Excerpts from the NYTimes article, Why the Antichrist Matters in Politics by Matthew Avery Sutton
While conservatives are in the driver's seat these days, there was a significant Christian progressive movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it seems to have faded away. It's puzzling why that happened, although it may be related to the decline of mainline churches (Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran).
"Understand this. If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain, when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I'll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States because Americans deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner."
"I expect all of you to march with me and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying."
They have a story taking the Obama administration to task, and excerpt an MSNBC article:
Obama Administration Set to Ban Asthma Inhalers Over Environmental Concerns 3:00 PM, Sep 23, 2011 • By MARK HEMINGWAY
Remember how Obama recently waived new ozone regulations at the EPA because they were too costly? Well, it seems that the Obama administration would rather make people with Asthma cough up money than let them make a surely inconsequential contribution to depleting the ozone layer:
Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government's latest attempt to protect the Earth's atmosphere.
The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday patients who use the epinephrine inhalers to treat mild asthma will need to switch by Dec. 31 to other types that do not contain chlorofluorocarbons, an aerosol substance once found in a variety of spray products.
The action is part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and other nations to stop using substances that deplete the ozone layer, a region in the atmosphere that helps block harmful ultraviolet rays from the Sun.
But the switch to a greener inhaler will cost consumers more. Epinephrine inhalers are available via online retailers for around $20, whereas the alternatives, which contain the drug albuterol, range from $30 to $60.
The Atlantic's Megan McArdle ...
Here is the next sentence in the MSNBC article: (emp add)
The FDA finalized plans to phase out the products in 2008 and currently only Armstrong Pharmaceutical's Primatene mist is available in the U.S.
This phase out was initiated by the Bush administration, a point the Standard hides from its readers. Typical.
With the party’s frontrunner sagging, Chris Christie is reconsidering pleas from Republican elites and donors to run for president in 2012, two Republican sources told POLITICO.
The New Jersey governor has indicated he is listening to big-money backers and Republican influence-makers, and will let them know in roughly a week whether he has moved off his threat-of-suicide vow to stay on the sidelines of a presidential race that remains amorphous heading into the fall, the two sources said.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s candidacy has failed to clear a basic bar with elites and some donors, and his shoddy debate performance in Orlando has only highlighted the window for someone who Republicans searching for a Mitt Romney alternative can rally around.
Christie’s potential candidacy has been an increasingly fevered fantasy of a certain cadre of some media and business elites — mostly based in New York, with a smattering of California technology and entertainment players — since last summer. That’s when he showed up at a Sun Valley conference hosted by the investment banker Allen and Co. and wowed the crowd, including Rupert Murdoch, with what many in attendance described as a nimble mind and a speaking style that was both articulate and blunt-spoken.
... the conservative elite buzz over a potential Christie candidacy has kicked into overdrive in the past few weeks, including on the pages of the Weekly Standard and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
Murdoch controls the Republican party with Fox News which, in addition to its daily propaganda to the faithful, is largely responsible for the Republican Tea Party contingent being what it is today, not to mention the fact that most of the presidential candidates were on the network's payroll.
Earlier this year Christie met with Murdoch's deputy, Rodger Ailes (and Limbaugh!) to talk about the governor's future. That is not the action of a neutral news organization.
Some time ago David Frum said that the Republicans work for Fox News. It would be more appropriate to say that Republicans work for Murdoch, owner of the lawbreaking News of the World, and of News America - the firm that got into legal hot water and paid a competitor half a billion dollars to settle the litigation (nytimes link). About that latter item:
In a statement, the News Corporation’s president and chief operating officer, Chase Carey, said: “It has become evident to our legal advisers from pretrial proceedings over the past couple of weeks that significant risks were developing in presenting this case to a jury. That, coupled with concerns over the venue, led us to believe it was in the best interests of the company and its stockholders to agree to a settlement.”
But wait! There's more:
In a separate case that was settled last year, News America was accused by another competitor, Floorgraphics, of corporate spying. Just as witnesses began testifying in a federal case in New Jersey, News Corporation settled the lawsuit and then days later bought the company outright for an undisclosed sum.
That case centered on the testimony of a former News America Marketing executive who became a whistle-blower. In a court filing, Floorgraphics said that News America had “illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary information from the computer system” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff.”
That's who is running the show with one of the two major political parties in the United States. Don't ever forget it.
I’m not shocked by much any more, but I am shocked by this: the leaders of one of the great parties in Congress calling on the Federal Reserve to tighten money in the throes of the most prolonged downturn since the Great Depression.
One line in the letter caught my eye as summing up the unreality of the Republican leaders’ position:
We have serious concerns that further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy. Such steps may erode the already weakened U.S. dollar or promote more borrowing by overleveraged consumers.
Are they serious? We are living through the most rapid deleveraging of the American consumer since the 1http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif930s. Much of that deleveraging is occurring tragically, through the process of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Some is happening more happily, through the increase in the savings rate from the 0 of the housing boom to about 6% now.
Even if consumers wanted to borrow, credit is just not very available to the typical person right now. Some credit, for example on credit cards, is not cheap. In fact, the average APR on credit cards is scraping a record peak: 14.96%. ...
The markets see deflation and depression, not inflation. Yet ironically this non-existent and much dreaded inflation is exactly the remedy we need to lighten the load of consumer debt.
As is, we’re looking at a continued economic slump, more unemployment, and more deleveraging via continuing catastrophic consumer default on mortgages, car loans, credit cards, and student aid. And now the GOP leadership is urging that the Federal Reserve make the catastrophe worse? To what end?
I know what the detractors will say: to the end of defeating President Obama and replacing him with a Republican president. And if you’ve convinced yourself that Obama is the Second Coming of Malcolm X, Trotsky, and the all-conquering Caliph Omar all in one, then perhaps capsizing the US economy and plunging your fellow-citizens deeper into misery will seem a price worth paying to rid the country of him.
President Barack Obama needs House Speaker John Boehner’s help to muscle a jobs bill through Congress, but he’s betting that Boehner needs the win just as badly.
The White House strategy rests on the risky assumption that Obama can sell Boehner on a new political reality: With voters desperate for jobs, neither leader can afford to do nothing.
... the administration’s belief is fueling the White House game plan on jobs, an all-out effort by Obama, Cabinet officials and the Democratic campaign committees to push Republicans into an untenable political position that forces them to act on more than just minor elements of the president’s plan.
The White House expects the Republican rank and file to fight the president’s plan, but it predicts that Boehner will eventually realize that his party would benefit from a bipartisan deal just as much as Democrats.
Or maybe it's just crazy. Boehner might go for some very small packages to avoid the charge of total obstruction, but there is no way he's going to go big on a bipartisan jobs bill.
Republican state legislators in Pennsylvania are pushing a scheme that, if GOPers in other states follow their lead, could cause President Barack Obama to lose the 2012 election—not because of the vote count, but because of new rules. ...
[Currently] Each state gets to determine how its electoral votes are allocated. Currently, 48 states and DC use a winner-take-all system in which the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of its electoral votes. Under the Republican plan—which has been endorsed by top Republicans in both houses of the state's legislature, as well as the governor, Tom Corbett—Pennsylvania would change from this system to one where each congressional district gets its own electoral vote. ...
Under the Republican plan, if the GOP presidential nominee carries the GOP-leaning districts but Obama carries the state, the GOP nominee would get 12 electoral votes out of Pennsylvania, but Obama would only get eight—six for winning the blue districts, and two (representing the state's two senators) for carrying the state.
Looks as if the Republicans are inspired by the British rotten boroughs of old. Those gave the Tories disproportionately more power than a consistent nation-wide formula for representation would have done. The rotten boroughs were eliminated in the Reform Act of 1832, widely considered to have "launched the rise of modern democracy in Britain".
In other words, the Republicans are looking to move away from "modern democracy" - which strives for proportional representation - and towards a kind of "crude democracy". Crude, in that it has the outward form of democracy - people voting - but with a representation formula that advantages one party.
Of interest: The British rotten boroughs were eliminated due to, in part, public pressure. I suspect that in this country, public pressure will be lacking due to the miserable job the press does informing people of what's important. Especially since it involves mathematics, where journalists have shown less understanding than that of a high school algebra student. Plus you have Fox News adding to the confusion with their unique form of "journalism".
The only thing working against a Pennsylvania-type plan is that, if implemented, it would bolster the party's power at the national level but diminish the attention the state would get during a presidential campaign. So competitive states might wish to preserve their valued status in this regard. It's interesting that the Republicans would put attaining federal power above preserving the influence of their cherished states (see Tenth Amendment fanaticism, abolishing the Seventeenth Amendment). posted by Quiddity at 9/14/2011 07:29:00 AM
The Obama White House is revising its initial unwillingness to negotiate on the president's job creation plan, saying now that if individual components of the bill came to the president's desk -- as opposed to the bill in its entirety -- he would sign them into law.
The new approach opens up the administration to charges that it no longer views the American Jobs Act as a take-it-or-leave-it bill. But in a briefing with reporters Tuesday, senior administration officials insisted President Obama wasn't backing off his position that he wants the entire bill passed through Congress.
You can settle for pieces, but putting that out at the beginning doesn't seem smart. As to:
Senior administration officials insisted that they had not hurt their standing at the negotiation table, noting that each component of the president's proposal is popular in its own right.
That may be true as far as the public is concerned, but each component isn't popular with the Republicans in the House, and they are the ones that matter when it comes to passing legislation.
It's too early to say what kind of jobs legislation will emerge, but it's beginning to look like it will be a bunch of small steps with limited affect on the economy. Also, a piecemeal approach may blunt charges that the Republicans aren't cooperating or trying to help the economy.
It's weird. Why not play hardball for a couple of weeks to see if that resonates with the electorate (and pundits). Just last week in the speech to Congress Obama was saying "Pass this bill" (17 times). This new White House stance seems so unnecessary at this early stage. What made it happen? Who called the shots? Something peculiar is going on.
A few timid people who fear progress have tried to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it fascism. Sometimes communism. ... Sometimes socialism. But in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical, something that is really very simple and very practical. I believe in practical explanations and in practical policies. I believe what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing, a fulfilment of old and tested American ideals.<
(links are to contemporary invocations of each charge)
Related: An interview with Michael Hiltzik, author of "The New Deal: A Modern History". Turns out that FDR and his policies are frequently misrepresented by those on the right and the left.
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
Back then, when everybody was wondering if we were falling into the abyss, Giuliani would be out there every day saying that 94 trucks were moving debris to a facility, that 203 tons of supplies were being brought in, that 17 search teams were looking for survivors. Stuff like that. It wasn’t particularly complex, but it gave people a sense of order and that something was being done.
That was particularly important because in the first days after the attack, Bush was very passive. At one point there was a nationally televised conference call between Giuliani and the White House. Bush was definitely the subordinate figure in that exchange. It was Giuliani saying “We New Yorkers are hustling and doing what we can to clean up the area and tend to the injured”, and Bush saying “That’s a good job you are doing”. A lot of people forget that.
Giuliani was maybe a bit of a fascist at that time – commanding this and that on limited authority – but sometimes in the immediate wake of a shocking tragedy, that kind of we’re-in-control posture helps calm the populace.
Now it's true that much later after 9/11, Giuliani was something of a hustler and he should be criticized for that. But in the early weeks of the post 9/11 chaos he presented a non-hysterical face of rational government competence. Something Bush was incapable of. On the whole, I'd say Giuliani was a positive figure and not a "false hero"
"mostly harmless" (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference)
In the Washington Post editorial that says, on balance, the U.S. did the right things after 9/11 - including going to war - we read:
At home, vigilance must be coupled with tolerance and economic growth, so that the nation can remain both welcoming and strong. Altogether that is not an easy strategy for a democracy to sustain, because it is expensive, unproven and guaranteed to encounter setbacks. Given the scope of the challenge, the country should give itself some credit for what it has achieved.
There was in fact no large-scale assault on personal freedoms — no equivalent to the Supreme Court-sanctioned roundup of Japanese Americans, no repeat of the Red Scare infringements on freedom of speech and association. The Patriot Act enabled a modest, mostly court-supervised expansion of law enforcement vigilance.
Hey, your civil liberties are assured under a mostly court-supervised surveillance.
Fell better?
As to that Iraq War thing:
The United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence ...
Wow! That faulty intelligence was just sitting there, inert, and yet look at what it was able to do. Got the nation to go to war. No humans were involved in that process.
The editorial is pretty much 100% neocon and wouldn't be out of place in William Kristol's Weekly Standard, or Dick Cheney's book.
... What we need right now, in the immediate term, is a series of massive public works projects. Kevin Drum wants $1 trillion in infrastructure spending over five years. I suspect we’d need more like $1 trillion per year for the next five years.
There’s an old saying that a job is the best form of welfare. “Teach a man to fish…” and all that. This is true enough for what it’s worth, which is not really all that much. Yes, you can have too much welfare and too much dependency on the state. But in a market economy some form of non-job welfare or state provision of services is simply necessary.
For one thing, in a market economy there will be constant adjustments in industry, and the demand for one skill set will quickly be replaced with demand for another. Entire labor pools can become irrelevant overnight. Jobs disappear through no fault of anyone at all. New demand, new technology, globalism – these are the culprits, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them because we’re all a part of it. Jobs may indeed be the best “welfare”, but if those jobs simply disappear, a lot of people are left without too many options beyond actual assistance. This is especially true during a bad recession.
Jobs are great, but welfare should be used to thwart the inherent economic uncertainty of a capitalistic, global society. People should not lose their insurance just because they’ve lost their job. Universal healthcare would go a long way toward allowing people to be more independent, more entrepreneurial, and less risk-averse in their private ambitions. I think that in the emerging service economy – with more and more people working outside of the normal constraints of office and industry jobs, as freelancers and contractors – this will become even more important. Far from discouraging work, the right kind of welfare can do just the opposite.
The debt ceiling hostage crisis was a political catastrophe for both Obama and Congressional Republicans. He came away looking weak. they came away looking crazy. The episode, though, had more than political ramifications. It had economic ramifications. Confidence in the economy -- the number one conservative explanation for economic weakness -- took a real and justified plunge.
The Republicans pursued a strategy that torpedoed the economic recovery, and, indeed, may well bring about a double-dip recession. Voters may punish House republicans at the polls in 2012, but they're at least as likely to punish Obama. That Republicans may gain the White House on the shoulders of a Republican-induced recession offers lessons about the incentive structure of our divided system of government that are frightening to contemplate.
California voters are increasingly downcast about the direction of the country, but — like their leaders in Washington — many would rather adhere to party orthodoxy than compromise to address the current economic problems, a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll shows.
The findings offer little guidance for President Obama, who will unveil a jobs package this week that he hopes to push through a polarized Congress. Further troubling for the president: The survey results suggest that Republicans, even in deep-blue California, are winning the rhetorical war of words over how to frame the country's economic troubles, and how to get out of them.
Although Obama has previously called for strategic government investments to stimulate the economy, only 37% of California voters said they favor such an approach. Instead, the Republican view — that slashing government spending to restrain the deficit will better lead to prosperity — was preferred by 49% of respondents, according to the survey sponsored by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and The Times.
Longish, but reads quickly. Doesn't hold back at all. I consider it essential reading.
I agree with everything he writes, including economic and demographic observations. Mostly it's about Republicans but Washington Democrats get deserved criticism.
Obama’s speech will achieve nothing. It will go nowhere because it has nowhere to go. A speech can rally the base, and maybe even temporarily change the topic in the news. But it can’t change the fundamental fact of politics right now, which is that the two parties disagree on the most profound question in Washington. It’s not: How do we fix the economy? It is: Who should win the next election?
So long as Republicans and Democrats disagree on that, there will be no significant cooperation on substantive issues. Boehner simply will not cut off his party’s candidates at the knees, especially its presidential contenders, by handing Obama a major economic accomplishment. Because he controls the House of Representatives, that means Obama -- and, by extension, the U.S. -- is not going to get a major economic accomplishment.
SITE NOTE: Been down with the flu for a week. Who gets the flu in August? Bummer.
