07/29/2011 archive

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 US economic growth stagnated in first half

By Veronica Smith, AFP

5 hrs ago

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Paul Krugman: The Centrist Cop-Out

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats – who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether – have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Joe Conason: Why China is Laughing All the Way to the Bank

The global impact of the American debt crisis-and the likelihood of permanent damage to American interests-are already visible to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., from his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Indeed, he is not only seeing but hearing those effects.

“The Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank,” said the former Democratic presidential nominee, because a downgrading of U.S. Treasury securities will mean enormous and completely unnecessary increases in our interest payments to the nation’s largest creditor-and our most important competitor in the international arena.

“If we suffer a downgrade of our (U.S. Treasury) debt simply because of the brief time before we have to go through this exercise again,” said Kerry, referring to the House Republican insistence on a debt-limit increase that will expire before next Christmas, “it would mean billions of additional dollars that would have to be paid to the Chinese.”

Your Bloguero this week had an epiphany.  Please.  Your Bloguero heard that all the way over here.  OK, you have a point.  It’s a small one, your Bloguero thinks, but he will concede it.  Maybe, as you say, his insight doesn’t really qualify for such a pompous, grandiloquent noun.  But maybe it does.  What was that?  Nothing? Your Bloguero still hears you snickering.   OK, maybe it’s just another passing, soon to be forgotten, exceedingly minor insight that your Bloguero is trying to palm off as something important.  You’ll be the judge of it, sure.  That’s fine.  Your Bloguero doesn’t mind your having a joke (or a series of them) at your Bloguero’s expense.   He can take a joke.

As your Bloguero was saying before he stepped on the cuff of his own pants because he was distracted by your unsolicited remarks, and stumbled awkwardly toward the gutter, your Bloguero had an insight.  About clouds.  Yes, the clouds you may see overhead, depending on where you are and when you look skyward.  Yes, those clouds.  And particularly the clouds in Patagonia.  Stop that.  Really.  The epiphany was about clouds.  Just give your Bloguero a chance, will you?  OK?  He will explain.

Maybe a quotation from Cesar Aira will help to convey this epiphany in all of its grandeur:

The actual winds, the air masses displaced between difference in pressure, always go toward the same place in the end, and they come together in the Argentinian skies; big winds and little winds, the cosmopolitan oceanic winds as much as the diminutive backward breezes: a funnel of stars gathers them all together, adorned with their velocities and orientations like ribbons in their hair, and brings them to rest in the privileged region of the atmosphere called Patagonia.  That’s why the clouds there are ephemera par excellence, as Leibniz said of objects (“objects are momentary minds”: a chair is exactly like a man who lives for a single instant).  The Patagonian clouds welcome and accommodate all transformations within a single instant, every transformation without exception.  That’s why the instant, which in any other place is as dry and fixed as a click, is fluid and mysterious in Patagonia, fantastic.  Darwin called it: Evolution.  Hudson: Attention.

No, it didn’t help?  Well, it’s not all that easy to convey epiphanies.

Look, it’s about the clouds.  So your Bloguero this week has been looking up.  At the sky.  At the clouds.  A lot.  Why?  This activity, as far as your Bloguero is concerned, is far, far more productive and far less disturbing than watching Congresspeople, all of whom obviously failed Economics 101, argue with each other about, of all things, Economics 101.  They failed it years ago.  They have forgotten whatever parts of it they actually knew back then.  This is really upsetting.  Especially when the primary argument appears to be that killing the economy dead as utterly flattened, unrecognizable road kill, so that nobody at all will be working and interest rates will be even more exorbitant and bank profits will be even more shameful, will prove something.  What will it prove, you ask?  It will prove that petulance is the new politics.  And that stupidity rules in Washington.  And that putting morons in Congress is the equivalent of unleashing weapons of mass destruction on the US.  It’s that simple.  You want to know where the WMD’s are?  Look to your Congress.

But I digress.  The clouds.  Back to gazing at the clouds.  Because of the abysmal quality of the current national debate about the debt ceiling, your Bloguero this week focused on the clouds.  Your Bloguero loves to look at the clouds.  He did that before, as well.  Last time, the topic was Credit Default Swaps and the alleged necessity for bailing out porcine felines who were too corpulent to push themselves away from the public trough filled with your wealth.  And nobody could move them either.  They had to be fed more and more and more until they nearly exploded. Cue Monty Python.  Now the same topic has morphed into whether grandmothers will end up homeless, eating cat food and being told that they should perform open heart and cataract surgery on themselves.  And find home remedies in the woods instead of getting their prescriptions paid for.  In other words,  different day, same topic, same redistribution of wealth from grandma to exploding porcine felines.  So your Bloguero, who has seen quite enough of this, thank you, looks instead to the clouds.

Cloud Hunter explores your Bloguero’s proposal for funding so that he may travel the world and photograph the clouds with his cell phone.  This occupation draws your Bloguero’s attention and passion.  The crazier the public discourse, the more your Bloguero seeks to emigrate to another place, another way of life.  Is there intelligent life somewhere on this planet?

No doubt the cloud proposal was driven by Counting Down To Default And The End Of The World, a countdown clock, and Today’s Exercise In Participatory Democracy,  a recounting of your Bloguero’s communications with his Republican Congressperson semi-T Bagger Chris Gibson, and Buddy Can You Spare A Dime, your Bloguero’s only serious look at the deficit ceiling debate before turning his attention skyward. .

In all important Futbol news (Futbol is far more important to your Bloguero than partisan politics or voodoo economics, a sign of your Bloguero’s sanity and resilience) your Bloguero noted that US Men’s National Team CoachBob Bradley was finally fired, a sacking for which the US defense and midfield and aging prima ballerina Landon Donovan should take full and ignominious credit,  and an incredible goal scored by Uruguay’s Diego Forlan in the final of the Copa America, which Uruguay won.  Note: Uruguay is a power for World Cup 2012.  They will go to the finals, your Bloguero prognosticates.  

She’s Alive , a remarkable video, notes the martyrdom of environmental advocates.

Newark: Too Darn Hot recollects your Bloguero’s fabled boyhood in the boiling hot Newark of the 1950s and gives you the voice of Ella Fitzgerald who was utterly fantastic.  The piece was inspired by the Eastern US heatwave.

And finally, from the local jail, is this crazy, Benny Hill pursuit of a prisoner by guards, which the authorities don’t think is funny.  But your Bloguero does.

This Week In The Dream Antilles is a weekly digest. Sometimes, like now, it is actually a digest of essays posted in the past week. Your Bloguero always solicits your support. No, not your money. Just leave a comment so that your Bloguero will know that you stopped by. Or, even easier, just click the “Encouragement jar”. Humor him. Your Bloguero likes to know that you’re visiting.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on images to enlarge

July 29 is the 210th day of the year (211th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 155 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1858, the Harris Treaty was signed between the United States and Japan was signed at the Ryosen-ji in Shimoda.  Also known as the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, it opened the ports of  Edo and four other Japanese cities to American trade and granted extraterritoriality to foreigners, among other stipulations.

The treaty followed the 1854 Convention of Kanagawa, which granted coaling rights for U.S. ships and allowed for a U.S. Consul in Shimoda. Although Commodore Matthew Perry secured fuel for U.S. ships and protection, he left the important matter of trading rights to Townsend Harris, another U.S. envoy who negotiated with the Tokugawa Shogunate; the treaty is therefore often referred to as the Harris Treaty. It took two years to break down Japanese resistance, but with the threat of looming British demands for similar privileges, the Tokugawa government eventually capitulated.

Treaties of Amity and Commerce between Japan and Holland, England, France, Russia and the United States, 1858.

The most important points were:

   * exchange of diplomatic agents

   * Edo, Kobe, Nagasaki, Niigata, and Yokohama‘s opening to foreign trade as ports

   * ability of United States citizens to live and trade in those ports

   * a system of phttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritoriality extraterritoriality] that provided for the subjugation of foreign residents to the laws of their own consular courts instead of the Japanese law system

   * fixed low import-export duties, subject to international control

The agreement served as a model for similar treaties signed by Japan with other foreign countries in the ensuing weeks. These Unequal Treaties curtailed Japanese sovereignty for the first time in its history; more importantly, it revealed Japan’s growing weakness, and was seen by the West as a pretext for possible colonisation of Japan. The recovery of national status and strength became an overarching priority for the Japanese, with the treaty’s domestic consequences being the end of Bakufu (Shogun) control and the establishment of a new imperial government.

I don’t even know what the hell the teabaggers want. Oppose whatever Obama might not veto, and blow up the world seems to be the agenda. ~ Atrios

Regrets, they have a few. After spending billions of dollars to buy the House, the US Chamber of Commerce has discovered that those Tea Party Republicans have a different idea about the economic needs of the country. The Chamber has been unsuccessful in convincing the freshmen, as well as, some of the more seasoned representatives that it is imperative to raise the debt ceiling to protect “the faith and credit of the US. The Tea Party caucus is winning

The chamber and other business groups have pressed with increasing urgency for Congress to raise the maximum amount that the government can borrow. They have cataloged the consequences of default at meetings, parties and dinners and over drinks.

On Tuesday, the chamber threw its weight behind the proposal of the House speaker, John A. Boehner, telling recalcitrant Republicans that a pending vote on the plan was a with-us-or-against-us moment that would be remembered during the next election campaign.

But as the government runs out of money, those efforts have not produced the desired result. The freshman class of House Republicans, along with longer-serving members, is balking at Mr. Boehner’s plan, let alone anything that Senate Democrats and the White House might be willing to accept.

David Case at Global Post‘s Macro says that business is fed-up with irrational right-wingers:

With the specter of a economic catastrophe looming unless Washington agrees to increase the government’s debt ceiling, Wall Street is already feeling the pinch. As lawmakers bicker, U.S. stocks have fallen for four straight days. The Dow has shed 3.3 percent, leaving it “on pace for its worst week since August 2010,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, investors this week gave the cold shoulder to a recent federal debt auction, foreshadowing downward pressure on the economy, higher borrowing costs and, in all likelihood, higher taxes on Americans (via even greater interest payments on our 14.3 trillion in debt) if lawmakers don’t get the deal right.

Who is to blame for this? “Tea Party hardliners,” according to an insightful analysis by Financial Times journalist Stephanie Kirchgaessner.

(emphasis mine)

At this point because of the doubt that this purely manufactured crisis, the average American tax payer will pay more thanks to the tea party idiots who are opposed to raising taxes. To say that this is pure idiocy on their part is an understatement. In the end they will play the victims and blame President Obama who wanted to give them even more that what they are now asking.

That is going to be not just a headache for the billionaires of the Chamber of Commerce but a migraine for most of the rest of the country. The Chamber of Commerce has a big problem that they created, like this whole manufactured crisis over merely paying the bill for what the US has already spent.

If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here: