This is dedicated to the Republicans in Congress, since it proves that there are others who share their objectives:
And when this song came up on my playlist today, it just seemed appropriate for those of us who were, let’s face it, fooled again in 2008.
The only thing that keeps Democrats in the running, politically, is the hubris of Republicans and their propensity to overreach, since they actually believe people elect them to do the things they deny they want to do while campaigning. Great example today on the hubris front, apart from cry-baby Boehner’s act in Washington. New Jersey Governor Christie, one of a pack of Republicans in states where voters are suffering from buyer’s remorse. One would think that a New Jersey governor would think twice before attacking Bruce Springsteen, but it’s debatable that Christie’s ever thought once, so into the breach he went:
He can’t help himself, our governor. In less than a year and a half, he’s demonized more people than the Salem witch trials — if they had been run by Judge Judy: Democrats. Teachers. Superintendents. Public workers. State Supreme Court justices. Regular Joes at town hall meetings. Snooki. Other governors.
And now he’s taking potshots at one of his (supposed) idols: Bruce Springsteen. The Boss got, as they say, CC’d (in other words, Chris Christie’d) in an interview with Diane Sawyer on Wednesday night. Here’s what Christie said:
“Bruce is liberal. Doesn’t mean I like him any less. But you know, Bruce believes that we should be raising taxes all the time on everyone to do all the things that he’d like to see government do.”
With heroes like that, who needs enemies?
And the governor wonders why Bruce wouldn’t play at the inaugural ball.
Of course, in typical Republican fashion Christie misrepresented what Springsteen said, but that’s only to be expected.
Not yet, but a case can be made that he’s got a chance.
Let us begin by stipulating that George Bush was the worst president in American history. This is a claim I have made before, and it is hard to believe that any serious minded individual would argue that any other president was worse by any reasonable metric one might care to adopt.
Yet, paradoxically, I believe a case can be made that Obama may become a worse president than Bush, which by application of the mathematical principle that I am quite sure is not called transubstantiation, but ought to be, puts Obama in the running for the worst president ever, at least if one considers domestic policy only.
Hear me out.
I grant you that Obama is not a sociopath, so he does not inspire either the fear or loathing (among the sane) that Bush easily earned and so richly deserved. But that lack of extreme mental impairment is perhaps his downfall. Nor does evil permeate his entire administration, as it did with Bush. Incompetence and corruption were endemic throughout the Bush Administration, and Obama cannot match that. But…
First, lets define our terms. I believe it is fair to say that we should rate our presidents in terms of the evil they do, or, in rare cases, the good that is interred with their bones. I include among the evil done those acts of others that the president allows or enables, and that may prove to be Obama’s downfall. He does not choose to do harm, but he is willing to allow others to do so to prove that he is a man of reason, by the beltway standards that he seems to have wholly absorbed.
George Bush would have been ecstatic had he been able to destroy Social Security and Medicare, the good interred with the bones of FDR and LBJ. He was unable to do so. He didn’t even try to kill Medicare, and his attempt to destroy Social Security was a non-starter that was squelched by the Democrats in Congress, whose spines were stiffened by Nancy Pelosi and an energized base that was already convinced that Bush was the devil’s spawn. Try as he might, he was unable to cause the harm he would so much have liked to visit upon us.
Obama has a chance to succeed, if that’s the right word, where Bush either failed or feared to tread. When Bush was president, the Democrats, or most of them, had no interest in helping him. But there are surely plenty of chickenshit Democrats that will follow Obama off this cliff, should he choose to jump, and choose to jump he may.
I, and others, have expressed frustration at Obama’s tendency to accept the other guy’s position as his opening negotiating position, from which he then seeks to compromise. There is every reason to believe that he’ll follow that pattern with Social Security and Medicare, but unlike Bush, and simply because he’s a Democrat, he’ll drag enough Democrats along with him to make every Republican’s wet dream come true, something Bush could never do. Thus will the pliant and always “reasonable” Obama “accomplish” what the unbending sociopath could not.
Surely, at least on the domestic side, that accomplishment, along with his craven cave on the tax cut, will vault him way past Bush so far as causing permanent, irreparable harm to the people of this country. After all, even the Depression Bush allowed to happen would not have been irreparable, had Obama made a serious attempt to do anything about it when he had huge majorities in both houses. Destroy Social Security and Medicare now, and it’s a sure bet that no person now living will see their return. Millions of people will be reduced to penury in their old ages, their only consolation being that their life spans will be mercifully shortened due to a lack of health care.
So, in the next few weeks we may see. Will Obama take advantage of the political gift that Paul Ryan is offering him, or will he once again feel compelled to try to appease the unappeasable?
There is, of course, one thing that seems to make Bush’s hold on worst ever unassailable. On the foreign policy end, it may be hard for Obama or anyone to match a disastrous war of choice and the permanent destruction of America’s already tattered reputation. And no, the Libyan adventure doesn’t qualify as a match.
But purely looking at it from the domestic side, Obama may soon, if he runs true to form, top Bush, though I suppose the case can be made that if we limit it to domestic harm, maybe Jimmy Buchanan or one of the other midgets from that era might slip through to take the prize. Scant comfort to either Obama or the country.
They truly know no shame:
In 2009, Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol joined a teen pregnancy prevention nonprofit called the Candie’s Foundation. Today, the Associated Pressreported that the Candie’s Foundation released its 2009 tax information, revealing that Bristol was paid a salary of $262,500.
But a closer examination of the tax form by ThinkProgress shows that the group disbursed only $35,000 in grants to actual teen pregnancy health and counseling clinics: $25,000 to the Mt. Sinai Adolescent Health Center and $10,000 to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
The sheer number of layers of hypocrisy is astonishing.
From the Department of You Couldn’t Make This Up:
Transocean Ltd. gave its top executives bonuses for achieving the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history” – despite the explosion of its oil rig that killed 11 people and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s truly a pity that the folks who run the Fukushima power plant aren’t Americans. They’d be in line for the biggest safety bonus of all time. After all, as with the Transocean folks, and in the immortal words of Alan Greenspan, with one “notable exception” their plant had a stellar safety record. And they’ve got the Transocean folks beat to a pulp in the competition for the magnitude of the notable exception. Transocean killed a mere 11 people plus a Gulf, while the Fukushima people have a shot at thousands of lives plus a huge swath of an ocean.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the Japanese have learned all of the lessons we here in America have to teach. They might still think that not everything a corporate executive does is tinged with genius. We’ve learned differently here. If you can take down an economy, or a large body of water, you deserve every penny you can steal. If you teach our kids for a living, on the other hand, you’re just scum.
Update: A right wing (this knowledge gained from previous comments from the same source) commentator points out that Transocean is a Swiss company. I invite him to peruse the bios of the management team here. True, some of them are from Socialist Europe, but judging by their educational backgrounds, most of them are true home grown Americans (including the richly compensated Mr. Newman), with a large percentage from Texas, the source of so much that is wrong with this country.
A few weeks ago I taped a PBS Special In Performance at the White House, which honored the Motown Sound. I highly recommend it. I had a little trouble watching one of the Jonas Brothers singing Can’t Help Myself, but the rest of it was pretty good. Part of the fun was watching the audience, many of whom couldn’t stop themselves from singing along.
So I went looking for great Motown songs (the White House clips aren’t on youtube, but I think you can still watch the show on the PBS website), and I found this clip of Marvin Gaye doing I Heard it Through the Grapevine in Montreal.
Definitely one of the greatest songs of all time.
I have, on occasion, noted that there appears to be a slight disparity in the way in which our media, including the “liberal” New York Times, reports on rallies held by right wingers as opposed to those held by left wingers. So long as two or more gather in the tea party’s name, the event is covered, while thousands of people braving the snow in Wisconsin merit barely a word.
Yesterday, the “tea party”, the world’s greatest astroturf organization, “rallied” at the National Capitol, and the Times covered it straight:
Outside the Capitol on a cold, damp afternoon, Tea Party activists from around the country warned that they would not accept less than a $100 billion cut from this year’s budget, and that there could be election consequences for those who did not heed their call.
Were they from around the country? No evidence is cited? Was it a rally? Well, if a ragtag group of perhaps 200 people qualifies as a rally, given the venue, then it was a rally. Would a group of 200 people demanding government spending on education have gotten this kind of press? Would they have been favored with one close cropped photo designed to mislead the casual observer into thinking there was a crowd, never mind the two misleading photos the tea party “rally” got?
Now, if you read deep into the article, you finally do find that even the Times finally gets around to estimate that this “crowd”, which Mitch McConnell claimed “sent a powerful message to Washington” consisted of no more than 300 people, including counter demonstrators and, most likely, the legions of the press that are attracted to tea party rallies like flies to dog shit.
It was, by any rationale standard but one, a total failure. It succeeded only because the media feels compelled to treat this political fraud seriously.
Today the Day joins the anti-union push, and in its usual somewhat muddled fashion, helps push the meme that the only thing standing between America and prosperity is unions, and please to ignore those corporations sitting on piles of cash they won’t even share with their shareholders. We are treated to a sympathetic portrayal of Nick Griseto, who recently purchased the Bradford Dyeing Association in the Bradford section of Westerly. Mr. Griseto, we are asked to believe, is a John Galt type, only with warm and fuzzy feelings toward his employees; who would have no problems with his employees wanting a union, which they had for 30 years under his predecessors, but which he can prove that they really don’t want or need, now that he’s engaged in some classic union busting activity that the NLRB and the courts have enjoined, an action so rare in these anti-union times that it speaks volumes about the magnitude of the violations. Furthermore, we feel Griseto’s pain as he bemoans the fact that he must spend so much money on legal fees to protect his employees from the greedy union – hundreds of thousands of dollars we are to believe – which almost sounds like enough money to, just at a guess, pay the workers he just laid off.
But, there’s more. The Day’s enterprising reporter dug up two employees who didn’t want a union, proving Griseto’s point. It was hard work for the enterprising reporter to find them. He had to venture out on the factory floor, follow Mr. Griseto, and speak to the employees to whom Griseto guided him. Now that’s investigative journalism, and fair and balanced to boot. We are to conclude, based on the views of two hand picked employees, that not a single member of the union actually wants to be in said union, but that all would rather be subject to the arbitrary whims of Mr. Griseto. Is there no union steward to whom the reporter might go for comment? Apparently not.
It might interest the Day to know that Mr. Griseto is not the first employer to maintain that his employees neither want or need a union. In fact, it’s fairly common and often, shockingly enough, and I know this should be hard for today’s breed of trusting reporters to believe, isn’t true. Indeed, one might safely maintain that the more adamant an employer is on the issue, the less likely it is that the assertion is true.
Seems to me that Tim Pawlenty has effectively put himself out of the running as a viable candidate for the Republican nomination for President:
Likely Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty won’t be joining mock candidate Donald Trump in his efforts to put birthers back on the political front burner: “I, for one, do not believe we should be raising that issue,” Pawlenty said Tuesday morning on MSNBC’sMorning Joe. “I think President Obama was born in the United States.”
Now, there are only three reasons that a Republican candidate would make a statement like that. He or she could believe they would not be overheard, he or she could be under oath, or he or she could believe that one can win the Republican nomination by being the sole candidate seeking to appeal to the vanishing slice of Republicans who have not taken leave of their senses.
The first two don’t seem to apply, which leaves the last possibility, but given the fact that Pawlenty has been sucking up big time to the teabaggers, that seems unlikely too, so we must seek for a fourth solution, which would be that Pawlenty’s not very smart. I, of course, exclude the possibility that he is just being honest, because honesty is a quality not seen in a Republican for decades, and scarcely seen in a Democrat. Pawlenty should realize that the safe response to questions about Obama’s birth is as follows: “I believe that there have been serious questions raised, and I think the President should answer them”. Always understanding, of course, that no answer could ever be sufficient, even if Obama unearthed live coverage of his birth by a Hawaiian television station. This response gives comfort to the frothing millions while preserving deniability should the candidate actually get the nomination, at which time, of course, they will want to work their way back toward an appearance of rationality.
To add to his woes, Pawlenty has yet another grievous strike against him, and I’m not talking about the fact that he induces a catatonic state in the listener. While he was governor of Minnesota, he encouraged the banks in his state to offer Sharia compliant financial instruments. Since Muslims, like early Christians (who have, as we all know, cast off the prohibition) are not allowed to pay interest on loans, it is necessary to design Sharia compliant financial instruments that allow them, for instance, to buy a house. These “instruments” are, in fact, simply devices in which the lender charges the equivalent of interest, but the arrangement is defined in such a way that it is not called interest. This is a form of hypocrisy practiced by all religions, and it is harmless. Harmless, and probably good for the banks, which can bury a higher interest rate in a vehicle like that than in a normal loan, where they have to disclose the rate. But, as every Republican primary voter knows, Sharia law is a bogey man second only to the one that currently inhabits the White House.
So, Pawlenty is toast. The nomination will be going to one of the other improbable candidates.
This, by the way, will be the first in a series of post in which I prove conclusively that not a single of the declared or semi-declared candidates has any chance of getting the nomination. Yet, as we know, one of them will, so I will only be “wrong” about one of them, but even then, only in a very limited sense, as the survivor of the “I’m crazier than you” competition will end up being the biggest loser of them all. For there is one fact of political life that has been constant for lo these many years: an also ran at the convention lives on in the world of politics; a losing presidential candidate is immediately relegated to the role of laughingstock, except, perhaps, in the strange case of John McCain, who lives on, zombie-like. But the 2012 Republican candidate will be a historical first: the victim of a drubbing at the hands of a man who has ineffectually presided over a major economic downturn, and is therefore unlikely to escape what will be, in his or her case, a much deserved fate.
When I first read this article in the Times, it brought to mind Anatole France’s observation that
“[t]he law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Charlie Engle (who, though not exactly poor, was definitely not rich) was recently sentenced to 21 months in jail for taking out a liar’s loan from Countrywide. Meanwhile, Angelo Mozilo, the former head of Countrywide will not face prosecution, though he knew the loans he was making to folks like Engle, and reselling to anyone stupid enough to buy, were fraudulent. He paid a sizable (by my standards or yours) civil fine, but it hardly made a dent in his huge fortune. He certainly did not take as big a hit as Mr Engle will take when he makes a court ordered $260,000 restitution payment to Countrywide when he finally emerges from prison. That’s right. Our government indulges in the fiction that Countrywide was a victim of it’s own fraudulent business plan.
What Anatole France neglected to say is that while the rich are indeed prohibited from sleeping under bridges, if a rich man chose to do so he would surely escape punishment. Angelo Mozilo will never see the inside of a cell, though he helped destroy the economy, though mortgage fraud laws, the last time I looked, were supposed to apply with majestic equality to everyone.
Engle’s story is interesting for another reason, in addition to the disparity between his treatment and Mozilo’s. The investigation into his “crime” (there were millions of liars loans, and nothing special about his) was initiated by an IRS agent who saw him in a movie about long distance running, and decided he must be a crook. He had neither evidence nor reasonable suspicion. After finding nothing in his trash, he put an attractive female agent on the case, who formed a friendship with Engle, who then told her about his nefarious misdeed. The story is a bit reminiscent of the Starr investigation of Clinton. Starr, after no evidence could be found of Whitewater misconduct, decided to keep investigating until something, anything, could be found. The entire investigation appears to have been a gross misuse of power.
By the way, the article in question was written by Joe Nocera, who will be leaving the business section for the Op-Ed page. Bob Herbert will be missed, but judging by his work in the business section, Nocera will be a good replacement.
