This editorial seems to pretty reasonably explain the current mess and why Geithner may be reacting the way he is- he has no good options.
NAMBLA Versus Mecha-Godzilla
Limbaugh strikes back. We can only hope that Newt responds in 3D. But, dear lord, not smell-o-vision.
***Update***
Some think that Gingrich made a smart play by taking on Rush directly. That is simply false. How much good do you think that technically significant Republican bloc that hates Rush will do for Newt? My magic eight ball keeps flipping between little and none.
Here is why. For all its numbers the constituencies that power the GOP political machine are relatively small. The religious right delivers warm bodies to the polls. Rush moves his dittoheads to volunteer and donate money to candidates. Finally, wealthy donors like Richard Mellon Scaife fund thinktanks and astroturf groups that push the media zeitgeist in useful directions. Most of the rest are like my dad – one issue or another keeps them voting for whoever the GOP puts up but they have better things to do with their life than get involved with interparty spats between a loudmouth and a has-been.
Rush has a third of the Republican base in his pocket. The country doesn’t hold that many hyper-motivated, single-minded angry people with time on their hands, say a couple million at the most, but about half of them will clog a congressperson’s switchboard at the drop of a name on the Limbaugh show. That, and the disproportionate amount of money that dittohead types donate, makes them a serious concern for any Republican politico.
That doesn’t mean that it’s not a fair fight! Newt has guys like David Frum on his side. Still, other than than exiled doofuses who lost the party’s soul on the day that Karl Rove met David Addington, I’m not sure whose support Newt is looking for here. The “middle” that used to keep Newt in business hates the GOP now. Newt would have to be pretty stupid to think that another serving of clif’s notes Reaganomics will lure them back.
It doesn’t matter that from your perspective and mine people like Gingrich and David Frum unquestionably have the better part of this argument. Whoever the GOP has left to referee this kind of fight* doesn’t have the liberty to ignore the dittohead mob, but they can safely ignore the exiled doofuses who will back Newt. It doesn’t seem like a very hard decision.
* Honestly, does the GOP have anyone to referee these things? This is a serious question. After ten years of top-down rule by DeLay and the Bush team it seems feasible that the rest of the party never developed the ability to make its own decisions. Who was this ‘they’ who made Michael Steele apologize to Rush? Eric Cantor? The only unmoved mover I can think of is Rush.
How To Watch Lou Dobbs
I’m sitting here trying to watch Lou Dobbs, and as he goes from story to story ranting incoherently, sucking back in his dentures, I imagine this is what it was like to have a crazy grandfather at the holiday dinners. The cognitive dissonance of the contradictions as he whiplashes the audience from one topic to the other is just brutal, and there really are only three ways to watch him and maintain your sanity:
1.) Drink heavily.
2.) Pretend he is suffering from a multiple personality disorder, and that you should not try to balance what he said two minutes ago in a previous segment with what he is saying right now. Ditto for what he says two minutes from now.
3.) Every time he takes a pause, use the Davenoon approach to analysis and pretend that Dobbs has also said “I’m a crazy person” in between every sentence.
It really is pretty funny. “Obama isn’t doing enough for Wall Street!” Two minutes later: “Don’t bail out Wall Street! Why are we giving these shmucks more money!” then thirty seconds later feature a two minute segment in which you don’t even bother to wait to contradict yourself, you do it right then and there and insist that Obama listen to Warren Buffett, note Buffett’s own stock is down 39%, and then ignore the sound clip of Buffett saying the economy will be fine in five years anyway. Then chide Robert Gibbs for taking on an affected persona in his press conference, then sneer that “Isn’t change I can believe in!”
Lou Dobbs, standing athwart history shouting “Get off my grass, you Mexicans!”
The Hazards of Gerrymandering
James Joyner links to a a story about the competitiveness of House races, and states:
CQ titles the piece “Nearly Three Dozen GOP House Winners Dodged Obama’s Coattails,” as if to signal that this is an extraordinary number of seats potentially up for grabs. Another way of looking at it, though, is that 401 of the 435, or 92.2 percent, of the districts voted along party lines. That’s an extraordinary number of seats where the party primary is synonymous with the election.
Making it worse, some of the mismatches are one-off flukes, such as the Louisiana 2nd where William “The Freezer” Jefferson was narrowly defeated in a multi-candidate race run under arcane rules and which are likely to return to form in the next election.
Put more bluntly, this is why there are so many seemingly crazy people in Congress.
Responsible critics
I like to read Michael Scherer because he provides such a clear view of how our national media thinks. Today he has a simplistic, if relatively inoffensive, piece about how Obama has to reassure everyone that things are okay if our economy is going to recover. I don’t necessarily disagree. Here’s a snippet of his last paragraph:
He will, over time, have to find a way to calm the markets, address the concerns of his responsible critics, and then use these successes to assure consumers everywhere that better days do, in fact, lie ahead, a claim that virtually every economist would endorse, though many disagree on the timing.
I think that the notion of “responsible critics” is very important to our national media. There’s an idea that there will be some kind of sensible give-and-take between Republicans and Democrats and that the job of the journalists is to referee this give-and-take. In a more perfect world, this might work very well.
The trouble is that there are no “responsible critics” in the Republican party. All Congressional Republicans offer now is warmed-over Hooverism, at best. On the subject of the banking crisis, for example, there are three alternatives, as I see it: do nothing and let the banks fail on their own, keep bailing the banks out, or nationalize the banks. The problem here is that while the first alternative is completely insane, “let them fail” seems to be the new Republican mantra.
What’s so damaging here is that all the time spent on the let-them-failsters is time that could be spent arguing the merits of nationalization. Similarly, the argument about the stimulus package could have been about whether or not to make it bigger as opposed to about whether “porkulus” was a good description or not and whether or not the Republicans were now back in the saddle again. With health care, we could be arguing about single-payer versus mandates instead of listening to one side compare government health care to Das Kapital.
The list goes on and on, of course. And it’s not clear what we can do about it. David Gregory is never going to have a round table discussion featuring Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, and someone from the Treasury Department. At best, we’d get Krugman, a Treasury guy, Amity Shlaes, and George Will. And the media is never going to press Republicans on the idiocy of their so-called plans.
So, while the country is facing all sorts of important decision, the media is going to pit the rantings of Galttards against the sane (if often flawed!) plans of the Obama administration. There will be no — zero, zip, zilch — responsible criticism of Obama in the media, even though there is plenty of solid responsible criticism of Obama out there.
If a system collapses in the woods, and no Republican hears it, does it make a sound?
Less Religulous
Interesting new survey:
When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.
The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.
These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.
Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:
• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, “the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,” the report concludes.
In not unrelated news:
A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help.
The nine-year-old had conceived twins after alleged abuse by her stepfather.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Italian paper La Stampa that the twins “had the right to live” and attacks on Brazil’s Catholic Church were unfair.
It comes a day after Brazil’s president criticised the Brazilian archbishop who excommunicated the people involved.
Brazil only permits abortions in cases of rape or health risks to the mother.
Doctors said the girl’s case met both these conditions, but the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho said the law of God was above any human law.
For an omnipotent and omniscient being, God has made some really lousy earthly staffing decisions.
Just Awesome
Ladies and gentlemen, the Republicans have some ideas how to move forward out of this economic mess:
John McCain and Richard C. Shelby, two high-profile Republican senators, said on Sunday that the government should allow a number of the biggest American banks to fail.
“Close them down, get them out of business,” Mr. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee, told ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “If they’re dead, they ought to be buried.”
While the Alabama senator did not say which banks to shutter, he suggested that Citigroup might be on that list, saying the bank has “always been a problem child.”
Looks like Monday will be a good day to short Citigroup (or maybe not, since commenters claim you can’t short under 5 bucks and Citi is worth approximately nothing anyway. I am still betting this was not helpful commentary for the broader market).
Seriously- the welfare queens on Wall Street keep asking what Obama can do to “regain the confidence of Wall Street” (and I really can not describe how angry those statements make me- Obama needs to have you regain confidence in him? You were the rocket scientists who caused this mess.) He could start by sending Sen. Shelby to Gitmo every Friday through Monday so he can’t appear on any more weekend shows. There may be drastic steps that need to be taken shortly, but the last damned thing the jittery market needs right now is Senators running around publicly suggesting we need banks to die.
By the way- which member of the CNBC brain trust will blame Obama for Citigroup’s cliff dive tomorrow?