Month: February 2009

Let’s Look In The Rearview Mirror

by digby

… and play the blame game.

Dover Bitch sent me this interesting little tid-bit from TPM this morning:

The conservative movement may be dead — but one of its key Washington lieutenants is launching a career in electoral politics. Barbara Comstock, who ran oppo research for the RNC and chaired Scooter Libby’s defense fund, is running for the Virginia House of Delegates, from the Washington DC suburbs, according to a website set up by “Friends of Barbara Comstock”. A staffer at the Fairfax County GOP headquarters confirmed to TPMmuckraker that Comstock will challenge incumbent Democrat Margi Vanderhye. Comstock’s resume as a GOP knife-fighter is beyond impressive. She served as a lead investigator for the notoriously partisan House Government Reform committee during the 90s, chaired by GOP congressman Dan Burton. In his 2002 book, Blinded By The Right, David Brock painted a vivid picture of Comstock’s obsessive zeal to bring down the Clintons:

Late night calls from Barbara Comstock were not unusual. She often telephoned with the latest tidbit she had dug up in the thousands and thousands of pages of administration records she pored through frantically as if she were looking for a winning lottery ticket she had somehow mislaid … She once dropped by my house to watch the rerun of a dreadfully dull Whitewater hearing she had sat through all day. Comstock sat on the edge of her chair shaking, and screaming over and over again, “Liars!” As Constock’s leads failed to pan out, and she was unable to catch anyone in a lie, the Republican aide confided that the Clinton scandals were driving her to distraction, to the unfortunate point that she was ignoring the needs of her own family. A very smart lawyer by training and the main breadwinner for her charismatic, happy-go-lucky husband and kids, Comstock remarked that maybe she couldn’t get Hillary’s sins off her brain because “Hillary reminds me of me. I am Hillary.” In this admission, a vivid illustration of a much wider “Hillary” phenomenon can be seen. Comstock knew nothing about Hillary Clinton. Comstock’s “Hillary” was imaginary, a construction composed entirely of the negative points in her own life.

Comstock may have mellowed a bit over the years, but her passion for trench warfare on behalf of the GOP never cooled.

There’s more at the link, including her malevolent campaign against Al Gore, her friendship with Monica Goodling and her stint in the Bush Justice Department. I’ve written about her for years. She’s a prime piece of work.

The Democrats in Washington may not want to play the blame game — but I do. I don’t believe that people like Barbara Comstock should be anywhere near government. Should she run, I would hope the blogs would make it their very special project to help defeat. rewarding that kind of behavior is partially why we are where we are today.

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Death Cab For Stimulus?

by dday

Senate Democrats have whipped the stimulus bill, and they say they don’t have the votes.

Senate Democratic leaders conceded yesterday that they do not have the votes to pass the stimulus bill as currently written and said that to gain bipartisan support, they will seek to cut provisions that would not provide an immediate boost to the economy.

The legislation represents the first major test for President Obama and an expanded Democratic Congress, both of which have made economic recovery the cornerstone of their new political mandate. The stimulus package has now tripled from its post-election estimate of about $300 billion, and in recent days lawmakers in both parties have grown wary of the swelling cost.

Moderate Republicans are trying to trim the bill by as much as $200 billion, although Democrats working with those GOP senators have not agreed to a specific figure.

If that comes out of spending and not tax cuts – and since Republicans and moderate Democrats are driving the boat on this one I assume it will – then the bill will be completely unable to accomplish its goals on job creation. It may provide a temporary boost, but won’t do what’s needed to stop the bleeding. The recession will continue for years and maybe slip into depression.

Keep in mind that, when pressed, Republicans can’t come up with more than 1% or 2% of the bill to criticize as “pork.” All of those could be taken out – I don’t think it’s necessary, but hypothetically – and the bill would essentially be exactly the same in size. So to eliminate enough spending to actually cut the bill, you’d have to get rid of things that would create lots of jobs and actually leave something tangible for the future, whether in health care or education or energy or infrastructure. This is what Republicans are demanding, because they wouldn’t dare slash the tax cuts.

Meanwhile, the same people who say they don’t want the bill larded up with things that aren’t germane want to use it to lower mortgage rates to 4% and give giant tax incentives to homebuyers, reinflating the housing bubble and hoping everyone can just get to the next election cycle on its back. This is serious lunacy, and it’s infected both parties. We have to fix the housing crisis, which is very central to the overall meltdown, and in particular stop foreclosures (which most of the Democratic plans try to do). But reinflating the bubble at a time when houses aren’t at the price they historically should be is mountains of stupid.

The upshot is that this bill, with the entire goal of stopping a careening disaster in the economy and putting people to work, is seriously off the rails. And I’ve got to say, a lot of it is because the Obama Administration isn’t answering the critics with any kind of force or action plan. Now the job numbers for January due out on Friday – which could be astronomically bad – will create more of a sense of urgency, but that won’t create action on Washington unless people are knocking at the gates. The bad timing of the Daschle withdrawal ruined Obama’s media blitz yesterday, as his “I screwed up” line got all the headlines. But even the content of their pushback when they’ve bothered to do it has been suspect.

The most serious charge against the stimulus package is that it does not pack enough punch. Two different camps have been making this argument over the last few weeks. Publicly, the Obama administration hasn’t really answered either one.

The first camp says that the stimulus is simply too small. The recession is likely to idle almost $2 trillion of resources — buildings, equipment and people — this year and next, yet the current stimulus will fill only $700 billion of the hole. Several liberal economists, the forecasters at Goldman Sachs and Mark Zandi (an economist whose forecasts the administration has used) all argue for a bill of at least $1 trillion.

The second camp says that, dollar for dollar, the current package is not as effective as it should be. The public face of this group is Martin Feldstein, a longtime adviser to Republicans. Rather than across-the-board tax cuts, he is calling for targeted tax cuts that people will receive only by spending money, on a new house or other items.

The administration has responded to its critics mostly by repeating its original arguments that the economy desperately needs help — which is true, but doesn’t address the criticisms. So I spent much of the last few days asking Team Obama to be more specific.

Yes, specific would be good. We need a Ross Perot-style PowerPoint presentation at this point. This is big and tricky and America doesn’t have a lot of recent experience with massive government spending. They need to be sold. And Obama needs to take control of the Senate’s runaway train and understand that there is not going to be a penalty for doing too much, only too little.

Credit crises are terrifically nasty beasts. They have a habit of making economists look foolishly optimistic.

The odds that, a year from now, Mr. Obama and Congress will regret not having been more aggressive seem bigger than the odds that they’ll think they overdid it. Why not redouble efforts to find a few other ways to spend money quickly? More than 50 mass transit agencies across the country are cutting services or raising fares, and the stimulus bill does nothing for them.

Today, the Obama administration can still blame the Bush administration for the economy’s condition. Next year, fairly or not, that won’t be so easy.

Finally, as Chris Bowers notes, the Obama team is asking shockingly little from its constituents. There was an organizing call last night that asked for some input, and they’re setting up house parties, but that’s EXTREMELY late in the game. This is the biggest legislation of the year, which will set the tone for all of the future promises Obama made. That he’s not effectively using the bully pulpit or organizing his cadres is astounding. It could be that they are working so hard on all these simultaneous crises that they forgot how important it is to bring the people along. Let me quote Bowers’ final sentence:

The silence is deafening.

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What I Learned From NPR This Morning

by tristero

I turned on NPR and they were reporting about the stimulus billl. What I heard was what sounded like a consensus of both reporters and Republicans – ie, all sensible people – that:

1. The House stimulus bill was an “embarassment.”
2. The Senate bill was not much better.
3. Republicans are trying their level best to salvage the situation from almost certain disaster.
4. Tax cuts are the only stimulus proven by economists to work.
5. Democrats had basically agreed to help Republicans in any way they could in their efforts to save the country.

Now, the questions I have to ask are these. The blogosphere knows the fix is in and is screaming bloody murder, of course. But we hardly matter to the MSM. Where the fuck are the top Democrats? And why aren’t they complaining about this disgracefully biased coverage? The only Democrat I recall quoted in this report was some non-entity who basically said he’d do anything he could to help the Republicans seize the initiative on fixing the economy.

Clearly, the top of the party has learned zip in the past 8 to 10 years or so. I think it’s time to work seriously to replace them. This isn’t a progressive vs. centrist issue, this is a competence issue. The current crop of Democratic leaders in Congress simply appear incapable of standing up to the malicious wackiness of Republicans. It is more than demoralizing. We live in exceedingly dangerous times and we simply cannot afford to have Republicans’ mad ideas continue to be injected into the mainstream discourse without vigorous objection.

This simply has to stop.

The Sad And The Beautiful

by digby

This is embarrassing. He didn’t die. He just had to withdraw from a cabinet appointment. Geez:

In a stunning turn of events, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) on Tuesday withdrew his nomination to be President Obama’s secretary of Health and Human Services.

The news shocked Democratic senators, who had publicly expressed confidence on Monday that Daschle’s nomination would not be significantly impeded by his failure to pay about $140,000 in back taxes.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) had tears in his eyes as he tried to speak to reporters on Tuesday afternoon. He said the former majority leader called him to give him a heads-up about the withdrawal, which Harkin did not believe was necessary.

“I’m emotionally distraught,” Harkin said. “I’m just too emotionally upset right now to talk about it.”

At least they didn’t blame liberal bloggers. This time it was the New York Times’ fault.

But this is good stuff from the Prez. More like it, please:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, Charlie, if you take a look at the bill, the fact is, there are no earmarks in this bill, which, by the way, some of the critics can’t claim for legislation they’ve voted for over the last eight years. There’s no earmarks in it. We’ve made sure that there aren’t individual pork projects in there.

The criticisms have generally been around some policy initiatives that were placed in the bill that I think are actually good policy, but some people may say is not going to actually stimulate jobs quickly enough. I think that there’s legitimate room for working through those issues over the next several weeks to make sure that we get the best possible bill. But here’s the thing that I think we have to understand. The economy is in desperate straits. What I won’t do is adopt the same economic theories that helped land us in the worst economy since the Great Depression. What I will do is work with anybody of good faith to make sure that we can come up with the best possible package to not only create jobs and provide support to families, but also to lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.

CHARLES GIBSON: CBO says only 25 percent of this bill would get to people within a year. Republicans now say it needs to be more stimulative, there needs to be more money on infrastructure, there needs to be more tax cuts, there needs to be more help for homeowners, maybe even guaranteeing 4, 4.5 percent mortgages.

Would you accept those things?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, keep in mind, for example, some want to put more infrastructure in the bill, and they’re also complaining that it doesn’t spin out fast enough. In some cases, there are contradictions there. I mean, we may want to spend on a whole bunch of great infrastructure, but it may take seven or eight years to do it, in which case we’re vulnerable for the criticism that it’s not spinning out fast enough. I think that in a package of this sort, that has to go to Congress with 535 opinions, at least, then there’s going to be some give and take.

What I’ve said is that any good idea thrown out there to improve this legislation I’m for. But I want to be absolutely clear here that the overwhelming bulk of the package is sound, is designed to put people back to work, help states that are in desperate straits, help families who are losing jobs and health care, and it’s designed to make sure that we’ve got green energy jobs for the future. In fact, most of the programs that have been criticized as part of this package amount to less than one percent of the overall package. And it makes for good copy, but here’s the thing — we can’t afford to play the usual politics at a time when the economy continues to worsen.

CHARLES GIBSON: And talking of politics, you have said you want bipartisanship in this bill, you want Republican support. You didn’t get any in the House, and the leader of the House, the speaker of the House, said, well, yes, we wrote the bill and, yes, we won the election.

Is that kind of an in-your-face trash-talking to the Republicans?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I think what Speaker Pelosi also said was that she wanted to sit down with them and talk to them and, in fact, included some of their ideas in the package. I mean, keep in mind, when I first released the framework for our plan, we were complimented by the Republicans for the fact that about $300 billion of the package was in the form of tax cuts. I was criticized by members of my own party.

Now, that hasn’t changed much. The only thing that’s changed is the politics of it. And I’m less concerned about bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake. I’m interested in solving the problem for the American people as quickly as possible. And I think that we have an obligation to make sure this money is spent wisely. I want this thing to move through the Senate. I want the House and the Senate bills to be reconciled.

We can scrub it of any problems that are in there. But what I don’t want to do is to delay creating jobs for people who are losing work, providing families some direct relief in the form of middle class tax cuts, in the form of tax breaks for small businesses, and I want to make sure that we are investing this money in a way that’s going to not just put people back to work right now, but will continue to pay high dividends in the future.

He needs to keep making that case or else the screeching cacophony of lies the Republicans are spewing into the ether will continue to be the only thing the people hear.

(It’s also sadly important that he exert his authority. The GOP is busily turning him into a “very nice young man with good intentions” which is another way of saying he’s a wimp. What else is new?)

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Oscar And The Garden

by digby

I was at an L.A. bloggers event today for Tom Geoghegan (which I will write more about in a bit) and I ran into my friend and fellow Democratic activist Julie Bergman Sender. I asked how she was doing and she said great and asked me how I was doing I said fine and then we chatted for a few minutes and she just sort of casually slipped it into the conversation that her film “The Garden” had been nominated for an Academy Award!

This is incredibly great news for those of us who’ve been knocking around the netroots for some time. Julie and her husband Stuart are both long time progressive filmmakers who have been fighting the good fight forever. This documentary feature is an incredible achievement that was no doubt recognized by the Academy as being a film of the moment — it is, after all, about “community organizing.”

Here’s the synopsis from the web-site:

The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community.

But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.

The Garden follows the plight of the farmers, from the tilled soil of this urban farm to the polished marble of City Hall. Mostly immigrants from Latin America, from countries where they feared for their lives if they were to speak out, we watch them organize, fight back, and demand answers:

Why was the land sold to a wealthy developer for millions less than fair-market value? Why was the transaction done in a closed-door session of the LA City Council? Why has it never been made public?

And the powers-that-be have the same response: “The garden is wonderful, but there is nothing more we can do.”

If everyone told you nothing more could be done, would you give up?

You can see the trailer at the link. I can’t wait to see the movie.

Update: Lisa Derrick hosted the director of the film, Scott Hamilton Kennedy, on FDL Movie Night last week.

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Eyeballs Popping From Sockets

by dday

I think every post I write gets me angrier and angrier, so I may need to take a time out. But first:

Max Baucus spoke at the Academy Health National Policy Conference today. His first words were:

The 19th Century British philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote: “The preservation of health is a duty.”

I believe that this Congress has a duty to reform health care.

And he continued, “this morning, I’d like to spend some time talking about the potential obstacles we may face as we move forward – and the reasons why those barriers can be overcome.” So his talk was a kind of analysis, setting out the barriers and how they can be surmounted.

The Washington Times watched that performance, listened to it, and wrote this.

A key Senate Democrat charged with overseeing his party’s swift push for universal health care indicated on Tuesday that reform may have to wait until next year, as other priorities related to the economy and wars take precedent.

“Why might reform not happen this year? As is often the case, the new administration and the new Congress face competing priorities,” said Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat and Senate Finance Committee chairman, at a health policy conference in Washington hosted by AcademyHealth and Health Affairs magazine. “These priorities compete for time on the agenda and attention in the press and in public.”

“The president’s dance card is indeed full,” he added.

Seriously, shoot me in the face.

These people are not too dumb to breathe, though it looks like it, but devious beyond all reason, ready to intentionally misinterpret anything to preserve the status quo. Do you want to know the very next sentence Baucus said? The RESPONSE to what he laid out?

Despite all of these competing demands, however, nothing seems to resonate with families more than the issue of health care.

We see the same thuddingly stupid, knowingly stupid tripe on the recovery package, with tired arguments about how government spending isn’t economic stimulus (that’s pretty much ALL it is) and how FDR didn’t pull the country out of the Great Depression, relying on the rantings of discredited hack Amity Shlaes to simply lie to the public.

Now the Democrats aren’t doing their job of selling this thing effectively, and it’s jaw-dropping that they can’t turn a fucking jobs program into a positive good. But make no mistake, they’re swimming uphill. The media is standing in the way of anyone but their rich friends and neighbors from making it out of this economic disaster alive, and I’m totally sick of it. They are corporate toadies who are nothing short of treasonous.

I’m not calling the Senate. I’m calling MSNBC, calling CNN, calling the New York Times, calling ABC, calling CBS, and telling them I’m advising everyone I know to sell their stock and doing whatever I can to hurt their bottom line even worse than it is now. We need to throw a Sinclair Broadcasting on their collective asses. They are doing more than hurting America this time. They are destroying it.

…and Think Progress falls for this, which is just, you know, awesome.

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Sweet Homeless Alabama

by digby

Here’s a great blog post by Andrew leonard at Salon about the perfidious and incoherent Richard Shelby:

On Monday, Shelby told an audience in Alabama that he was prepared to filibuster the stimulus bill. But, as was the case with the auto bailout, which he also threatened to filibuster, the numbers in the Senate just aren’t working for him. He also might have sensed over the last 24 hours that the stimulus bill is politically popular, because he backed off the word “filibuster” in his conversation with CNBC, saying only that “I would certainly extend the debate as long as we could to get the attention of the opposite side.”Shelby said he wants to “shelve” the existing bill and “start all over and look at it in a bipartisan way.” But all that means is that he wants the bill to be written as if the Republicans were still in power, ladling out tax cuts to all and sundry. Meanwhile, he says the real focus should be on fixing the bank system.

What will turn the economy around is us finding some solution to the financial frozen assets and banks not making loans because that’s what will create jobs.

But as the interviewer astutely noted, that’s precisely what the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), currently being rejiggered by the Obama team, is for. And Shelby voted against TARP — even though the initiative was cooked up by his own party. I guess when the choice is between bailing out banks, and bailing out the general public, the Republican option is a no-brainer: help the rich!But even on TARP, Shelby made no sense. The interviewer asked him what kind of Wall Street rescue plan he would vote for:

Well, I’d have to see it. But what I would do is something that’s well thought out, that would bring in the government and private money to get a lot of these bad assets, not let the banks make a lot of money off of the taxpayer, but to get our banking system moving … We have to do it right. They’ve got to price those assets right. Some of them are trying to do it by models. A lot of these models don’t work. We need to price it by the market.

Democrats and Republicans, left-wing and right-wing economists, pretty much everyone agrees — the problem of how to price the toxic assets held by banks is proving hugely difficult to solve. If the government purchases these assets from banks at a high enough price so that the banks don’t lose billions of dollars on the deal, then taxpayers are left subsidizing Wall Street’s recklessness, and shareholders in the banks emerge relatively unscathed. But if the assets are valued at what “the market” is willing to pay, then the banks are screwed, because the market doesn’t want to pay squat for busted mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations. They’re called “toxic” for a reason.
At one point, Shelby reached an embarrassing height of plaintive whining:

What I fear is that there will be more than one or two Republicans who will jump ship. I hope that won’t happen. I wish we would hold on — hold together like the House did and we could make a difference in this bill and make a difference for America.

read on.

Ah, good old Richard Shelby. He used to be a Democrat, you know, and switched parties in 1994 in the big sweep. I said good riddance at the time. He’s always been a piece of work.

Remember this?

When it comes to apportioning stimulus money to Alabama, I’m sure that Shjelby will be there slopping at the trough. He’s nothing if not self-serving.

h/t to bb

Blogging The Origin: First Rehearsals

by tristero

It’s been a busy few days here in Oswego< NY. On Sunday, I heard both a chorus and a separate orchestra rehearsal. It was the first time I had heard most of the music for The Origin live.

When I write, I use specialized software to compose. I usually compose in a program called a sequencer, in my case, Digital Performer. This software is the modern a-go-go version of a player piano roll. You sit in front of a computer hooked up to a piano-style keyboard and play your music into the computer. Like a word processor, you can edit, move around, and munge in all sorts of different ways the music you play. The possibilities are literally endless, and it’s addictive.

The sequencer itself, however, doesn’t make sound, it simply plays them. But what does it play? Since I was writing for orchestra and chorus, I used a large collection of sound samples that reproduce each and every orchestral instrument as well as vocals. To oversimplify the process of sampling, every note playable by an instrument – say, a flute – is recorded separately. These samples are then mapped via special software so that when you play, say, a G on your keyboard, you hear a flute play a G. It sounds exactly like a flute, because in fact, it is a flute. Naturally, there’s more to flute playing than just playing a single note and modern sampling technology has various clever ways to create a musically convincing performance (if you don’t listen too closely). A typical set of orchestal samples has hundreds if not thousands – if not tens of thousands! – samples. And, if you are writing for orchestra, you can, on your desktop, get an extremely good sense of what your music will sound like when played live.

Still, there are unknowns. No software, at least not yet, can give a sense of how difficult a piece of music will be to play. Composers, as part of their training, learn how instruments work, what their strengths and limitations are, but of course, the skill level varies with each individual player. When you’re writing for orchestral violins, you can’t assume that every fiddler can play the Brahms Violin Concerto perfectly; you need to write a less virtuosic kind of music. All of this – and much more – we take into account when composing. Our training is such that we internalize all this information about the instruments and simply write.

The choral rehearsal went exceedingly well. They had done a few pieces last year at a preview, but most of it was new to me. They had been rehearsing for all of the previous semester and they sounded quite lovely. “The Doctrine of Malthus” was suitably dark and ominous. It’s about Malthus’ theory that more individuals are born in each generation to an organism than can possibly survive. Darwin’s encounter with Malthus provided him with the key insight that led to the finalization of his theory of evolution by natural selection. It is both an important scientific theory and somewhat creepy. The chorus got it. Conductor Julie Pretzat and I had the luxury of tweaking the articulation of the words in nicely obsessive detail. They will sound terrific during the performances.

The orchestral rehearsal also went well. As is common, the orchestra first sees the music they will play about a week before the performance and, at the first rehearsal, are reading the music at sight. With a piece of new music, there are two sets of potential, and unavoidable, problems that crop up at the first rehearsal.

First, there can be errors in the parts. Music notation is a written language that has been developed over 1000 years. It is very sophisticated and detailed. Errors are inevitable no matter how careful you are (which doesn’t make them any less embarassing for the composer). And every error slows down rehearsal to a crawl, the last thing you want to have happen at an expensive orchestral session. Fortunately, we had gone over the parts pretty carefully; we found less than 20 mistakes in over an hour and a half of music, something of a personal best!

The other main problem is style. Every different kind of music – baroque, rock, jazz, medieval, etc – has very specific ways that notes and phrases are shaped. The only thing more embarrassing than Michael Bolton trying to sing “Nessun Dorma” is an elderly flute virtuoso rocking out on Scott Joplin rags. (I speak from experience here.) In the case of a completely new piece of music, the players literally have no idea how the composer wants the piece to sound and feel. And despite the precision of modern notation, there is much you simply can’t write down. You simply have to stand in front of the orchestra and sing or play what you want. This is not for the faint-hearted.

The performance style I’m seeking for The Origin is really paradoxical. I want, like all modern composers, a precise, crisp performance. I want every detail heard and the tempos well-defined. But I’m also looking for a performance with a lot of wit, humor, passion, and personal expression. The tension involved in trying to resolve these contradictions makes for a truly exciting performance, I think.

The orchestra was enthusiastic about the music and really open to suggestions. Julie did an excellent job of taking them through the entire score – quite a feat, as there are a lot of notes for a first reading – and I must say I was quite pleased.

After a few hours of sleep, I was picked up first thing Monday by Mary Avrakotos, the head of our presenter ArtsWego, and it was off to Syracuse for interviews at WCNY. They’re doing a television documentary about The Origin and they wanted some comments from me to sprinkle throughout. They’ll also be attending rehearsals and filming the performances. Next, it was across the hall for a charming interview with Bill Baker on WCNY radio where we discussed Darwin and his decisive influence on the lucrative 19th century guano industry.

This kind of hectic schedule is typical for any kind of major performance, and I thrive on the excitement. My health, however, is still shy of 100% so I have to be very careful. I was given a suite with refrigerator, microwave, and hotplate in it and the motel is literally half a block from the Mustard Seed, a terrific health food store, so I’ve been cooking up an organic storm and taking it very, very easy. So far, so good, but there’s a nasty stomach bug floating around – the last thing I need – so I’ve been given strict orders not to hug anyone.

I”m writing this in the breakfast nook while I wait for the women from Kitka to amble in. We have a rehearsal at 10:30 AM in the bar here at the EconoLodge (The Steamers Bar and Grille”) and I’ll get to hear some of the most unusual and risky music in the piece, including “The Voyage of the Beagle” and “A Taste for Collecting Beetles.” More to follow.

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Devastated

by digby

I’ve been meaning to post this and kept forgetting. A week or so ago, Erroll Morris asked some white house photographers to find the most emblematic photos of the Bush years and talk about them. The whole article is fascinating, but this actually made the hair on the back of my neck stand up a little bit:

JIM BOURG: I was planning describe to and you had asked me to choose ten photographs, but to tell you the truth, I was pretty tempted to supplement it with one of the pictures by our photographer Jason Reed from last night’s farewell address. I was paging through the thumbnails with our remote editing program as they came in live from the White House. And it is not often, with all the pictures I’ve edited, that I stop dead in my tracks and say, “Oh, my God,” but I did that last night. Bush finished his address to the nation, went back out through the doors, and the doors closed behind him and the national TV broadcast went off the air. And then after the live TV was off, the doors suddenly reopened, and he came back in to say goodbye to all the guests – his former cabinet members, his current cabinet members, Dick Cheney, his daughters, Laura and lots of other friends and supporters. He popped out that door, and when the door opened and he came through it, the look on his face was like no look I’d ever seen on George Bush’s face in my life. I actually flagged three versions as he comes through the door and his expression changes.

U.S. President George W. Bush re-enters the White House East room to say goodbye to staff and friends after his primetime address in Washington, January 15, 2009. Bush on Thursday defended his actions to avert a collapse of the financial system and protect America from another terrorist attack as he mounted a farewell bid to polish his troubled legacy. REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES)

And I turned to one of my editors — First I said, “Oh, my God.” And he said, “What?” And I said, “You’ve got to see this picture of Bush. This is really stunning.” And I flipped it over to him to process and his first reaction was, “Wow.” And I said, “If he wasn’t just back there behind that door crying, I don’t know what that look on his face is.” Because he just looks absolutely devastated as he comes through this door after essentially ending his eight year presidency. And it’s just really striking. He just looks absolutely devastated.

State Of Play

by digby

Last night I happened to hear Dick Morris lecturing Sean Hannity about John Maynard Keynes which was a lot like the time I accidentally ate a hash brownie. On the heels of the bizarroworld “lake” metaphor from Grover Norquist on John King’s show this week-end, I think I need to go to rehab.

The conservatives are simply babbling incoherently on economics and I’m sure it’s confusing to people because the solution of massive government spending is counterintuitive unless somebody explains what went wrong and what needs to be done to set it right. I’ve not heard anyone but wonks do that and it’s distorting the political situation.

For a primer on what went wrong, I think this article by Thom Hartman is a good one and worth sending around to people on your email lists. Here’s Krugman on the bad faith Republican arguments.

In other news, the Daschle withdrawal was the right thing to do. He actually should have taken himself out of contention when he found that he had “forgotten” to pay taxes. In a climate where we are excoriating wall street titans for their bonuses, you just can’t have someone in the cabinet who didn’t pay taxes on his limousine and driver. Obama ran very much as the reformer, almost holier-than-thou in approach, and he just can’t have this kind of thing.

Unfortunately, the gasbags are all saying that Daschle needed to go because Obama’s number one priority is to change the tone and be bipartisan, and the Republicans were ginning up the machine to turn it into a big fight, which just reinforces the illusion of GOP power. As long as Obama is seen as having to be bipartisan and changing the tone, they hold him hostage. Like four year olds, they can threaten to have a tantrum any time they choose, thus ruining Obama’s reputation as a united not a divider. It’s quite a bind.

Apparently, the dittoheads are calling their Senators at a a record pace exhorting them to vote against the economic bill. If you would care to have your voices heard in contrast, you can call as well. Unfortunately, I don’t think blog readers have the clout to stop legislation in its tracks as the Republican base does. (After all, we could not get our presidential candidate not to switch his vote on FISA, a politically free vote.)

That big list is where the Obama movement is, and I understand they are sending out emails, so perhaps that will get people calling. If the bill is really in trouble, which I doubt, the best politician of his generation, with his enormous popularity, will take his case directly to the people. All he stands to lose is the myth of post-partisanship, (which isn’t exactly a great loss in my book).

The bill is going to pass. The problem is that it is larded up with Republican tax cuts but has been painted as a Democratic “wish list,” thus starving the beast while feeding the tax ‘n spend, fiscal responsibility shibboleths at the same time. There’s nothing we can do about that now. Unfortunately, the big battles to come are going to be much tougher because of it.

We’re still in the first round, but I would say the Republicans have already masterfully played it. After just having their asses handed to them in November, they managed to turn the crisis into an opportunity to shore up their base, weaken their opposition and misdirect the commentariat to the debt (which they created) rather than the crisis (which they also created) and narrow the options for the new president. All in the first two weeks.

Oh, and they have successfully portrayed the Democrats as crazed social engineers with a credit card and the President as a very nice young man who just isn’t strong enough to control the congress. It’s good stuff.

Again, it’s round one. The Dems will ultimately win it, but they are bloodied.

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