White House Is Discouraging Senate Dems From Pursuing Opt-Out Public Option
This really is bizarre. I don’t know what to make of it:
Peggy Noonan: Obama “Own’s” Bush’s Failure
Steve’s right — the tangled web of Peggy Noonan’s neural pathways are particularly difficult to navigate this week (italic is Steve’s, quoting Noonan):
Review: “Encirclement: Neo-liberalism Ensnares Democracy”
Here is a great film review of a movie that will likely never run in the U.S. (but from the sounds of it should) by an excellent Vancouver blog, Beyond Robson.
If you are interested in economic theory, social justice, world trade, and financial systems then you will probably be interested in at least some of this film if not the entire thing. I never found myself bored despite the length and heavy content; and I was only lost once to what was going on, which is less of a testament to my intellect and more of a testament to the frankness of the interview subjects.
That all being said, I do have some criticisms of the film.
- The first being that there is definitely room to make the film shorter without losing the flow of the argument or making the film unintelligible.
- The second is that out of the many interview subjects in the film they were all old white guys except for one woman. A little diversity would have been welcomed.
- The third, which builds on the second, is that, even though the topics were often ‘developing countries’ there was no inclusion of interviews of any representatives of those countries (maybe due to budget constrictions, who knows). However, this led the film to have a clinical and cold aspect that saw the topic removed from the actual people it impacts. This left the film feeling too heady and abstract with not much to connect the ideas with real life examples. Since being cold, clinical, and far removed from real life is one of the major criticisms of neo-liberal economic theory, it’s too bad a film criticizing it fell into the same trap.
It’s easy to make a film attacking neo-liberal policies and so I commend Brouillette’s inclusion of interviews with libertarians and neo-liberal champions; however, the last half of the film had a noticeable deficit in balanced interviews. I would have liked to hear more from the other side of the debate in order to see things clearer.
I have no doubt that many parts of this film, if not all, will be shown in university classrooms across the country and beyond.
The Baucus Bill Explained and Deconstructed
Piggybacking on Mike Tedesco’s post about the Health Reform Committee meetings being aired on C-Span now, here is a roundup of analysis and commentary about the health care reform bill that Max Baucus just released from the Senate Finance Committee.
A Common Sense Proposal That Will Never Happen
Andrew Romano of Newsweek looks beyond the argument about whether Obama is lying when he says his health care reform package will not cover illegal immigrants or whether it’s Joe Wilson who is lying when he says it will, and asks “Why shouldn’t we insure illegals?”
Of course, insuring undocumented workers is ethically murky and politically impossible. Some people argue that if we’re hiring illegals to, say, shingle our roofs, we have a moral obligation to care for them if they fall off. But more people, it seems, simply want them out of the country. Given that illegal immigrants have, by definition, broken our laws, it makes sense that large numbers of upstanding citizens oppose any measure that would encourage more foreigners to sneak into America or make their lives easier once they’re here.
The only problem? From a purely economic standpoint, insuring illegal immigrants makes a lot of sense—and not just for them, but for everyone.
Via Memeorandum.
Holding Firm on the Public Option
On Memeorandum right now, there is an avalanche of commentary about the White House’s signaling that it’s ready to cave on the public option. Because there is so much progblog analysis, and because there are so many distinct issues involved with this legislation, I’ve decided to organize the progblog analysis by the talking points.
Note to Rasmussen: There IS No Health Care Reform Bill
So Rasmussen asks “1,000 likely voters” this question: “Which would be better… passage of the bill working its way through Congress or no health care reform passed by Congress this year?” and gets the following response:
35% Passage of the bill working its way through Congress
54% No healthcare reform passed by Congress this year
11% Not sure
One problem: There IS no health care reform bill currently working its way through Congress.
Who Sets the Parameters of the Debate?
Paul Krugman wants to know why some points of view on big issues are all over the place, while others are ignored:
One of the mysteries of the way issues are covered in much of the news media is how certain views get ruled “out of the mainstream” and just don’t get covered — even when many well-informed people hold those views.
The most notorious example was during the buildup to the Iraq war: skepticism about the case for war was treated as a fringe view, even though the evidence being presented by the hawks was flimsy on its face, and the ranks of the skeptics included a number of people with excellent national-security credentials.
But in a way, the implicit censorship on the stimulus debate is even stranger. During the initial discussion of the stimulus, the debate was framed almost entirely as a debate between Obama and those who said the stimulus was too big; the voices of those saying it was too small were largely frozen out. And they still are — if it weren’t for my position on the Times op-ed page, there would be hardly any major outlet for Keynesian concerns.
And here’s the thing: in this case, there isn’t any hidden evidence — you can’t argue that the CIA knows something the rest of us don’t. And the voices calling for stronger stimulus are, may I say, sorta kinda respectable — several Nobelists in the bunch, plus a large fraction of the prominent economists who predicted the housing crash before it happened.
But somehow, the pro-stimulus people are unpersons. Who makes these decisions?
I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s a good question.
Pres. Obama Should Have Listened to Paul Krugman
He had it right all along about the size of the stimulus package:
Closing the Circle
Thanks to Rush Limbaugh, we now know that Gov. Mark Sanford committed adultery because he was in despair over Pres. Obama’s handling of the economic crisis. But what we did not know until today was the answer to this question: What caused the economic crisis?
The Right’s Chrysler Dealership Conspiracy Theory
There is a trend going on in Wingnuttia that I have been noticing for months now: Right-wingers are engaging in exactly the same behaviors that they condemned or mocked the left for doing when George W. Bush was president. Attacking a sitting president’s foreign policy in a time of war? Check. Helping the enemy by showing that Americans are divided and disunited? Check. Politicizing national security? Check. Ignoring or not taking seriously laws that forbid public officials from revealing classified information? Check.
To these, we can now add: tinfoil hat conspiracy theorizing:
A whole lot of right-wing blogs are worked up today over a report about the political affiliations of Chrysler dealers who’ve been shut down.
Evidence appears to be mounting that the Obama administration has systematically targeted for closing Chrysler dealers who contributed to Repubicans [sic]. What started earlier this week as mainly a rumbling on the Right side of the Blogosphere has gathered some steam today with revelations that among the dealers being shut down are a GOP congressman and closing of competitors to a dealership chain partly owned by former Clinton White House chief of staff Mack McLarty.
The basic issue raised here is this: How do we account for the fact millions of dollars were contributed to GOP candidates by Chrysler who are being closed by the government, but only one has been found so far that is being closed that contributed to the Obama campaign in 2008?
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), who has a dealership that will close, called this “an outrage.” A variety of far-right bloggers chose more colorful language.
And what is the “evidence” of a partisan conspiracy that “appears to be mounting”? As you might have guessed, like most conservative theories, this one is extremely thin. The argument, in a nutshell, is that Chrysler dealers owned by a variety of Republican donors are being closed, the government is now involved with Chrysler’s restructuring, so that points to “evidence” that the Obama administration is deliberately punishing GOP contributors.
There’s one big problem with this reasoning, says Nate Silver (linked from Steve’s post):
… Nobody has bothered to look up data for the control group: the list of dealerships which aren’t being closed. It turns out that all car dealers are, in fact, overwhelmingly more likely to donate to Republicans than to Democrats — not just those who are having their doors closed.
Duh:
It shouldn’t be any surprise, by the way, that car dealers tend to vote — and donate — Republican. They are usually male, they are usually older (you don’t own an auto dealership in your 20s), and they have obvious reasons to be pro-business, pro-tax cut, anti-green energy and anti-labor. Car dealerships need quite a bit of space and will tend to be located in suburban or rural areas. I can’t think of too many other occupations that are more natural fits for the Republican Party. …
S.C.: Massive Teacher Layoffs and School Budget Cuts Averted (for Now)
Gov. Mark Sanford blinked:
Gov. Mark Sanford will comply with a midnight Friday stimulus deadline and become the last governor in the nation to seek millions of dollars in federal economic-recovery funds for his state, aides said late Thursday.
Sanford will continue contesting $700 million in education and law enforcement money for South Carolina, but his 11th-hour move to meet the deadline buys time for schools fearing mass teacher layoffs and draconian cuts.
Sanford’s month-long fight over stimulus money placed South Carolina in the national spotlight and put him at loggerheads with President Barack Obama.
“Tomorrow the governor is going to send the (Section) 1607 certification for everything except the stabilization funds,” Sanford’s spokesman, Joel Sawyer, said Thursday evening. “The governor will apply for that (additional) money if the General Assembly is willing to compromise and pay down some debt with it.”
Obama has twice rejected Sanford’s written requests to use $700 million in State Fiscal Stabilization Fund money to pay off state government debt instead of its stated use to help school districts retain teachers and modernize old schools or build new ones.
Unemployment and Unions
Chris Kromm at Facing South points out something interesting about the latest job figures (emphasis in original):
The GOP Budget Plan Does Not Pass the Laugh Test
Paul Ryan, ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, sets forth his party’s “alternative budget” plan, on the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal (where else?).
Depression (Both Kinds) Is a Government Conspiracy
McClatchy picks up an article from the Fresno Bee, about Mendota, California, where unemployment is 41% and people don’t have $1 to pay for a blouse in a thrift shop:
You’re a Loon, Ms. Bachmann, You Know That, Don’t You?
The Madwoman of Minnesota is flaunting her madness again:
The madness continues as Michele Bachmann introduces legislation that “would bar the dollar from being replaced by any foreign currency.”
What the Chinese were proposing, of course, was to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. I would take the view that a move away from near-exclusive reliance on the dollar is probably inevitable irrespective of what we do. But whether or not you agree with me about that, this isn’t something congress can ban—it’s a decision by foreign countries about what they do with their reserves.
This all got started when Bachmann went ballistic after China announced a proposal to replace the U.S. dollar as the preferred global currency, and Tim Geithner initially appeared to be suggesting it was a good idea:
The thing is, though, is that Geithner has already clarified that he doesn’t foresee a change in the dollar’s centrality. And Obama himself flatly declared that he’s not open to such a change at his presser the other night.
Undeterred, Bachmann has even “introduced a resolution that would bar the dollar from being replaced by any foreign currency,” as her release puts it.
It appears Bachmann may have thought that Geithner was talking about being open to a change in U.S. currency, rather than the world’s reserve currency, which is what the China proposal was about. And as Matthew Yglesias notes, foreign countries partake in decisions about the world reserve currency.
So is Bachmann proposing legislation that would ban foreign countries from doing this? Can Congress really legislate the behavior of foreign countries?
No, it turns out. I checked in with Bachmann’s spokesperson, Debbee Keller, who reassures that this is only about American currency.
“She’s talking about the United States,” Keller said. “This legislation would ensure that the U.S. dollar remain the currency of the United States.” Of course, no one had been discussing any change in U.S. currency in the first place….
Ms. Bachmann Goes to Washington (She’s No James Stewart)
Michelle Bachmann discovers the Constitution. It’s not pretty.
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