Wait, what, they interrupted House!? That’s blasphemy! Who dares to interrupt Hugh Laurie?
I find it a little offensive that you twist what I’m saying out of context into stating my opinion as the wholesale destruction of a large part of my heritage being equal to a guy fucking up his taxes. What I’m saying is that until Obama actually shows me some hope or change, I’m not just going to assume he’s going to make good on his promises. Right now, a month into office, he hasn’t shown any. Over his campaign, most of his platform involved very little actual change from the span of common American politics, and no definitive reason for hope. It is, in fact, exactly as I said; I care about what he does, I just see no reason to give him my support or any such blind benefit of the doubt until I actually see any reason to. Which, thus far, I haven’t. You then decided that responding to me explaining to X-Wing that I do not desire to be Obama sycophant, just yet, by assuming that me saying him failing to show me a reason to believe is identical to him commiting some horrific atrocity. If you have to make a strawman out of me, just don’t make it a strawman insinuating I don’t care about the history of my family.
Since I didn’t even know you were of Native American ancestry, I have absolutely no idea how you’ve interpreted me bringing up Jack Abramoff as claiming you don’t care about your family’s history. If you want to talk about ethics in politics, Jack Abramoff’s name is going to come up.
:hahaha;
I figured it wasn’t intentional. You just picked a rather poor citation to try and make my argument into a strawman with. Taking me saying, “Falling very close to the rest of the candidates on a political spectrum, I am uncertain how much legitimate change Obama offers, and I do not blindly follow him for a promise that seems rather insubstantiated, thus far,” and turning it into, “I believe that organized murder and theft from my relatives is equal to a silly tax mistake,” angers me because, firstly, it has very little to do with what I was saying, whatsoever; it’s not even an oversimplified, stupider version of my argument, it’s an oversimplified, stupider version of a different argument. Secondly, it inadvertantly uses people I know as a weapon to try and make my argument look stupid.
There is also a degree of cognitive dissoance; the issue hits close enough to home that I do not view it is “political ethics;” to me, Jack Abramoff isn’t what comes to mind when people mention Native Americans and money. I think of young unwed pregnancies that end abruptley from equally young alcoholism and trends of abuse, collossal college dropout rates, worse unemployment, chronic poor health, and res-punk skinheads from a culture that believes one should cut one’s hair after a tragedy. I remember being fourteen and thinking of how much more I knew than them, with their bald heads and my long hair, and shooting my mouth off about cutting it, only to hear, “Yeah, that’s the fucking point.” I will never forget the tone, a gentle reminder of the obvious, like acquescing when a young child figures out some unpleasant truth about dogs not really going to farms. Like I was young and stupidly naive for not having yet figured out that every day waking up where they did was a tragedy.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s a touchy subject, personally.
You say this after he passed a billion dollar stimulus plan completely over the heads of the Republicans?
The reason all the Republicans were so totally against this was because they knew it would pass without them. This way they aren’t culpable if (when) things get worse despite this. That and to cynically show Obama off as partisan when in fact he’s trying to get a bill passed he believed in. That’s not partisan.
No, not Obama. Listen closely to who the Republicans in Congress are attacking directly; Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Representative Obey - the standard Democratic leadership. They say that this bill isn’t change and put it on the stairs of the Democrats, not Obama directly, because he remains extremely popular.
The Republicans will not be able to show President Obama as a partisan - yet. But by attacking the Democratic leadership and identifying them as the big spenders in the current environment, they can possibly gain traction. Your first assertion is astute and correct; Eric Cantor and the Republican party leadership whipped all the votes in the House against both iterations of the bill in order to was their hands of it but to do something else that is also very important; begin to make the party about something again.
Whether the stimulus package fails or not, Republicans can say that they didn’t support a nearly trillion dollar bill worth of spending. Even President Obama’s team has stated that the Republicans were able to characterize the bill as a mass spending bill until the President kicked into high gear and restarted his campaign mode in support of it. They’ll pull this card a number of times; it’s a win-win situation for House Republicans. They can demonstrate their values and principles without worry about actually obstructing anything. They can be fiscal conservatives without having to sacrifice anything for it.
I disagree with Curtis though; if it wasn’t for the three Republicans in the Senate - Murkowski, Collins and Specter, this bill would have been filibustered. It was very clear going in committee that if the Democrats tried to make any vast changes in spending those three Republican Senators were going to renege their support. That’s a rather significant amount of clout.
But either way, this fight is over now; we can only hope that the money will be appropriated intelligently and work the wonders folks seem to expect it too. Now, on the issue of foreclosures and Geithner’s plan…things don’t seem as simple…
Well, wait a second, I disagree with the whole assertion as well by Curtis if it’s a response to Arac’s complaint if I’ve interpreted it correctly. The passing of this bill was not a sign of change. This whole bill was politics by numbers. It certainly doesn’t signal any kind of change in Washington. You had a vote that was almost completely partisan and the fights that were going on the floor were the same old stances by both parties. The Democrats dictated very clearly what would be going in the bill. The Republicans characterized it as they liked. The President used his bully pulpit to help get it through.
You can switch the Democrat and Republican label, place it in any age of American politics* and it would be applicable. That’s not change.
*Well, as long as you use those labels after the 1860’s.
Um, yeah, not only is “passing it over the heads of [group],” not a change whatsoever from politics-as-usual, in concept or (as Mullenkamp points out) in practice, nor does it somehow show Obama to be in any way legitimately different from the standard, very similar American political pantheon.
I can only describe market’s reaction to his speech as “ so where is the beef?”. The lack of details in Geithner’s plan, as presented initially, was remarkable; and Wall Street doesn’t like uncertainty.
There were also expectations of Mark-to-Market accounting rules repeal – not a full reversal of the policy, but one that deals with illiquid securities. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhY4-arQAVc
Well, Mr. Geithner didn’t come through this time.
Setting up a public-private fund to buy toxic assets from banks with a small amount of government money, and then expecting the private sector to stump up the rest, seems problematic to me. One of the reasons such transactions are not happening in the private sector - despite many of the private equity and hedge funds having raised billions of dollars – is because no one can agree on a pricing mechanism.
I heard a very astute comment on NPR the other day. It dealt with one of the reasons why we haven’t heard clear and concise answers from Geithner; because the government doesn’t have cajones to tell us what they really have to do.
There are a lot of banks that are largely insolvent. If we dump more money into them, it’ll be a delaying of the inevitable. We’re going to have to sift between those financial institutions which are solvent and insolvent and determine which ones are worth saving and which ones aren’t. We’ve overcompensated for allowing Lehman Brothers to fail, but it’s got to stop or else we’re going to wind up dumping ourselves into an ever bigger problem.
There’s also the fact that Geithner just…doesn’t connect with the American people. He couldn’t give Congress an estimate about how much money would be neccessary or give simple answers to the questions. He failed to articulate a meaningful plan…it was just a plan of action that might be changed at some period depending on the circumstances; oh, and we don’t know if it’ll work.
sigh
There is no clear and concise answer other than we are thoroughly screwed and there is no magic pill to get us out of our problems. Right now you have a surgeon who’s presented with someone who’s had his limbs chopped off and you have to stop him from bleeding and the only thing you have at your disposal are ziploc bags. You’re absolutely right that things will get worse before they get better and this isn’t what America wants to hear.
We could always start a massive, all-consuming war that completely mobilizes the nation’s production capacity… that is, afterall, how the Great Depression was eventually solved.
But seriously, I don’t know a lot about economics, but from the few stuff I’ve read, what economists have learned from our first Great Depression and from Japan’s 20 years of recession is that you need massive government regulation and spending to survive these things. Obviously we couldn’t get into a war on the same scale as WWII even if we wanted to, but I think the government could be doing more than it is - for instance, nationalizing and reforming the banking industry ASAP.
Also, I’m glad Obama took advantage of the situation to insert a bunch of long-term projects into the stimulus bill that don’t have anything to do with immediate recovery, such as finding a renewable energy source. In fact some economists say the stimulus bill doesn’t have much stimulus stuff at all and is really an attempt to initiate other goals under the guise of economic relief.
That’s not change. That’s the kind of earmarking that’s been put into legislation for decades. You can appreciate it all you like, but I don’t understand how anyone can call Obama a transformational figure if he’s playing the same Washington game that we’ve become accustomed to.
I’m just amazed that you find it a good thing that the bill had loads of approprtiation measures towards interests that had nothing to do with why the bill was made. You recognize it as a “guise” and thus, must understand that’s it’s an underhanded measure - a means to push his agenda, but you find it admirable.
It’s not. This is not what legislation is supposed to be about. We don’t have time for these games either. The legislation should have been focused and concise. President Obama knows that it’s going to take years for medical records to be digitized but he allowed the Democrats to put it in the legislation anyway - that’s not good. That’s not transparent. It’s certainly not laudable.
Oh Jesus h. Christ would you stop and listen. The fact is there is no simple and concise answer to this problem because it goes against all the typical economic thinking, and as such the answer has to be at best educated guesswork (we can hope for very educated, but not the typical education). Long term investments that will help create jobs now and makes things more efficient in the future are as good a bet as any. Long term investments that will pay for themselves in the future (which includes roads, health and education) are great. But no short term solution is going to sort this mess out. You’re asking for the impossible.
All I’m asking for is to get what I’m paying for. President Obama didn’t say on the campaign trail that he’d sign off on legislation that focused more on investing in the long-term on items that weren’t going to help us in the present day. No, he said he was going to sign off on a bill that dealt with the immediate problems and made a very clear case for what it would be. This legislation did not reflect that.
I didn’t vote for President Obama, but I’m paying for this bill along with every other American taxpayer; we should at least know that the stimulus package is dealing with the immediate financial crisis. Otherwise, all the spending we’re doing on education and other noble goals means nothing; all it amounts to is more spending of money that we don’t have. That’s one of the ways we got in this mess in the first place.
If we’re going to make long-term investments in the midst of a financial crisis, we should do it responsibly. A reckoning will come - and it’s not going to be based on how much we’ve spent, but on how intelligently we’ve spent it. If we don’t have an even footing in the present day, why are we acting like the future is certain and spending so much money on it? All this education spending you’re talking about isn’t going to go into effect until 2010 or further anyway. Some of the infrastructure and health care changes aren’t going to go into effect until later. Why are we dealing with that when the housing market is still in shambles and consumer confidence is at an all time low?
I’m taking another approach I recently heard; that this bill is more a sign of temporary relief than anything. At least they had enough sense to add a good amount of unemployment benefits. But this extra spending is unneccessary.
Yeah, it is kinda bullshit that Obama is already doing a shitton of the things people were mad at Bush for doing, but now they’re literally cheering him on for it. In some cases, like this one, where the way he takes advantage of the system to get what he wants done isn’t different, but the goals are, it is understandable, I suppose. In others, such as his utter lack of transparency on torture and other issues, as criticized by the ACLU and others, it is the exact same bullshit, but his sycophantic proponents are cheering him on just the same.
Because there is no immediate solution. None. It. Doesn’t. Exist. The only solution is a long term one, although some of the effects would be immediate. This is quite likely the best thing to try and do. It’s an immediate response as best you can manage. And you always have to plan for the future.
Yep, you’re right, I don’t care about the fact that its underhanded. Obama can’t reform the political process, and I don’t expect him too. I simply hope that he can fulfill his policies(which I believe are good policies) by any means short of violence or outright breaking the law. Our political process is a direct result of the nature of the American people(their general apathy and making decisions based on emotional impressions rather than logic), and it can’t be changed until the public changes. Which isn’t happening anytime soon, since most voters are middle-aged or elderly and thus past the point where they can experience meaningful congnitive changes. The one time Obama tried to be honest and treat the public like an adult, when he said that people “cling to guns and religion because of economic failure”, people got angry at him.
Furthermore, Arac, Obama isn’t on the same level as Bush. Bush was outright breaking the law, whether it was authorizing the use of torture, wire-tapping people, creating false intelligence for an invasion of Iraq, etc.
Also consider that if Obama didn’t secretly do this stuff, it wouldn’t get done.
Cavelcade is also right by saying there’s no short-term solution. But, there are still things that must be done to effect a solution, over the long-term. And yes, its guesswork, but most economists who have studied Japan’s problems seem to think that nationalizing and reforming the banking industry would be a pretty good guess.
So President Obama is a skilled, shrewd politician; but he’s not an agent of change if he allows these kinds of things to occur.
In other news, President Obama had his first foreign trip today - to our friendly neighbor to the North. There was an NPR report on just how intertwined the Canadian and American economies are. It’s interesting to see the Preisdent back off of reforms to NAFTA - which the Canadian government might not like to incur drastic changes.
But this trip, like Secretary of State Clinton’s trip to Japan, was well-timed and largely symbolic but neccessary gestures. These are some of the largest economies and some of our biggest financial partners. I found it strange though, that the news reports here never seemed to even show an answer by the Prime Minister of Canada. I’d kind of like to hear what he has to say. He couldn’t have been as hammered as the Japanese Finance Minister was.
This is an irrelevant point, but I remember watching the opening of the Canadian Parliament (a large amount of pomp and circumstance, but after the Inauguration I can’t call the kettle black here) and being rather surprised. I was somewhat stunned to see, in the middle of it all, a black woman occupying what seemed to be the premiere position of power.
I don’t know the cultural issues in Canada concerning blacks, but seeing a black woman in such a position of power is amazing to me. Here in the United States, that’s something that’s unlikely to say the least. There was a Prime Minister and an entire Parliament stopping and listening intently to the words of a black woman. who commanded power. I’m not even Canadian but I oddly felt a sense of pride in Canada for being able to progess far enough to reach that point.