That's the conclusion reached today on the front page of the Washington Post. Meanwhile, when the only hope of getting out of this recession is to spend more, House Republicans are calling for a spending freeze. Unfuckinbelievable. I don't blame Republicans for proposing this (after all, they don't want to solve anything, they just like to throw red meat), I blame the media for giving them a platform that doesn't include a Comedy Central logo plastered across the screen.
Maybe Washington's wise men would prefer George Bush be back in power. Health care would not get fixed, but America's brush problem would certainly get priority again.
That's the number, in millions, of Americans who went without health insurance at one point in the last two years. Is it any wonder that 72% of the American people favor the government getting involved in our health care system? At the same time you've got jack-holes running around saying Obama is doing too much. All this change should wait until the economy is back. Well until the cost of health care is addressed there will be no true recovery. We're at critical mass. Now is the time (well, actually, yesterday was the time, but who's keeping track).
I'm thinking, this morning, the big wigs over at CNBC are regretting their decision to pull ranting Rick Santelli from The Daily Show last night. Now, if only they regretted destroying the economy, then I'd say progress was being made.
Maureen Dowd spent a good chunk of the 1990s ripping the Clintons for just about anything she could. Her snarky op-ed columns in the New York Times were sometimes entertaining, but rarely served much purpose beyond displaying just how cruel and snarky she could be.
To make matters worse, her targets often did not deserve of her wrath, and her reliance on rumor and innuendo often resulted in her victims being vindicated by other sources.
It didn't dawn on me until Dubyah almost beat Al Gore in the 2000 election (before losing to him in the selection) that, gee, perhaps a good number of NY Times-reading voters were swayed by this woman's churlish character assasinations. Maybe not enough to vote for the boob the Republicans were running, but perhaps enough to indignantly stay home on election day.
Dowd is an angry, mean, destructive force. Maybe not quite the red-haired Ann Coulter, but certainly worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence.
The New York Times should be better than that.
Dowd is at it again, slashing President Obama both unfairly and unnecessarily from her over-sized podium at the Times. She's on the new president's back because there is (gasp!) wasteful spending in his administration's first budget even though he vowed to cut pork.
Guess what, Ms. Dowd? There is always going to be pork in trillion dollar budgets. That's just a fact of life in the way our government works. Can it be controlled and decreased? Sure. Is now the time to belittle the fledgling administration over this?
This budget bus has been speeding along carrying all of this pork for decades, dontcha think that pulling a complete u-turn at speed might be a bit irresponsible?
In her pork-bashing column she mentions that Iraq was leftover from last year, "and the president’s trying to end that." Yes, and I expect the new president and his administration cut quite a sizeable hunk of last year's bacon out of the budget, too.
Can we be a little realistic here? The Obama administration has a massive clusterfuck to fix and has been on the job for 6 weeks.
A little slack for Mr. Obama, please.
And a pink slip for Ms. Coulter. Er, I mean Dowd.
What do you think? Please take the poll above.
PS-I hear Keith Olbermann is looking for a column...
This is, quite possibly, the most amusing thing I am hearing from the furious fringe: That Obama's plan will wreak hell on the deficit for generations to come. It's a bit like hearing a Catholic priest scold you on the perils of child abuse. I'm sorry, did you just say that it was fine and good to rape the Treasury for the past decade and worship Big Oil and waste two trillion on a failed and useless war, but redirecting those sums into science, health care, children and alternative energy is a terrible and costly idea?
That's the percentage of very aware people who understand that Barack Obama inherited this economic mess. Maybe more importantly, the poll also shows a large majority of people will cut him slack for at least a year (66%) and a whole bunch are willing to give him two years (41%) or more (23%). Americans know this is George Bush's mess, no matter how many times Karl Rove tries to tell them it's not.
I am in the camp that believes spotlighting Rush Limbaugh's ridiculousness is sound political strategy. He is the face of farce and forcing elected Republicans to stand with him or against him exposes them as unserious about the big problems we face. I applaud it. His dangerous rhetoric needs to see the light day. That being said, I also believe we must not stop there.
Last night on The Rachel Maddow ShowArianna Huffington was trying desperately to make the point that, on the danger to civilization scale, it's not Rush we should focus on, it's Karl Rove. Rove is the one who, for what ever reason, has the respect of the more mainstream media and this media is giving him a platform to whitewash the failures of Bush into success. Arianna quoted Orwell: "He who controls the past commands the future.” Right now Rove is trying to control the past and we must not let the people who created our current mess flush their accountability down the drain.
I believe Peter Daou is trying to get to Arianna's point here, but I don't see why spotlighting Rush and/or Rove has to be mutually exclusive.
We're only in the third inning of this crisis and the American people are down by a trillion with no relief pitcher in sight. I'd say sit back, eat a dog, have a beer, but who could afford the prices.
It really is astonishing how conservative have fallen in love with the Constitution again since Barack Obama has become president. For eight years it was used as a doormat and now, suddenly, protecting it is all the rage.
That's the number of dollars, in billions, lost by AIG in the fourth-quarter of last year. It's the biggest quarterly lose in the history of quarterly losses. It also means we, the people, will be ponying up another $30 billion to help keep this house of cards standing. That's $30 billion on top of the $150 billion already used to prop this giant up. Ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I understand the systemic risk involved, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
