The stimulus is needed now, but veto anything that does not extend Bush’s disastrous tax cuts, which would otherwise end in 2011.
The fact is that sticking with appallingly bad tax policies in order to create a relatively modest stimulus package is a bad idea both in terms of the well being of the republic, and in terms of politics, and the Democrats should be willing to walk away from the table if this is a condition.
The GAOhas the details on Iraqi reconstruction spending, but the nickel tour is that Bush and His Evil Minions™ lied when they said that, “By July 2007, the administration said, Iraq had spent some 24 percent of $10 billion set aside for reconstruction that year”, as was stated in documents given by Crocker and Petraeus to Congress.
But in its report on Tuesday, the accountability office said official Iraqi Finance Ministry records showed that Iraq had spent only 4.4 percent of the reconstruction budget by August 2007. It also said that the rate of spending had substantially slowed from the previous year.
The reason for the difference, said Joseph A. Christoff, the G.A.O.’s director of international affairs and trade, was that few official Iraqi figures for 2007 were available when General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker went to Congress.
So the administration, with the help of the Finance Ministry in Baghdad, appears to have relied on a combination of indicators, including real expenditures, ministries’ suggestions of projects they intended to carry out, and contracts that were still under negotiation, Mr. Christoff said. But actual spending does not seem to have lived up to those estimates for spending on reconstruction, a budget item sometimes called capital or investment expenditures, he added.
“So it looked like an improvement, but it wasn’t an improvement,” he said.
Meaning that there was no data, and that they did not look for ways to get that data, because they were under orders to sell Bush’s endless war™.
This was not bad data, this was Crocker and Petraeus telling the Iraqis the numbers they wanted, and then getting those numbers.
BTW, the 2007 number on Iraqi spending is LESS than the 2006 number. It’s getting worse, not better.
Not only are these clearly government records which require retention, but these tapes have been used in investigations going back to Iran-Contra.
They knew that this could be used as evidence, and they knew that it had been used as evidence, and they deliberately decided to destroy this evidence.
This also means that the Ultra-Orthodox Shas party, with 12 members, is all that prevents a new round of elections, that Olmert would almost certainly lose, and Shas has said that it would leave the government if any compromise is made over Jerusalem.
You’ve gotta love Israeli politics.
BTW, this sort of crap is why proportional representation sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.
And as Harry Truman once said, “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like one, the people will vote for the real Republican every time.”
His talk to Reno Gazette editorial board exemplifies this.
Barack Obama and I are alike in some significant ways.
We are nearly the same age, he was born in 1961, and I was born in 1962, and we both missed the 1960s, we was in Hawaii and Jakarta during the decade, and I was in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Juneau (though after August 1969, I was in Virginia for a time.
As such, we were in some very real ways separated from the cultural goings on of the 1960s by virtue of geographic separation.
We thus both became politically aware at the same time, though I might have done so earlier, as both my parents were politically involved, and I had a summer without cartoons while my mom watched the Watergate hearing.
For most of my generation, any political awareness came around the time of Jimmy Carter, who was, and is, truth be told, a depressingly sanctimonious downer.*
So there are a lot of people, and I am not one of them, who have some fondness for Reagan, if just because Carter was so depressing.
I remember him running a blatantly racist campaign, and opening up the White House for the personal profit of his friends.
He won by keeping the hostages in Iran until after the election.
In any case, he gave a talk to the Reno Gazette editorial board on Monday, and it was caught on tape for posterity.
In any case, he gave a talk with Here is a transcript of the relevant portion of his talk, (H/T Open Left)
I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s
This, of course would be the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicare, the opening of social welfare programs to black and brown people, and to a large degree the elimination of childhood malnutrition in the United States?
Yep, that’s REALLY excessive.
and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.
You like how the American people forced the US to withdraw from a wasteful, stupid and useless war?
You mean like how a corrupt and dictatorial President was forced from office because the American people would not tolerate a crook in the White House?
When people like Ronald Reagan refered to the excesses of the 1960s, they mean that they did not want people with your complexion to be able vote in the South, and that Lynching and church bombings were the God given right of the white man.
You think those were excesses?
Well, Ronald Reagan certainly made it explicit that he was running on behalf of people who that that they were.
No, Ronald Reagan didn’t appeal to people’s optimism, he appealed to their petty, small minded bigotry and selfishness. Jimmy Carter told people to tighten their energy belts and act for the good of the country; Ronald Reagan told them they could guzzle gas with impunity and do whatever the hell they wanted. He kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about “state’s rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964’s Freedom Summer. He thus put up a welcome sign for “Reagan Democrats,” peeling off white voters who were unhappy with the multi-ethnic coalition within the Democratic Party.
One of his first acts was to fire 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 — one of the most devastating union busting moves of the past century. And his vision of deregulation didn’t free the country up for entrepreneurship, it opened it up for the wholesale thievery of the savings & loan crisis. He popularized the notion that all government is bad government and in eight short years put in place the architecture for decades of GOP graft and corruption.
There’s enough hagiography of Reagan on the right, I don’t think Democrats really need to go there.
*I also consider him a war criminal, along with Zbigniew Brezinski, for quite literally buying a civil war in Afghanistan just to screw with the Soviets.
Seriously, when the Las Vegas Review Journal gave this endorsement, they knifed Obama and Clinton. They describe him as “hardly” the ideal candidate fro president, but preferable to, “Bill Clinton invited onto a This is Your Life talk show where they’re joined by Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky.”
So, “Obama is, at least, likeable”, and Hillary is “re-run of the horror movie “It Came From Little Rock,” with the sound turned up much too loud.”
The only substantive comment that they make is that, “John Edwards’ anti-capitalist populism is not in this country’s long-term best interests.”
Like Anglo-Saxon hyper capitalism has led to rising living standards.
It’s wankeriffic, but at least it’s well written wanking. It made me laugh.
Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times has a hysterical essay on the thrill of the trappings of power. Read it, but don’t drink anything, you’ll have to clean your screen.
A sample:
“If you fly into Camp David on a helicopter,” he assured me, “it’s instant arousal. But if you have to go to a European summit in Brussels, its so depressing you’re impotent for a week.”
We have unemployment rising, homes being foreclosed, Iraq and Afghanistan collapsing, and what does Delegate Lionell Spruill think is important? Truck nuts. Yep, this man, to my great shame a Democrat, is proposing a bill to ban truck nuts, saying, “It comes to a point where there are certain things you just can’t do. And putting testicles on the back of a truck is just too much. So I am trying to stop it.”
About the only person that this benefits is David Letterman.
There’s something else going on here. I strongly suspect that Barack Obama is being asked to condemn Louis Farrakhan not because there’s some bogus two-degrees-of-separation thing going on, but because Barack Obama is black, and because black politicians are supposed to condemn Louis Farrakhan before they can be trusted. This isn’t racism, but it’s an implicit double standard, under which black politicians have a higher hurdle to jump before they deserve public trust than white ones. More generally, this is a bad, wrongheaded, and even dangerous article. Richard Cohen shouldn’t have written it, and the Washington Post shouldn’t have printed it.
I will go further. This is explicitly, and intentionally racist.
I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that Trumpet Magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree.
Richard Cohen is a shanda before the goyim, and a miserable excuse for a human being.
This explains why he works writing openions for the Washington Post.
I have no clue as to where this is headed, but I think that it’s now clear that Kibaka needs to go, and it’s better if it happens sooner rather than later.
In his order, DeLaughter said the election should be held “within 90 days of the governor’s Dec. 20, 2007 proclamation of writ of election…on or before March 19, 2008.
Hood cited Mississippi Code 23-15-855, which applies to U.S. senator vacancies. He and Barbour have differing interpretations of that statute.
This is significant for a number of reasons:
Special elections favor motivated parties, and the Democrats are motivated, and the Republicans are not.
Barbour’s appointee, Roger Wicker is largely unknown throughout the state, and it prevents the politicking to make him look like a real incumbent.
The RSCC is broke, and the DSCC is flush with cash, and the election must be held before the RSCC can recover.
I’m not sure of the legalities, but he was offered a spot, and then it was withdrawn, and he had made arrangements to be in Las Vegas for the debates, so I think having him in the debate is the right thing to do.
It would appear that the judge made his ruling based on some sort of implied contract, and the public service requirement for broadcasters, but I’m completely unequipped to evaluate the law here, I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit*!
His plan for people who might lose their homes is a subsidy, when a better and far cheaper solution is to allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of the loan, as they do for vacation and rental homes. (It also hits the bad lenders where it hurts, which should be a goal).
I do approve extending unemployment benefits though, and the aid to municipalities who are hemorrhaging property tax money.
That being said, e have bridges falling down, and we need massive investment in alternative energy, and his primary thrust is cutting taxes.
A better solution is stepped up infrastructure repair, and money for alternative energy programs. The money these people will earn will be spent more quickly, and it is the velocity of money that causes a recession or a recovery.
Why it’s good to have Democrats in control of Congress, when the EPA political apparatchiks decide to ignore the recommendations of professional staff, and veto California’s clean air standards, you have someone looking into what happened, and why, in this case, Henry Waxman.
Dear Administrator Johnson:
On December 20, 2007, I wrote to request that you provide the Committee with documents relating to your decision to reject California’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I requested that the documents be produced on a rolling schedule, starting on January 10 with responsive documents from your immediate office. On January 4 and January 11, 2008, your staff responded to my letter, but did not provide any documents.
I appreciate the efforts EPA is taking to collect responsive documents, but I am concerned about the failure of the agency to meet the Committee’s January 10 deadline. I am also concerned that no schedules for document production are proposed in your letters.
In an effort to accommodate the agency without unduly delaying the Committee’s investigation, I ask that your staff work with Committee staff to establish by the close of business on January 16 mutually agreeable deadlines for producing documents to the Committee.
The Committee will also be conducting transcribed interviews or depositions of agency staff who may have knowledge of the agency’s deliberations. As a first step in this process, I request that a schedule be established by the close of business on January 16 for the interview or deposition of the following officials:
* Robert Meyers, Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator, Office of Air and Radiation * Jason Burnett, Associate Deputy Administrator, Office of the Administrator * Margo Oge, Director, Office of Transportation and Air Quality * Karl Simon, Director, Compliance and Innovative Strategies Division, Office of Transportation and Air Quality * Brian McLean, Director, Office of Atmospheric Programs * Dina Kruger, Director, Climate Change Division, Office of Atmospheric Programs * Rob Brenner, Director, Office of Program Analysis and Review
In prior investigations, the Committee has allowed counsel representing the agency to be present during transcribed interviews. In this case, since your own conduct is being examined, this accommodation would not be appropriate, although counsel employed by the agency may participate if they certify that their presence is as counsel for the witness. Attachments to this letter provide additional information about Committee interview and deposition procedures.
If you have any questions concerning this request, please have your staff contact Greg Dotson of the Committee staff at (202) 225-4407.
