SOTU 2010

One of the highlights:

Our most urgent task upon taking office was to shore up the same banks that helped cause this crisis. It was not easy to do. And if there's one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, it's that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal.

But when I ran for President, I promised I wouldn't just do what was popular -- I would do what was necessary. And if we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system, unemployment might be double what it is today. More businesses would certainly have closed. More homes would have surely been lost.

So I supported the last administration's efforts to create the financial rescue program. And when we took the program over, we made it more transparent and accountable. As a result, the markets are now stabilized, and we have recovered most of the money we spent on the banks.

To recover the rest, I have proposed a fee on the biggest banks. I know Wall Street isn't keen on this idea, but if these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again, they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need.

As we stabilized the financial system, we also took steps to get our economy growing again, save as many jobs as possible, and help Americans who had become unemployed.
That's why we extended or increased unemployment benefits for more than 18 million Americans; made health insurance 65% cheaper for families who get their coverage through COBRA; and passed 25 different tax cuts.

Let me repeat: we cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95% of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college. As a result, millions of Americans had more to spend on gas, and food, and other necessities, all of which helped businesses keep more workers. And we haven't raised income taxes by a single dime on a single person. Not a single dime.

Tricksterism And Thuggery

There was a lot of noise when a kid named James O'Keefe came into the light with his "ACORN sting" - he's the guy who went into a Baltimore ACORN office, posing as a pimp and asking questions about how to evade taxes - but of course, there was a lot less noise about how the video from his hidden camera had been creatively edited to make ACORN look as bad as Cluster Fox needs them to look.

(BTW: ACORN has some big problems and it's never a bad idea to bust people doing wrong things; I'm just saying we need to follow our own rules - Due Process keeps us all free.)

Now we have this from NOLA.com.

We should make a point of watching who steps up to take care of this guy.  In one way, he's the Henry Hill of conservatives - willing to do anything to get in good with the mob boss.  I wonder though, about the publicity.  If he gets too famous, it should be harder for him to pull off his tricks in future.  So what's he really up to?

Get Some Balls

What He Said

No particular reason for this right now - it's just good to remind ourselves that here in The US, the process is as important as the goal.

From Citizens To Prisoners

Democracy in America is a Useful Fiction - by Chris Hedges

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury.

Get In The Fight

Knowledge

It's estimated that medical knowledge, for example, doubles every seven years, and scientific knowledge doubles every twenty years.

The total written knowledge in the world is said to have doubled between 1450 and 1750, and then to have doubled again between 1750 and 1900. 

Between 1900 and 1950, human knowledge doubled once more, and then again from 1950 to 1975.

Now, it is believed to double every 900 days. By the year 2020, global knowledge is predicted to double every 72 days.

plain truth = schooling never ends; education is never finished.

God Love The Onion

Final Season Of 'Lost' Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever

Never A Bad Time To Laugh

You have to take everything seriously enough to make the effort necessary for finding the humor in it.  Comedy is some serious shit.

From The Spectator, here's the first of what i hope is just the beginning of our recovery from the depths of terror.

Redneck Love Songs

"If Love Were Oil, I'd Be A Quart Low"

"I Got In At 2 With A 10, And Woke Up At 10 With A 2"

"At The Gas Station Of Love, I Got The Self-Service Pump"

The New Paradigm

A couple of posts at The Baseline Scenario point to some real-world examples of a creepy feeling I've had for several years - that the point of the exercise is no longer to honor your word and to deliver at least what you promised, but to make the customer force you to hold up your end of the bargain.  It's like every business is adopting the Used Car Lot model.

James Kwak tags it as "Design or Incompetence", and has begun to lean toward Design.  ie: they do it on purpose.  The banks or the mortgage companies or whoever make the contract or the offer of service as complicated and opaque as possible in order to suck us in and then fuck us over. (first post - second post)

Most of us being 'hassle-averse', we're not inclined to press a point even when we think we're not being treated quite right.  Applying this assumption to a business rolling out a new offer (using rough round numbers here):  I'm trying to pull in $1M in new revenue, with a Net Target of $300K.  I'm spending $500K getting it out to the public, and I'm offering discounts/rebates totaling another $200K.  Then I sit back and watch the numbers as the calls come into Customer Service.  But what if I make a coupla relatively simple adjustments?  First, the offer of discounts is big and splashy, but I add several lines of disclaimers and eligibility requirements in very complex and jargony language.  Then I take some steps to ensure that I'm weeding out the new prospects who are likely to insist on getting the good deal they think I'm offering (putting them on hold when they call in works wonders - but any hurdle will do); plus, I build in a way for the Cust Svc reps to get a little bonus by cutting into the discounts, or upselling, or counterselling, or whatever.  It could also be as simple as not telling the reps what the offer actually requires the customer to do to be eligible for the deal.  It's not quite Bait-n-Switch, but it's really close.

The point is that we're going way off into the weeds of Caveat Emptor.  Companies that can make it obvious that they're working hard to earn back the trust of their customers will lead the economy back to solid footing.  Without that trust and confidence, we don't have an economy.

The Crystal Ball

Fixing healthcare will not fix the economy.  But if you don't fix healthcare, you can't fix the economy.

Here's a nice peek into the future of the debt from a CBO report put out a year before Obama took office.

We Are So Fucked(?)

SCOTUS blows up a hundred years of 'settled law', and there's an awful lot of sturm und drang about the end of democracy as we know it.  (BTW: I'm gettin' a little tired of Olbermann - seems like he's in full Drama Queen mode every 3rd day about some damned thing or another)  I don't wanna lose my shit just because something scary is happening.

That said, I think the decision is pretty fucked up.  It allows any given company's Executive Suite to dedicate a portion of every employee's work to a political agenda item that will likely NOT be in the best interests of those individual employees, even as it works to benefit that company.  It concentrates way too much power in way too few hands.

None of this is certain, of course, but I don't wanna be all Zen Master-y, and just say, "we'll see", because there's a very real potential threat here.  The first priority of power is to perpetuate itself.  And since we haven't seen anybody resembling Geo Washington lately, I'm not expecting to see anybody walking away from power willingly.  Not now.  Every tin-plated martinet now has even greater incentive to grab whatever he can.  The real kicker is how ironic the whole thing becomes in light of two things: 1) proponents of the decision and of big corporate power are likely to claim status as acolytes of Ayn Rand.  2) Ayn Rand detested the weakness of people who tried to use governmental influence to further the interests of a company, and addressed it well in Atlas Shrugged in the section called 'The Politics of Pull'.

Maybe we'll get a better idea of how it plays out by watching to see who moves first &/or most aggressively &/or most stealthily, &/or whatever.

I think, if he wants to get back on top of things, Obama needs to pick a fight over this - we saw some of that yesterday(?) when he took some rhetorical shots at Wall Street Bankers and Special Interests.  His SOTU next week is the perfect platform to launch a brand new campaign.  Big opportunity; big risk; big potential payoff.

This post is rambling around the bend.

Weird Science

Via True/Slant
Researchers have turned to a slime mold for tips on work efficiency. While that’s just another day at the office for me, the researchers seem impressed.

They say Physarum Polycephalum built a replica of the Tokyo train system in 26 hours that’s just about as efficient, reliable and “expensive” to run as the real thing. It could be the ultimate outsourcing strategy, but Japanese and British scientists see another opportunity.

Government By Minority

From James Fallows:

Counting the new Republican Senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts, the 41 Republicans in the Senate come from states representing just over 36.5 percent of the total US population. The 59 others (Democratic plus 2 Independent) represent just under 63.5 percent. (Taking 2009 state populations from here. If you count up the totals and split a state's population when it has a spit delegation, you end up with about 112.3 million Republican, 194.7 million Democratic + Indep. Before Brown's election, it was about 198 million Democratic + Ind, 109 million Republican.)

Let's round the figures to 63/37 and apply them to the health care debate. Senators representing 63 percent of the public vote for the bill; those representing 37 percent vote against it. The bill fails.

Quote For Today

Sully posted this one today.
"Much indeed to be regretted, party disputes are now carried to such a length, and truth is so enveloped in mist and false representation, that it is extremely difficult to know through what channel to seek it. This difficulty to one, who is of no party, and whose sole wish is to pursue with undeviating steps a path which would lead this country to respectability, wealth, and happiness, is exceedingly to be lamented. But such, for wise purposes, it is presumed, is the turbulence of human passions in party disputes, when victory more than truth is the palm contended for," - George Washington, in a letter to Timothy Pickering, July 27, 1795.

Holy Warriors, Batman!

Washington's Blog


TUESDAY, JANUARY 19, 2010
U.S. Military Officially Endorses Crusade

I've written numerous posts showing that the war on terror is really a religious crusade, at least for troops on the ground (I've pointed out that the officials ordering the troops into battle may not be religious at all, but may be faking religious sentiment to rally the troops).

Now, an official Pentagon spokesman is making it clear that the U.S. military endorses the crusade. As Raw Story notes:

A Pentagon spokesman says there is nothing wrong or illegal with the armed forces using rifle sights inscribed with references to biblical passages.

Air Force Maj. John Redfield, a spokesman for US Central Command, said the sights from Michigan-based Trijicon -- which are now the target of controversy following news reports earlier this week -- "don't violate the [military] ban on proselytizing because there's no effort to distribute the equipment beyond the US troops who use them," the Associated Press reports.

"This situation is not unlike the situation with US currency," Maj. Redfield said. "Are we going to stop using money because the bills have 'In God We Trust' on them? As long as the sights meet the combat needs of troops, they'll continue to be used."

Meanwhile, a lawyer and former training officer for the US Army Reserves says that any attempt by the US government to cancel its contracts with an arms supplier that enscribes biblical references on its rifle sights would be "discrimination."

Play any word games you like ... the truth is that the military has just officiallyacknowledged that it endorses a crusade.

Nice work creating new terrorists, you morons.

Ten Years Of Hell

I posted earlier about the collapse of the USSR, and how the defensive spin was that "Communism didn't fail; the Soviet leaders just weren't true to the core tenets of Real Communism."

We've been hearing the same crap from the Bush apologists (we need more conservatism because Bush wasn't really a conservative and didn't stick to conservative values), and now we're hearing it from the Free Market purists.

From Dan Geldon at The Baseline Scenario:
Over the past year, there has been much discussion about how the financial crisis exposed weaknesses in free-market theory. What has attracted less discussion is the extent to which the high priests of free-market theory themselves destroyed meaningful contracts and other bedrocks of functioning markets and, in the process, created the conditions for the theory’s weaknesses to emerge.

The story begins before Wall Street’s capture of Washington in the 1980s and 1990s and the deregulatory push that began around the same time. In many ways, it started in 1944.

In that year, Frederich von Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, putting forward many of the ideas behind the pro-market, anti-regulatory economic view that swept through America and the rest of the world in the decades that followed. Von Hayek’s basic argument was that freedom to contract and to conduct business without government meddling allowed for free choice, allocated resources efficiently, facilitated economic growth, and made us all a little richer. Milton Friedman built on Hayek, creating an ideology that resonated with conservatives and ultimately became the prevailing economic view in Washington.

With apologies to Mr Gandhi: "What do I think of free market capitalism? I think it's a good idea - you should try it."

We've evolved an economic system that doesn't actually produce anything. The point of the exercise in business now is all about Acquisition and Disposal of Assets, with the goal of Equity Extraction by way of Debt Leveraging - whatever the current lingo is. It's become a zero sum game of 'I can't win if you don't lose'. The system can't sustain itself because eventually it has to eat itself.

Senator Brown From Massachusetts

Hey, Democraps.  Coakley lost because people got the impression she felt entitled to the position; and because people tho't the Mass Dems gave her the nomination because they felt entitled to public support for any stupid fucking thing they do; and because people are gettin' a little pissed off, thinking they haven't seen much of the change they were promised when they voted for Obama, so they're still voting for change.

Yes, there was an awful lot to do. And yes, political headwinds have been fierce.  But while Obama has managed to get some good things done, his messaging hasn't hammered any of it home, and his supporting players in Congress have looked weak and timid.  Also, he's seen as being way too cozy with Wall Street assholes and K Street pimps - basically, it seems like nobody's really sure whose side he's on.

It's a little weird, but it's like people got so used to being spoon fed Republican Brand Bullshit for so long, they're exhibiting some kind of withdrawal symptoms.  I guess they all voted for Bush because he helped 'em believe the issues were cut-and-dried, and all you needed was some common sense and a firm commitment to a few simple principles - that we don't really have to do any thinking or any real work to make decisions about how we govern ourselves.

The system is in a major state of flux again.  I think what's really going on here is that we're trying to make some decisions on what exactly we want this little experiment in self-government to look like.  I guess you could say that's always what's going on in a democracy, but I think there are times when we really have to concentrate on it.  Like now.

One quick tho't:  democracy stops working when people stop participating.

We Are So Fucked

Bill Moyers Journal