US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

but its not that brooks and friedman and (RIP) broder hate policy or numbers! they hate conflict. friedman in particular would love a country run by a council of technocratic geeks

actually, i stand corrected. max is 1,000% correct about brooks/friedman/broder. this troika isn't particularly GOOD about discussing policy in any meaningful way IMHO, but that is different than saying they are not concerned with policy or anti-technocrat.

anyway, we're all morbz now. at least we know that next year's "lesser evil" candidate will be as much Bob Dole circa 1996 as Jimmy Carter (a comparison i've made myself since like the moment Barry threw his hat in the presidential ring several years ago).

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/157759-schumer-pressures-boehner-on-oil-subsidies-

So now the White House and Schumer have finally decided that ending oil company subsidies is a good idea? It is, but they should have tried earlier and I doubt they will now properly keep up the pressure on Boehner to do so (Republicans consider ending subsidies to be a tax increase) as it also makes political sense.

Bam is still an even lesser Bill Clinton to me, w/out a phony Prosperity Bubble to protect him

goddamn phony prosperity

question: were there trillion-dollar federal deficits during Reagan's presidency or not?

Several hundred billion -- first ever.

Which was fine: we ended the Cold War w/out firing a shot, made America strong, and gave millionaires tax breaks.

2.85 trillion by the end of his presidency

Adjusted, that's about 5.1 trillion

my mom wz watching lol Glenn Beck and he was graphing the national debt as a straight and level line that elevated slightly w/ Clinton, dipped pretty low w/ Dubya, and then divebombed w/ Obama...

wait what

why would Glenn Beck be arguing that the national debt went DOWN under Obama

watching it again, there's a slight dip to indicate that Reagan brought national deficit into 200 billion territory

xp my bad Shakes, the graph was surplus/deficit...mainly hung around zero until Reagan who had a 200B deficit, Clinton pulled it back into the surplus etc etc

his point seemed to be: remember when Dubya's deficit was bad; that's nothing compared to what Obama has done

(along w/ points about banks having literal boatloads of TARP money in reserve and the hyperinflation that releasing it would cause)

sorry about that

meanwhile, vermont is set to ratify the nation's first single-payer health care system

http://www.wcax.com/story/14518224/vt-senate-approves-single-payer-plan

awesome

so glad the 50 people who live in Vermont finally have healthcare

man when is California gonna fall into the ocean already?

(<3 shakey!)

Overall, he cut the rate of growth in Fed spending from 4% to 2.5% and, to his credit, he reduced the early deficits as percentages of GDP from 6% of GDP in 1983 to 3.2% of GDP in 1987. If you don't remember the early years of his presidency, allow to point out that they were very bad; almost like the last several years bad. Unemployment was near 10% but that can be attributed in great part to the Fed keeping interest rates very high, the highest ever in modern markets, peaking at around 20% in 1980, so the beginning of the Reagan recession was really during the end of the Carter presidency.

The salient thing about Reagan overall is that he only cut spending by 1%; he basically transferred about 5% of annual public expenditures to the military while drastically cutting the maximum marginal tax rates and changing the emphasis on taxation from high earners and capital gains and onto payroll and new investment. It's a very mixed bag from the point of view of praxis. He treated business income more fairly across the board, ridding the code of many preferences for certain kinds of investments but raising it overall. His record on deregulation is overstated too; much of that was begun under Carter.

The marriage of military hawkishness along with classical economic theories, like the alliance of (classic) economic liberals and social conservatives in the party today, is sometimes a bit odd. Reagan wasn't proud of making the US a debtor nation but he was justly proud of his record wrt the USSR/Eastern Bloc and its economic and political collapse.

630 K ppl in Vermont, Shakey

Unemployment was near 10% but that can be attributed in great part to the Fed keeping interest rates very high, the highest ever in modern markets, peaking at around 20% in 1980, so the beginning of the Reagan recession was really during the end of the Carter presidency.

Paul Volcker warned Reagan in '81 that the short term economic outlook would be very bad; he would be keeping a choke hold on interest rates until the economy was starved.

And he did kill inflation

good summaries of the early 80s economics-wise. kinda sad to think that we've gotten so low that reagan and tip o'neill's early 80s shenanigans look like up to us in 2011.

Panetta to Defense, Petraeus to CIA.

But the White House press secretary has been busy for the last 2 days dealing with questions on something else:

For the second consecutive day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was peppered with questions about President Obama's birth certificate. It wasn't just some fringe reporter who worked his way into the briefing room -- the questions came from CNN's White House correspondent. Washington Monthly

oh ffs Obama/White House

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkbco2MFYh1qa9bmvo1_500.jpg

The phrase "live birth" always makes me think of snakes. Which is funny, because most snakes DON'T give live birth, they lay eggs, but I must have seen a nature program of a boa giving birth or something, and they made a big deal of it.

^^^ hardy har (re "full name of father")

weak. shoulda waited til summer 2012.

looks fake

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkbdxzb69h1qa9bmvo1_500.jpg

yr killin me

via twitter

GeneHogan
If Obama really wanted to convince the conservatives, he should have attached the birth certificate to a chain email written in all caps.

LOLOL

also, the thought of a 5 year old bin laden impregnating hippie grad student is lols

http://sheikyermami.com/wp-content/uploads/obamabirth.jpg

the 2 years of the Obamaniac Admin proves to me that he is a hardcore Alinsky leftist, but an incompetent leftist, with no knowledge of basic business or financial concepts, and without any leadership or management abilities. Separate and apart from that is my suspicion that he is a literary and political fraud who fabricated portions of his autobiographies and political resume. If my suspicions are correct, we should all know that before the next election. Simple really.

"the very beating heart of kenya" always gets me.

petraeus at CIA is pretty weird

panetta as secdef seems equally strange. the guy was a chief of staff, a budget dude... don't you want some kind of rockribbed west pointish type dude as secdef?

Well, look at Cap Weinberger.

yeah and you DON'T want a guy like that at CIA, is what people always say. damn spooks hate the military, or something...

xp

I wish Sydney Pollack was still alive so that Oliver Stone could cast him as Panetta in Bam: The Movie.

yeah and you DON'T want a guy like that at CIA, is what people always say

yeah

http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/1125/casparii1zk.jpg

^^^^ hoping someone would post this

really weird post alfred

the one that ends in 'simple really'