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Fool me once…

Monday, December 21, 2009

It’s almost enough to fill one with despair.

What’s one definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

What clichés or common phrases are running through my mind?

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it
It’s the same old song
Here we go again.

What brings these musings on?

Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd, who one month ago proposed an overhaul of financial regulations that was hailed by many consumer activists, has all but jettisoned that proposal following Republican objections and has initiated talks for a new approach designed to satisfy some of his fiercest GOP critics.

Dodd’s strategy has raised concerns among consumer activists who were counting on him to come up with a tougher bill than the one recently passed by the House, and now worry that the entire measure will be weakened.

But the Connecticut Democrat, in an interview in which he laid out his strategy, said it would be too risky to launch another legislative effort that might repeat the Senate’s experience with in the health care debate, in which single senators have forced major rewrites or threaten to defeat the measure.

Yes, Chris Dodd is about to water down a bill that was probably not all that good to begin with in order to get Republican votes. How many votes will he get? None. If he gets no votes will he restore the bill to its present, more palatable wording? No. So in exchange for no votes we will get a shitty bill. Just like health care.

Did I say just like health care? This will be even worse, because this is a bill, as both Paul Krugman and Nate Silver have pointed out, that is tailor made to break the back of the filibuster. Even the Democrats must have the ability to win a war of words against a party that will be, and should be easily portrayed as being, the handmaidens of the bankers, hedge fund managers and other assorted crooks and slimeballs that got us into this mess. This bill represents not just a chance for the Democrats to fix our economic system, but to portray Republican intransigence for what it is. This is the bill on which the country would applaud them for going nuclear if that’s what it takes.

Instead, we can look forward to months of stories about Chris Dodd trolling for Republican votes that he is never going to get, with RIchard Shelby and Judd Gregg, playing the roles of Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope Dodd is just trying to set them up. Neither his words nor recent history give us much hope.

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Bonus music

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Just finished digging out here, and the annual Christmas letter, which gets harder every year.

This video will probably be all over the internet soon, so I’m trying to get ahead of the curve. Yes, I know it’s corporate sponsored and all that, but I’m a softie.


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Friday Night Music-Happy Holidays

Friday, December 18, 2009

A holiday concert.

Bruce Springsteen with a classic

Bob Dylan, veering toward the bizarre.

I haven’t the slightest idea if there are even any Chanukah songs out there, except the Chanakuh Song, so here’s Adam Sandler:

Speaking of music, in a short while my wife and I will be going to the farewell concert, the Last Waltz, if you will, of our Drinking Liberally buddy Atul Shah’s band, Exit 82, at Burke’s Tavern in East Lyme. For those who’ve never had the pleasure, this is the last time to hear the band play its greatest hits, at least for a while. The band normally starts around 6:00 PM.


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An abject apology

Thursday, December 17, 2009

A commenter recently took umbrage at the fact that I referred to the “Democrat Party” in a recent post. I humbly apologize, as I share her feelings about this usage. All I can say is that the reference slipped by the fact checking committee, the style committee and the board of editors, all of whom have now been duly chastised.

In my further defense, I was running out of gas when I wrote that. Once in a blue moon (and in fact we are having a blue moon this month) I suffer from insomnia. I got no sleep the previous night, and by the time I got around to working on the blog I was running on empty. (Notice how I avoided mixing metaphors, at the unfortunate cost of using the same word twice.)

I wish I could say that it won’t happen again, but given the poor staffing around here, it’s almost inevitable.


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A health care rant

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I receive emails from a guy named Mitch Stewart, of Obama’s “Organizing for America” organization pretty much every day. Today I’m being urged to contact my Senators (rich irony on that one) to support health care reform because insurance lobbyists are desperate to pull apart the bill and derail reform”. All I can say is that Mitch has a lot of damn gall to ask me to make that phone call.

The insurance lobbyists can rest easy, the Democrats have already done their work for them, while Obama has played a mostly passive public role while privately assisting the derailment of the bill every step of the way.

There’s a bit of a debate going on about whether this bill is worth passing. It may very well be, that overall, the country will be somewhat better off with the bill than without it. That’s what the policy wonks say, but they’re only looking at the impact on the health care system. If the passage of this bill leads to the derailment of the Democratic party then a marginally better health care system will be cold comfort.

The Democrats have painted themselves into an impossible situation. If they don’t pass the bill the Republicans will crow about it and the Democrats will be perceived (and rightly so) as incompetent pushovers. If they do pass the bill they will create a political backlash among those most affected by it, e.g., young people forced to pay for worthless insurance, while those most benefited will be predominantly people who don’t vote anyway. Either way they lose.

Had the Democrats held a meeting this past January and tried to come up with a sure fire way to achieve minimal reform while destroying their own party in the process, they could not have come up with a better plan.

Here’s what you do:

1. Have the president raise the hopes of your base by initially talking up a reasonably good public option.

2. Start the bidding with a proposal you think you might be able to sell to Republicans, thus assuring the insurance companies from the start that the eventual bill will be a weak one, and signaling that you can be steamrolled into giving up more.

3. Take reconciliation off the table.

4. Hand the bill over to Max Baucus, who proceeds to freeze his fellow Democrats out of the process while “compromising” with Republicans all to get an unnecessary vote to get the bill out of committee from a person who will, in the end, vote to maintain a filibuster. As an added touch, encourage Max to slow walk (and that term overstates the pace) the bill through committee, knowing full well that every day you waste is another opportunity for the opposition to build up steam.

5. Get your base’s hopes up once again by inserting the public option back in the bill after it emerges, battered and beaten, from Baucus’s death grip.

6. Then let the loathsome Joe Lieberman get his petty revenge on his former party by visibly caving to his every demand, while still not getting a commitment that he will even vote for anything.

Result: an embittered base and a lousy bill.

After all that, I’m supposed to get excited enough about this piece of crap to call my Senator (joke again) to urge its passage? Even after all this I’m not convinced the Democratic Party is a fit candidate for assisted suicide, so I decline to get involved.


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On message

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

You really have to admire the message discipline of the Democrats. One of Dodd’s potential opponents is Linda McMahon, former head of the World Wrestling outfit. Connecticut Democrats have been attacking her, making what is a quite accurate charge that it is not the PG family friendly entertainment that she claims it to be. Unless, of course, you consider necrophilia, rape and public sex to be PG ratable activities.

A large share of the blame for Dodd’s current predicament must be laid at the feet of the Obama administration, specifically the Treasury Department officials that tried to shift the blame for allowing bailout bonuses from themselves to Dodd. They were wildly successful.

Now Obama is going to undermine the Connecticut Democrats’ anti-McMahon message by doing a thirty second “greeting to the troops” using the World Wrestling platform for his little spiel. Anything for the troops of course. It’s patently obvious that morale would have suffered if Obama had not chosen that particular stage. It’s yet another example of the Democrats incredible inability to speak with one voice, even in the most minor fashion. Naturally, McMahon has seized on his appearance as validation of her claim that her company is Disney east.

I realize that it was not good when everything Bush did was political, but that doesn’t mean that Obama should completely ignore the political.


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Olbermann exposes the liberal media

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The news is too depressing. I can’t bring myself to emit yet another rant against the weak, helpless, impotent, inadequate, incapable, ineffectual Democrats who “control” the United States Senate. If they had sat down in April and tried to figure out a way to simultaneously wreck the Health Care system (even more than it already is) and their own electoral prospects in 2010, they couldn’t have done better. But then, they wouldn’t have had the ability to accomplish even that had it been their actual objective.

So, rather than rant, I provide herewith some commentary from Keith Olbermann, as he commiserates with the conservative victims of all that left wing media bias.


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It ain’t so about Joe

Monday, December 14, 2009

There has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth about Joe Lieberman, with many trying to divine the reason for his health care obstructionism. Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly, points us to a new theory:

There’s been ample speculation about what motivates Lieberman, and what compels him to be so profoundly annoying. My hunch is that the independent senator is just spiteful, and wants to deny the left any victory at all. But Jon Chait offers an argument I haven’t seen emphasized elsewhere: maybe Joe Lieberman just isn’t very bright.

A snippet from Chait’s argument:

I think one answer here is that Lieberman isn’t actually all that smart. He speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. But there’s little evidence that he’s a sharp or clear thinker, and certainly no evidence that he knows or cares about the details of health care reform.

We ignore Occam’s razor at our peril here. Joe Lieberman is not dumb. I realize that being a Yalie is not proof of intelligence (see, e.g., George W. Bush), but Lieberman was not a legacy. He was a passably good lawyer, even though he tended to grandstand as an AG, preferring a stirring press release to actual results. But that’s a politician’s way. He may have become intellectually lazy, but that’s not the same as being dumb. It just means he finds it easier to avoid situations where he has to answer challenging questions when he can choose to spout off in fora where he won’t be challenged.

No, Benen should definitely stick with his hunch. Joe Lieberman is causing much weeping and gnashing of teeth because that is his sole objective, and he has it in his power to achieve that objective. He doesn’t care about his constituents, and he no longer has any principles, if he ever did. Like the Lord, he insists that vengeance is his (as well as that cushy job in a right wing think tank after he decides not to run for re-election).


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The Europeans are ahead of us again

Sunday, December 13, 2009

It is somewhat heartening that our European friends, they of the socialistic health care systems and reasonably contented populaces, have begun moving toward something I’ve been advocating for years: taxing the income of certain non-productive elements of our society, i.e., the bonuses of the bankers who have been systematically destroying our society. Britain is imposing a 50% tax on bonuses given out this year, and raising the marginal rate on high incomes to 50% next year. France is set to follow suit, and Goldman Sachs, always ahead of the curve, has already announced that it will try to mask obscene bonuses as stock awards. It would therefore behoove those countries to impose similar taxes on those types of bonuses as well.

There is so far not a whisper in this country about following suit. What is truly amazing is that every attempt at reining these folks in is met with the claim that we will discourage risk taking and “creativity”, both of which got us where we are today. It takes a lot of nerve for the folks who wrecked our economy to claim that they have a right to outsize compensation for the opportunity to do it again. It probably takes a lot of money (but a drop by comparison) to induce our “representatives” to buy into such an outrageous fiction.

The NY Times Op-ed piece to which I’ve linked above contains a description of the British economy that applies here as well:

If banking moves from London to Switzerland, that will really hit tax revenues. For I am not at all sure what Britain does anymore. We don’t really make much. The last piano manufacturer moved production offshore a few months ago. Even Savile Row suits are made in Italy. No, the nation seems to exist solely to shuffle money around, and it’s got that gig only because of the universality of the English language and its convenient time-zone location.

To put it more succinctly, as those hippies sang in Hair, it’s a moving paper fantasy. Our economy is more and more faith based, requiring above all that we (and increasingly, the rest of the world) all believe that it actually does something. Someday, that belief will collapse, and we’ll all be in real trouble. Except, of course, for the people who have created and sustained the illusion, who will be sitting pretty while the rest of us cope with the collapse.


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Upcoming nuptials

Sunday, December 13, 2009

This holiday season has seriously cut in to my blogging time, no doubt to the relief of many.

Yesterday, my wife and I hosted an event sponsored by the Groton Federation of Democratic Women. Some Democratic men showed up as well, though I am somewhat reluctant to admit we segregated ourselves into a separate room from the females. Among the guests were 94 year old George Swift and 85 year old Dee Harrell, pictured below, who recently announced their engagement.

Both George and Dee have been members of the RTM since prehistoric times. They are both testaments to the truism that keeping active makes for a long life. Besides serving as a member of the RTM, George keeps busy driving cancer patients to their doctors appointments. Dee also serves as the president of the Groton Federation of Democratic Women.

This is doubly good news for us Groton Democrats. Every year we raise money by inflicting a “person of the year award” on one or more people. George and Dee have made this year’s choice an easy one.


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