Wake Up

The death of Furl.com, which is what I’d been using to provide the headlines that sit at the top of the left column, has finally motivated me to switch to something else. The headlines are now coming via my bookmarks at Delicious.com, with the added benefit of clippings when you hover over a headline, and the front page loading doesn’t crawl along anymore while Furl eventually gets around to working. I think it’s definitely a change for the better, especially since the headlines tend to be the most active part of this blog.

It’s been a stellar week for Obama on the economic front.

Start with his decision to tap Senator Judd Gregg as his new Secretary of Commerce, a guy who voted to abolish the Commerce Department back when Clinton was President.

So, Judd Gregg will become Commerce Secretary, and a Republican will keep Gregg’s seat in the Senate. Gregg’s lifetime Progressive Punch rating of 10.08 out of 100.00, and 6.91 “when the chips are down,” should make him a much needed right-wing champion for the Commerce Department. Gregg should also be a useful voice during cabinet meetings, making sure that President Obama and the other radical liberals there don’t over-reach.

Then there’s the stimulus bill, where, despite Obama’s willingness to give the Republicans all sorts of concessions, there apparently still aren’t enough votes to get it through the Senate. The likely solution? More concessions, because that’s the bipartisan way.

If that comes out of spending and not tax cuts – and since Republicans and moderate Democrats are driving the boat on this one I assume it will – then the bill will be completely unable to accomplish its goals on job creation. It may provide a temporary boost, but won’t do what’s needed to stop the bleeding. The recession will continue for years and maybe slip into depression.

Lastly, there’s news that Obama and his administration are working on a bailout plan that will attempt to keep the shambling corpses of the big banks moving around for a while longer by letting the taxpayers guarantee huge amounts of toxic paper. No pesky nationalization for him, despite the many studies that show that’s the way most likely to actually work.

The Obama Administration, if the Washington Post’s latest report is accurate, is about to embark on a hugely expensive “save the banking industry at all costs” experiment that:

1. Has nothing substantive in common with any of the “deemed as successful” financial crisis programs

2. Has key elements that studies of financial crises have recommended against

3. Consumes considerable resources, thus competing with other, in many cases better, uses of fiscal firepower.

The Obama Administration is as obviously and fully hostage to the interests of the financial services industry as the Bush crowd was. We have no new thinking, no willingness to take measures that are completely defensible (in fact not doing them takes some creative positioning) like wiping out shareholders at obviously dud banks (Citi is top of the list), forcing bondholder haircuts and/or equity swaps, replacing management, writing off and/or restructuring bad loans, and deciding whether and how to reorganize and restructure the company. Instead, the banks are now getting the AIG treatment: every demand is being met, no tough questions asked, no probing of the accounts (or more important, the accounting).

Oh, wait, there were also the newly-announced executive compensation restrictions, which couldn’t be more obvious an attempt to appease the proles even as billions more of their dollars are spent trying to save zombie banks.

I was hardly expecting Obama to govern from the left, given the fact that he’s a center-right technocrat and all, but this is getting ridiculous and it’s only February.

What happens when you make concessions to the Republicans so you can have “bipartisan” support for the stimulus bill? This:

The stimulus package just passed the House, with the billions in corporate tax cuts, without the money to re-sod the National Mall, without the money for family planning for poor people, and without one Republican vote. Without one. Final vote was 244-188 as 11 “Democrats” crossed over.

It’s the exact same result Obama (and Pelosi) could have gotten by pushing a better bill through without any concessions at all.

As the Rude Pundit put it:

We don’t know what Barack Obama actually said to Republican members of Congress in his closed-door meetings with them yesterday regarding his stimulus plan. But we do know one thing for sure: it accomplished nothing. This is the way it’s gonna go, and if you’ve paid attention at all, you know the steps: Obama will concede shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they already got more tax cuts than anyone fucking needs), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they’re gonna get the family planning funding taken out), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more, and then when the vote comes, Republicans will vote against it, saying that no one listened to them and fuck that Obama for lying about bipartisanship. Yet the legislation will have passed in a watered down form from the deep infrastructure and other spending so desperately needed to, you know, create jobs, which will, you know, create taxable income, which will, you know, help actually pay for shit some day.

Obama has done good work so far when he’s been able to do things directly, like starting the process of closing Guantanamo, lifting the gag rule, and reviewing the idea of letting states set emissions standards that are tougher than the federal governmen’s. Apparently though, everything he learned about how to play things in Congress he learned from the same Democrats who failed to get much done for the past two years. Here’s hoping this episode teaches Obama that the Republicans have no interest in compromising, no matter how much the new President wants this to magically be a post-partisan world. He should do what’s right, rather than responding to Republican hissy fits with concessions.

From the L.A. Times [via Informed Comment]

Minutes away from a scheduled phone interview on Israeli TV 10 with newscaster Shlomi Eldar, Aboul Aish called Eldar’s cellphone, screaming and weeping in Arabic and Hebrew. The doctor’s home had been struck by a shell:

“Oh God, oh my God, my daughters have been killed. They’ve killed my children. . . . Could somebody please come to us?”

Via Informed Commment:

CBS News broadcasts an interview with a Norwegian physician on the scene in Gaza.

He says he has seen one military casualty come into the hospital. Of 2500 wounded, 50% are women and children. Doing surgery around the clock. There are injuries you do not want to see– children coming in with open abdomens, with injured legs, we had to amputate both of them. This is a war on the civilian population of Gaza. It is a very young population. They cannot flee. They are fenced in. They are bombing one and a half million people in a cage.

[Warning: Disturbing images]

Glenn Greenwald hits the nail on the head yet again, reminding those who have apparently forgotten the Clinton years (and ignored the Democrats in Congress during the Bush years) that Obama’s whole post-partisan shtick is hardly new:
(more…)

Tomorrow the 2008 Presidential election will finally be over, and I’ll have voted for Barack Obama.

I’m not voting for Obama because I agree with all of his positions on the issues, or because I believe he is truly a progressive candidate, or because I’ve become part of his sometimes disturbing cult of personality. I’m voting for him because he’s not John McCain, a man who apparently wants to do everything G.W. Bush has done, only moreso. Since I’m going down to my local polling station to vote for my Congressman and vote against Connecticut ballot question 1, I’ve decided that I may as well do my part to push up the popular vote for Obama. If he’s elected to office with a landslide victory, and with both the House and the Senate even more firmly in the hands of his fellow Democrats, maybe the next four years will prove once and for all whether or not the Democrats are really capable of keeping even the modest promises they make to the American voters. The pathetic performance by the Democratically controlled Congress over the last two years leads me to believe that the answer will be that they aren’t, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

It’s an unusual year here in Connecticut, as we have two statewide ballot questions to deal with on November 4th.

1. “Shall there be a Constitutional Convention to amend or revise the Constitution of the State?”

This is the important one. Right now the Connecticut State Constitution can only be changed by a yes vote on an amendment in the General Assembly followed by a yes vote from the voters of the state. However, if this ballot question passes there would be a Constitutional Convention during which the delegates (who would be chosen by state legislators) would be able to change the State Constitution without further input from regular voters.

Not surprisingly, a yes vote on this question is supported by organizations that want to ban gay marriage, get rid of abortion rights, add special tax breaks for businesses, and take away rights for workers. All things that would not pass if the citizens of Connecticut were able to vote on them directly during the regular amendment process.

In addition, the Constitutional Convention process will be expensive, and the state government certainly has better things on which to be spending its limited resources.

If you’re a Connecticut voter, vote NO on Question 1, and make sure your friends and family understand what’s truly at stake. On it’s face, the idea of a Constitutional Convention doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but once you understand what’s truly involved it’s easy to see why a no vote is the way to go. Read more at: http://ctvoteno.org

2. “Shall the constitution of the state be amended to permit any person who will have attained the age of eighteen years on or before the day of a regular election to vote in the primary for such regular election?”

In other words, seventeen year olds would be able to vote in the primaries if they would be of legal voting age in time for the general election. This one’s an easy yes, as it certainly makes sense that first-time voters should be able to participate in the primary process as well as the general election.

Here’s what happens when you replace “same-sex marriage” with “interracial marriage” in a pro-H8 ad:

via Wil Wheaton

If you’re a California voter, be sure to go out and vote NO on Proposition 8 tomorrow.

The brilliant Naomi Klein goes into the lion’s den and takes on Friedmanism (and the Wall Street bailout) :

More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.

So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.

It’s a long read, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there.