One of Google’s geniuses figured out that whenever people get sick, they use Google to search for more information. By collating these searches, Google has created an early-warning system for flu outbreaks in your area, with color-coded graphs. Google says that Flu Trends (google.org/flutrends) has recognized outbreaks two weeks sooner than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has.
For some reason, I found the surprising elegance of this idea extremely satisfying, as in, “Of course! How incredibly stupid not to have thought of that!” to paraphrase Tom Huxley.
And if you click on the link, you’re taken to an incredibly simple graph and equally clear map that illustrates the flu trends and does so in a color-blind friendly fashion.
This is really a jump the shark moment for Matt Drudge, who is only relevant to the Gang of 500, anyway.
The markets opened this morning with a sustained decline, which Reuters attributed to a new “report showing yet more deterioration in the housing market.” Matt Drudge, however, wanted to blame it on President Obama, so he posted an auto updating graph of the Dow Jones Industrial average. Under that, in large block letters, Drudge asked, WAS IT SOMETHING HE SAID? But as the day passed, the market rebounded, and Drudge was left suggesting that Obama was responsible for the rally. Drudge couldn’t let that stand so, several minutes later, he changed the headline: MARKET REBOUNDS. But then, shortly before the closing at 4:00 PM, the market declined again. What did Drudge do? He hurriedly changed it back, typos and all: WAS IT SOMETHING HE SAID?”>WAS IT SOMETHING HE SAID?
We all know that every minute of market activity is dictated entirely by the utterances of whoever is President at that time, so Drudge is surely on solid footing here. So I’m sure this embarrassment is just a temporary setback for him. After all, markets rarely fluctuate over the course of a day.
I’m also fairly certain this will cause approximately no member of the chattering class to reassess their reliance on headlines and news stories hand-picked by someone who today revealed himself to be a complete idiot.
On his radio show this afternoon, Limbaugh leaped to Jindal’s defense. “I love Bobby Jindal, and that did not change after last night,” he said. Limbaugh then directed this admonition at his fellow conservatives:
LIMBAUGH: [T]he people on our side are really making a mistake if they go after Bobby Jindal on the basis of style. Because if you think — people on our side I’m talking to you — those of you who think Jindal was horrible, you think — in fact, I don’t ever want to hear from you ever again. … I’ve spoken to him numerous times, he’s brilliant. He’s the real deal.
Jindal was playing to the base he needs to get the nomination. And they are living in an alternate universe that is looking forward to a depression for their political revival. Most of them are obviously too dumb to know the particulars, but they know instinctively that it’s not historically unprecedented.
When professional musician John Amato launched the Crooks and Liars political blog in September 2004, it featured something that was quite novel in those ancient pre-YouTube days: video clips. Today, Crooks and Liars is among the most widely read political blogs on the Web, and Amato — now known in blog circles as “the Vlogfather” — is recognized as a pioneer of video blogging. The video selections — snippets from government press briefings, Congressional hearings and TV talk shows — are the sort of clips that Jon Stewart uses for fodder, but this is a chance to see the video in its original unintentionally humorous context. Amato leans liberal, but his blog is an equal opportunity attack dog, taking a bite out of the crooks and liars on both sides of the aisle.
Sample Crooks and Liars post: I’m afraid Bill O’Reilly’s Fox show is something of an existential threat to the existence of the universe.
Entry you’ll never see: Congressman Barney Frank said something incredibly stupid on MSNBC last night, but I forgot to record it. Sorry.
Shout out to TPM, HuffPo and Krugman’s “Conscience of a Liberal” blog too, which also made the list. It’s not necessary to receive MSM accolades, but it is nice to see that they are at least honoring progressives for a change.
The GOP liked a lot of what it heard in President Obama’s address Tuesday night about deficit reduction and personal responsibility. But Republicans didn’t like what they didn’t hear: talk about Social Security reform. Obama zipped past the issue with a one-line reference, saying, after a few lines about reforming health care, that “we must also begin a conversation on how to do the same for Social Security, while creating tax-free universal savings accounts for all Americans.” The way to kill an issue in Washington is to suggest we begin to talk about it. Republicans took notice. After hoping that Obama might be open to some sort of bipartisan reform that would reduce benefits and raise the eligibility age — and perhaps plant the seeds for private accounts — Republicans are now less hopeful that he’ll come their way. “I was not happy,” Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told the Huffington Post. “That was the one area of his speech I was not happy with. He appears to be backing away from what I thought was an earlier commitment to tackling Social Security reform.” McConnell said that when Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had previously spoken to Republicans, they struck a tone that indicated a willingness to work on Social Security. “That was the place that I hoped, based on what both he and the chief of staff had said earlier, we’d be able to move on a bipartisan basis. He kind of brushed over that issue” in his speech, said McConnell. He said he has noticed a change in the administration’s rhetoric over the last few weeks. “They seem to be kind of back-pedaling some,” he said. The back-pedaling McConnell sees comes after several weeks of intense lobbying from liberals concerned that Obama might be opening a door to weakening Social Security. And if the GOP isn’t happy, it means the lobbying campaign has had an impact.Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) noticed the shift in rhetoric, too. “I think they’re getting pressure from the left,” he said. “They’re just going to have to look some of the unions in the eyes and some of the other groups and say that everything’s on the table: benefit recalculation for high income Americans and realistic age adjustments.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) likewise heard the silence. “I would say from what I’m not hearing is, I’m not hearing a commitment to make Social Security more actuarially sound. They’re talking a lot about health care,” said Sessions. “Maybe because President Bush tried to do it and was met with a stonewall from the Democrats. They wouldn’t even meet him in the room, much less halfway.” Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said he wished there had been more talk about entitlement reform. “There’s more of an opportunity for a Democrat president to deal with entitlements, because Republicans will join a Democrat president,” he said. “I’m hoping that they’ll get back to it.” (Otherwise, said Ensign, the speech was “terrific.”) Graham, who was in Obama’s Social Security breakout session on Monday at the White House, wished that the focus Obama put on health care had been given to Social Security. “I was very disappointed it wasn’t mentioned more… It’s the one entitlement reform that’s achievable,” he said. “There were a couple of applause lines: ‘We’re not going to delay health care reform any longer.’ I wish he’d said, ‘We’re not going to put off Social Security solvency any longer,'” Graham said.
Yeah, well, wish away Huckleberry.I’ve said before that I think the administration made those promises before they had fully assessed the horrifying state of the economy and realized that talking about “entitlement reform” at a time of great economic insecurity would not be helpful to the recovery or be politically wise. (It was also before they understood that the Republicans had adopted the Kamikaze strategy.) I do not believe that it was unhelpful to push hard on this and those that did were not being disloyal or hysterical in getting out front and making noise about it. There is clearly a faction in the administration who see social security “reform” as either something centrist technocrats believe they can take credit for “fixing” (Gene Sperling) and others who want to use it as a legislative bargaining chip (Rahm Emmanuel) . It’s important that those who believe that there has never been a less propitious moment for mucking with the safety net (indeed, we think it should be expanded) are also part of the mix. This idea that activists should just trust that their point of view is shared by the administration is naive. The administration is a collection of various points of influence and power, complicated by the need to compromise, bargain, punish and reward. It’s not static and the views of one or two people you might know or see in the media are not capturing the whole picture, which doesn’t even exist until a bill is signed or an order is executed. It’s the way most organizations work, none more so than political bureaucracies. The thing is, this isn’t over. It’s never over. Despite its fiscal soundness, “reforming” Social Security is still considered by villagers to be one of the main roads to “fiscal responsibility.” (Even if the Obama team is now saying ‘entitlement reform is health care reform,” that isn’t going to change as long as there are enemies of the system like Pete Peterson out there lying about it.) Here’s Michael Sherer, in a Time article from this week, writing about Obama’s ambitious plans to banish fiscal irresponsibility once and for all.
The reasons for those unfulfilled promises are no secret. At bottom, entitlement reform means one of two things: less spending on things voters like, such as medical treatment or retirement checks, or unpopular higher taxes to pay for those things — and quite possibly it means both. Blocking each of those routes are powerful lobbies ready to whip supple members of Congress: antitax ideologues, liberal New Deal defenders, retiree groups, patient advocates, pharmaceutical companies and medical providers, to name a few. To make matters worse, while the financial crisis is both real and terrifying, it is not always apparent. Even as our fiscal position deteriorates, the world continues to buy U.S. government debt, allowing for magically low interest rates in spite of enormous deficit spending. It is on this inhospitable terrain that President Barack Obama now plans to accomplish the impossible: reverse the trajectory of the political universe and make real progress on reforming Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
[…] The effort to reform Social Security, which is generally seen as a less complex problem, is likely to take a backseat over the coming months to health-care efforts. This is partly because of resistance by many House liberals to the idea of reducing Social Security benefits. This group includes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was able to take over the reins in Congress in part because of the resentment caused by Bush’s failed reform effort. Although Administration officials don’t like discussing the problem on the record, the White House has not yet ruled out the idea of establishing an independent commission (outside the congressional committee structure) to look at creating a specific reform plan, an approach supported by many experts as the best way to break the political deadlock. Tennessee Representative Jim Cooper, a centrist Democrat, recently discussed his proposal for such a commission during a White House meeting with Obama and other moderate, so-called Blue Dog Democrats. “We have to approach the topic very gingerly,” Cooper said in an interview, noting the concerns of certain congressional leaders that they will lose jurisdiction with an independent commission. “The key is going to be a required congressional vote, so we can’t duck the problem any longer.”
So the fight continues. And that’s ok. But it is a fight — it’s always a fight.
Today House Republicans are going to engage in an extended whine about the omnibus federal spending bill, which they claim is being pushed through in the dead of night even though the bills have been written and available for over a year. This is a leftover from FY2009 because George Bush constantly threatened to veto the bills. But be sure to hear plenty of Republicans clamor about “runaway spending” today. They’re even planning on calling for a spending freeze in the midst of a recession where government spending is practically the only economic activity available. But if they want to yammer on about waste, they might want to look in the mirror.
Republicans are expected to deliver a daylong rant Wednesday against Democratic spending legislation, yet the bill is loaded with thousands of pet projects that Republican lawmakers inserted.
Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, included $142,500 for emergency repairs to the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., joined state colleagues to include $1.425 million for Nevada “statewide bus facilities.” The top two Republicans on Congress’ money committees also inserted local projects.
In all, an estimated $3.8 billion worth of specific projects, called “earmarks,” are in the $410 billion spending bill that the House of Representatives is to vote on Wednesday. Easy passage is expected. The Senate is expected to act soon, too, since federal agencies will run out of money a week from Friday unless new funds are enacted.
The strongest part of Obama’s speech last night, in my view, was when he identified the hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in the federal budget that are entirely a consequence of corporate welfare, contractor fraud and a host of other methods that the GOP has been using for decades to funnel cash out of the Treasury to their contributors. They want to have a conversation about “fiscal responsibility” that slashes any worthwhile investment in people, while keeping intact the flows into executive bank statements and massive trust funds. They have played budget games for years, hiding the true costs of their giveaways to the rich, and this is the reckoning. We don’t have a spending problem, we have a priority problem. And President Obama is vowing to fix it.
In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use. We will root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.
Our job is to hold the President to this rhetorical flourish, as he’ll doubtlessly be under a lot of pressure to do the opposite. But what this said to me is that Republicans and fiscal scolds are being called out. If they want to talk about runaway spending, they have to be willing to talk about where the waste actually is. There’s been a class warfare in this country for 30 years and the rich have won. This is the blueprint to turning that around.
…in an essay Jindal wrote in 1994 for the New Oxford Review, a serious right-wing Catholic journal, Jindal narrated a bizarre story of a personal encounter with a demon, in which he participated in an exorcism with a group of college friends. And not only did they cast out the supernatural spirit that had possessed his friend, Jindal wrote that he believes that their ritual may well have cured her cancer.
Reading the article leaves no doubt that Jindal — who graduated from Brown University in 1991, was a Rhodes Scholar, and had been accepted at Yale Law School and Harvard Medical School when he wrote the essay — was completely serious about the encounter. He even said the experience “reaffirmed” his faith.
Just what the world needs: Another seriously disturbed world leader. People, this is the kind of extremism that begs comparison with the likes of Osama bin Laden, and Jindal does not come across as the more rational of the two.
But of course, Jindal doesn’t stop with exorcism. He’s also a creationist whose grasp of science is alarmingly stupid:
don’t think students learn by us withholding information from them. … I want them to see the best data. I personally think human life and the world we live in wasn’t created accidentally. I do think that there’s a creator. … Now the way that he did it, I’d certainly want my kids to be exposed to the very best science. I don’t want any facts or theories or explanations to be withheld from them because of political correctness.
This is called by those in the biz “teach the controversy” creationism, ie the notion that since there’s a controversy over evolution, public schools should teach “intelligent design” creationism as well as evolution by natural selection. There’s just one teensy weensy problem with this position: there is no controversy over evolution.
And Gerson thinks this clown shows a mastery of detail and uses “thoughtful” arguments! (Oh, how that word has been perverted by the right wing; I’ve seen defenses of the KKK described as “thoughtful.”)
Clearly, an ignorant, unstable extremist like Jindal belongs nowhere near the levers of political power. Equally clearly, Michael Gerson has no business foisting his deranged opinions from the pages of a major metropolitan daily. We need to remember this, folks: despite the enthusiasm with which once-respectable media treat these people, modern conservatives are not responsible actors. They should never be taken seriously for to do so is dangerous: see Perle, Richard and the Bush/Iraq War.
DougJ at Balloon Juice caught this amazing exchange from Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post:
Baltimore, Md.: Speaking of junior senators, do you see Al Franken being seated anytime before 2010? Shailagh Murray: Perhaps, but it seems more and more likely that the Minnesota race will wind up as a re-vote. At this point it seems like the quickest way to resolve the situation. […] Al Franken Revote Really?: Star Tribune just published an article on the front page which discusses Coleman’s dwindling chances. The Politico last week published an article discussing Coleman’s need for a miracle. Election experts from Minnesota are discussing the math which makes a Coleman comeback extremely difficult and the higher courts taking this case an unlikely prospect. How did you arrive at this recount theory? I think the only folks advocating this are a FEW Republicans who see this as Coleman’s only realistic hope for overturning the results of November washingtonpost.com: Rulings have diminished Coleman’s recount chances (StarTribune.com, Feb. 23)Shailagh Murray: I don’t have a revote “theory.” I’m just wondering how long this is going to sit in the court system. If Coleman looks desperate, why not just hold another election and beat him handily? But there’s a process in place here, and we can only assume both parties will abide by it.
These media people always believe they have the right to choose the candidates and frequently put their thumbs on the scale to make that happen. But blithely advocating some wingnut fantasy of re-voting a race they’ve clearly lost takes it to a new level. Is she angling for a job with Karl Rove or something?
Coming from the guy who thinks recessions are character building, I guess this is to be expected. But it’s still pretty unbelievable.
And for all of you who are puzzled by Jindal’s bizarre opposition to volcano monitoring, you probably aren’t aware of this. He’s just screwing with is main competition for the heart of the wingnut base. (Hey, if you can’t outrun a river of lava, you don’t deserve to be called an American.)
With all eyes on the possibility of increased U.S. government ownership of embattled bank Citibank, and with increased discussion of the need for a government takeover of other major banks, a new USA Today/Gallup poll indicates that Americans’ reactions to these prospects vary significantly, depending on how the process is described to them. A majority of Americans (54%) favor a temporary government “takeover” of major U.S. banks, but a much lower minority (37%) favor a temporary “nationalization” of the banks.
I find this interesting because it means that the conservatives have penetrated to greater degree than I thought with this stuff. I just didn’t think that most people had an opinion on “nationalizing” things, but I guess they have made that leap from nationalization to “socialism” quite naturally — or maybe it’s just the old “the government is the problem” cant.
I’m not a big believer that such propaganda can be disappeared overnight simply by using new words, so I don’ t know how useful it will be to just start speaking differently. (Those who find it in their interest to keep that frame will not just quietly retire from the stage.) However, it is always interesting to see just how important language is in selling certain ideas. I honestly didn’t know that so many people had absorbed the right wing concept that “nationalizing” was a terrible idea. Doyou suppose most of them have any idea why they think that?
Anyway, here’s a primer from CAF on “good” temporary take-over and “bad” temporary take-over.