Tuesday, February 24, 2009

You guys are just so fuked.....


Barack Obama towers...

God Bless Us All


Tonight, Barack Obama melted the pavement.

The tributary known as Black History flowed into the river known as American History and they began to flow as one.

Great speech President Obama. We are blessed to have you as our leader.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Slumdogs Unite!


Americans “resent people who appear to be living high off a system dominated by insiders with the right connections.”

By FRANK RICH
Published: February 7, 2009
SOMEDAY historians may look back at Tom Daschle’s flameout as a minor one-car (and chauffeur) accident. But that will depend on whether or not it’s followed by a multi-vehicle pileup that still could come. Even as President Obama refreshingly took responsibility for having “screwed up,” it’s not clear that he fully understands the huge forces that hit his young administration last week.
The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus. It’s even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president’s best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn’t get in front of the mounting public anger.

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Obama was blindsided by the savagery and speed of Daschle’s demise. Conventional wisdom had him surviving the storm. Such is the city’s culture that not a single Republican or Democratic senator called for his withdrawal until the morning of his exit. Membership in the exclusive Senate club, after all, has its privileges. Among Daschle’s more vocal defenders was Bob Dole, who had recruited him to Alston & Bird, the law and lobbying firm where Dole has served as “special counsel” when not otherwise cashing in on his own Senate years by serving as a pitchman for Pepsi and Viagra.

In New York, editorial pages on both ends of the political spectrum, The Wall Street Journal and The Times, called for Daschle to step down. But not The Washington Post. In a frank expression of the capital’s isolation from the country, it thought Daschle could still soldier on even though “ordinary Americans who pay their taxes may well wonder why Mr. Obama can’t find cabinet secretaries who do the same.”
As Jon Stewart might say, oh those pesky ordinary Americans!

In reality, Daschle’s tax shortfall, an apparently honest mistake, was only a red flag for the larger syndrome that much of Washington still doesn’t get. It was the source, not the amount, of his unreported income that did him in. The car and driver advertised his post-Senate immersion in the greedy bipartisan culture of entitlement and crony capitalism that both helped create our economic meltdown (on Wall Street) and failed to police it (in Washington). Daschle might well have been the best choice to lead health-care reform. But his honorable public record was instantly vaporized by tales of his cozy, lucrative relationships with the very companies he’d have to adjudicate as health czar.

Few articulate this ethical morass better than Obama, who has repeatedly vowed to “close the revolving door” between business and government and end our “two sets of standards, one for powerful people and one for ordinary folks.” But his tough new restrictions on lobbyists (alreadycompromised by inexplicable exceptions) and porous plan for salary caps on bailed-out bankers are only a down payment on this promise, even if they are strictly enforced.

The new president who vowed to change Washington’s culture will have to fight much harder to keep from being co-opted by it instead. There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.

This includes Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary. Washington hands repeatedly observe how “lucky” Geithner was to be the first cabinet nominee with an I.R.S. problem, not the second, and therefore get confirmed by Congress while the getting was good. Whether or not this is “lucky” for him, it is hardly lucky for Obama. Geithner should have left ahead of Daschle.

Now more than ever, the president must inspire confidence and stave off panic. As Friday’s new unemployment figures showed, the economy kept plummeting while Congress postured. Though Obama is a genius at building public support, he is not Jesus and he can’t do it all alone. On Monday, it’s Geithner who will unveil the thorniest piece of the economic recovery plan to date — phase two of a bank rescue. The public face of this inevitably controversial package is now best known as the guy who escaped the tax reckoning that brought Daschle down.

Even before the revelation of his tax delinquency, the new Treasury secretary was a dubious choice to make this pitch. Geithner was present at the creation of the first, ineffectual and opaque bank bailout — TARP, today the most radioactive acronym in American politics. Now the double standard that allowed him to wriggle out of his tax mess is a metaphor for the double standard of the policy he must sell: Most “ordinary Americans” still don’t understand why banks got billions while nothing was done (and still isn’t being done) to bail out those who lost their homes, jobs and retirement savings.

As with Daschle, the political problems caused by Geithner’s tax infraction are secondary to the larger questions raised by his past interaction with the corporations now under his purview. To his credit, Geithner, like Obama, has devoted his career to public service, not buckraking. But he still has not satisfactorily explained why, as president of the New York Fed, he failed in his oversight of the teetering Wall Street institutions. Nor has he told us why, in his first major move in his new job, he secured a waiver from Obama to hire a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his chief of staff. Nor, in his confirmation hearings, did he prove any more credible than the Bush Treasury secretary, the Goldman Sachs alumnus Hank Paulson, in explaining why Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail while A.I.G. and Citigroup were spared.

Citigroup had one highly visible asset that Lehman did not: Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who sat passively (though lucratively) in its executive suite as Citi gorged on reckless risk. Geithner, as a Rubin protégé from the Clinton years, might have recused himself from rescuing Citi, which so far has devoured $45 billion in bailout money.

Key players in the Obama economic team beyond Geithner are also tied to Rubin or Citigroup or both, from Larry Summers, the administration’s top economic adviser, to Gary Gensler, the newly named nominee to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a Treasury undersecretary in the Clinton administration. Back then, Summers and Gensler joined hands with Phil Gramm to ward off regulation of the derivative markets that have since brought the banking system to ruin. We must take it on faith that they have subsequently had judgment transplants.

Obama’s brilliant appointees, we keep being told, are irreplaceable. But as de Gaulle said, “The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.” You have to wonder if this team is really a meritocracy or merely a stacked deck. Not only did Rubin himself serve on the Obama economic transition team, but two of the transition’s headhunters were Michael Froman, Rubin’s chief of staff at Treasury and later a Citigroup executive, and James S. Rubin, an investor who is Robert Rubin’s son.
A welcome outlier to this club is Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairmanchosen to direct Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But Bloomberg reported last week that Summers is already freezing Volcker out of many of his deliberations on economic policy. This sounds like the arrogant Summers who was fired as president of Harvard, not the chastened new Summers advertised at the time of his appointment. A team of rivals is not his thing.

Americans have had enough of such arrogance, whether in the public or private sectors, whether Democrat or Republican. Voters turned on Sarah Palin not just because of her manifest unfitness for office but because her claims of being a regular hockey mom werecontradicted by her Evita shopping sprees. John McCain’s sanctification of Joe the Plumber (himself a tax delinquent) never could be squared with his inability to remember how many houses he owned. A graphic act of entitlement also stripped naked that faux populist John Edwards.

The public’s revulsion isn’t mindless class hatred. As Obama said on Wednesday of his fellow citizens: “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.” But we do know that the system has been fixed for too long. The gaping income inequality of the past decade — the top 1 percent of America’s earners received more than 20 percent of the total national income — has not been seen since the run-up to the Great Depression.

This is why “Slumdog Millionaire,” which pits a hard-working young man in Mumbai against a corrupt nexus of money and privilege, has become America’s movie of the year. As Robert Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary, wrote after Daschle’s fall, Americans “resent people who appear to be living high off a system dominated by insiders with the right connections.”

The neo-Hoover Republicans in Congress, who think government can put Americans back to work with corporate tax cuts but without any “spending,” are tone deaf to this rage. Obama is not. It’s a good thing he’s getting out of Washington this week to barnstorm the country about the crisis at hand. Once back home, he’s got to make certain that the insiders in his own White House know who’s the boss.

Treasury Chief Aims to Restore ‘Lost Faith’ in Bailout

Lost faith huh......

February 10th, 2009 2:51 pm

Consumer credit????? The major banks, I personally know of two incidents one involving Wells Fargo and the other Bank of America, of refusing to release funds claiming that it would take 11 business days to clear an out of state check.

It seems to me that getting these banks to start lending again is now less of a priority than getting them to release our own funds.

11 business days, in this case including President's Day (a bank holiday) is a total of 18 days.

The banks are taking gross advantage of consumers and small business in order to increase their float. This is causing, certainly in our case, extreme stress on our ability to do business. They are holding funds needed for payroll and other expenses. By holding our funds they slow our cash flow to the detriment of our company, our employees and those that we rely upon for goods and services to run our business.

The banks must be either nationalized or come under strict regulation that ensures that they do the right thing for our country and our economy.
— Multifarious, USA

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Will Obama Save Liberalism?

397. EDITORS' SELECTIONS
January 26, 2009 6:01 pm

So conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of do they?

Decades of conservative led deregulation of the financial system has left the country gorged by greedy Wall Street bankers, our monetary system feckless and our economy in the worst shape since the 1930’s.

Jihadism rages while we are bogged down in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that continue to cost America inconceivable amounts of lives and treasure.

Law and Order? America leads the world in the percentage of our citizens that are incarcerated. Do you really consider that a success?

A New York Times editorial published August 12, 2007 points out that The World Health Organization ranked the United States 37th in the world in the quality of our health care and conservatives remain obstructionist regarding universal health care falsely labeling it as “nationalized health care”.

Our educational system is ranked amongst the lowest of developed countries and we have one of the highest school drop-out rates in the world.

Liberalism has triumphed over conservatism in America because conservatives, when given the opportunity, governed selfishly and to the detriment of the greater good.

Mr. Kristol, while berating President Obama’s reference to America’s founding fathers (little did we know that conservatives have the phrase copyrighted!) says that today’s dangers are less stark than those of The Greatest Generation. This after 7 years of conservatives declaring Jihadism the greatest threat that civilization has ever faced.

Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have nothing to be proud of and I for one will not miss Mr. Kristol’s exhortation of the virtues of conservatism on these pages.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Field of Dreams

I've watched Field of Dreams, maybe one hundred times, more or less. I've been brought to tears every time I've seen it, as I remember.

Field of Dreams is the kind of story that tells you what you need to hear, every time you see it and when you need to hear it.

Tonight; faith. Field of Dreams is about faith. It is about believing that what you need to happen, happens when you need it. Faith.

I first learned what a "circular reference" was when I learned to use Lotus123. Field of Dreams is a story within a story within a story....it keeps telling itself.

Virtual Face-Off: What Does Google Owe Newspapers?


NEWSPAPERS CRASHING AND BURNING

37. February 4, 2009
10:21 pm

So, say Google enters into negotiations (which it won’t) with the newspapers and Google doesn’t agree to one of the papers demands or the amount the paper want’s to charge? Which paper wants to be the first to be left out of the search results?

Remember 1998 when newspapers started to squirm about what to do with this new technology? Many refused to put their content online-they lost. Some tried registration schemes (so how are you monetizing the registration information?). Some tried to sell content or charge a fee for “premium” content (we know how that worked out don’t we NYT…).

Buggy whips, telegrams, victrola’s (don’t even get me started on the idiots who run the music business!), sundial’s……….

We need in-depth investigative reporting. I love the NY Times and have been a reader for most of my life. But content is king and content producers are the Crown Prince’s and Princess’es of this new technology. I have no doubt that Thomas Friedman, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks (not William Kristol!!!!) will find plenty of outlets that will be more than willing to pay them to write. Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. The papers better get over it really quickly and get with the program.

— Multifarious

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Internet Money in Fiscal Plan: Wise or Waste? (2)

Reading the comments posted by readers of this article you start to understand how most people don't even understand what broadband is.

255.February 03, 2009 5:50 pm
Link

DSL is NOT broadband. DSL is an old joke perpetuated by monopolistic telecommunications companies. Allowing Verizon, Cox Communications and COMCAST to dictate our future is ludicrous. The US should launch anti-trust action against these monopolies and break them up or force them to do what is good for the public and the future of our economy.

Internet Money in Fiscal Plan: Wise or Waste?

Extension of broadband into rural areas of the U.S. (absolutely necessary) will not come close to meeting the real broadband needs of a 21st century America. I am afraid that current proposals mask the real issues and lull us into complacency.

The United States currently ranks 14th (as low as 18 as measured by some) in broadband amongst the nations of the world. We are driving on a two-lane road when a multi-lane superhighway is required.

For the United States to be competitive with the rest of the world, and for our citizens to learn, research and consume in a modern world a high-speed broadband infrastructure is not an option.

According to A new study by the Communications Workers of America (Speed Matters http://www.speedmatters.org/document-library/sourcematerials/cwa_report_on_internet_speeds_2008.pdf) the median download speed in the U.S. is an agonizingly slow 2.35 megabits per second. Compare this to Japan where the median download speed is 63.60 Mbps. In South Korea it’s 49 Mbps and in Finland it’s 21.7Mbps.

All manner of Internet and Web development is stifled without assurance that advanced applications are accessible to a wide-spectrum of user.

South Korea, which already offers its citizens broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps, is planning to introduce 1Gbps service by 2012. That’s a tenfold increase. Comcast and Verizon are only now planning for speeds approaching 100 Mbps by 2010.

The major carriers in the United States are without adequate competition, or in its place, government "stimulation" or mandate. While these carriers concern themselves with maintaining control over what they consider to be THEIR infrastructure and access to the public through it, the rest of the world is moving swiftly to ensure modernity for their societies.

Broadband is a necessary public utility, the development of which requires urgent federal government attention.

220.February 03, 2009 3:30 pm

Sunday, February 1, 2009

"Raise More Hell"


Betsy Moon: What Would Molly Ivins Think?

I miss Mollie Ivins. Her death was untimely.

Every column she wrote was biting and humorous and you always knew where she stood. She was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights and an outspoken critic of hypocrisy.

Here is some of the best of Molly Ivins:
Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?
You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You
Shrub : The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush
Bushwhacked : Life in George W. Bush’s America

Herbert Hoover Lives


Once again, Frank Rich nails it......

401.February 01, 2009 12:03 pm
Link

Poor Michael Steele, he has just become Chairman of nothing left to lose.

Rush Limbaugh flies from NFL game to NFL game in his private jet while he thinks that it is still 1999 and that the country is as fat and happy as he is. In a dark hour some humor is a necessity and so Mr. Rich – watching the far-right hijack what is left of the Republican Party is a laugh riot.

There is a complete void of leadership in the Republican Party due in large part to the abrogation of responsibility for the sake of ideology. Limbaugh is filling that void.

In the words of George W. Bush "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again".

These are serious times that call for serious people with serious solutions for serious problems. Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the obstructionists are not close to being that.

The vast majority of the American people won’t be fooled again. Limbaugh will lead the rest into a vast right wing irrelevance.