Saturday, October 22, 2011

Stim This


Do you like stimulus packages? I know that you do. Here are two fun facts:
1. The stimulus worked
2. The stimulus wasn't nearly enough

Now it's my recollection that Krugman has been saying this for years. But this is the winning quote:
Everyone always thinks this time will be different: The bubble won’t burst because this time, tulips won’t lose their value, or housing is a unique asset, or sophisticated derivatives really do eliminate risk. Once it bursts, they think their economy will quickly clamber out of the ditch because their workers are smarter and tougher, and their policymakers are wiser and more experienced. But it almost never does.
"Tulips won't lose their value."
"Nobody's making more real estate!"

Friday, October 21, 2011

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Brilliance

The Barack Obama campaign is amazing. They are using the media circus of the GOP against the GOP -- this is something that I don't think many national Democrats have ever done before. The GOP Debate Watch makes a drinking game out of the platitudes and inanities that come out of the mouths of the Republicans.
Oh man. That is a very smart bit of social networking right there.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

An Anarchist Conspiracy to Disrupt Global Markets

So here's the thing. In the post - 9/11 - world the authorities simply can't call protestors "terrorists". They used to, boy, let me tell you. But they just can't anymore. Nobody will buy it. They'll try almost anything else though.

And the other thing I appreciate is the Occupy Wall Street not being all like "Obama is exactly the same as the Republicans" which was basically the message the "Millionaires for Bush and Gore" were all about c2000.

The "left" in America are often all too ready to jump on the Democrats because they're "exactly the same" as the Republicans. Now maybe that level of BS has been reduced because we saw just how bad things got under Bush II ten years ago when the left was saying that so now they think that yeah, OK, maybe the Democrats aren't as bad as Republicans. I dunno.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Mea Culpas

So the New York Times takes a bit of responsibility for the sheer malarky level of hoo-ha they spouted encouraging the US to get into the Iraq invasion.

Keller apologizes. But that's not without caveats:
We forget how broad the consensus was that Hussein was hiding the kind of weapons that could rain holocaust on a neighbor or be delivered to America by proxy.
Uh. No we don't. Even freakin' Newsweek could smell the bullshit on Colin Powell's breath when he tried to convince the UN that Hussein had chemical-weapons trailers that were roaming around the desert.

And you know what? This is total crap:
If there was only a 50-50 chance that Hussein was close to possessing a nuclear weapon, could we live with that? One in five? One in 10? 
 We were aware with 100% assuredness that Iraq had no nuclear program at all before we invaded. You didn't need some sort of high-security clearance to know Iraq no longer had a nuclear program, you only had to ask the scientists who had defected.
Lots of people did. As as much as they hated Saddam Hussein and wanted the US to invade Iraq, they would tell you there was no nuclear program in the years leading up to the invasion.
Whether it was wrong to support the invasion at the time is a harder call. I could not foresee that we would mishandle the war so badly, but I could see that there was no clear plan for — and at the highest levels, a shameful smugness about — what came after the invasion.  
What? Everybody who had any sense at all at the time realized that. In fact, the whole argument about news agencies vs those political bloggers (ahem) came about because so many blogs called the whole thing right -- right down the line. It was completely eminently clear that there was no plan for after the invasion. The whole military point the Administration was trying to make was that we get in, topple the government, and get out. How could you not remember that?
And then to whine that people don't trust you anymore?
“Whatever we wrote — no matter what it was, and no matter how well documented — was dismissed as Bush propaganda,” added Dexter Filkins, who covered the battlefields and politics of Afghanistan and Iraq for The Times...
Do you remember that the New York Times had an actual mole for the Bush Administration as a member of its reporting staff?