If you read This Is A News Website Article About A Scientific Paper. you will have the gist of every such article ever published or that will ever be published.
How can you pass up this investment in time that will pay off many times over? 😉
Finally, someone graphically illustrates the issue of extending the tax cuts.
If you are watching this or any other video on the home page of the blog, please click on the article title first so that your browser is showing only the one article. This will keep other videos on the home page from trying to steal bandwidth from the one you want to view.
I like to think Goolsbee is making the point that I have been trying to make.
Furthermore, finally we have a Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers who understands that part of his role is to explain things to the voters. This White House White Board is a great idea.
The preamble to the video on www.whitehouse.gov/whiteboard is:
Today we’re trying out something new — White House White Board, in which one of our key players on the White House team will cut through the political back-and-forth you hear every day and break down an issue affecting American families into simple, understandable terms. Today, Austan Goolsbee, the new Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers here at the White House, tackles the tax cut fight and what it means that Congressional Republicans are “holding middle class tax cuts hostage” as the President has said:
Here is President Obama addressing 26K Cheering College Kids in Wisconsin while 200 other colleges were linked in electronically. He really lays it on the line. How could anyone remain apathetic after hearing this speech?
Thanks to MardyS for posting this on his Facebook page as a reminder to us all.
You can also see this posted in an article on TalkingPointsMemo.com
In the article Return of the ‘Contract With America’, author Joe Conason writes
The Republicans have announced the forthcoming release of the “Contract From America”—a set of legislative proposals presumably intended to replicate the “Contract With America” used by their leaders in the historic 1994 midterm when they won control of both houses of Congress.
The Republicans seem to have trouble with prepositions. I have always called these things Contract On America. It seems so much like a Mob hit contract, that my title seemed more appropriate.
For another take on the Contract On America, read Clive McFarlane’s piece GOP pledge no pathway to future in the Worcester T & G.
The actual headline of the article is Stimulus Spending On Highways Isn’t Delivering On Job Promises.
This is the classic “the glass is half empty” story if there ever was one.
Based on other people’s comments on the story, my comment was:
Why am I not surprised that people see in this story exactly what they want to see? No matter which side of the political spectrum you are on, this story proves that you have been right all along. Does McClatchy have a magic typewriter hidden away in their offices?
So, you can feel safe in reading the story because it is sure to prove to you what you have always known, whatever that is.
View Fed. Chairman Ben Bernanke Address at Princeton University on C-SPAN. The video is just over 1 hour long.
The address talks about the role of economic research, engineering, and management in the efforts of the Fed to counteract the recent deep recession and financial system near meltdown.
I was late to David Simon’s ‘The Wire.’ I don’t have cable TV. However, I am hooked on this gritty TV (and now DVD) series about life, death, crime, honor, and corruption in Baltimore. My wife and I have now seen four out of the five seasons of the show. We borrow the DVDs for a season from our public library and then watch all of the episodes over a one-week period. Exhausting and exhilarating.
In the 14 October 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books, Lorrie Moore writes In the Life of ‘The Wire’.
Read the article and then borrow the first season from your local library or from NetFlix.
Note: After a certain (or uncertain) length of time, NYRB articles disappear behind a subscriber pay-wall.
-RichardH
The comment card that he mentions is on the PCCC web site. There is a place to say what you think Elizabeth Warren’s top priorities should be. Besides choosing three items from a list, I also wrote in:
Stop allowing Wall Street Ponzi schemes to dupe the public. Claiming sophisticated investors should protect themselves, when the Wall St purveyors of this garbage know they are lying to bamboozle even sophisticated investors should not be a get out of jail free card.
If the direct video and the link above don’t satisfy you, here is the YouTube Link To Al Franken’s video.
In the 24 September 2010 NY Times, historian Ron Chernow addresses The Founding Fathers Versus the Tea Party. The Tea Party claims that its views mirror those of the Founding Fathers. Chernow claims that the Founders were certainly NOT “a like-minded group of theorists.”
The truth is that the disputatious founders — who were revolutionaries, not choir boys — seldom agreed about anything. Never has the country produced a more brilliantly argumentative, individualistic or opinionated group of politicians. Far from being a soft-spoken epoch of genteel sages, the founding period was noisy and clamorous, rife with vitriolic polemics and partisan backbiting. Instead of bequeathing to posterity a set of universally shared opinions, engraved in marble, the founders shaped a series of fiercely fought debates that reverberate down to the present day. Right along with the rest of America, the Tea Party has inherited these open-ended feuds, which are profoundly embedded in our political culture.
As a general rule, the founders favored limited government, reserving a special wariness for executive power, but they clashed sharply over those limits.
The Constitution’s framers dedicated Article I to the legislature in the hope that, as the branch nearest the people, it would prove pre-eminent. But Washington, as our first president, quickly despaired of a large, diffuse Congress ever exercising coherent leadership. The first time he visited the Senate to heed its “advice and consent,” about a treaty with the Creek Indians, he was appalled by the disorder. “This defeats every purpose of my coming here,” he grumbled, then departed with what one senator branded an air of “sullen dignity.” Washington went back one more time before dispensing with the Senate’s advice altogether, henceforth seeking only its consent.
President Washington’s Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, wasted no time in testing constitutional limits as he launched a burst of government activism. In December 1790, he issued a state paper calling for the first central bank in the country’s history, the forerunner of the Federal Reserve System.
Because the Constitution didn’t include a syllable about such an institution, Hamilton, with his agile legal mind, pounced on Article I, Section 8, which endowed Congress with all powers “necessary and proper” to perform tasks assigned to it in the national charter. Because the Constitution empowered the government to collect taxes and borrow money, Hamilton argued, a central bank might usefully discharge such functions. In this way, he devised a legal doctrine of powers “implied” as well as enumerated in the Constitution.
Aghast at the bank bill, James Madison, then a congressman from Virginia, pored over the Constitution and could not “discover in it the power to incorporate a bank.” Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was no less horrified by Hamilton’s legal legerdemain. He thought that only measures indispensable to the discharge of enumerated powers should be allowed, not merely those that might prove convenient. He spied how many programs the assertive Hamilton was prepared to drive through the glaring loophole of the “necessary and proper” clause. And he prophesied that for the federal government “to take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn … is to take possession of a boundless field of power.”
After reviewing cogent legal arguments presented by Hamilton and Jefferson, President Washington came down squarely on Hamilton’s side, approving the first central bank.
John Marshall, the famed chief justice, traced the rise of the two-party system to that blistering episode, and American politics soon took on a nastily partisan tone. That the outstanding figures of the two main factions, Hamilton and Jefferson, both belonged to Washington’s cabinet attests to the fundamental disagreements within the country. Hamilton and his Federalist Party espoused a strong federal government, led by a powerful executive branch, and endorsed a liberal reading of the Constitution; although he resisted the label at first, Washington clearly belonged to this camp.
Jefferson and his Republicans (not related to today’s Republicans) advocated states’ rights, a weak federal government and strict construction of the Constitution. The Tea Party can claim legitimate descent from Jefferson and Madison, even though they founded what became the Democratic Party. On the other hand, Washington and Hamilton — founders of no mean stature — embraced an expansive view of the Constitution. That would scarcely sit well with Tea Party advocates, many of whom adhere to the judicial doctrine of originalism — i.e., that any interpretation of the Constitution must abide by the intent of those founders who crafted it.
Of course, had it really been the case that those who wrote the charter could best fathom its true meaning, one would have expected considerable agreement about constitutional matters among those former delegates in Philadelphia who participated in the first federal government. But Hamilton and Madison, the principal co-authors of “The Federalist,” sparred savagely over the Constitution’s provisions for years. Much in the manner of Republicans and Democrats today, Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians battled over exorbitant government debt, customs duties and excise taxes, and the federal aid to business recommended by Hamilton.
No single group should ever presume to claim special ownership of the founding fathers or the Constitution they wrought with such skill and ingenuity.
-RichardH
And now for a really hilarious interview by Jon Stewart with King Abdullah II of Jordan. 😉
Made you look, I hope. It was a serious and good interview, not hilarious. I deserve ten strokes with a wet noodle for that deception.