Keith Olbermann and comedian Christian Finnegan discuss the Republican Candidates debate for the comedic aspect of the event. As cogent as any analysis I’ve heard today.
09/08/2011 archive
Sep 08 2011
Punting the Pundits
“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”.
Katrina vnder Heuvel: Who Will the Super Committee Fight For?
While President Obama’s highly anticipated jobs speech seems to be all political junkies are paying attention to today (that is, if you’re not a football junkie), attention must also be paid to the first meeting of the infamous super committee.
Today these 12 men and women begin the business of finding $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in new revenues and spending cuts over the next decade. What this committee comes up with might go a long way towards determining the kinds of resources that will be available (or not) for any lasting economic recovery.
Before embarking on a GOP “cuts only” approach that too many Democrats seem willing to buy into, the super committee members-six from the House and six from the Senate, evenly divided between the parties-should look homeward to their own districts and states and see how their constituents are doing. That should serve as a reminder of just whom it is they were elected to serve-it’s not K Street and the nearly 100 registered lobbyists who used to work for super committee members and now expect to be “heavily involved” in this debate, according to the Washington Post. It’s their constituents back home.
John Nichols: Rule No. 1: Do Not Use the Word “Stimulus”
Barack Obama is often a great communicator. But when it comes to discussions about the sorry state of the economy, he has failed to connect.
Obama, who proved so remarkably agile when it came to discussing America’s place in the world, and whose ability to add a few grace notes to the country’s stilted dialogue about race made even his critics begin to see him as presidential, has since January 20, 2009, struggled to connect with Americans who worry not about the job they lost but about whether they will ever work again.
The current jobs crisis — and, make no mistake, from Toledo to Tulsa to Tarpon Springs, this crisis is real, and getting more real by the minute — has weighed on Obama from the first day of his presidency. And he has never been able to find the right words.
Paul Krugman: Facts That Strain Personal Incredulity
Somewhere in his writings Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, talks about anti-evolution types who argue from personal incredulity – they say, “I just can’t believe that chance could create something as complex as an eye,” and think that they have scored an important point. All they’ve actually done, of course, is rehash their prejudices. (Simulations show, by the way, that chance plus selection can indeed create an eye, in a relatively short time as evolutionary history goes.)
I’m getting the same kind of thing a lot on issues macroeconomic. People write and say, “I can’t believe that you are asserting that X. You must be an idiot.”
Here X might be the paradox of thrift, the claim that a rise in desired saving leads to lower investment (which is closely linked to the case for fiscal stimulus, which in turn is closely linked to the argument that wars and other bad things can be expansionary). Or it might be the paradox of flexibility, which says that under current conditions a fall in wages would lead to lower, not higher, employment and output.
Peter Rothberg: Tell President Obama: Jobs, Not Cuts
This Thursday, September 8th, President Obama will give a speech laying out his plan to combat stagnant job growth and create new economic opportunities for millions of hurting Americans. He is also expected to ask the Congressional Super Committee to sign on to his plan to reduce the deficit by four trillion dollar.
The danger is that the President will sacrifice the integrity of Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid on the alter of deficit reduction and in the interests of getting other elements of his plan passed. But no deal would be worth it. It’s no understatement to call Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid the foundations of our economic security. Social Security does not contribute a penny to the deficit. Its already thin benefits are absolutely critical for many people’s survival. Medicare is a sacred trust. Medicaid is crucial for seniors, women, children and people with disabilities and an literal lifesaver for the poor.
Jamelle Bouie: Bloodlust at the Republican Debate
Even with the participation of Texas Governor Rick Perry, yesterday’s Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library in California was a standard-issue affair. Candidates traded barbs on everything from the individual mandate-they hate it, in case you were wondering-to climate change and economic growth.
There was one moment in the evening, however, that went beyond the usual grandstanding of primary debates and became something a little more disturbing. Sometime toward the end of the debate, moderator Brian Williams noted the 234 inmates that sit on death row in Texas prisons-more than any other state in the country. This, oddly, prompted immediate applause from the audience. Williams’ question, directed to Rick Perry, was this, “Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?” Perry’s answer? “No, sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process.”
Again, the crowd went wild with applause, and when asked to account for the audience response, Perry told the moderators that he thinks “Americans understand justice.”
David Sirota: The “Shock Doctrine” Comes to Your Neighborhood Classroom
Corporate reformers use the fiscal crisis and campaign contributions to hype an unproven school agenda
The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness – a method based in Disaster Capitalism.
Though Klein’s book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy. That’s why Watkins’ outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important: It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of “reform.”
Sep 08 2011
The Gold Bug
We estimated the entire contents of the chest, that night, as a million and a half of dollars, and upon the subsequent disposal of the trinkets and jewels (a few being retained for our own use), it was found that we had greatly under-valued the treasure.
When, at length, we had concluded our examination, and the intense excitement of the time had, in some measure, subsided, Legrand, who saw that I was dying with impatience for a solution of this most extraordinary riddle, entered into a full detail of all the circumstances connected with it.
So what determines the price of gold at any given point in time? Hotelling models say that people are willing to hold onto an exhaustible resources because they are rewarded with a rising price. Abstracting from storage costs, this says that the real price must rise at a rate equal to the real rate of interest.
…
The logic, if you think about it, is pretty intuitive: with lower interest rates, it makes more sense to hoard gold now and push its actual use further into the future, which means higher prices in the short run and the near future.
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(T)his is essentially a “real” story about gold, in which the price has risen because expected returns on other investments have fallen; it is not, repeat not, a story about inflation expectations. Not only are surging gold prices not a sign of severe inflation just around the corner, they’re actually the result of a persistently depressed economy stuck in a liquidity trap – an economy that basically faces the threat of Japanese-style deflation, not Weimar-style inflation. So people who bought gold because they believed that inflation was around the corner were right for the wrong reasons.And if you view the gold story as being basically about real interest rates, something else follows – namely, that having a gold standard right now would be deeply deflationary. The real price of gold “wants” to rise; if you try to peg the nominal price level to gold, that can only happen through severe deflation.
Sep 08 2011
On This Day In History September 8
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.
September 8 is the 251st day of the year (252nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 114 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day in 1966, The TV series, “Star Trek“, debuted on NBC-TV, on its mission to “boldly go where no man has gone before” and despite ratings and only a three year run that gave us 79 episodes, the series did exactly that.
When Star Trek premiered on NBC-TV in 1966, it was not an immediate hit. Initially, its Nielsen ratings were rather low, and its advertising revenue was modest. Before the end of the first season of Star Trek, some executives at NBC wanted to cancel the series because of its rather low ratings. The chief of the Desilu Productions company, Lucille Ball, reportedly “single-handedly kept Star Trek from being dumped from the NBC-TV lineup.”
Toward the end of the second season, Star Trek was also in danger of cancellation. The lobbying by its fans gained it a third season, but NBC also moved its broadcast time to the Friday night “death slot”, at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (9:00 p.m. Central Time). Star Trek was cancelled at the end of the third season, after 79 episodes were produced. However, this was enough for the show to be “stripped” in TV syndication, allowing it to become extremely popular and gather a large cult following during the 1970s. The success of the program was followed by five additional television series and eleven theatrical films. The Guinness World Records lists the original Star Trek as having the largest number of spin-offs among all TV series in history.
The series begat five televisions series and 11 movies with more to come. I knew I loved Lucille Ball for a reason.
Sep 08 2011
GOP Debate Open Thread
Well, Obama thought it was important enough to delay his Joint Session of Congress ‘Jobs’ speech for so I expect earth shattering developments of enormous consequence.
Or not.
I’ll not be live blogging it, or probably even watching as I’ll get a chance at the repeats, but if you have any observations of significance (or trivial expressions of snark) feel free to express them below.
Update: In a late breaking development Texas Governor Rick Perry is abandoning his state to be consumed by wild fires (after cutting the budget for fire fighting 70%) to attend this American Idol audition.
Sep 08 2011
Evening Edition
Evening Edition is an Open Thread
Now with 48 stories.
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 NASA twin spacecraft to map the inner Moon
By Kerry Sheridan, AFP
1 hr 36 mins ago
| The US space agency plans to launch two unmanned spacecraft Thursday that will chase each other around the Moon as they use gravity measurements to draw an unprecedented map of its inner workings.
Known as the GRAIL mission, or Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, the satellites will launch together on a single Delta II rocket as early as 8:37 am Thursday (1237 GMT), when the launch window opens. Researchers hope GRAIL will answer some of the mysteries about the far side of the moon, which humans have never explored, and also shed light on how other rocky planets like Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury may have formed. |
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