Month: January 2009

Two New Stars In Heaven

By Dennis Hartley

RIP: Ricardo Montalban 1920-2009

Jeez, they’ve been dropping like flies this week.

Ricardo Montalban was best known as a TV actor (Fantasy Island) and the pitchman for the Chrysler Cordoba, but also accumulated a long list of film credits during his 66 years in the biz. He never snagged an Oscar, but did earn an Emmy and a Screen Actor’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993. He may not have been a critic’s darling, and was a frequent target of ridicule for late-night TV comics (which always smacked uncomfortably of unconscious racism to me, like Billy Crystal’s Fernando Lamas shtick) but always remained a classy, dependable performer with a powerful physical presence and charismatic aura that served him well throughout his career. A Mexico City native, he immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1940s and made a name for himself in radio, theatre, film and TV, helping break down barriers along the way. He founded a non-profit organization (the Nosotros Foundation) dedicated to helping dismantle character stereotypes and to push open more doors for Hispanic performers.

Adios, Don Ricardo.

Recommended viewing:

Border Incident -A typically taut and tough little noir from the underrated Anthony Mann features an excellent performance from Montalban as a Mexican police officer who goes undercover to help U.S. immigration officials bust an exploitive human smuggling ring.

Mystery Street -This is another early 50s noir with Montalban, this time as a Boston police lieutenant investigating the murder of a young woman whose bones are found on a beach. This was one of the first police procedurals to showcase the science of forensics.

Sayonara -This uneven 1957 culture clash drama (based on the James Michener novel) was primarily a vehicle for star Marlon Brando and has not dated very well, but Montalban had a memorable (if a bit oddly cast) role as a Japanese character. Go figure.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes-Although this franchise became sillier with each installment, this entry has its moments, including a likeable performance by Montalban as the kindly carny who adopts the baby chimp who grows up to become…oh, never mind.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan -“Khaaaaahnn!!” Montalban’s turn as the charismatic leader of a renegade group of genetically tweaked supermen not only presented Shatner’s Captain Kirk with a formidable nemesis, but an equally hammy acting partner as well.

RIP: Patrick McGoohan 1928-2009

Alas, more sad news to report. No. 6 has also left The Island. Patrick McGoohan, like Ricardo Montalban, had an eclectic career as an actor (theatre, film and TV) but will be best remembered for his work on the small screen. The brooding Irish actor (actually born in Astoria, N.Y., oddly enough) became synonymous with two memorable British TV characters in the 1960s: John Drake (in Danger Man, aka Secret Agent on this side of the pond) and the enigmatic “No. 6” in the short-lived summer replacement series which has become a long-running cult phenom, The Prisoner. Now, there are some who may go to great lengths to convince you that John Drake and No. 6 are one and the same person…but I’m not going to open that can of worms (oops, I may have already done so). I admit to owning the series on DVD, but I can’t tell you with 100% confidence that I’ve got it all sussed, despite repeated viewings over the years (even McGoohan took its cryptic subtexts with him…erm, to his grave). Maybe that was his point? Be seeing you!

Recommended viewing:

All Night Long -This rarely screened curio is (literally) a jazzed-up retooling of Othello, with McGoohan starring as a conniving musician (he’s not half-bad on the drums). Cameos by Dave Brubeck, Charlies Mingus and other jazz stars lend a certain hip factor.

Ice Station Zebra-This all-star Cold War thriller is still best appreciated in its original Cinerama format. McGoohan plays (surprise) an enigmatic heavy (or is he?). Directed by John Sturges, who also helmed Mystery Street on my Montalban list above-spooky,eh?

Silver Streak-Director Arthur Hiller and screenwriter Colin Higgins teamed up for this Hitchcock homage that takes place on a train. Gene Wilder, Jill Clayburgh and Richard Pryor steal the show, but McGoohan is “on board” as The Heavy (again). Choo-choo!

Scanners-This early effort from the twisted David Cronenberg is not his best, but as far as movies with exploding noggins go, it’s a ”head” above the rest. Performances range from bad to wooden (McGoohan is the only real actor in the cast) but it’s still a cult fave.

Braveheart -We’re gonna party like it’s 1299! Mel Gibson’s testosterone ‘n’ kilts fest (file under: “Sort of” Historical Epic) featured one of McGoohan’s better latter-day film performances as Edward Longshanks-the king everyone loved to hate “back in the day”.

And I can’t think of a more fitting coda to this tribute than this little music video gem by one of my favorite British power-pop outfits from the 80s, The Times:

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Obamabottle

by digby

I’m as struck by the historic nature of this inauguration as anyone and the new president coming into Washington on that train is certainly a stirring sight. But as much as I yearn for a Zenith of Change plate this, which is being advertised on FoxNews, of all places, is just wrong:

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“Serious People” Part XXVI

by digby

Jamison Foser’s column this week is must reading. I’d begun noticing the same thing — that the coverage of the economic crisis, in particular the gravitation to “serious” people whose track record shows that they have always been wrong about everything, is shockingly like the run-up to the Iraq war. When I watched that horrifying Pete Peterson propaganda piece on CNN last week-end, I could hardly believe I was seeing it all unfold exactly the same way — again.

There are differences, of course. Most importantly, President Obama is not a complete idiot. But the forces of the establishment are all coming together very quickly to restrict his range of movement and he appears to be at least somewhat inclined to appease them on some levels rather than using his popularity with the public to stop them before they get traction. It’s possible that he can walk that tightrope, but it seems to me that if he’s actually making it harder for himself by empowering them. It should be interesting to see how this unfolds. He’s very good, so maybe he can change the parameters of the debate through sheer force of will.

But he will get no help from the media — or the political establishment. Yesterday, we had a fairly typical gasbag roundtable on the president’s proposed stimulus plan on Lou Dobbs. He seems to be developing a critique that Obama is practicing the politics of fear instead of the politics of hope. But his understanding of the economic problems, the causes and the proposed solutions is so confused, contradictory and just plain dumb that I understand why he (and his audience) would be afraid. And his guests were no better:

DOBBS: Well, joining me now, three of the best political analysts in the country, CNN contributors, all. Republican strategist, former White House political director, chairman of the Mike Huckabee presidential campaign, Ed Rollins.

Good to have you here, Ed.

Columnist of the “New York Daily New,” host “Morning Show” WWRL, Errol Louis — Errol.

And Democratic strategist, Robert Zimmerman, Democratic national committeeman.

Robert, good to have you here.

It looks like, what, with an extra $350 billion there’s going to be a little discussion about what happens with money. This is another victory for a president-elect. You don’t often have legislative victories for president-elects. The expectations, Robert, are soaring, here. How much of a problem are we going to have with soaring expectations?

ROBERT ZIMMERMAN, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Well, the problem is going to be how this president spends the money. The Democratic Congress wrote a bill, and to your credit, you pointed out the pitfalls and gave them fair warning. But it was a piece of legislation so poorly drafted, even Chris Dodd acknowledged it, they had to stiffen the bill. Maybe their backbones still, but this…

DOBBS: And Chris Dodd is still mad at me for making those observations.

ZIMMERMAN: But the point is, he recognizes the legislation had to change. But, here’s what’s significant. This bill passed with 46 Democrats and with six Republicans, and we talked last Friday about why the president’s rhetoric was so intense. Obviously, he was trying to galvanize this Congress and this strategy worked.

DOBBS: When he Robert uses the word “intense,” he’s referring to my questions as to whether or not this is the rhetoric of fear, rather than rhetoric of hope. I’m curious to see whether or not this continues. Ed Henry, our White House correspondent, pointing out something that is concerning the staff of the president-elect right now because they have to have a balance. What are your thoughts?

ERROL LOUIS, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: Well, I think the rhetoric of fear, maybe not fear that the economy will collapse if they don’t do anything, but rather fear they will have severe political consequences. I was looking at today’s numbers from Gallup, the approval ratings for the president-elect are in the stratosphere. I mean, he’s — you’re talking about 78 percent, in some cases over 80 percent.

DOBBS: On issues, 60 percent on approval.

LOUIS: On how he’s handled the transition, on his cabinet appointments, even though there have been a couple of bumps in the road, so I wouldn’t…

DOBBS: I don’t want to bring you down, here.

LOUIS: I wouldn’t get in the way of a train like that, if I were a Republican at this point.

ED ROLLINS, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Sometimes — listen, Republicans are not relevant. I’ve said it over and over again, Errol, and you keep wanting to go there. It’s now a Democrat game. And the other part of this is the Congress is still very unpopular. You look at any — so they have to perform, and they have to spend the public’s money in a way that clearly makes the economy move forward again. And I don’t think anybody can guarantee that at this point in time.

DOBBS: Yeah, it’s an interesting issue, because the Republicans are, I mean, talk about being marginalized, they have been marginalized to the point that it’s absurd in some respects, but of their making.

But, the Democratic Party, we’re talking about $825 billion as the Democratic leadership of Congress and this president-elect are, $350 billion in this bailout money additional. A $1.2 trillion budget deficit and the president-elect is talking about a fiscal responsibility summit in February? Is this colossal irony?

ZIMMERMAN: Well, it’s also ultimately the reality of the situation, which is there’s no question everyone recognizes the economic climate we’re going to have to spend our way out this have crisis. And of course, the consequences of it could be inflation down the road that could be very dramatic and very severe.

DOBBS: I’m not an economist, but the idea we have to spend our way out of this crisis, that we have to create more debt to get out of a crisis created by debt…

(CROSSTALK)

Excuse me, let me just finish the sentence — you’re so aggressive tonight, Robert. A crisis created by debt and by spending, this is at best counter intuitive.

ROLLINS: But, the problem here is you can’t create a whole bunch of public jobs, because there’s no long lasting, there. I mean, Bill Clinton created 100,000 policemen, thought it would be solve crime. Two years later those cop’s jobs were eliminated because the local communities couldn’t pay it.

DOBBS: And the money went away.

ROLLINS: So, I think the key thing here is you can’t substitute public spending only for capitalism. Capitalism may be on the ropes, but you’ve got to do something to create private jobs in addition to the public jobs, otherwise we’re going to have a very soft economy.

(CROSSTALK)

LOUIS: The assumption is that will happen, this is intended to sort of bridge the gap and not let too much of the economy…

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

DOBBS: We’re back with our panel. Ed Rollins, Errol Louis, Rob Zimmerman. All of this talk about money to build a bridge to what. We’ve got $8 trillion thrown at this economic crisis, we don’t have any instinct from any one of our leaders — the Treasury secretary, the Federal Reserve, the Congress of the United States or this president as to what that money has accomplished and what it was expected to accomplish.

The American people in the CNN Opinion Research Poll saying 86 percent say they know this isn’t working, they’re opposed to bailouts. This puts a real limit on the horizons for this administration if real results are not achieved with this money.

LOUIS: Well, I think that’s why you saw the president doing something I had actually recommended in a column. I’d love to think he just read it and took my advice.

DOBBS: I’m sure he did, Errol.

LOUIS: Just go out on the road, stop in a factory, show people what the money’s going to buy, that this isn’t just a blank check written to a bunch of bankers to be used in some invisible non- accountable way, but that this is going to bring…

(CROSSTALK)

LOUIS: Well, that the recovery portion, the bailout, you know, that’s one thing, but going forward, the big bill he’s trying to move is his first piece of major legislation.

ZIMMERMAN: That was the first bailout, though, because the funds were used to go — the funds were used for banks to buy other successful banks or banks were hoarding the money.

(CROSSTALK)

They weren’t fact addressing the foreclosure crisis. People didn’t see the results and that’s the challenge, here.

DOBBS: Hank Paulson, Treasury Secretary Paulson basically used the money to bail out his buddies on Wall Street, and don’t let anybody kid you.

ROLLINS: There’s also this great myth, going back to the Great Depression, that all of the spend FDR did basically moved the economy back quickly. It was five, six years and it was the war, it was the buildup to the war and it was the war that got us out. We’ve had our war and at the end of the day, you know, we better have something that stimulates this economy…

DOBBS: Think about this. With all of the money being spent on the war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, that is simulative spending, by any definition. The $8 trillion thrown at this crisis and we have yet to hear an official say this is what it’s accomplished, what it’s achieved. In fact, we heard the president-elect today say things may get worse before they gets better. That’s an extraordinary position to be in.

You try to untangle that rats nest because I couldn’t. Apparently, the 8 trillion dollar Iraq war failed to fix the recession so Obama needs to get the private sector to create more jobs because Bill Clinton’s hundred thousand police jobs didn’t solve the crime problem and the jobs were lost. Oh, and the New Deal was a bust and everybody hates bailouts.

This is a particularly ugly example of the economic ignorance among the punditocrisy, but there is very little I’ve heard that sounds remotely convincing from our side anywhere. That is why bringing up “entitlements” and the deficit is such a threat to any successful recovery — it’s something about which people have been throughly indoctrinated and they can easily understand it. Nobody has bothered to educate them about liberal economics in decades, so when they are confused they turn to familiar refrains about how the government screws everything up and how it should be run like a business and how taxes are too high etc. Even the professionals don’t know how to make a convincing case for government action in a crisis and they really need to.

To that end, I would hope that members of the Democratic establishment at least read this article by Paul Krugman in the latest issue of Rolling Stone to familiarize themselves with the fundamental arguments for liberal economic policies in this time of crisis. It’s not that complicated. And even if it were, there is absolutely no reason that every single “democratic strategist” who goes on TV should not be laying the blame for this mess at the feet of conservatism every time they get the chance. If they can’t muster the affirmative argument for liberalism, the least they can do is make sure that the nonsense the Republicans have been spouting for years is repudiated. Allowing these lies about the New Deal and deficits and the need for government spending to go unchallenged is political malpractice.

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22%

by digby

He goes out with a whimper, not a bang:

President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush’s final approval rating at 22 percent.

Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years.

Mr. Bush’s final approval rating is the lowest final rating for an outgoing president since Gallup began asking about presidential approval more than 70 years ago.

The rating is far below the final ratings of recent two-term presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who both ended their terms with a 68 percent approval rating, according to CBS News polling.

Recent one term presidents also had higher ratings than Mr. Bush. His father George H.W. Bush had an end-of-term rating of 54 percent, while Jimmy Carter’s rating was 44 percent.

Truman’s was at 32% when he left office, which in Republican logic means that Bush will end up being much more popular than him over time.

And Cheney is at 13%. (As tristero would say, “who are those people?”)

I think what amazes me the most about this isn’t that Bush is unpopular, but that he was perceived as being “enormously popular” for so long. He was given a very generous honeymoon in 2001, particularly considering the circumstances in which he took office. And after 9/11, he was canonized in the mainstream media as a “great wartime leader.” Just yesterday I heard the gasbags trotting out the old saw that his performance after 9/11 was his finest hour.

(Whenever I look at footage from that day I just have to laugh that Bush and his cronies are actually making the case that the man under whose watch that happened is supposed to get some credit for not letting it happen again. It’s patented Bushian hubris.)

The media went nuts, as I’m sure you recall. That stupid bullhorn moment was turned into an iconic image and Bush was commonly referred to as being “enormously popular” (poll numbers notwithstanding) by the press well into his second term:

Matthews (4/11/05): “Let me ask you about this thing, about George Bush, George W. Bush. He’s been an amazingly popular president, much more popular than either of the guys who ran against him, obviously.”

(Except for that little matter of losing the popular vote in 2000 and the near electoral college defeat in 2004, anyway.)

Other than a few short months after 9/11, he was never as popular as the press painted him. And by building him up the way they did, they made his fall all the more embarrassing.

Media approval is just about the worst indicator of success there is. They are either giddy market analysts who pimp worthless stock to keep the bubble expanding until it finally explodes or petulant doomsayers nursing personal grudges and refusing to acknowledge success. Either way, they usually get in the way of the country’s ability to genuinely assess of their leaders.

If they hadn’t written that absurd hagiography of Bush the-great-wartime-leader, he probably wouldn’t have gotten a second term. And once that Bush bubble finally burst, it burst hard, and the slide has been steep and ugly.

He probably would have been better off historically if he’d gone down in 2004. God knows the country and the world would have been.

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Colbert Collectibles

by digby

I have got to have a Zenith of Change Plate.

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Nudge Czar

by digby

So, it appears that President Elect Obama is going to name Cass Sunstein as his regulatory Czar. I know little about Sunstein, other than this:

Prosecuting government officials risks a “cycle” of criminalizing public service, [Sunstein] argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton — or even the “slight appearance” of it.

This discussion by Matt Stoller of Sunstein’s book “Nudge” is informative about his views on regulation and business:

Sunstein is a prodigious legal scholar, putting out books at a stunning clip. Usually what he does is package a set of ideas from another sector into a marketable and media digestable recipe, and Nudge is no different. The authors go through the standard litany of important concepts; anchoring, herding, biases, imperfect information, defaults, incentives, and feedback. Anchoring, for instance, is the concept that the first price you hear for an item is forever the price associated with that item. If someone tells you a diamond is worth $5000, it is a luxury item and getting one for $4000 is a deal. If someone tells you a piece of artificial condensed carbon is worth $50 for industrial uses, you’ll feel ripped off if someone puts a price tag of $60 on the same stone that was a steal at $4000. The Tipping Point basically told this story, but better. Still, these are important ideas, because they undermine the notion that free markets exist as neutral arbiters, showing markets as artificial constructs with important regulatory choices built into them. This is a newly emergent set of ideas, and who controls their interpretation will control the public policy choices they imply. As we move into an era where free market fundamentalism dies, it’s important to keep our eyes on the framers of the new intellectual moment. Ideas can be used to prop up the corrupt system we have now, or to renew it. Sustein and Thaler are firmly on the side of propping it up. In chapter 6, for instance, Sunstein and Thaler go into a long discussion of savings rates and the importance of opt-in versus opt-out strategies for getting people to save more for their retirement. This, though, is how it’s framed, on page 103.

As all politicians know but few are willing to admit, we will eventually have to bite the bullet in order to make Social Security solvent, through some combination of tax increases or benefit cuts.

That is exactly 100% out of the conventional wisdom from the 1960s conservative movement, which treats Social Security as a ponzi scheme. It is unsupported by evidence, as the ‘insolvency’ date for Social Security keeps being moved up every few years, but it is the way that Sunstein supports his theory of ‘libertarian paternalism’, which is an updated version of the DLC mantra that we must find a solution between a socialist regulatory state and a free market. Here’s how Nudge explains this philosophy and its political viability.

Libertarian paternalism, we think, is a promising foundation for bipartisanship. In many domains, including environmental protection, family law, and school choice, we will be arguing that better government requires less in the way of government coercion and constraint, and more in the way of freedom to choose. If incentives and nudges replace requirements and bans, government will be both smaller and more modest. So, to be clear, we are not for bigger government, just for better governance

The notion of ‘nudges’, or various things government and business can do to control human behavior without Stalinist regulation, is not new or particularly interesting. For instance, labor unions and business are locked in a multi-million death struggle about card check, which is simply a way of voting for or against labor representation. Labor wants to be able to use petitions or voting, business wants just voting. More examples include voter ID laws that help suppress the vote, ballot designs that privilege one candidate over another, and urban design and sidewalks that encourage or discourage driving. Yet more examples include economic assistance to low income women to reduce abortions, or the fight over abstinence-only education to lower the rates of STDs. Thaler and Sunstein create new language to describe people who design the defaults in various systems, such as ‘choice architect’, but once again, this is not even close to a new idea. Bookshops have been charging money for retail placement for years; want your book at eye level, that’ll be extra. No, the real point of this book is not to teach anyone about behavioral economics, but to enforce a Beltway orthodoxy that is anti-government to the core

Libertarian paternalism is a clever little slogan, but it’s an oxymoron.
I have heard all this stuff about making government smaller and more responsive, offering more choice and less coercion using market forces before. It is the DLC’s central argument, repackaged (yet again) as something hip and modern. Basically, it’s conservative economics, Democrat style. I bought into it when Bill Clinton ran on it, thinking that it was worth a try. Now that I’ve seen what happens when Democrats act like second string Republicans, I’m not much impressed with such “new” ideas.
One of his former students, Kathy G, calls him the legal equivalent of Alan Colmes :

… the conservatives’ favorite liberal, because he accepts their terms of the debate and has no compunction about kissing their asses with the utmost enthusiasm, the honor of liberalism, or his own self-respect, even, be damned. Either he has no clue how dangerous and destructive these right-wing extremists are, or he doesn’t care. And I’m not sure which is worse.

I’ll have to read the book myself, but based upon his notions of “criminalizing politics” alone (anyone who compares Clinton’s partisan impeachment over a blow job to Bush’s unitary decision to torture, has some trouble with moral equivalency) I’m not keen on him. If he believes the financial sector will fix itself through government “nudging” it in the right direction then he’s wrong. But at least he isn’t being named to the supreme court.

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No Brainer

by digby

This seems like one thing President Obama could do quickly to reassure Americans that he’s looking out for the working folks:

In 2002, the federal government directly employed less than 1.8 million civil servants and at the same time indirectly paid for more than 8 million workers through contracts and grants, according to New York University professor Paul Light. Tom Woodruff, director of the strategic organizing center of the Change to Win labor federation, says that 1 million of those contract workers earn less than $8.20 an hour, and most of those low-wage workers receive no benefits. Many in the labor movement hope President-elect Obama will take executive action early in his tenure to raise the standards and protect the rights of all workers under government contracts. They argue it’s a matter of common decency and smart economic strategy. Under Bush, contracting out has skyrocketed—growing by 86 percent from 2000 to 2005, according to a study prepared in 2006 by the minority staff of the House Committee on Government Reform for Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). Federal laws—such as the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act (covering construction), the 1936 Walsh-Healey Act and the 1965 Service Contract Act—were designed to make sure that such federal contractors paid at least the prevailing wage. But these laws provide wage standards for only a third of federal contract workers. According to a 2000 Economic Policy Institute study, for many occupations covered by the laws, the prevailing wage standard pays below poverty income. And standards are routinely violated and rarely enforced. In 2007, the Labor Department investigated 659 contractors, and discovered that 80 percent of them violated the Service Contract Act compliance standards. A Wall Street Journal investigation last March found that 40 percent of service contractors did not provide employees the health insurance or cash equivalent the law requires. Toward the end of Clinton’s presidency, lawmakers and the administration offered proposals to raise standards, including a federal “living wage” for all government contract workers, modeled on the legislation passed by about 140 cities and other local government jurisdictions across the county. In its final month, the Clinton administration amended federal acquisition regulations that required contractors to have a “satisfactory record of integrity and business ethics.” The new rule specified that they must be in “satisfactory compliance with the law, including tax, labor and employment, environmental, antitrust, and consumer protection laws.” It also prohibited contractors from using public funds to promote or deter unionization. But business groups filed suit, and the Bush administration quickly killed the new requirements.

Obama should reinstate them and argue that if the government is going to spend billions to bail out banks and big business it can certainly ensure that workers under federal contract get a living wage and are treated humanely. I think people would support him.

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A Tale Told By An Idiot

by dday

I didn’t watch one second of Bush’s farewell address and I didn’t really read much coverage of it either. I heard that he said something like “our air and water is cleaner” and frankly, that’s all I need to know about it. I guess when he wasn’t lying about his record, the whole theme of the speech was “I tried.”

Sorry, not good enough. The Effort Olympics may work for young children, but for leader of the free world I don’t think you should get an “also competed” award. Under his tenure, the President crippled our economy at home, sold off much of the country to corporate interests, violated more laws than I thought we had on the books, caused us little but scorn abroad and was directly responsible for the death and suffering of untold millions. That is the work of a sociopath, and a few flowery words written by speechmakers saying “I always tried to do what’s right” won’t really paper over the pain.

A lot of the derision for Bush focused on his words instead of his actions, which I always found to be a mistake. Yet if there’s one example of those words and actions coming together to really explain the character and soul of the man, I’d say it’s this:

People asked, “Which moments from the last eight years do you revisit most often?” Bush, after talking about meeting with families of fallen soldiers, replied, “I think about throwing out that pitch at the World Series on [Oct. 30] 2001. My heart was racing when I got to the mound. Didn’t want to bounce it. Didn’t want to let the fans down. My heart was pumping so hard, I wasn’t sure if I could lift my arm. I never felt that anxious any other time during my presidency, curiously enough.”

I don’t think “curious” begins to explain it.

The other 15 million decisions he had to make during his Presidency, decisions that impacted the lives of practically everyone on the planet, weren’t going to affect him one way or the other. He had family money and lived inside the bubble, and if the planet is singed and chaos reigns in the globe’s trouble spots, “in 100 years we’ll all be dead” so who cares, right? But throwing a baseball in front of a crowd is a deeply signifying event, you see. Because it’s just George up on the mound. He has nowhere to hide and nobody to blame it on if things go awry. THAT’S what makes him anxious. Stupid feats of athleticism. The sending soldiers into a zone of death, no problem.

Never let it be forgotten that this was the guy who was practically worshipped by a fawning Establishment that saw his dullness and lack of concern for anyone but himself as an attribute.

MATTHEWS: What’s the importance of the president’s amazing display of leadership tonight?

[…]

MATTHEWS: What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that’s the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?

[…]

MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically […], the president deserves everything he’s doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That […] if you’re going to run against him, you’d better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[…]

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here’s a president who’s really nonverbal. He’s like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

[…]

MATTHEWS: We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple. We’re not like the Brits. We don’t want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a [Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president.

I guess the vain deserve the vain.

…See also.

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It Burns

by digby

The stupid, I mean.

From Dylan Matthews:

Did you know that Krispy Kreme hates unborn children? It’s true; just look at this announcement of theirs (via Cara at Feministe):

“Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies — just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet ‘free’ can be.”

I’ll let the American Life League explain just how dastardly this is:

President-elect Barack Obama promises to be the most virulently pro-abortion president in history. Millions more children will be endangered by his radical abortion agenda.
Celebrating his inauguration with “Freedom of Choice” doughnuts – only two days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion – is not only extremely tacky, it’s disrespectful and insensitive and makes a mockery of a national tragedy.

This is one of the first times I’ve ever seen a clever liberal appropriation of right wing cant actually trip up the right wing. (It usually only trips up the left.)

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Gentle Reminder

by digby

Economist Dean Baker sez:

The Washington Post regularly editorializes for cuts in Social Security benefits. It also routinely makes untrue statements in its news article about the state of the program that have the effect of undermining confidence in it. It did so yet again today with a front page story that told readers, “beginning in 2011, Social Security will take in less revenue than it pays out and will be forced to dip into reserves to pay benefits.” This is wrong, the program is projected by the Trustees to take in more money in tax revenue than it pays in benefits until 2017. The Congressional Budget Office puts this date at 2020. Of course being “forced to dip into reserves” is not a problem for the program. The reason that the program built up a huge stock of reserves (more than $2 trillion) was to defray the cost of the baby boomers retirement. We over-taxed workers for the last quarter century precisely so that we would have reserves to tap when the baby boomers retired.

So, when Pete Peterson claims that the baby boomers are selfishly saddling their own children with the burden of their retirement is nonsense. All of us have been paying extra into social security for nearly our entire working lives to pay for our retirement and it’s not going broke. Just saying.

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