Zombie Republicans 3

Ron Paul joins the chorus of free market Republicans who don’t get it.  According to CNN Paul posted a video on Youtube in which he “agrees that the economy needs to be stimulated but doesn’t think the federal government should be doing it.”
“Sure, we want more spending,” Paul said. “We need a lot more spending [...]

Zombie Republicans 2

Here’s Mitch McConnell on why we can’t spend our way out of a recession:
“…we know for sure that the big spending programs of the New Deal did not work. In 1940, unemployment was still 15%. And, it’s widely agreed among economists, that what got us out of the doldrums that we were in during the [...]

Obama vs. Limbaugh

Obama has made a point of taking on far right talkers like Hannity and Limbaugh to a certain extent.  During the campaign he said that  “hardcore Sean Hannity fans probably wouldn’t want to have a beer with me“.  And the other day he told GOP leaders that “you can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh [...]

Rush: “if they get national healthcare, it’s over”

I understand that Alan Colmes is gone now from the Hannity and Colmes Show , but I don’t think it’s going to make a lot of difference.  I watched the beginning of  the  show a few weeks ago.  My goodness.  A little one sided, perhaps?  First Hannity does the entire voice-over introducing the show.  Then [...]

Back to the future with Newt

I heard Newt Gingrich on NPR this morning talking about how the GOP can make a comeback.  After saying that small government and tax cuts are the primary feature of the GOP, he went on to say that we shouldn’t get the wrong idea.  The GOP isn’t anti-government.  In fact the smallest government he and [...]

Confidence?

In his New York Times column today entitled “Confidence Surplus” David Brooks worries about Obama’s big stimulus program.  He thinks it’s is too big and ambitious.  Can government really do all this stuff?  Can it be done in time?
I don’t know, and realistically no one knows.  But here’s the deal:  Obama isn’t proposing massive government [...]

Fructose

You could make a pretty good case that the current meltdown of the world economy could have been prevented if American regulators hadn’t been asleep at the wheel.  The Fed, the SEC, and the Office of Thrift Supervision come to mind as parties that could have, in different ways, put the brakes on the housing [...]

Welfare through the looking glass

The New York Times Economix blog reminds us that the word “welfare” hasn’t always had negative connotations:
…“the image of the poor person in the 1930s was the agrarian farmer, down on his luck, but not complaining.” Think of Tom Joad, the protagonist of John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Starting in the mid-1960s, however, that [...]

The ownership society

From Reuters:
MUMBAI (Reuters) – The fallout from a three-day rampage that killed nearly 200 people in Mumbai threatened on Sunday to unravel India’s improving ties with Pakistan and prompted the resignation of India’s security minister.
I have no idea if the resignation of India’s security minister will result in better security for India, but isn’t [...]

Far right news: Lieberman edition

I missed this a few weeks ago, but apparently  Joe Lieberman appeared on Glenn Beck’s shows (poor judgment to begin with) and had this interchange with Beck:♦
Beck:  “do you agree…. if we don’t at least have the firewall of the filibuster in the Senate that in many ways America will not survive?”
Lieberman:  Well, I hope [...]