Follow this link to the Frank Rich column in the New York Time.

Now that Chris Dodd is vacating the Senate, his chairmanship of the Banking Committee may fall next year to Tim Johnson of South Dakota, home to Citi’s credit card operation. Johnson was the only Senate Democrat to vote against Congress’s recent bill policing credit card abuses.

And my fellow central Massachusetts citizens scoffed at my claim that we would be sorry for the loss of Chris Dodd as Senator from Connecticut.

Watch the Senate Debate from Friday, January 8th with candidates Martha Coakley (D), Scott Brown (R), and Joseph L. Kennedy (I).

Available as:
Quicktime Video
Windows Media File

The above is a snippet from the WGBY web site.

I have decided that apparently the people of Massachusetts do need to hear debates among the candidates. According to polls, 41% of the electorate is considering voting for Scott Brown.

The Worcester T & G published Coakley, Brown, Kennedy Spar, an article about the debate.

My comment on their message board about their article:

I trust the honesty of the Worcester T & G in reporting on the Senatorial race.

After all, why shouldn’t I. It is not as if they only publish letters to the editor in praise of Scott Brown, but nothing for Coakley.

It is not as if they go through all the comments on their message boards and only pick the ones favorable to Brown to repeat in the next day’s paper.

Oh, wait a minute. That is exactly what they are doing.

I have now listened to the debate in its entirety. It is a shame that Martha Coakley is such a weak representative of what the Democrats are trying to accomplish. She didn’t call Brown’s and Kennedy’s nonsense for what it was in a strong enough way. This type of performance by Coakley is exactly why I voted for Capuano in the primary.

Kennedy must think he is running for emperor. One Senator from Massachusetts proposes to go to Washington and repeal this and that, right and left, as if he had that power. The Democrats with a 60 vote margin can barely get anything by the 39 Republicans. One Libertarian with no allies is going to go and change it all. You have to wonder what fairy land this guy is living in. He may be a student of History and Economics, but he didn’t tell you that he is a failing student.

Across the board tax cuts may have been proposed during JFK’s time, but the situation was quite different back then. Back then, the credit system was not frozen. Back then, we had not crossed the tipping point to where businesses were fighting for their lives and trying to preserve their capital in order to prevent bankruptcy. The housing market had not collapsed, and foreclosures were not at record highs. What would have worked back then did not work now. With the humongous tax cuts that Bush rammed through, you’d think that a recession would be impossible by Brown’s way of thinking. Of course most of the tax cuts went to wealthy people to invest in CDOs and RMBs and other real estate bubble causing investments. The tax cuts also added incentives for outrageous bonuses for unconscionable risk taking in the financial sector. Little of the tax cuts went to the middle and lower classes to spend on necessities.

When there is some stiffness in the system you can push it around with some tax cuts. When private spending has gone limp like a string out of fear, pushing on the tax-cut string is not very effective. That is exactly why the government has to spend money on the types of investments that were neglected during the boom years.

Another useful analogy might compare trying to push around an inflated economic balloon compared to trying to push around a burst balloon.

Brown is absolutely wrong that there has been no spending in Massachusetts on infrastructure projects. I see repaving projects going on all around me. I don’t believe the cash strapped cities and towns are putting out all this money from their own budgets.

You might be tempted to use my argument about tax cuts to decry increased deficit spending, but you would be wrong. Bush had no business doing deficit spending during boom years. However, spending money to blow things up during boom times is quite different from spending money to invest in infrastructure, health care, and education during a recession. If Bush had spent that money on something useful, his profligate ways would still have been damaging, but not as damaging. He let our manufacturing base be outsourced away while he was busy fighting wars of choice.

RichardH just posted the following as a comment to the original post below the green line:

Remarks by the President on Strengthening Intelligence and Aviation Security 7 January 2010.

The President is far more eloquent than I could ever be in explaining what he is doing. That is why I want to elevate Richard’s post to here. I don’t want you to miss this link because it was buried in a comment.

Follow this link to the story on the McClatchy News web site about President Obama’s response to the December 25th airplane bombing attempt..

What a novel concept – the person in charge takes responsibility.

He doesn’t ask for major new intrusive and unconstitutional powers. He does not ask for more data to drown the data we already have. He analyzes the problem and takes the steps that an executive has the power to take to fix the problem. He also doesn’t make some underling take the fall for a failure of the system.

He didn’t even have to go to Harvard Business School to learn this. If I were still in the work force, I sure know which President I would prefer to work for.

Think about this.  If you are an employee and you see that heads don’t roll when you give your boss an honest assessment of what went wrong, are you likely to be open and honest with your boss in the future?  On the other hand, if you see that someone gets fired when something goes wrong, are you likely to spend your time to deflect blame on some other patsy the next time something goes wrong.  Which is more productive to fixing problems, honest assessments of what to fix or massive efforts at blame shifting?

Let me see if I have this straight, the President who ignored the pleadings of his subordinates and allowed the killing of nearly 3,000 people and billions of dollars of destruction got elected to a second term.  The President whose administration has thwarted many such attempts in his short tenure and who takes immediate responsibility for an attempt that got way too close to success is supposedly in trouble electorally.

Follow this link to the story on the McClatchy News web site.

Of course there will be problems say the insurance companies.  What would we expect them to say?  Given their level of credibility, it is hard to know if there is any merit to their arguments.

If problems arise, I bet the Obama administration or Congress can fix them.  One of Obama’s key principles is that you keep a close eye on and keep measuring programs so you can catch problems early on.

We have found out that management talent in the executive branch at the highest level does make a significant difference in how well the government works.

Although President Obama does the beer party better than GWB, if that is your criterion for something, hire someone else in some other job to fill that need.  President Obama is very busy trying to make things work.

Follow this link to the latest article in the Worcester T & G about this issue.

Even the Worcester T & G seems to be implicitly understanding that waterboarding is a contemptibly immoral act.  It puts this story on the third page of the newspaper.  In order to find this story on their web site, you have to know the content of the story and search for it.

If it weren’t for the fact that yesterday’s story is one of the most read stories, you wouldn’t even find the word Brown on the home page of the web site.  Apparently the T & G’s attempt to downplay this as much as it can, won’t stop Brown from digging his hole deeper and deeper.  When he gets it deep enough, he can bury his campaign in it.

To further the level of idiocy in Brown’s stance, there are news stories that the latest terrorist suspect is giving lots of information to the FBI.  Presumably, if this information comes from legal interrogations, it will be admissible in court.

Waterboarding will tend to shut down the flow of information as it did in the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Most, if not all, of the information we got from this terrorist came before we started water boarding.

Follow this link to the article speculating that Dodd is about to announce his retirement.

Apparently not enough of you people responded to his request for contributions. 🙂

I wonder if I get my money back. 🙁

I had no idea that he was in so much political trouble.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if Lieberman gets to stay and Dodd has to leave?

Follow this link to the article in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

If you had been under the mistaken impression that you could morally cast a vote for Scott Brown for Massachusetts Senator, then this article should be enough to disabuse you of that idea.

Not only is Scott Brown willing to wreck the economy, he seems to be willing to give up our constitutional rights at any opportunity.

The man accused in the attempt to bomb an airplane is being handled in the civilian justice system.  From what little is covered in the news, the investigation seems to be going along quite well.  Even without signs of any trouble handling this case in a constitutional manner, Scott Brown wants to torture the suspect and let the military handle this case.

It seems that getting educated as a lawyer is no guarantee of having any moral center.  It just proves that if you have no moral center when you start, law school is not the place to get one.

An article at TimesOnline discusses the situation in Yemen.

It looks like the government there is exactly the kind of government that we should avoid like the plague.

Perhaps we ought to pursue an approach of trying to support the rebels to lure them away from al-Qaeda.  Trying to fight al-Qaeda via the Yemeni government sounds like a losing proposition to me.

At least we could have our rebels fighting the al-Qaeda rebels and completely bypass the central government.

Why should we spend money trying to train government forces that do not want to be trained when we can work with rebels who seem to be more than adequately trained already?