Today's Krugman

He's been on a bit of a hot streak lately - except maybe for his choice in music.

He makes a great point in this post, not only about Nate Silver's 538 thing, but about the GOP's  Bubble of Alternative Reality.

This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.

From the comments:

And:

Gettin' It Done - 7

"Saved the US car business" may be overblown hyperbole and graceful understatement all at once.  Government shouldn't be in the business of propping up failing enterprises.  There is such a thing as a life cycle, and it applies to companies and to whole industry sectors as well as to people (also to countries, but that's a different post).  So I'm always worried that throwing tax dollars at a business problem is just postponing the inevitable.  It's a really tough call, but sometimes you have to pull the plug.  All that said, if you don't have the capability to produce stuff that you can sell, then you don't have an economy.  Lose your manufacturing base and you're on your way to losing it all.  Not understanding that concept was one of the hugest mistakes we made in the 80s and 90s.

I'll admit right now that I was all for Free Trade agreements like NAFTA,et al - thinking it'd be good for us if American businesses had to compete just like everybody else; if we couldn't build better refrigerators than the Japanese, then we should get our butts kicked - damned unions blah blah blah.

I was wrong.  Not so much wrong about Free Trade - if you do it right, then the whole free trade thing really is a good idea.  But that's just it: "if you do it right".  About all we've managed to accomplish is to turn Ross Perot into a prophetic messenger - and you start to get an idea of the monumental-ness of your fuck up when that happens.

So the very stark difference in the basic instincts of Obama vs Romney when it came to making a decision on what to do about Detroit tells me most of what I need to know about these guys.  Obama sees what's happened and understands that we have to do some things aimed at leveling the field so we're not always playing up hill.  Romney sounds like he's stuck in 1989, still thinking (like I did) it doesn't matter if we don't make anything here anymore, because the workforce will just retrain itself and become managers; or everybody'll borrow some money and go back to school; or they'll finally open that shoe store their mom always wanted them to try.

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry: In 2009, injected $62 billion in federal money (on top of $13.4 billion in loans from the Bush administration) into ailing GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added more than 100,000 jobs. In 2011, the Big Three automakers all gained market share for the first time in two decades. The government expects to lose $16 billion of its investment, less if the price of the GM stock it still owns increases.

I still don't like bailouts, but you have to know how to make the better choice from a very short list of shitty options.

The Mustache Of Understanding

Tom Friedman used to be a pretty decent writer who had decent ideas and a decent regard for what goes in the world.  The only decent thing about him these days is that he's still a decent writer - or more accurately: he can put words together in a way that makes a point and makes it fairly easy to understand the point.

Here he is trying desperately to keep us from realizing how culpable he is for having contributed mightily to the steaming pile of crap that is Centrism, while not working nearly hard enough to keep the Repubs from losing their minds completely.

HARD-LINE conservatives have gone to new extremes lately in opposing abortion. Last week, Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party-backed Republican Senate candidate in Indiana, declared during a debate that he was against abortion even in the event of rape because after much thought he “came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” That came on the heels of the Tea Party-backed Republican Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois saying after a recent debate that he opposed abortion even in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, because “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” in which a woman would not survive without an abortion. “Health of the mother has become a tool for abortions anytime, for any reason,” Walsh said.

He goes on with some pretty cookie-cutter verbiage (that most middle schoolers could come up with), pointing out that wearing the "pro-life" badge is inconsistent with a position that isn't also in favor of gun control (eg), etc.

So it's nice to see Friedman with his head somewhere other than up his own ass for a change, but I have to wonder why he waited until now to start writing about the extreme positions being staked out by an increasing number of Repubs.

Maybe he finally senses a certain change in how most Americans think about such things. Or maybe he senses a certain change in how more and more of his readers are getting hip to the fact that he's a billionaire know-nothing who tripped and fell into a river of cash, and who now needs us to forget he's actually a douche bag shill for Corporate Media.

I dunno - but he's doing nothing so much as he's playing the very old game of "discovering" an issue and standing in front of it, hoping we'll be fooled into thinking he's leading us in some way.

Fuck him - don't get stupid and hit him; and don't throw shit at his head, but if you see this dick in a bar somewhere, do us all a solid and spit in his drink.

A Quickie

Undecided Voters get a lot of attention, and I think the spanking they're finally taking is richly deserved and long overdue.



I think I can (mostly) conclude that The Undecided Voter is trying to rationalize his apathy by hiding behind this phony impartiality.  Being "undecided" becomes a way to deflect criticism for staying deliberately ignorant of practically the whole process.  And the more we kiss their asses trying to move them one way or another, the more Undecided Voters we create - because we end up rewarding this childish behavior.

In the end, Undecided is just another form of Both Sides Do It / They're All The Same etc.

It's bullshit and they need to be called out for it.

This Is How Ya Do It

Whatever it is you're trying to do, you get your ass out there and you sell the fuckin' thing.



"I refuse to see us live on the accomplishments of another generation."

"The business of government is the business of the people, and the people are right here."

Gettin' It Done - 8

Personally, I kinda like having an economy that works; even one that's not great, but still manages to limp along at a 1 or 2% growth rate, in spite of all the best efforts of a certain opposition party in Washington.

8. Recapitalized Banks: In the midst of financial crisis, approved controversial Treasury Department plan to lure private capital into the country’s largest banks via “stress tests” of their balance sheets and a public-private fund to buy their “toxic” assets. Got banks back on their feet at essentially zero cost to the government.

One of the biggest problems we have right now is that Obama hasn't gone after many of the worst offenders - the banksters (et al) who helped blow up the mortgage bubble that blew up the financial system.

It would be monument-worthy badass if the Prez took on Wall Street and beat 'em into submission - ala JFK in '61 against Big Steel, and again in '62 when he actually put a few Big Utilities execs in jail on charges of collusion and price-fixing.

It's a much different time now, of course, so Obama has to do things in a way that doesn't feed the anti-gubmint mindset of the rubes.  Here's hopin'.

Today's Pix

Gettin' It Done - 9

It may well be impossible to create the "perfect union", but our founding documents require us to keep trying.  And until we all have the full compliment of rights and privileges due us under the law, we're all 2nd class citizens in one way or another.  

9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: Ended 1990s-era restriction and formalized new policy allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military for the first time.

In Bed With Willard

Bill Maher makes the point about electing a lot more than just Mitt Romney.  Put this guy in the White House, and every bumpkin with a bus ticket and a bad idea will be headed back to Washington to collect on what he thinks Willard owes him for turning out the Radical Right Voters.  Do you really want Grover Norquist, Bryan Fisher and Sheldon Adelson picking a replacement for Ruth Bader-Ginsberg?

Tweets Are The New Bumper Sticker

...or graffiti or t-shirts or whatever.