I may or may not have had a bunch of cocktails.
I do, however, miss my dog. I bet I have called my folks 20 times in the last 36 hours to check on her.
This thread is for 80’s music. Or else.
Archives for 2009
Teabag demographics
This is not be a random sample obviously but here’s all the ages of everyone interviewed in the Post article on Beckapalooza:
- Brian Burnell, 45
- Dave Rue, 67
- Shaun Bryant, 40
- Phil Chancey, 66
- Debbie Wilson, 51
- Anna Hayes, 58
- Joan Wright, 78
- Jeff Mapps, 29
- Dee Meredith, 62
But Sully does have one nice picture of a kid.
Thirty thousand is a pretty pathetic turn-out given that there’s a whole network devoted to promoting this thing.
All the world’s a stall
This sounds like quite a play:
A playwright and filmmaker who splits his time between New York and Los Angeles is writing a fictionalized play about former senator Larry Craig’s 2007 arrest in an airport men’s room sex sting, The Sleuth has learned.
The work-in-progress, titled — what else? — “Wide Stance,” is already scheduled for a debut reading in Craig’s hometown of Boise…
[……]Still, the men’s room stall may make a cameo in Kirkman’s play. “I may end the play with all six people in the restroom,” he told The Sleuth.
Bitsy Bleg
The heat is on, and we really need to crank out some votes to keep Bisty competitive this week, so don’t forget to vote for Bitsy:
I’m always accused of having minions, so go forth, army of Mordor, and conquer.
I’m heading out to dinner and hopefully some live music, so here is your open thread.
The great leap backwards
Another good Brownstein piece on the failure of Bush’s economic policies:
On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton’s two terms, often substantially.
[…..]That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms, notes Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The median household income increased during the two terms of Clinton (by 14 per cent, as we’ll see in more detail below), Ronald Reagan (8.1 per cent), and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (3.9 per cent). As Mishel notes, although the global recession decidedly deepened the hole-the percentage decline in the median income from 2007 to 2008 is the largest single year fall on record-average families were already worse off in 2007 than they were in 2000, a remarkable result through an entire business expansion. “What is phenomenal about the years under Bush is that through the entire business cycle from 2000 through 2007, even before this recession…working families were worse off at the end of the recovery, in the best of times during that period, than they were in 2000 before he took office,” Mishel says.
The piece goes on to detail just how dramatically important economic measures improved under Clinton.
One thing I wonder here is to what extent it makes sense to view this in Republican versus Democratic terms. Clinton’s economic policies — particularly when it comes to taxes — were in some sense a continuation of Bush I’s. The same is broadly true in foreign policy (both were committed multilateralists).
I tend to agree Glenn and others when they say that Republicans were just as crazy about attacking Clinton as they are about attacking Obama and that the teabaggers are just John Birch 2, Electric Boogaloo. And it’s also possible that, as Krugman asserts, Reagan would have gone just as nuts as Bush did if Republicans had controlled both houses of Congress during his presidency (though I’m not sure I believe this).
But in terms of actually implementing poor policy, wrecking finances of average Americans, racking up trillions dollars of debt during an expansion, and decimating our military and international prestige, Bush II was something new under the sun.
The Europeanization of American politics
Ron Brownstein makes an interesting point:
But with Republicans operating as a parliamentary party of opposition, Democrats will have to pass health care reform virtually, if not entirely, alone. That leaves them with a binary choice: Democrats can either fragment into stalemate or function as a parliamentary majority party by unifying enough to advance their agenda. The choice would seem straightforward. If one side in a firefight is operating with military cohesion and the other devolves into ragged, undirected units, it’s not hard to predict which will suffer more casualties.
I don’t think this is necessarily bad news in this case. Democrats are likely to be mostly the majority party for the next generation. The extent to which they are able to get around the filibuster-fucking around ineffectuality of typical American governing coalitions and ram stuff through Congress will be the same extent to which they are able to make the United States into a normal first-world country.
The Europeanization of American politicsPost + Comments (39)
Two little Hitlers
Remember when the MoveOn member compared Bush to Hitler and it shook the very foundations of our society? Now Serious People like Dick Armey are condoning similar comparisons:
One blogger who writes regularly for Freedomworks, Ross Kaminsky of Boulder, Colo., compared Obama’s Tuesday address to U.S. schoolchildren to the tactics of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and other murderous dictators. “Totalitarians of all stripes put great emphasis on brainwashing the young, and Obama is no exception,” he wrote on the group’s Web site under the name “rossputin.”
If Ross plays his cards right, he could end up marrying one of the Atlantic’s bloggers.