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Sarah Palin has hit a low point in polling, The Washington Post reports in its latest survey, but the Post also brings some good news for the Tea Party movement as it heads into the 2010 elections: it’s perhaps not as far outside mainstream opinion as it’s made out to be.
Palin’s favorability is at its lowest point since the 2008 campaign, according to the Post/ABC’s numbers: 37% view her favorably, while 55% view her unfavorably (in November the Post put her at 43% favorable, 52% unfavorable), and only 26% of respondents said she was qualified to be president (a drop of 12 percentage points since November), vs. 71% who said she’s not.
In other words, Sarah Palin is neither lucky nor savvy. She’s as unpopular as she’s ever been.
But reality means nothing to the Village. They’ve all decided this week that it would be exciting to have Ayatollah Starbursts as our next president and they have to make the narrative stick.
Rubbers, not bankers, caused the financial crisis.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™*For more penis, go read Flaccid Hollywood’s John Nolte who apparently thinks that teabagging and cocksucking are the same thing — no, John, the cock and the balls are different things — and who says he is sorry that Roger Ebert’s treatment for thyroid cancer, which left Ebert unable to speak, didn’t also leave him unable to type.
Alan Grayson shows us how Democrats could be kicking ass if they weren’t a-skeered of having their Wall Street campaign cash dry up:
I also think Grayson is correct to frame this issue outside of the typical “left-right” spectrum our media uses. This is instead about our economic survival.
Glenn Greenwald is outraged that I dared criticize in a bloggingheads discussion Markos Moulitsas’s forthcoming book “American Taliban,” which apparently will “argue” that conservatives share the same agenda as Islamic radicals — you know establishing an Islamic caliphate, destroying Israel, beheading infidels, veiling women, all that stuff…
Time prevents me from replying to everything in Greenwald’s extravagantly updated post, which if you follow the links, attacks my entire oeuvre (such as it is), my upbringing, my high-school friends (who, granted, probably deserve attack), and on and on…
Oh hai Rich! Tis true I attacked your “entire oeuvre,” but that’s only cuz the Obama Administration, David Talbot, and George Soros showered me with gifts to do so. The best thing is, I still qualify for food stamps! Does that make u sadz? Wah, wah, wah!
However, I must object to your pity-soliciting characterization of my post: I didn’t attack your “upbringing” as such, and I certainly didn’t attack your high school friends. As per your suggestive parenthetical, I attacked your attitude to your high school and college friends; looking for a reason why someone who looks, speaks, and acts as you do pretends to be such a macho, manly-man, I came across some of your references to your formative years, warmed my hands to the sizzling resentment and bitterness in them, and made the obvious conclusions. Yay, me! I did notice, though, that you didn’t refute any of my points about .. well, anything. Time prevents you from doing so, you say; it, too, must be a Liberal Fascist member of the Party of Death.
The Social Security debate is headed toward a monumental political irony: It might well be that Republicans offer creative ideas to make the system more “progressive” — i.e., more favorable to people lower down on the income scale — and Democrats resolutely refuse to adopt them. What happened to the Democrats we used to know, who made progressivity the highest test of any public policy and leapt at any opportunity to “soak the rich”?
Social security privatization — it’s the new estate tax!
I’m on the hook to be on Fox today around 1:30. They’re sending a car. I’m dubious. If things get bad, I might just have to cut open the driver like [a - sic] tauntaun and get inside.
Attention Hothington, D.C., pedestrians, homeless, et al., braving the blizzard. Beware a pudgy doofus carrying a toy lightsaber and wearing a taxi-driver’s skin stretched partially over his parka like an exploded sausage casing. He may try to use his Force on you, which you do not want to smell; just step out of his way, and let him go battle Liberperial Fascist Stormtroopers and save Princess K-Lo Virgana or whatever nerdlusion is central to his point this week.
And just so I can say that I contributed positively to the debate: What we’re seeing now is pretty definitive proof that an economy built on consumerism can’t last. It’s a castle built on sand, to use a Biblical metaphor. Problem is, the American system is very good at generating money but not as good at generating wealth. That’s problematic, but because wealth isn’t a concern of most people (including the Wall Street Masters of the Universe), the problem goes unnoticed.
No one – Obama included – is really trying to fix this, which means that this sort of mess will happen again and again until the system can’t take anymore. Some would suggest that this is a problem which can’t be fixed through government, but that’s really a rash comment to make when no one has actually tried fixing it through government. After all, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the notion that a country should have an exportable product.
Well, yes.
And this goes back to why Obama’s pro-bankster bonus remark made me blow my damn gasket.
Let me break it down with bullet points:
The banks right now are basically time bombs. They just had the government bail their asses out after they wrecked the economy.
Absent breaking up the banks and implementing a modern-day Glass-Steagall, the banks will be emboldened to take even more stupid risks now that they know the government has their backs.
But the next time they screw up — say, by inflating the Great POG Bubble of 2011 — the U.S. government might not have the money nor the political will to bail them out again. Hence, Great Depression II.
And as Johnston says, I’ve seen no indication — other than that one somewhat promising press conference with Paul Volcker all those weeks ago (and yes, I know the irony here is that we have to look to Ronald Reagan’s damn former Fed chairman for even halfway sensible finance policies) — that he really is going to fight hard for this. This is not me being a PUMA, dudes. This is me saying our country will simply not survive if we can’t get the banks under control.
Posts by Frau Schlüssel are always extremely educational, but I found this one to be particularly so. Here’s what I learned:
Muslims should never be hired as bus drivers because they all will stop the bus and prostrate themselves in the middle of the bus to pray to their false god.
A Muslim stopping a bus to pray is exactly the same in each and every respect as a pedophile bus driver stopping the bus to rape a child.
All British men are fags.
America’s special relationship with Britain does not extend to admiring its fish and chips, which are much worse than the fish and chips that you can find here in America.
I went to Yemen and totally chewed some really good shit with some dudes who were all like, “We need better schools and stuff.” And I was like, “Fuckin-a, man; children are totally our future. Or your future, which is, like, also our future.. woah, hey, that’s deep, dude.” So, yeah, here’s my column about it.
My suggestion that Barack Obama bomb Iran to save his Presidency is so rational, so utterly reasonable and serious, that already one major politician has demonstrated her sober genius by endorsing it.
President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.
Jesus H. Christ. This is something I’d expect Bush to say. And yes, I mean that as the worst possible insult.
Hey Obama: THE TAX PAYERS DIDN’T SPEND HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO BAIL OUT ALEX RODRIGUEZ. This is an important distinction that bears repeating.
The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”
If by “free market” you mean “they wrecked the economy, we bailed them out and now they’re back to doing the same old shit.”
Man, fuck it. I’m now officially on the Palin 2012 bandwagon. Because if this country’s going to crash, I want it to crash hard and fast so we can just start over.
Brad quotes Jacob Weisberg blaming the American public for the nation’s ills:
[O]pinion polls over the last year reflect… a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we’re suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.
It’s funny when a Villager pretends to dislike the status quo. But let’s take Weisberg at his word. He’s frustrated; what should he do about it to make the situation better? Answer: go Galt, and take all the other Villagers with him. Yes, the public is “suscepti[ble] to rhetorical manipulation;” duh. The public wants stuff that works, which is brought about by leftwing solutions that are often lately promised them by politicians yet are constantly undercut in the media by wingnuts on the one hand and Sensible Liberals like Weisberg on the other, when not totally sabotaged by the politicians themselves. Hence, the public’s apparent schizophrenia.
It’s hard to be more Villager than Weisberg; he was offered Skull and Bones membership, spent many years at The New Republic, and was, until recently, editor of the many “contrarian” douchebags at Slate. The TNR connection is the most salient. Consider the following blurb in which Weisberg praises David Frum (yes, that David Frum):
Jacob Weisberg, editor in chief of the Slate Group and a longtime observer of and participant in the political magazine sphere, said, “I think Frum is the most interesting writer they have. You can’t assume he’ll come down on the side of the party line.”
“I think the problem of conservative magazines is they often follow the party line more than liberal magazines,” he said.
Bear that “party line” thing in mind while considering what Weisberg saw fit to write about Israel’s invasion of Lebannon and Robert Farley’s criticism thereof:
We do know enough, however, to divide responsibility for the current war among these players: Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. This has not stopped many analysts in Europe and the United States from laying blame for the violence squarely at a less obvious doorstep—that of the Bush administration.
[I]t’s interesting to see what Weisberg thinks an important contribution really is… To be sure, Weisberg can write anything he wants… But this is part of a pattern with Weisberg; regardless of the issue, he seems to find a way to attack liberals, rather than bother with conservatives who are making egregious and unsupportable claims.
Weisberg is a graduate of The New Republic school of journalism, which is all about attacking liberals. Therefore, Weisberg’s praise of Frum should actually be seen as self-serving. However, Farley is also imprecise in his criticism: there is nothing wrong with not “follow[ing] the party line” and there is nothing wrong with attacking liberals per se, with whatever frequency.
“You’re using a rightwing talking point/frame/trope” is a common call-out phrase among the netroots. But a political point is not necessarily bad or truly rightwing even if it is first communicated by a wingnut (the question of whether the speaker has a right to say it is something else altogether); just because a wingnut says something doesn’t automatically make it false or evil. What’s crucial, for a liberal, is the direction from which it comes; Weisberg, like pretty much all Villagers who claim to be or are advertised as liberal, always attacks from the right or sides with the right. That’s the TNR way, and pretty much everyone who’s worked at that dump — wherever they end up — will uphold the tradition.
Considering the above, it naturally follows, then, that Weisberg:
Weisberg truly blows, but then that’s the nature of his species. The depressing irony of so many TNR graduates, and their clones, loosed on the landscape is that their “contrary” take on the alleged conventional liberal wisdom of the day actually becomes the conventional “liberal” wisdom of the day. Who will offer a “contrarian” take on Weisberg’s Sensible Liberalism? The glibertarian/Randroids had a hard time with that question, finally forcing themselves to believe that he didn’t really mean:
“Liberals lost the support of the nation not because of their ideals,” argues Weisberg, “but as a result of the flawed way they put them into practice.” To regain the public’s trust, he says, today’s Progressives have to advocate a pragmatic, limited government, guided by what he refers to as “five habits of highly effective liberals”: Accept risk, and steer away from policy prescriptions that treat adults as children, or as helpless victims of their environment. Stop overpromising and offer programs that try to alleviate social ills rather than “solving” them. Sunset federal programs frequently, because a “set expiration date fosters a mission mentality [on an agency] rather than a bureaucratic one.” Stop pushing massive new laws that leave most of the regulatory decision-making in the hands of executive branch bureaucrats. And place a limit–as a percentage of national income–on the ability of federal, state, and local governments to tax and spend.
That was 1996. In the years since, thanks to Sensible Liberals like Weisberg, the Overton Window’s moved even farther right. Now it’s 2010, and he can be found at about where one would expect: Yes, he — like his Villager colleagues — is an Obamaton, and will continue to be until the President does something decently radical, which is highly unlikely even though the hopeyness that he would do so was the source of his massive political capital. Now that capital’s worth about as much as AIG stock, but such is the predictable result when you behave in a way of which Jacob Weisberg approves.
Update: I regret that I did not see Doghouse Riley’s excellent take on the insufferable Weisberg until after I posted this.
Great Presidents don’t bother with domestic issues; great Presidents exercise their prerogative to blow shit up and have people tortured all over the world. Barack Obama is not a great President.
When Thomas Jefferson entered office 210 years ago, Chief Justice John Marshall warned that Jefferson would “embody himself in the House of Representatives.” This would “increase his personal power,” Marshall predicted, but it would lead to the “weakening of the office of the President.” The chief justice meant that his political rival (and distant cousin) would gain power by joining forces with his party’s legislative majorities. But the combination would realize the Framers’ fear that Congress would come to dominate the executive branch.
Funny, I was just reading a bit on Marshall’s opinion of his cousin last night. “The Democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists. With the latter I am disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.” Many things never change; one is the fear and loathing of the reactionary (Marshall, Yoo) for the perceived left-radical (Jefferson, Obama), another is that perceived left-radicals are never all that radical except to further rightwing interests. Witness, Obama’s extension of most of Bush’s programs and Jefferson’s corrupt when not illegal Western policies.
Anyway, since Yoo constantly invokes the Framers, they reserved for Congress alone the most powerful responsibility over foreign policy: the right to declare war — a fact Yoo omits to mention but then he and people like him have done much to usurp that power for the Executive branch.
Jacob Weisberg, who is apparently working overtime to give Sarah Palin a lifetime’s worth of material for examples of liberal elitism, lashes out at the American public:
In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.
Anybody who says you can’t have it both ways clearly hasn’t been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we’re suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.
Weisberg is, of course, a man of superior judgment. That’s why he helped Bob Rubin write a self-serving autobiography informing us of Rubin’s measured method of probabilistic decision making that gave him exception wisdom in both the business and the political world. And look at how well that’s turned out for him!
Now, I’ve been known to fume and rant about the fickleness of the American voter. They basically want you to balance the budget while cutting taxes and keeping the military, Medicare and Social Security fully funded. That’s, like, insane and so forth and also impossible.
So, OK, the typical American voter won’t ever win awards for deep understanding of policy issues. But I also don’t think Americans are particularly ideological in the sense that most of them either read the Nation or the National Review. Rather, they vote based on a key metric that I like to call the “Is This Guy’s Shit Working for Me?” quotient.
Put it to you like this: FDR was economically farther to the left than just about any president in American history — hell, can you imagine what Glenn Beck would do if Obama ordered the confiscation of all privately held gold as FDR did?
And yet, the American voters elected him to a record four terms as their president. Why? Because his shit was working for them. He took steps through the Works Progress Administration and other initiatives to significantly lower the nation’s horrendous employment situation. He set up Social Security to help ease older workers into retirement to make room for younger workers. The Wagner Act helped make organizing unions easier, which in turn helped people negotiate for better wages.
In other words, he decided that the best course of action during the Depression was to directly help people. Obama and his team of economic wizards so far have settled for a strategy of doing just enough to ensure the economy doesn’t collapse and nothing else. To put it politely, most people are correctly concluding that this shit isn’t working for them. 10% unemployment and a whopping 16% U6 are catastrophically high numbers that are causing immense psychological damage to millions of families across the country. The American people may not be policy wonks, but they know when they’re getting the shaft.
[T]he economic problems that he did acknowledge were blamed on just about everyone but the major U.S. financial players.
Rubin said part of the problem is that we need a “more educated electorate” to hold politicians accountable. Without that, the U.S. won’t be able to overcome long-term economic challenges, like the troubles surrounding social security and budget deficits, or the new problems created by globalization.
Actually, what we need are more educated elites who know how to run a company without crashing it into the ground.
Barry’s statement that he is rooting for the Saints is further proof that he is a socialist who wants to confiscate white wealth and give it to black “victims.” Me, I’m rooting for the white team. And, no matter how much the Superbowl broadcast begs for money for Haiti, I’m not giving a nickel to those “victims” either.
A reader draws our attention to Mark Steyn’s fondness for the writings of Mark Steyn. No sense in quoting all the quotes, but awareness of all internet traditions requires that you read the whole thing.
Talk about lobbyists! The internet, which is a rancorous aggregate of special interest groups, loudmouth rabble, and permanently outraged idiots, has basically destroyed the President’s ability to govern. By the way, I host a site called bloggingheads.tv where tepid, Village-approved near-liberals reasonably debate troglodyte reactionaries with an aim of reaching consensus, which is how the internet ought to be.
So a Republican caller just dialed into NPR and asked, “Why are the Democrats complaining about Republican obstructionism when they control the White House, the House and have 59 senate votes?”
I spontaneously shouted out at my radio:
I’m not sure if it helped anything. But it sure felt good.
