Another Ginny and Guesly picture:
And someone’s cat passed out cold:
And here is someone’s pooch:
I’ll be back later, have at it.
Archives for 2009
Suck on this, Russian journalists
This is so sick, I’m not really comfortable joking about it. From Vanity Fair’s “Thomas Friedman’s Five Worst Predictions”:
In 2001, Friedman advised the American citizenry to “keep rootin’ for Putin,” hailing the K.G.B. veteran as “Russia’s first Deng Xiaoping” and a strong force for reform. Three years later, Friedman announced in his most awkward prose that “I have a ‘Tilt Theory of History’,” and called Russia “a huge nation” (this part checks out) “that was tilted in the wrong direction and is now tilted in the right direction” with regards to free speech, the rule of law, and the like. In 2007, Friedman finally noticed that Russia cannot even properly be termed a democracy and promptly wrote a column to this effect.
From a New Yorker article, a few years ago:
Since 1999, when Vladimir Putin, a career K.G.B. officer, was, in effect, anointed as President by Boris Yeltsin, thirteen journalists have been murdered in Russia. Nearly all the deaths took place in strange circumstances, and none of them have been successfully investigated or prosecuted. In July, 2003, the investigative reporter Yuri Shchekochikhin, a well-known colleague of Politkovskaya’s at Novaya Gazeta, died of what doctors described as an “allergic reaction.’’ Shchekochikhin, who became famous in the Gorbachev era with his reports on the rise of a new mafia, had been investigating allegations of tax evasion against people with links to the F.S.B., the post-Soviet K.G.B. Nobody ever explained what Shchekochikhin was allergic to, and his family is convinced that he was poisoned. On July 9, 2004, Paul Klebnikov, the founding editor of the Russian edition of Forbes—who had made powerful enemies by investigating corruption among Russian business tycoons—was shot dead as he left his Moscow office.
The attacks have not been limited to journalists. In September of 2004, Viktor Yushchenko, a candidate for President of Ukraine who helped lead the Orange Revolution, and who was vigorously opposed by Putin, barely survived a poisoning. Doctors determined that he had been given the deadly chemical dioxin, which left his face disfigured and his health severely impaired. Since then, two members of the Duma, the Russian parliament, have been assassinated, and last September Andrei Kozlov, the deputy chief of Russia’s central bank, was shot outside a Moscow stadium following a company soccer match. Kozlov had initiated a highly visible effort to rid the country of banks that were little more than fronts for organized crime.
Read the New Yorker article about some of the brave journalists who were gunned down and tell me you don’t feel like vomiting about the fact that that America’s most influential foreign policy columnist wanted us to keep rootin’ for Putin.
Update: This Matt Welch piece on Friedman is top notch, and very well-researched.
Genuinely Good News
I hope a trend starts:
The State Assembly on Wednesday announced that it has agreed to pass legislation to repeal much of what remains of the state’s 1970s-era drug laws.
The proposal, scheduled to come to a floor vote late Wednesday afternoon, would be the first pivotal step in a push to dismantle the laws that tied judges’ hands and imposed mandatory prison terms for many nonviolent drug offenses.
The Assembly’s proposal restores judges’ discretion in sentencing in many lower-level drug possession crimes. Judges would be able to send many offenders to treatment programs instead of prison without receiving consent from prosecutors. In addition, the measure would permit about 2,000 prisoners to apply to have their sentences reconsidered.
I don’t have the answer to many of the current issues regarding the failed War on Drugs, but I certainly have an opinion about mandatory minimums- they have got to go. And I sure hope that instead of building bigger prisons and locking up more of our citizenry for minor drug offenses, we instead spend that money on rehabilitation and drug prevention. That would be money well spent. I really hope this is the start of a new trend. We need to rethink all of our drug policies, and I think this is as good a place as any to start.
*** Update ***
A good piece in Reason about the international drug war.
Show Me
In the comments section of the Swampland post DougJ linked earlier, Michael Scherer says the following:
greenlyfe, I don’t see anything wrong with saying you do not want any political leader to succeed in his policy goals. It happens all the time, and is the basis of a free democracy.
Let’s put aside the absurd notion that the very existence of “free democracy” hangs in the balance. What intrigues me is the assertion that this happens all the time.
I remember 2000 and 2001 pretty well. I was a Republican at the time, and we have talked before about how excited I was to vote for Bush. I remember not being able to sleep, waking up early to go vote as soon as the polls open, and I remember going to see a movie during the afternoon to take my mind off the election (I even remember what movie it was- Charlies Angels, which was brand new in the theatres, and I went with my friend’s girlfriend, who was just dying to see it, but he refused to go because he thought it would suck. He was right. They later got married.). I remember coming home and watching the returns until late in the morning, I remember the sinking feeling over Florida, and thinking “We are going to get screwed. The Democrats are going to steal this.” I remember all of that.
Many of you will have a hard time understanding this, because one thing we as a country aren’t very good at politically is putting ourselves in the opposition’s mindset, but I remember at the time thinking the whole process was screwed up and the Democrats were trying to pull a job over on the Republicans. Why was Al Gore only asking for recounts in a few select counties that just so happened to have huge Democratic majorities? Why were all these mistakes just magically appearing in Democratically controlled counties where Democrats were the ones who designed the damned ballots? Theresa LaPore, anyone? Why were the standards for counting votes changing with every day? WTF is a hanging chad? Voter intent? How convenient.
Again, most of you won’t understand it, but the Republican base was just as convinced the Democrats were screwing them as the Democratic base was convinced the Republicans were stealing the election. Both sides were equally convinced the other was up to no good.
I also remember the aftermath, and I do remember a lot of anger. I remember the “Selected, not Elected” stuff, I remember protests and a sullied inauguration, I remember a lot of anger. People are just pretending if they say there were not a lot of angry people on the left. It was there, and it was real. Democrats who try to deny that today are full of it (and in fairness, I see very few people who deny that there was a lot of anger). I don’t remember it among the mainstream of the minority in Congress- they sort of seemed resigned to the fact that Bush was President and mouthed stuff about working with him.
I also remember what was going on at the time. There was a mild economic downturn, but the country overall was in pretty good shape. The big crises in the first couple of months in the Bush administration was the story about “W” keys on the White House keyboards (since debunked), the continuing fallout of the Marc Rich pardon, the sad case of the US submarine that t-boned a Japanese fishing ship, and I remember an Air Force plane being forced to land in China. That was the “big stuff” in the early months, if my memory serves correctly.
Other than that, the big issue was the tax cuts. Our surplus was going to be too big, and we had to return the money to the people. I remember Alan Greenspan concern trolling the country about too much government ownership of private companies. I know, I know. We got the government ownership of companies anyway, Alan, and this all sounds like the history of an alien universe considering the mess we are in right now. And I remember a lot of Democrats were really opposed to the tax cuts, and called them irresponsible and said they would lead to real financial problems (how did that prediction work out?) and that we had a lot of stuff to pay for (like the national debt). I remember them repeatedly saying it was bad policy and it should be stopped.
But here is what I don’t remember. I don’t remember one single Democrat standing up on national television and loudly proclaiming “I hope George Bush fails.” I simply do not remember it happening at all.
So until Michael Scherer and others can show me the clips or transcripts of Democrats sitting around rooting for Bush and this country to fail, I think he and everyone else defending the Republicans and Limbaugh, who are explicitly stating they want President Obama to fail and stating it at a time of FAR greater consequence than we had in 2001, can quite simply just shut up.
And just so we are clear, until shown otherwise, what I remember is the following:
2001, time of mild economic downturn but with a large budget surplus projected as far as the eyes can see, and Democrats stated the tax cuts are bad policy and should not be adopted.
2009, during two wars, a financial disaster, an economic crisis and massive unemployment and trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, and the Republicans and Limbaugh are rooting for Obama to fail so they can regain some political power.
Until I am shown otherwise, that is how I see things. What is happening right now is nuts, and there simply is no comparison. Show me the tapes. Show me the transcripts. Show me Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid standing in front of a camera saying “I want President Bush to fail” just like we have seen Mike Pence and the parade of other Republican leaders do in the past few days. Bring it on, and I don’t mean some random jackass on the internet or some crazy tenured prof at a community college somewhere. I will admit my memory was wrong if it happened, but I want to see it, because I don’t remember it. And I’m not merely talking about opposition to policy. I mean stating that they wanted the President to fail. And then when you are done, you can show me the video tapes or transcripts of all the Democrats groveling and begging for forgiveness at the feet of Michael Moore (who, by the way, is fat) after dissing him.
*** Update ***
Also, when a real crisis happened on 9/11, I remember the Democrats rushing to do whatever Bush wanted. I remember hand-holding and singing on the Capitol Steps. I don’t remember them hoping Bush’s response would fail.
Edited for clarity.
Team Swampland’s petty Obama strategy
Michael Scherer is at it again:
Team Obama’s Petty Limbaugh Strategy
President Obama won the presidency by promising to be a different, more substantive, less gimmicky leader. He said he would not waste our time on “phony outrage,” like fulminations on the meaning of “lipstick on a pig,” or silly characters like “Joe The Plumber,” a guy who was actually named Samuel and was not even a licensed plumber. No, Obama said he was going to solve problems instead. Now that he is in the White House, he still makes this case, almost every day. On Wednesday morning, during an address about contracting reforms, he referred dismissively to the “chatter on the cable stations.”
But what is the chatter on the cable stations? For most of this week, and for much of the last month, it has been about Rush Limbaugh. Hour after hour, daytime pundits are asked a litany of banal Rush questions: Does Rush really run the Republican Party? Why did RNC chair Michael Steele apologize to Rush? What does it mean that Rush addressed conservatives last weekend? As Jonathan Martin makes clear in the Politico today, this entire controversy has been cooked up and force fed to the American people by Obama’s advisers. In other words, it’s not the kind of change you can believe in.
[….]Republicans in Congress are not the only losers. The American people also lose. At a time of unprecedented threats to the United States, a time of financial collapse, bank failures and record layoffs, at a time when the credit crisis has not been solved, and the stock market is in free fall, at a time of stagnating wars, rising terrorism in Pakistan and growing nuclear potential in Iran, the White House has done the easy thing. It has asked the American people to focus their attention not on solving the problems, but on a big-mouthed entertainer in Florida.
There’s all kinds of problems with this. First, the fact that Republican leaders regularly prostrate themselves before El Rushbo means that Rush does in fact speak for the Republican party; and most of what he’s doing is telling Republicans to oppose Obama. Hence, it is only logical that Rush should be part of any debate about whether or not Republicans will support any part of Obama’s policy.
Second, the idea that cable news would be focusing on “serious problems” if it wasn’t so busy talking about Rush is Just. Plain. Laughable. We know full well they’d be looking for missing white women or talking about beer pong herpes or worse if they weren’t talking about Rush.
Finally, though, there’s the part of this post where I have to get personal: why is Michael Scherer doing this? Is he an actual wingnut? Probably not, he used to work for Salon and Mother Jones. So the answer is clear: he thinks this is good for his career.
This is what it means when people like JMM say that Washington is “wired for Republican control.” Reporters believe that by attacking Democrats and going easy on Republicans — Scherer is probably the very worst example of this, but Jake Tapper’s a pretty glaring one too — that they’ll get ahead in the world of journalism. And the fact is that’s probably been true for the last 30 years. Doing so removed the “liberal bias” taint from a reporter and curried favor with Republicans, who have more or less been in power since 1968.
What’s fucked up about this is that reporters like Scherer hold up their slanted hackery as evidence that they’re straight-shooting tough guys in the mold of I. F. Stone and Eward R. Murrow. They’re not. They’re careerist sociopaths in the mold of Cokie Roberts and David Broder.
What makes Scherer particularly odious to me is that he does all of this while trying to look cool for his (mostly young, liberal) audience by quoting poetry and shedding crocodile tears for David Foster Wallace. If you’ve sold your soul, don’t try to pretend you still have one.
Update: From Boehner’s mouth to Scherer’s pen, apparently:
Political operatives in the White House are trying to divert attention away from the challenges facing our economy, the sinking stock market, and the irresponsible spending binge they are presiding over. This diversionary tactic will not create a single job or help a single family struggling in today’s economic crisis. That’s where our focus should be. President Obama has said we must change the way Washington operates in order to address the challenges we are facing. In the midst of a deepening recession, White House staff should have higher priorities than this cynical strategy.
No One Could Have Predicted (A Continuing Series)
RIP, “Up or Down Vote”:
In a letter released [Monday], all 41 Senate Republicans threatened to filibuster President Obama’s judicial nominees unless they were given veto power over judges from their states. The letter also demanded that President Obama renominate ultra-conservative Bush nominees like Peter Keisler, Glen Conrad and Paul Diamond.
I’m shocked.
No One Could Have Predicted (A Continuing Series)Post + Comments (50)
The Obama recession deepens
From Bloomberg:
Companies cut 697,000 jobs in the U.S. in February as the recession’s grip tightened, offering no sign the pace of the decline in payrolls is easing.
The drop in the ADP Employer Services gauge, a survey based on payroll data, was larger than economists forecast and followed a revised cut of 614,000 for the prior month.
Employers are cutting staff as demand plummets in the face of strained credit and battered housing and equity markets. The Labor Department may report in two days that employers cut payrolls in February for a 14th consecutive month, putting jobs losses in the current downturn at more than 4.2 million, according to a Bloomberg survey.
“We doubt any of these numbers have hit bottom yet,” Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics Ltd. in Valhalla, New York, said in a note to clients. “Employment is tanking right across the economy.”
Buckle up. This is going to be a rough ride. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that high unemployment is going to increase demand for things like health care that you don’t lose when you lose your job. That means next time around, people won’t get hit as hard when the axes start dropping.