September 22nd, 2008 · Comments Off on Bush on the bank crisis: “Can’t get fooled again”
Dave Winer has an excellent suggestion for the current bank crisis:
So let’s see the Republicans do a little of that famous Country First stuff.
Bush and Cheney must resign immediately. No immunity, no pardons. Nancy Pelosi will become President, promising not to run for re-election on November 4. Her term will be one of the shortest in US history, just long enough to enact the provisions of the bill being proposed by the Republican administration. If it really is the best thing for the country and not a trick, then the Republicans, being impressed by the seriousness of it, would have to insist that Bush step aside and let the Democrats execute the plan. The entire Bush cabinet stays in office through January 20, but reports, of course to Pelosi. And that includes Paulson.
It’s pretty simple. If they won’t do it, we know they’re bluffing.
Danger, danger, danger! Our country is in trouble, so let’s give George W Bush a big blank check — no strings, no accountability — so that he can make everything right again.
Blank check? America gave Bush a blank check after 9/11. So we ended up with government-sponsored torture and invasion of privacy on a massive scale. What we didn’t end up with was catching Osama Bin Laden.
Blank check? Congress gave Bush a blank check to go into Iraq if all else failed. Wow that was fast. How many of his cronies are multi-billionaires now on the fat profits they are making there on his watch? What we didn’t end up with was finding weapon of mass destruction.
Somebody is going to have to help clean up the mess that the unregulated excesses of Wall Street have made. But if we give Bush a blank check on that, who is to say that he’ll spend the money wisely? Who’s to say the next president won’t have to ask for another huge amount of money to get things fixed up?
Even Bush should agree, based on the old Texas saying, “Fool me, can’t get fooled again.” Any big bailout needs to have big strings attached.
Joe Biden said it. Hillary Clinton said it. And (I confess) Betsy Devine also thought it, back when the primaries were getting started. Who was this young guy with his groupy supporters, his visions of Red-and-Blue harmony? Wasn’t he just a naive dreamer who would quickly be crushed by Karl Rove and his cynical minions?
A supporter of John Edwards, I later trended toward Clinton, deeply annoyed by the Hillary-haters who found welcome instead of rebuke among Obama’s groupies.
But the big-eared guy with the funny name won me over. Making a long story short, he won me over completely, on March 18, with his “speech on race,” giving respect to divisive resentments, both black and white, even as he asserted his own call to unity.
What would it be like, I finally asked myself, to have a President who was thoughtful and empathetic and deeply intelligent. Somebody who stayed loyal to his big-mouthed pastor long after it would be expedient to have denounced him, but somebody who stuck up for what he himself believed in, even when what he believed was a complex reality, not poll-tested bullet points.
Predictably, McCain supporters will use people’s long-ago words to claim that Obama now is not ready to lead. I disagree, and so (I bet) do most of the people they’ll be deceptively quoting.
“I know it sounds ridiculous but my mother has started playing the computer game WoW, World of Warcraft … This summer she has been sitting up all day and all night and she forgets what’s important to me. And when she’s not at the computer she’s like a lost soul. She just looks straight ahead and says nothing. I’m not doing so well.”
Kids aren’t well-equipped to compete for Mom and Dad’s monetizable eyeballs. The kingdom of Bhutan was recently shocked to discover that more than 35% of parents would rather watch TV than talk to their children. What do you suppose that percent is in the US? Are more than 65% of US parents passing up Warcraft and chat rooms and prime time TV to spend meaningful family evenings with Alex and Zoe?
Could some level 70 Paladin deal with this, please?
A few months ago, the GOP gurus were upset, but now they are happy. How can they be happy? All their most Rovian candidates were shot down in the primaries by John McCain, who’s never been in their pockets.
The GOP gurus are happy because they feel confident that McCain can be pushed into a graceful exit before the convention. Having taken the (minimal) heat and (even less) scrutiny from press for a year of primary season, he will step aside for a candidate who will look clean, exciting, and new, swapping loser for winner.
April 14th, 2008 · Comments Off on “Ultrarich” disappeared fast from NYT front page
Wow! If you’re in the US this morning, you already missed this.
I wondered if my coffee-deprived, early-morning-in-Europe eyes were playing tricks when I noticed that the big front-page picture story of the NY Times online when I woke up in Paris (which would be about 2 a.m. in New York City) had disappeared by a few hours later. “Despite Tough Times, Ultrarich Keep Spending” had been deep-sixed into “NY Regional.”
As a search result from the NYT Archive, however, it’s still “Front Page – News.”
In 590 AD, the archangel Michael decided to sheath his sword and stop killing Romans with plague.
The expression on this statue by Raffaello da Montelupo (1504–1566) says so much. Immortal Michael can’t really understand why puny humans care so much about whether their lives end with plague or with some other horror.
I would like to see a new kind of Peace Corps created, even a short one, for politicians whose decisions shape people’s lives. Just for a week or two, I’d like these powerful guys to be assigned randomly to some not-prosperous neighborhood and given not quite enough money to meet all their needs.
Let them cope with public transportation and busted-up second-hand cars instead of a limousine, chauffeur, and police escort. Let them argue with tired emergency room personnel on behalf of a sick kid whose parents don’t have good insurance. Heck, let them stand in line to buy macaroni with food stamps.
I wish Democrats would move a little bit faster to shore up the American infrastructure of schools, streets, bridges, buses, and decent jobs that pay a decent wage to people who work hard–all things our parents took for granted but that the rich “archangels” of Team Bush have heartlessly plundered because none of these things mattered to their own lives and families.
First, McClatchy Newspapers found an insider source to confirm that the US Department of Justice protected Republican bigwigs from their slow-walked “investigation” of the 2002 Election Day phone-jamming scandal.
Second, two advance reviews of phone-jamming tell-all How To Rig An Election are full of dark seedy details of GOP dirty tricks.
Bring on Boston’s Red Dragon Exterminating Company!
..although Ms. Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn’t talk about things like that.
A blogger? Dear me! And she blogs about TV dance contests? How dare such a low-life pen light-hearted novels about what-if worlds of deposed Greek gods stuck into modern-day London? You or I might imagine this concept is clever. The book’s craftmanship is so seamless you or I just may not notice the author’s “writing.”
You or I might even think those are virtues worth praising in someone’s first novel? Hmmph, sniffs Ms. Maslin, the novel is “flossy, high-concept.”
Author/blogger Marie Phillips mildly remarks that Maslin “could hardly squeeze another spoiler in and still stick to the word limit.” In fact, the plot spoilers are the best of Maslin’s obnoxious review, which falls apart even by its own limited logic when she tries to tell readers that these wildly inventive plot twists have been torn from a book that is (Maslin says) “sitcomlike” and “suggests the help of fiction-writing software.”
In case you can’t tell, I’m angry because I loved this book, first published in England and given show-placement in Uppsala’s English bookstore on the front table with Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman–whose fans will adore it. I don’t know Marie Phillips and I don’t want to know Janet Maslin, whose contrastingly reverent review of Dean Koontz’s glurge about his dead dog also makes me feel nauseous.
He actually met with them, or at least with one of them. And that one he met with was the President-elect of the year 2000 (at least by popular vote), Peace Prize winner Al Gore.
It’s easy to let eyes get hazy over this photo–just imagining how the whole world would be different if Al Gore had become US President back in 2000 instead of George W. Bush–starting, maybe, with a President who paid attention to memos with titles like “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.” Or at least a President
more focused on Bin Laden than on Saddam Hussein
with nobler priorities than cutting rich people’s taxes and killing Social Security
whose patriotism cares more about our Bill of Rights and less about flag pins
But that’s not how it turned out, and doesn’t George Bush look delighted!
