Comment

Comment by Neal 4 hours ago

WI's politics, like the country's, has been taken hostage by money.

On Twitter, Koch Group Offers Illinois Residents Free Food, Trips To Wisconsin To Support Governor Scott Walker
By Lee Fang posted May 28th 2012 at 12:40PM

David Koch, co-owner of the Koch Industries petrochemical, manufacturing and commodity speculation fortune, hasn’t been shy about supporting Governor Scott Walker (R-WI), whose controversial union-busting agenda has forced a recall election this summer. Earlier this year, Koch told the Palm Beach Post: “We’re helping him, as we should. We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years. We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”

Indeed, Koch has spent millions through the Republic Governors Association, through a network of attack-ad airing front groups, and financed a set of local Wisconsin think tanks to show support for Walker.

Now, it appears, Koch is spending money even in Illinois to help save Walker. Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Koch brothers, is advertising bus trips with free food for Illinois residents who commit to traveling to Wisconsin to help Walker:

The Republic

Comment by doone yesterday

Romney’s Big Fat Wet Kiss to Keynesian Economics

• By Jonathan Chait

Not that there's anything wrong with that! Keynes' theories remain the essential guide to understanding recessions.

More

Comment by doone on Saturday

"What we thought was that Japan was a cautionary tale. It has turned into Japan as almost a role model. They never had as big a slump as we have had. They managed to have growing per capita income through most of what we call their ‘lost decade’. My running joke is that the group of us who were worried about Japan a dozen years ago ought to go to Tokyo and apologise to the emperor. We’ve done worse than they ever did. When people ask: might we become Japan? I say: I wish we could become Japan," - Paul Krugman, in conversation with Martin Wolf.

Comment by doone on Saturday

LAND OF PROMISE

Whatever their political party, American leaders have generally subscribed to one of two competing economic philosophies. One is a small-government Jeffersonian perspective that abhors bigness and holds that prosperity flows from competition among independent businessmen, farmers and other producers. The other is a Hamiltonian agenda that believes a large, powerful country needs large, powerful organizations. The most important of those organizations is the federal government, which serves as a crucial partner to private enterprise, building roads and schools, guaranteeing loans and financing scientific research in ways that individual businesses would not. Today, of course, Republicans are the Jeffersonians and Democrats are the Hamiltonians. But it hasn’t always been so. The Jeffersonian line includes Andrew Jackson, the leaders of the Confederacy, William Jennings Bryan, Louis Brandeis, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The Hamiltonian line includes George Washington, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, both Roosevelts and Dwight Eisenhower. Michael Lind’s “Land of Promise” uses this divide to offer an ambitious economic history of the United States.

more from David Leonhardt at the NY Times here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:48 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on Friday

A note from David Frum about USA Politics that makes sense to me at least http://www.thedailybeast.com/davidfrum.html

The Democrats seem to have found a way to marginalize the far fringes of their base without completely losing their vote, while the Republicans seem currently to have been overwhelmed and taken over by their far fringes. Assuming you agree with that rather generic statement, why do you think that the GOP has been less successful in holding their middle? And, how do you think they can pull back from this current trend? Or, do you think it's possible at this point for that to happen?

About 20% of America calls itself liberal; about 40% calls itself conservative. That asymmetry explains a great deal of the difference between the parties. The Democrats cannot remotely convince themselves that their base can deliver elections for them. They know they must work to broaden their coalition—and to restrain their base. Their base knows it too.

The bigger Republican base, however, can imagine itself as representing the majority of the country, or anyway, something close to it. All that's needed is one last push! And when you are so close to having everything your own way—why compromise?

That aversion to compromise is intensified by a strange fact of American government. Republicans, the anti-government party, depend on the votes of the elderly, the affluent, and the rural—in other words, the American government's redistributional winners. From the point of view of those voters, any compromise will bring only bad news to them. They like things the way they are now! And—in contrast to more prosperous times in the past—they don't today feel they have anything like the margin of security that would allow them to share.

Comment by doone on Thursday

The Depression Trap

Some economists expected the double-dip recession in Britain to be revised out of existence with more accurate numbers. But the revised figures actually show a sharper contraction in the first three months of this year, with GDP dropping 0.3 percent, the same rate of contraction as Spain.

The current British recession is now much longer than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Does Obama's record look so terrible in comparison?

Comment by Keely on Wednesday

Anti-racist vigilantes. I love it! That's definitely not something you hear about every day.

Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on May 23, 2012 at 8:54am

And now for something completely different.

Comment by doone on May 22, 2012 at 6:32pm

If You Want Another Debt And Spending Binge, Vote GOP

How else to interpret this graph?

One key fact: the author attributes the fiscal year of 2009 to Bush (while assigning the stimulus extras to Obama). Why?

The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress. Like a relief pitcher who comes into the game with the bases loaded, Obama came in with a budget in place that called for spending to increase by hundreds of billions of dollars in response to the worst economic and financial calamity in generations.

Seems reasonable to me, even though Obama did not try to ratchet any of it back. And in the kind of recession of 2009, he was right not to. Here's another way of looking at it:

Remember that Romney has promised to slash all taxes, and massively increase defense spending. Well: you do the math. But if you want another spending binge, just look at the first chart. It explains why a fiscal conservative like me has a hard time backing Republicans. Either they have completely switched their core DNA, or they're bullshitters. And the only way to prove they're not bullshitters is to show us the precise math: how deep must Medicare and Medicaid and core government services be cut to afford more defense spending and more tax cuts?

We await an answer.

Comment by doone on May 22, 2012 at 2:10pm

22 May 2012 01:37 PM

Marijuana Is Not A Joke

Penn Jillette rages against Obama's drug policies:

From the transcript:

Do we believe, even for a second, that if Obama had been busted for marijuana -- under the laws that he condones -- would his life have been better? If Obama had been caught with the marijuana that he says he uses, and 'maybe a little blow'... if he had been busted under his laws, he would have done hard fucking time. And if he had done time in prison, time in federal prison, time for his 'weed' and 'a little blow,' he would not be President of the United States of America. He would not have gone to his fancy-ass college, he would not have sold books that sold millions and millions of copies and made millions and millions of dollars, he would not have a beautiful, smart wife, he would not have a great job. He would have been in fucking prison, and it's not a goddamn joke. People who smoke marijuana must be set free. It is insane to lock people up.

A-fucking-men.

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