Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Hard times call for desperate measures:
Green Balloon Juice!
The Spousal Unit is taking me to a performance of the NUTCRACKER, the kind that backs a handful of professionals with the local children’s ballet school and a recorded orchestra. Happy thoughts, y’all.
For something different:
Bueller and McLovin were saved by Peggy, a former grad student of my partner. She is a cat rescuer. A semi-feral colony of cats was living around a house a couple blocks from Peggy. The fellow who lived in that house was very old and ill and he put out food but did not look after the cats. He passed away and the cats were completely untended. Peggy slowly nabbed them one or two at a time (she eventually did save the colony). Naomi, my partner, and I saw pictures of the little boys and went over to look. We had lost a couple of beloved cats over the previous two years and were ready to think about new ones.
These boys, now 2, are the sweetest, most playful, funny pets I have ever had. I cannot even think of a long vacation because being away form them would hurt too much. They are delightful, beautiful companions and the best part of my day is playing our nightly “getting ready for bed” games, which include lots of hugs and scratches (of them, not me, although McLovin tends to hug back).
Bueller is laying with his back to the camera and McLovin is looking you in the eye. They are less than 1 in this photo.
Love that look.
But in the very next breath, they will then promote statistics that say the tea parties are more popular than either the Democratic or the Republican party, and wonder if it’s an opportune time for a third party candidate. (From the “right,” of course, because who would take the “left” seriously.) At no time do the synapses firing in their brains make the connection that both the “lazy progressive bloggers” and the tea party activists are saying almost the exact same thing about the Senate bill.
Really? Progressive bloggers are saying the same thing as the tea party activists? I really fucking missed out on all of the posts at Eschaton that Obama is a socialist. I haven’t seen Markos in his tree of liberty t-shirt yet. There is no telling what David Sirota might do or say, so I’ll give you that one.
Dean/Palin 2012. Good luck with that. We’re all teabaggers now.
Last week, as the U.S. House debated the Wall Street reform package crafted largely by Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat quietly slipped regulations into the bill that would force the most significant overhaul of the credit rating industry to date.
The top raters–Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch–seemed ripe for regulation ever since they awarded inflated grades to investments that ultimately unraveled the economy.
If the provisions in the bill, passed by the House last Friday, make it through the Senate, investors who lost billions of dollars on those top-rated financial products would likely find it easier to sue the raters for fraud. Also, by no longer mandating that mutual funds buy only top-rated investments, the bill has the potential to squeeze the raters out of their special status in the financial system.
I still think S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch need to go the way of Arthur Andersen.
Turn off MSNBC. Tune out Howard Dean and Keith Olbermann. The White House has its liberal wing in hand on health care, says White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
“There are no liberals left to get” in the Senate, Emanuel said in an interview, shrugging off some noise from the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) that a few liberals might bolt over the compromises made with conservative Democrats.
As the White House leans on conservative Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska for the 60th health care vote, Emanuel has made the case that this generation of liberal political figures will not make the mistake of their predecessors. The late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s greatest regret was not cutting a deal with Richard Nixon on universal health care. Former President Bill Clinton has forever rued the day he did not take moderate Republican Sen. John Chafee up on a compromise that could have secured a health care bill early in his presidency.
Liberal senators nearly scuttled the creation of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program -– S-CHIP –- because Clinton compromised with Republicans and agreed to take the program out of Medicaid and involve private insurers.
“Every time they’ve gotten close to the deal, they’ve passed up the opportunity and chosen to walk away from a particular where they’ve lost the forest for the trees,” Emanuel said.
Now, of course, Rahm is right. There are no more liberal votes to be had in the Senate, and the bill is being held hostage by the Joe and Ben bullshit parade, but here is the thing- YOU CAN’T SAY THAT. This is going to enrage the usual suspects. Good christ, I can hear the shrieking already “Rahm’s not taking us seriously!” and “Obama is taking us for granted” and “we got you elected.” They are probably already working on another idiotic commercial attacking Emmanuel.
And for the record, the always even-keeled Booman laid this all out the other day:
Obama can’t pass anything that doesn’t have unanimous support in the Democratic caucus because of the ruthless obstruction and opposition of the Republican Party. This forces him to govern to the center and make all his compromises with centrist Democrats and/or the two still-existing centrist Republicans in the Senate. The Republican obstruction empowers people like Joe Lieberman. It actually gives veto power to every single senator, but the only way to make up for a defecting Democrat is to win over Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins. So, if Bernie Sanders or Roland Burris revolt, he has to move the bill further to the right in response.
The left is immensely frustrated with this situation and inclined to blame the administration, but this is a simple logic tree. Obama cannot push the progressive position on pretty much anything if the centrists refuse to go along. Compounding the problem, progressives don’t really know how to influence centrists. They tend to insult them, call them whores, attack their families, and generally question their morals. Over time, this sets up the situation we saw with Lieberman where he switched positions on a Medicare buy-in proposal simply because the measure was pleasing to people who have been demonizing him for over three years. Rather than persuade the Ben Nelsons and Blanche Lincolns of the Senate, progressive tactics make them even more inclined to reject anything they perceive to be coming from the left.
I think progressives have multiple reasons to be pissed, and it sucks that Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh and the rest of the moderates get to force-feed them shit sandwiches. But there isn’t much that can be done about it. This notion that if “Obama used his bully pulpit” or “got out in front of the bill more” is just silly. The bill progressives want is not being held hostage by Obama, it is being held hostage by Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman.
And it is infuriating. Personally, if I were in the liberal wing of the Senate, I would have my staffers sniffing out every single piece of legislation Nelson is interested in and would attach pro-choice amendments to each and every one. I would be designing strategies to block or put on hold every thing on his agenda. I would block any judge from his state. I would work to make his life a living hell.
But right now, there is not much you can do. Nelson wants this bill killed, and would love it if the liberal wing does it for him. His insurance industry checks aren’t going to stop.
One thing that I’ve been disturbed by is how many comments I’ve seen saying things like “we should be as willing to let good people die as they are”, where they equals Joe Lieberman and Republicans. I’m not going to provide links because I think the people who said these things don’t really mean it and I don’t want to embarrass them, but please, don’t accuse me of using strawmen here.
If you think that it’s worth fucking up people’s lives in order to teach Joe Lieberman a lesson, or even for some loftier purpose like advancing the overall liberal cause, I don’t think you’re really a hippie. Conservatives believe things like that. They believe that if you’re not willing to let a million people die for your cause du jour, then you’re a worthless pussy who can’t be trusted. They believe that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Hippies are supposed to believe that the road to hell is paved with greed and sociopahtic assholery. That’s what I believe, anyway.
I understand the idea that, to paraphrase Jimmy McNulty, “Joe Lieberman is an asshole, he doesn’t get to win, we get to win.” But this can’t be about Joe Lieberman or about how Howard Dean was disrespected. I’m sure there’s all kinds of reasons to hope that this Senate bill doesn’t pass in anything like its present form. But those reasons shouldn’t involve personal antipathy or ideas about “winning and losing”.
Checking the headlines, memeorandum, and twitter, today looks like a rehash of yesterday with the battle lines hardened.
I’m out. I have better things to do.