close to the Truth and that his expulsion is evidence of Obama’s complicity. Kind of like Honest John telling his mob yesterday that The Whippersnapper’s expressions of anger and disgust were evidence of his guilt.
So now we have the meme:
Guilt by association.
Guilt by denial.
Neither of which, of course, require any real evidence to support.
Get out the tin-foil helmets folks, the mind control rays are going to get intense over the next 30 days.
The Other Steve
I didn’t think they let John McCain fly any more.
bootlegger
WTF are the Hungarians doing flying over Iranian airspace? It’s gotta be a charter because it would be seriously weird to have the Austro-Hungarian Empire suddenly make a move on the Persians.
Not My Fault
Local papers in San Diego seem to be in a time warp these days. Imagine my WTF when I opened the paper this morning to see in print that PALIN WINS BIG WITH A REAGAN-LIKE FLAIR
I understand different perspective and disagreement, and would read carefully an editorial that thoughtfully advanced the position that Palin made an important statement at the debate. I really want to understand the perspective of folks who see things differently than I do.
Dick Morris, however, is clearly a loon.
bootlegger
After he crashed his third plane I think they took away Honest John’s wings.
TheFountainHead
I don’t care what your politics are, that’s funny. I mean, whoever thought that one up ought to be taken out back and whacked repeatedly with a rolled up newspaper like a dog that just shit on your rug.
Notorious P.A.T.
Why? What’s wrong with those statements?
r€nato
what’s disrespectful is deliberately provoking the worst racist sentiments in a desperate bid to boost your sagging poll numbers. That’s what history’s worst demagogues and would-be dictators have done; appeal to nativist and racist sentiments. I fail to see much difference between the latest Palin rallies and, for instance, what Milosevic did to obtain power.
Maybe you would like this photo or this one better.
Remember when John McCain said he would run an honorable campaign? That was just this past May. It took five months to do a complete 180 on that one.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
He does a 180 on everything.
r€nato
Probably because Balko is still one of those ‘fuck you I’ve got mine’
conservativeslibertarians.He’s not a woman, so why does he care if women are paid only 70% of what men make?
His job can’t be outsourced, so why does he care if everybody else’s are?
It’s one of the features of the right-wing which absolutely sickens me; the complete inability to empathize with others, the complete inability to understand that we really are not islands unto ourselves.
You would think that a believer in free market economics would understand that if people don’t have jobs, they don’t have discretionary income and they can’t, you know, buy stuff.
Grumpy Code Monkey
That was…not funny. I know they’re spewing some pretty hateful rhetoric right now, but until they (or their supporters) actually do start stringing up black people there’s no cause for going there.
Let’s all grab some fucking perspective, please.
Notorious P.A.T.
Could be. But why do people here agree with him?
Look, those of you who think jobs aren’t being moved overseas: you think when you call for IT help the guy with the Pakistani accent lives in Kansas City?
Here in Michigan almost all our factories have shut down. Yet manufactured goods are still being made and purchased. My home town used to make most of America’s refrigerator motor compressors. Not anymore. Are people not buying refrigerators these days?
Laura W
and Gibbs. He gave Morning Jerk Off a nice little punch back this morn, and like the rest of them…temperament is perfect. Never nasty, calm, on point, smiles, jokes.
Screamin' Demon
And taxes are theft. We don’t need to pay them, because money to build roads and bridges and stuff will just fall from the sky like manna from heaven if we all just close our eyes and click our heels three times.
Fucking looneytarians.
nicethugbert
I new the Repugs were a disaster long before Chimpy ran for preznit. Can I get paid to write now?
jcricket
@Screamin’ Demon.
That’s where I’m coming from. It’s all hand-waving, wishful thinking, etc. Look at privatizing the toll road infrustructure that a lot of debt-ridden states are looking to do. Sure it will "work", in that private companies will pay a one-time fee, take over roads, and then JACK TOLLS THROUGH THE FUCKING ROOF to "cover their costs" (read: juice their profits).
And then when all the poor people who have to live 60+ miles from the cities go bankrupt trying to get to work, will the Libertarians be saying then? Oh right, "get another job closer to you" or "demand will go down so the prices will drop".
Libertarian "command" of economics-in-practice is shittier than Palin’s command of the constitution. It’s just wrapped in a veneer of truthiness.
jcricket
Give Balko some credit – that’s not at the root of his Libertarianism. He’s not a true "glibertarian" (like McCardle). However, I think he’s simply taken as fact that government is the wrong solution 99.99% of the time, and so it blinds him to any evidence to the contrary.
harlana pepper
And I’m sorry I don’t know who this Balko fellow is, but I don’t read libertarian bullshit. Talk about fantasy. This is really not the time to experiment with philosophies of government that have never been tested.
Grumpy Code Monkey
My wife once commented that Big-L Libertarianism was much like Big-C Communism in that both were the products of ivory tower intellectuals working in an idealized, abstract framework, and not taking the real world (read: human greed and general nastiness) into account. Therefore the models inevitably conflict with reality.
Most of us deal with the conflict by tweaking the model to accommodate reality; however, some of the more fervent proponents demand that reality accommodate the model.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
I want to make it clear that I was only saying he was correct on the excerpt that was quoted here on this page. I didn’t go to the link. I agree with what he said above.
Joshua
I think Balko is a simple minded fool about anything but modern policing in this country (and he really, really knows his stuff about this) – but he believes his own bullshit. And this post shows this. I mean, you don’t need much beyond a few months of middle school US History to know McCain and Palin are bad faith, unserious candidates for the Presidency and Vice Presidency.
bootlegger
Ditto. They are both "theories" in the sense that they are based on certain assumption that, if true, lead to specific conclusions. The problem of course is that the assumptions are only correct in some instances, while in other instances other assumptions are correct. Thus, you find that the assumptions of communism can be true AND the assumptions of libertarianism can be true, but in reality there is a mix of both operating.
Jon H
Grumpy Code Monkey wrote: "That was…not funny. I know they’re spewing some pretty hateful rhetoric right now, but until they (or their supporters) actually do start stringing up black people there’s no cause for going there."
This is the usual "don’t call them Nazis until they’ve killed six million Jews" bullshit.
If you want to avoid the stringing up part, you need to start talking before it happens.
Grumpy Code Monkey
That’s "Don’t call them Hitler until they’ve killed six million Jews" bullshit to you, Bubba.
There’s a difference between painting a candidate as scary because of his racial background and calling for wanton violence against all people of that background.
Have Palin or McCain or their surrogates called for stringing up random black people for the crime of being black? No? Then shut the hell up. They’re not calling for random lynchings, and I defy anyone to provide evidence to the contrary.
DrDave
@Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse:
He’s almost 3 years old now and is a total clown. The wise old man expression was a ruse to lull me into a sense of false security.
But he is very sweet and devoted and a great companion to Rosie, our 5 year old Golden Retriever.
Paulie Chestnuts
@r€nato:
On top of that, renato, I remember one post he had on his Agitator blog where he said (my memory’s probably failing me, but I definitely got the gist of it) that if he were a member of the U.S. Government and he knew of a colleague who was a communist, he would have that person imprisoned/interned/whatever — definitely not a libertarian ‘live and let live’ approach.
Really, the only bona fide freedom-lovers are anarchists. Everything else is different shades of control freak (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it’s just interesting to see where the cut-off for other people’s freedom stops with self-identified libertarians.