Richard Day's picture

    TIS THE SEASON

    Miracle on 34th Street

    Tis the season, aint it?

    And I feel some of that Xmas spirit just boiling over; giving us warmth we need during these cold days as the Sun abandons us all—except in Cal or Fla or one of those OTHER heathen environs!

    tmccarthy0's picture

    The Evolution of Liberalism

    Ultimately as liberals and progressives I think we get stuck in our definition of words. There are some people who define liberalism as a static rather than dynamic concept. But I would put out there that liberalism as a concept is dynamic and does nothing more than reflect the milieu of any given era in civilization.

    MrSmith1's picture

    Taking the REINS

    Headline:  House of Reps. passes bill granting itself the power to veto anything they don't like and destroy the system of checks and balances established by the Constitution.

    Okay, the copy-editor just came in and said that's too long for a headline.  

    How about: House Louses Grouse; Pass Neat-o Veto.

    Mr. Gingrich, bwana, what about Freddy Mac?

    The Swedish author Henning Mankel who created the "Kurt Wallander" series has written a novel about Africa, where he lived for twenty years. In "The Eye of the Leopard", a young Swede travels to Zambia on a two week trip and stays eighteen years. It is the late 60's, post independence, and the white farmers are carrying on their work in a dangerous and uneasy balance with the Africans. The country is a pressurized tank of steam ready to blow. The Swede takes a "temporary" job as the foreman of a farm but has never managed workers. 

    "How should I treat them?", he asks.

    "Firmly", the owner says. "The Africans are always looking for your weak point, those moments when you can be talked into something. Give them nothing; find something to complain about the first time they wash your clothes. Even if there's nothing; then they'll know that you make demands...."

    It is not hard to imagine bwana Gingrich in the role of the privileged farm owner. Following his quick rise in the polls Gingrich's messages quickly became focused on the degrading "southern strategy" of using coded messages for blacks and minorities to scapegoat them for the nation's ills. The strategy apparently appeals to a large part of the Republican base. "Poor people in the projects don't know about work", "they get their money from drugs", they'd make good janitors if you got them young enough. And of course, their leader, Barack Obama, is the best "food stamp President" we've ever had.

    Richard Day's picture

    VOX POPULI, VOX DEI; THE MUSICAL

    VOX POPULI, VOX DEI

    Republicans of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your brains!

                                                                                                           (DD)

    acanuck's picture

    Egypt’s Islamists in driver’s seat

    It will be more than a month before we get final, official results of elections to Egypt’s lower house. But even partial results from the first round (runoff voting is still taking place) tell the story: Islamists have won a stunning mandate.

    The Muslim Brotherhood’s coalition collected 37 per cent or so of votes, close to what many had predicted. The shocker is that the next-biggest bloc, with a quarter of the votes so far, is that of the Salafists – religious fundamentalists who back a rigid application of sharia.

    Stop me before I enjoy more

    This just in..The perfect top marginal  rate is 70%.

     Brad Delong says that  Paul Krugman says that Mark Thoma says that Emmanuel Saez and Nobel laureate Peter Diamond say  that's the sweet spot where the Government achieves the maximum overall good 

    Good being defined as the Govt causing as little unhappiness as possible while collecting as much  cash as possible. Or balancing the fiscal requirements of the deficit with  the moral need to do that as painlessly as possible.

    Making an omelet without breaking eggs.

    A turd blossom economy.

    George Bush misapplied the term "turd blossom" to Karl Rove because the term requires a person to hold two opposing images in mind at the same time---cow dung vs. flowers---and Rove is definitely not a flower. But the term does accurately describe the economic green shoots which are now, after three years, beginning to push their way up through the pile of crap left behind by George Bush. And for the economy itself there are definitely two distinct lines of thought---a bit of complexity---will the sprigs of blue bells and lavender continue to grow and prosper or is our economy still all just a pile of doo-doo?

    Irresponsible speculation in Carrier IQ "spyware" case.

    Last Wednesday, I highlighted recent hubub around a piece of mobile phone metrics collection "spyware" called Carrier IQ. Since then, there have been some significant happenings. Largely because, after the EFF's involvement and Carrier IQ's decision to cease legal threats, researcher Trevor Eckhart provided more explicit documentation [note: the site has been crashing occasionally due to extraordinarily heavy traffic] of how the Carrier IQ software has been implemented on his HTC Evo 3d (Sprint). With Video.

    What the software appears to be doing in this case looks pretty bad. And it is, no doubt.

    FurudeRikaChama's picture

    Copyright bill will close the Internet down if something isn't done.

    We need your help. Congress is passing a dictatorial bill that will officially enable websites to be closed down for copyrighted content, which could mean the destruction of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites dedicated to users putting up things. This bill must be stopped, because this anti-piracy campaign is a disguise for censorship by RIAA, WMG, and other greedy, evil corporations who get mad when they aren't recieving money.

    How do you spell C R O O K? It's P A U L S..................

    Keith Olbermann, natch, covered this with his well chosen guest Jeff Madrick. But it wasn't coverred in either  the  Times or FT and it should be read. 

    What happened? The Secretary of Treasury flouted the laws against insider trading by telling a room full of investors that the Government intended to let  Fannie and Freddie go into bankruptcy.  

    Newt Gingrich is not a pretty bird.

    Newt Gingrich is now the front runner in a discordant Republican primary process as beautiful as angry alligators mating in a swamp or birds fighting over a smeared hamburger wrapper from a fast food dumpster. One might think that troubled times at home and abroad would bring forth American citizens from great traditions of military service, public service, economics, science or notable business careers. Instead Republicans have a field of flawed candidates. If these candidates somehow managed to slip into a conference of distinguished Americans they would be seated at a table by themselves in the corner of the banquet hall fighting over rolls and butter like a flock or voracious grackles. What is the cause of such low brow Republican candidates and a selection process which seems to go against our better nature? Why an ugly bird like Gingrich? 

    tmccarthy0's picture

    Helping the Working Poor -- A Practical Defense of PPACA

    The Health Care Bill, more often than not, raises the ire of both conservatives and progressives. They've teamed up to spread as much misinformation about the bill as possible. Why? I am not sure, because this bill goes a long way to get more people access to health care.

    Elusive Trope's picture

    The Parable of Our Tribes

    The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased."
    - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

    A Reason to be Grateful.

    Truth be told, I haven't been feeling the Thanksgiving spirit. Looking outward, it is difficult to see past the smoldering economic rubble that fills the lives of so many of those dear to me from my own tenuous outpost on the edge. With no plausible course of action on the horizon to bring appropriately wide-scale relief, let alone begin the rejuvenation and rebuilding that our system and society so desperately need, the call to dig deeper and muster up some tritism to serve as my offering on the alter of national habit has mostly just served to highlight a situation so grave for so many people that reveling in an annual orgy of gluttonous overconsumption simply feels a microcosm for so many of our current ills.

    I'm grateful for Black Friday and cramming more victuals down my gullet in one sitting than many households (including my own) should responsibly make last for an entire week in the current economy! Yay.

    So it was, under a dark cloud, that I wandered the internets ... sampling the fluff-headed bullshit offered up by the pretty people, self-centered fluff from those who's biggest concern in life is sports, and obligatory self-absolving highlights of whatever local groups spent their day providing a once-annual decent meal to ever growing ranks of the poors. Not much of a silver lining in sight. At Fire Dog Lake, Dakine manages to one-up my malaise by missing the point entirely.

    Clearly the time had come to move past Thanksgiving 2011.

    Psst: wanna buy a Grand Bargain?

    On NPR tonight, commentators were saying the $40 billion cut back in the Department of Defense's 2013 budget would require the planning to start soon. Wrong. It will  require immediate actions. Like cancelling contracts next month.

    To save $40 billion in 2013 the DOD has got to not buy things. Those not-bought things will be things that were supposed to have been built either under contracts already signed or ones in the late stages of procurement

    Alastair Cooke explains LBJ to the UK, Nov. 25, 1963,

    in "The 36th President," published in The Guardian.

    Alastair Cooke was The Guardian's "America correspondent" at the time of the assassination. It's amazing to me how much he knew and understood about LBJ's politics at the time, and how he could express it in such a short piece.

    Don't miss the graph where he says:

    Barth's picture

    That Anniversary Again

    No time for something new.  This was written in 2009 and will have to do for today's sad anniversary:

     

     

    Thank you, Patti Murray

    And maybe the whole Supercommittee was a clever TeamObama plan.

    That's contrary to Occam's razor but hey who says Occam's so great?

    The outcome of the whole affair is that Obama holds a slightly better hand today because the Republicans can't abide the idea of a $400Bn DOD cut. 

    Not because of patriotism, forget that. But because DOD cuts means a loss of jobs. And you can believe there'll be jobs in every  key district. Because as presumably nearly every one here  knows, that's how Govt procurement works.

    Followup to: In truly scary news...

    It looks like some agency hit a water supply SCADA. A SCADA, sort of like the ones on planes.

    In this water supply issue, a pump was damaged by turning it on and off an excessive number of times.

    The Ultimate Meaninglessness of Money

    If you haven't already seen today's xkcd cartoon, I hope you will take a few minutes to look at some interesting, some amusing and some appalling information about how much different things cost in 2011 dollars.  

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