I’m not sure why, but this song captures my political mood perfectly. Consider this an open thread.
Ben Stein on CNN
I’m not sure if any of you watched it, but Ben Stein was just on CNN with Laura D’Andrea Tyson and Wolf Blitzer, and not only defended the budget, but basically threw the last eight years under the bus and then, and this is what blew me away, stated that he agreed with Paul Krugman that there need to be trials for the mismanagement that led to this crisis and basically called for Hank Paulson’s head. Someone’s net worth clearly took a beating. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone as pissed as Ben Stein just was, which is really surprising because there are all sorts of reasons to be pissed off right now.
I’ve been told I have minions now, so if any of you minions have a copy of that or can youtube it, please let me know.
*** Update ***
The folks at Media Matters have a portion of the clip in question:
There was more to it than that, but you get the flavor.
The New *New* Coke
Fresh off the news that Obama’s poll numbers have rebounded to 67% approval, some in the GOP have come up with an innovative new strategy to knock him down a peg:
Top Republicans charged President Barack Obama with driving the United States toward socialism on Friday, opening an ideological attack on his big spending plans.
While the tough rhetoric was certain to rev up hard-line Republicans — many of whom regard “socialism” as anathema to American life — it was unclear how much it would change the debate in the Democratic-led Congress, which begins hearings next week on Obama’s $3.55 trillion budget proposal.
John Boehner, Republican leader in the House of Representatives, on Friday called Obama’s new budget proposal and recently passed economic stimulus plan “one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment.”
***Senator Jim DeMint called Obama “the world’s best salesman of socialism,” while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Obama’s proposals recalled the “big government mentality” of former Democratic President Jimmy Carter — a favorite target for many in the conservative movement.
That is certainly a breath of fresh air, and really signifies the new thinking the GOP is going through while in the minority. Original ideas like this are sure to really do the trick. Has anyone tried to claim he pals around with terrorist? That probably hasn’t been tried before and I bet that would really help their cause.
Friday Open Thread
I’m eating dinner, and I just heard Wolf Blitzer state that a group is under investigation for their role in assisting up to 200 suicides by “extreme methods.” As opposed to the milder methods of suicide, which only leave you dead.
At any rate, here is a shiny new Friday night thread. Is BSG still running?
*** Update ***
By request, I am upping the fur quotient of this post:
Claim your pets.
They Never Learn Anything
The US is pulling out of Durban II citing problems with anti-Israel language, and this causes Captain Ed to remark:
We have to see what Obama says formally about the withdrawal, but perhaps we can expect Stephen Harper to issue a four-word statement on behalf of Canada: I told you so. In fact, the man who benefits most from this might be Harper, who took a lot of heat in Canada for his decision to stay out of Durban after the prep work revealed Durban II to be a sequel in every context. Obama had to learn that the hard way.
I sometimes wonder how these guys tie their shoes. During the campaign, if you remember, one of the big flare-up and ridiculous talking points about Obama was that he was going to meet with leaders of rogue nations, and there was much nonsense about giving in to terrorists and blah blah blah. I’m too lazy to look at every individual post, but I am sure Captain Ed was part of the hooplah.
As it was noted then, it is still true now. Meeting with people, talking with people, and giving people a chance does not mean you simply acquiesce to them. You negotiate with them in good faith, and if that is met with bad faith, you simply move on. Strong nations, confident nations, and confident leaders can do this.
This is what has happened here and this is what happened with the negotiations with the Republicans during the stimulus debate (other rogue actors acting in bad faith). Obama hasn’t “learned” anything, he is just doing what he said he would do all along and you folks could never figure out. Seriously, these guys must run around terrified, spending their days hiding from used-car salesmen, because if they talk to one, they just know they are going to have to buy a car.
The Backlash in the States
From the NY Times (via the comments, and I can not remember where), it appears that Republican governors are facing a little backlash for their political theatrics:
As governors in nine states, mostly in the South, consider rejecting millions of dollars in federal stimulus money for increased unemployment insurance, there is growing anger among the ranks of the jobless in those states that they could be left out of a significant government benefit.
The stimulus bill recently passed by Congress includes incentives to states to expand benefits to many more jobless people, including part-time workers and those who have cycled in and out of the work force, who are not covered in many states.
The Republican governors of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas, along with Alaska and Idaho, have raised protests, saying that expansion could eventually require them to raise taxes.
***Mr. Kight, who worked for more than three decades as an engineering technician, discovered in September that because of complex state rules, he was not eligible for unemployment insurance after losing a job at a major electronics manufacturer he had landed at the beginning of the year.
Unable to draw jobless benefits, he and his wife have taken on thousands of dollars in credit-card debt to help make ends meet.
***“I don’t understand the whole thing,” said Kelley Joyce, 43, of Myrtle Beach, S.C., about indications from Gov. Mark Sanford that he may reject some of the stimulus financing in that state. “Apparently because he has money and he doesn’t have to worry about everybody else who doesn’t have money.”
***In Mr. Kight’s case, he was unemployed for the second half of 2007, after losing an earlier job he had at a different electronics manufacturer in a downsizing. As a result, when he applied for unemployment benefits, he did not have enough immediate work history to qualify.
“I have worked for so many years, a total of probably 30 years, contributing to the support system that helps people when they get in a tough spot like I’m in,” Mr. Kight said. “I haven’t needed it too much in the past, but I sure could use it right now.”
This should reinforce Larison’s point yesterday about the simple fact that the reason the GOP is hemorrhaging middle class votes is because they simply do not represent the best interests of the middle to lower classes. And has been pointed out numerous times, the Governors could simply amend the law after the federal money runs out- presumably by then we will be out of the recession and back into a growth period (or we hope). At any rate, Schumer and company are already working on this issue, trying force the governors into an all or none decision regarding stimulus funds:
No one would dispute that these governors should be given the choice as to whether to accept the funds or not. But it should not be multiple choice. The composition of the package was rightly dictated by economic considerations; we should not let the implementation of the package be dictated by political considerations.
From a purely political (and deeply cynical) standpoint, I would tell Chuck Schumer and company to cease and desist and instead keep handing these guys rope. Now, that would require standing by and letting people in need hurt, and since I am a new Democrat and an Obama voter, I am not allowed to be that cynical and must be earnest and concerned with the best interests of people, so clearly that is not an option.
But you have to at least appreciate the stupidity of the Governors. Given the choice between a couple hundred rich nitwits with “porkulus” signs play-acting at tea parties and thousands of their constituents, out of work, in need of assistance, and racking up poisonous credit card debt to temporarily stay afloat, and the Governors have chosen… the nitwits. And considering this recession is probably going to get worse before it gets better (and unemployment is a lagging indicator), all they are doing is giving their voters a crystal clear recent example of why they are unfit to lead.
Impressive, isn’t it?
Dead Center
I just walked downtown and got my hair cut (still going to the same place I have been going for fifteen years, $11 plus tip), and while I was there I read an older issue of TAC that I had not gotten around to yet. That, in and of itself, is amusing. First, I have a ginormous melon. If I were a cowboy I would have to wear a twelve gallon hat. My head is so big I had to special order my hat while I was in the Army, because they usually did not have size 7 7/8’s – 8 in stock. Second, I no longer wear contacts (my logic was there are so many other things I could focus on to fix my personal appearance, so what is another torpedo in a sinking ship? Just wear glasses, they are easier.), and I am blind as a bat without my glasses. To give you an idea how bad my vision is, one day when I was standing at attention in formation in basic training, and I was wearing my birth control glasses (“You’ll never get laid in ’em!”), my Drill Sergeant was behind me, looked through my glasses, and exclaimed: “Holy Cow, Private Cole! Your glasses are so thick you can see the future throught them!” Try standing at attention after that. Thank goodness modern plastics make my glasses much thinner. At any rate, imagine a middle-aged pudgy guy with a basketball sized head wearing an apron and holding a magazine three inches from his face, and you get the picture. The picture portrait of dignity, if you will.
Back to the point. I was leafing through the February 9th edition, and I found this by Jack Ross:
ALMOST COMPLETELY ignored in the excitement over Barack Obama has been the collapse of the New Left revival that peaked between the Nader campaign of 2000 and the Dean campaign of 2003. For a time, with the antiwar movement burgeoning and a deeply unpopular Republican in the White House, the politics of the late 1960s seemed poised to return. Even Students for a Democratic Society revived. But the moment quickly passed. This was more than the end of a fad–it was the death of a distinct American Left. Obama’s mass following and the liberal blogosphere today are moved more by partisanship than ideology, and they have scarcely any sense of a political past. In other words, they have about as much connection to the historic American Left as the pioneers of the New Right had to the Old Right.
To say that Markos Moulitsas and Obama’s liberal netroots represent the triumph of centrism may sound absurd–as absurd as arguing that Richard Viguerie and the 1970s New Right heralded victory for the political Establishment. But Murray Rothbard built a persuasive case for just that claim in a 1977 Libertarian Forum essay, “The New End of Ideology?” The title was a play on Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology, which celebrated the triumph of the liberal-democratic center–Truman Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans–in the 1950s. Rothbard considered the partisan divide that started to take shape in the late ’70s to be a new end of ideology because it marked a) the final transformation of the American Right into what could be rightly called a conservative movement, characterized by a “drive toward Establishment respectability”; and b) the end of the New Left, in which he and other libertarians once staked a great deal of hope, as it rejoined the Old Left.
***This, then, is our new end of ideology. The Left has ceased to be the Left, just as surely as by the late 1970s the Right had ceased to be the Right to anyone, like Rothbard, old enough to remember a time when conservatives opposed war and welfarism. In place of the radical Left now stands an optimistic, impeccably patriotic mass movement that is far too young to have a discernible character beyond simple devotion to Barack Obama. If the president should achieve little else than to appoint competent technocrats to do what needs doing in both foreign and domestic affairs, this pragmatism will be the one sure path to success for the Left. Any loyal opposition from the Right will be shaped by this fact, hastening a true end of ideology.
Any thoughts on this? Yesterday, someone remarked that should the GOP continue their headlong descent into oblivion, the Democratic Party will become the new Republican party, and what could possibly happen is a new “left” will emerge in the vacuum. What do you think?