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Still fun to beat this dying horse

Sunday, December 21, 2008

This morning’s Times has a post mortem on one of George Bush’s many failures: the housing crisis. The Times credits Bush with genuinely wanting to increase home ownership. I refuse to do that, since I don’t think he’s ever actually wanted to improve the lives of ordinary people. He has done what needed to be done in order to enrich the members of his class.

The article establishes anew what we already knew: that the primary reason the situation got so out of hand was Bush and his gang’s adherence to Republican anti-regulation orthodoxy. It doesn’t matter whether they actually believed that unregulated markets always work optimally, or only said so because it was in the interests of their base. The effect was the same.

Publicly, Bush blames everyone but himself. Privately? I never believe the second hand Bush quotes passed on by Bush flacks, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is true:

But in private moments, aides say, the president is looking inward. During a recent ride aboard Marine One, the presidential helicopter, Mr. Bush sounded a reflective note.

“We absolutely wanted to increase homeownership,” Tony Fratto, his deputy press secretary, recalled him saying. “But we never wanted lenders to make bad decisions.”

Here is a guy who exploited every loophole, and created a bunch from whole cloth, to expand and abuse his own power. When the law did not allow him to do something, he argued that it did. When it was clear as day that something he did was illegal, he did it anyway, because he knew one thing. He was subject to absolutely no oversight. As a result he made a lot of bad decisions. In fact, it would be the work of a day to try to come up with one good decision he made.

So we must wonder. What made him think his banker friends would act any differently, after he abolished effective oversight of them? Those bankers did not make bad decisions. Things worked out great for them. They all got spectacularly rich, and they’re still spectacularly rich. Thanks to Bush, they’re still in line for big bonuses, on our dime. Their decisions were bad only if looked at from the point of view of the general interest. But Republican dogma tells us that business people are not supposed to consider any interests but their own. That’s what regulators are for-to make sure that the pursuit of private gain does not destroy the public good. So, if Bush didn’t want lenders to make bad decisions, he himself made all the wrong decisions to prevent them from doing so. But then, what else is new?

Update. Paul Krugman, on his blog, comments on Bush’s commitment to home ownership and the root of our present problem:

I’m also with Barry Ritholtz that Bush’s emphasis on homeownership was not the problem. Bush favored homeownership; I’m sure he also favored marital fidelity; his influence on homeownership and his influence on adultery were probably comparable. It’s Bush’s opposition to financial regulation that did the evil deed.


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Friday Night Christmas Music

Friday, December 19, 2008

Well, what else could you expect the Friday before Christmas? The following song is on my Ipod Christmas playlist. It seemed like a good choice. Unfortunately, I had a choice between a video with poor quality audio that wasn’t so obviously lip synced, or one with better audio but bad lip syncing. I decided to go with the good sound. In each case the video was terrible.

The Kinks, Father Christmas:

And, as a Christmas bonus, the Boss singing Santa Claus is Coming to Town:


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Coleman, Franken, and partisanship

Friday, December 19, 2008

It looks like Al Franken may be winning the recount in Minnesota. While I was trolling the net this morning I came across this article at Rolling Stone, by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone about the recount, Coleman and Franken. It’s a fun article, and well worth a read. Taibbi makes a point at the end with which I heartily agree: it would be sad if Franken buried his sense of humor under his senatorial gravitas, should he get elected. Humor can be a powerful political weapon, if, as always, it is in the right hands. Fortunately, our side tends to be better at the humor game than the other, probably because, as Taibbi writes, humor is about the truth.

I do have a bone to pick with Taibbi. I confess I’m being lazy here, because I’ve said all this before. On the other hand, we need to keep repeating this stuff until the message gets through. Taibbi makes the point that Coleman ran his campaign, and is participating in the recount, in a manner reflective of his basic personality. In case you were not aware, Coleman is basically an asshole. Taibbi describes Coleman’s recount behavior as follows:

It was behavior straight out of the red-blue death-match ethos of the past 15 years, in which Democrats and Republicans alike were willing to undermine public confidence in the legitimacy of things like elections, confirmation hearings or court rulings to serve partisan ends. The notion that an elected official can’t count votes in an impartial fashion or conduct a lawful criminal investigation simply because he happens to belong to one party or another ought to be antithetical to our view of government, but we have gone there over and over in recent years, training the public to be almost reflexively paranoid about the legitimacy of government action. From independent prosecutors (Ken Starr) to the Supreme Court (Bush v. Gore) to bipartisan congressional investigations (the 9/11 Commission) to the attorney general (Alberto Gonzales), no wing of government was safe from charges of partisan politicization.

There is a fundamental problem with this reflexive propensity to blame the parties equally for the stench in Washington. It ignores the truth. I’m not quite sure what Democrats have done to undermine the legitimacy of “things like elections, confirmation hearings or court rulings”. They haven’t tried to steal any elections that I can recall, nor have they sought to undermine the legitimacy of any legitimate elections. And there’s the rub. There is such a thing as truth, and a statement like Taibbi’s presumes that we can disregard the merits of the various issue that have arisen in the past 15 years.

Each of Taibbi’s examples involved Republican partisanship. The Democrats, for example, did not make a concerted effort to undermine Ken Starr’s legitimacy, at least not until he had done so himself. Hearken back. The first special prosecutor had concluded that Clinton had done nothing wrong. That prosecutor was lawlessly replaced by a partisan judge who put the partisan Ken Starr in his place. (This is all long before Lewinsky by the way) Starr proceeded to engage in what almost any sane person now agrees was a partisan witch hunt of the first order. As to the rest of Taibbi’s examples, at least two led to charges of undue partisanship because the charges were true. Try to find a lawyer or a judge who believes that Bush v. Gore would have gone the same way had the positions of the candidates been reversed. Try to argue that Gonzales was not abusing his office for partisan purposes. Even his successor was forced to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate him. The evidence of wrongdoing at the Justice Department is overwhelming.

If anything, the Democrats have allowed themselves to be rolled time and again, down to the present day, as they cede power to the rump Republicans in the Senate who intend to govern by filibuster.

When my kids were growing up, my wife often reminded them that “the truth is important”. It is simply not true that the parties are equally culpable for undermining the legitimacy of our institutions. (Bear in mind that the bedrock principle of right wing “philosophy” is the notion that government itself is illegitimate.) The Democrats are not without sin, but their sins were venial indeed compared to the mortal sins committed by the Republicans since they captured the House in 1994.


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Not buying

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Obama has responded to the fury from the gay and lesbian community, (not to mention the fury of those who believe women have the right to choose to have an abortion) at the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the Inauguration. (Via Salon):

Let me start by talking about my own views. I think that it is no secret that I am a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans. It is something that I have been consistent on and something that I intend to be consistent on during my presidency. What I’ve also said is that it is important for American to come together even though we have disagreements on certain social issues. I would note that a couple of years ago, I was invited by Rick Warren’s church to speak despite his wariness that I held contrary views…. that’s what this campaign was about….We’re not going to agree on very single issue…but what we have to do is be able to create an atmosphere that we can disagree and not be disagreeable….

When Obama went to Rick Warren’s church, it was to speak to the members of Warren’s church, not to speak for them. No endorsement was implied, and in fact it is my understanding that Warren went to great lengths to avoid endorsing either candidate. I have no problem if Obama speaks to Rick Warren, but I do have a problem if Obama chooses Rick Warren to speak for him. Now, it’s true that I might feel differently if Obama needed a lawyer, and picked a right wing super-lawyer to speak for him to a judge. But this is a bit different. In this case, Obama has chosen this person to speak on his behalf, and in a broader sense, on our behalf, to God. Unless Obama is merely a cynical politician, it is impossible to conclude anything but that this is an implied endorsement not merely of the message, whatever it turns out to be, but the messenger.

By the way, not that it matters, but Obama’s ploy won’t work. He will get absolutely nowhere trying to make nice to the right. They are horrible at governing, but they’re great at opposing. It’s what they do best. They enjoy it. Nothing short of nuclear war or an invasion by space aliens is going to get them to cooperate with Obama in any way. He might as well face that fact right now.


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Righteous anger

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

What is it about Democrats? Republicans bend over backwards to mollify their base, even if they don’t deliver for it. Bush went so far as to talk in code to the religious whackjobs who he was conning.

So what does Obama do? He hasn’t even been sworn in and he has offended a major constituency, the gay community, by choosing a homophobic preacher to give the invocation at his inauguration. The gay community is up in arms, and they are absolutely right. This is a gratuitous slap in the face to a group that gave Obama wholehearted support.

Would it have been impossible for Team Obama to find a preacher that believes in the worth of every human being? You know, a true Christian? Or, alternatively, someone who was not quite so visibly involved in the Proposition 8 campaign in California.


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In which my computer returns from the near dead

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

If you’re a Mac owner, you may be aware that an update of the latest operating system (Leopard) was released yesterday. Naturally, I rushed to install it.

Now, my computer had been acting a bit funny recently, and in retrospect I guess I should have heeded the warning signs. I had to unplug certain USB devices before I could start up. It was a minor inconvenience. I figured I would resolve the problem down the line somewhere, or that maybe the update would do the trick. Whether due to this low level bug, or something else, when I installed the update I had major problems. It ran fine for a few minutes, then strange things happened. The menubar disappeared. If I tried to start an application, I got a dialog box telling me that the program involved was no doubt corrupted. The computer refused to respond to the keyboard. Then certain programs froze while others plodded merrily along. In short, my computer was having an episode of decompensation before my very eyes. Needless to say I did the only logical thing: I panicked.

At least, I panicked at first. After that I hit the Google (using my wife’s computer, on which the update had installed flawlessly) and eventually found an answer. I was able to restore the computer to the previous setup using Time Machine. Oddly enough, although I supposedly restored it to the precise state it was in prior to the update, the mysterious bug that caused the startup problem did not reappear. In fact, the computer ran great. I then reinstalled the update (yes, I tend to tempt fate) and the computer is still running better than ever. My computer’s GAF went from 20 to 100 in a few short hours.

I don’t know what this all means, except that living through the above two paragraphs took about six hours of my life and who knows how many of my remaining hair follicles, not to mention the fact that it caused me to rush my anti-Joe post of yesterday, leading to a far lower level of vitriol than I could have reached had I had time to fine tune it. It also took some data that I didn’t back up, but that’s life.

Though I can’t say with certainty, I suspect that my computer had something Macs are not supposed to get: a virus. I suppose it’s inevitable that Mac viruses will become more common as these machines become more popular.

I pass this along to give the PC diehards something to gloat about. Lord knows they deserve to have some happiness in their otherwise miserable lives. As for me, I will put this behind me. In a few weeks I’ll forget all about this unfortunate event, and I will return to the state of zombie like bliss that is the hallmark of the true Mac user, as we see here:


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Pelosi (perhaps) shows Reid how it’s done

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

If this is true (from Politico via Truthdig) then it’s a terribly refreshing development:

[Pelosi] is laying down the law nonetheless.

In talks with Emanuel and others, sources say, Pelosi has “set parameters” for what she wants from Barack Obama and his White House staff — no surprises, and no backdoor efforts to go around her and other Democratic leaders by cutting deals with moderate New Democrats or conservative Blue Dogs.

Specifically, Pelosi has told Emanuel that she wants to know when representatives of the incoming administration have any contact with her rank-and-file Democrats — and why, sources say.

Obama may have picked Emanuel for his take no prisoners style, but we on the left, whether of the near or far variety, have to remember that this is the guy who, when he headed the DCCC, consistently looked for the most conservative people he could find to run as Democrats for Congress. In 2006 a number of those folks (aka Blue Dog Democrats) got elected to seats that honest progressives also could have won. Now Rahm’s children are holding the Democrats hostage to Republican-lite policies. I would like to believe that Pelosi really did tell Emanuel that there are to be no backdoor deals with the right wing of the Democratic Party.

Would that we had similar leadership in the Senate. Harry “It takes 60 votes to pass anything when and only when Democrats are in the majority” Reid is happy as a swine in dung at the prospect of Evan Bayh founding his very own Senate Blue Dog Chapter:

“Nearly a decade of Republican fiscal irresponsibility has contributed to our current economic crisis,” Reid spokesman Jim Manley said in an e-mail statement. “That is why Sen. Reid welcomes Sen. Bayh’s decision to form this group. For we know that Sen. Bayh, like all Democrats, is committed to restoring our nation’s fiscal and economic health.”

Yes, committed to restoring the nation’s fiscal and economic health by breaking unions (more gently than Republicans, I suppose), protecting corporate criminals, and making it impossible to pass the kind of progressive legislation that we will need to get out of the mess the “conservative” philosophy has created. Bayh expects to hold the balance of power in the Senate. He wants to be the guy who can get the Democrats to 60, but when they get there it will be by caving to his ilk. We will see more legislation like the shameful bailout.

All of this, of course, stems from Reid’s insistence that it takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate. It doesn’t. It takes 51 votes to pass something. It takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster. We will never know if Reid could muster those 60 votes because the only time he’s ever required anyone to actually filibuster was when he forced Chris Dodd to filibuster the shameful FISA cave-in. If Reid doesn’t force the Republicans to actually stand and talk all day, if he doesn’t force them to let the public see who is holding up legislation designed to help them, then he deserves to lose.

He should take a page from Pelosi’s book, or he should take a walk and give his job to someone who can handle it.


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Connecticut going soft on Joe?

Monday, December 15, 2008

According to the Courant, Connecticut Democrats are about to go squishy on Joe Lieberman.

[A]censure resolution drafted in September, when Lieberman still was jetting about with John McCain and Sarah Palin, is getting a rewrite before this week’s Democratic State Central Committee meeting.

“We’re in the process of updating the resolution to be more reflective of the current time and situation,” said Audrey Blondin of Litchfield, one of two committee members who proposed the censure.

Words like “censure” are certain to disappear. So is any suggestion that Lieberman end his affiliation as a registered Democratic voter in Connecticut.

Instead?

“An expression of disappointment, an expression of disapproval,” Blondin said. “And let it go at that.”

Before I go further, I want to point out that the list in this article of towns that have passed anti-Lieberman resolutions is short by at least one. We here in Groton passed a resolution months ago, but then we here in Eastern Connecticut are always ignored. Not a single town east of the river is listed, save Glastonbury, which is an honorary part of Hartford.

Getting back to my main point, assuming I have one, I am thinking of offering my betting companion a double or nothing wager. I am willing to bet, provided the stakes are low enough, that Joe will be welcomed back, albeit grudgingly, to the Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey dinner next year. Will it be like old times? No. But will the usual suspects gather around him, and glad hand him as if nothing has happened? To that I venture a qualified yes. Nobody suffers from battered wife syndrome as much as Democrats, and the higher placed they are, the more susceptible to the disease.

The larger question is whether Joe can worm his way back into the good graces of enough Democrats to try to get the party’s nomination in 2012. Even Zell Miller had the good grace to retire after his bit of treachery.


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Chickens come home to roost

Saturday, December 13, 2008

When the Supreme Court allowed nativity scenes on public property several years ago, it did so by adopting the most specious of arguments:that such a scene was permissible if it was surrounded by otherwise secular symbols, since it simply represented “‘the historical origins of this traditional event long [celebrated] as a National Holiday,’ and that its primary effect was not to advance religion”. The decision was viewed as an insult to both believers and non-believers. That decision, and the steady erosion of the wall between church and state, has led to an increasing number of religious displays throughout the country.

These court decisions have always carried the seeds of their own destruction. All that was necessary was for non-mainstream religions to demand equal time, something that the Constitution seemingly requires. Local governments are then faced with a choice. Give equal time to everyone, or stop allowing religious displays.

We got a foreshadowing of this in Utah a few years ago, in a somewhat different context. A federal law demanded by religious groups requires public schools to allow student groups of all descriptions to meet after school. The law was intended to aid religious groups, but it couldn’t be written that way, for obvious reasons. Result: Utah was told it had to allow a Gay-Straight Alliance group to meet in its public schools. Utah, in order to preserve its traditions of intolerance (exception: polygamy) passed a law virtually eliminating after school activities.

In the religious display context localities have been set up by a sort of incremental invasion of the “other”. First the Jews came, and no one but a few bigots objected to letting them display their Menorahs. But that set a precedent. Then other fairly non-objectionable groups came. But sooner or later it was inevitable that the true “other” would arrive, and by that time any legal basis for excluding such groups had been destroyed by precedent.

So something like this was inevitable: In Washington State the state government allowed a group of atheists to put up a display.

The display talks about the natural world, says there are no gods or devils and calls religion a “myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

Well, of course Bill O’Reilly heard about this attack on Christmas, and he unleashed his hordes on the governor, who, much to his credit, stood firm and refused to order the display taken down. Now the state has called a halt to requests for other displays. Among other things, a hate based religion wants to join the fun, so it can tell everyone that “Santa Claus will take you to Hell”.

The obvious thing for Washington to do is ban all private displays. That’s normally all that the non-religious are really looking for-real and not sham religious neutrality. Governments are supposed to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Religion is another business altogether.


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Friday Night Music-Velvet Underground

Friday, December 12, 2008

I’m sort of coming to the end of my rope here. The unofficial rule is that I can’t repeat any particular band. I don’t think I’ve done the Velvet Underground, which, if so, is an unforgivable omission, since they were one of the seminal rock and roll bands. Oddly enough, I thought of them at our office Christmas party, to which someone had brought fudge. That made me think of the non-seminal band, Vanilla Fudge, which in turn, and inexplicably made me think of the Velvet Underground. I’m sure somewhere deep in my brain some synapses have been mis-wired, leading to this odd pairing. Anyway, I decided to go with the superior band, here singing Sweet Jane.


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