For those few of us who still appreciate him, The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Recalls Obama’s Fall From Grace, is a worthwhile read.

It is hard to find just one thing to quote from the article.  The one I have chosen is just the easiest one, not necessarily the best one.

“Once that media-spun narrative is out there, from that point on all you hear is critiques of the narrative, deconstruction of the narrative, debates concerning the narrative, affirmations of the narrative, attacks on the narrative, with nobody talking about substance, because we don’t even know what substance is,” Wright said.

If you are not a fan of Rev. Wright, don’t bother to read the article.  The opening remarks of the author of the piece will have your eyes and ears flapping closed so fast that you won’t be able to see the words in the rest of the article even if your eyes wander over each and every one of them.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

By the way, I don’t agree with everything that is in the article.

James Fallows wrote the article I Wonder If President Obama Really Believes This. He starts with the following paragraphs:

Read the two bits of testimony by Congressional staffers — one Democratic, one Republican — about the nihilist freefire zone that is the modern Congress. Then consider President Obama’s Labor Day pledge:

“We’ve got a lot more work to do to recover fully from this recession,” Mr. Obama said. “I’m going to propose ways to put America back to work that both parties can agree to because I still believe both parties can work together to solve our problems.”

An objective observer must of course conclude that in fact there is no way “to put America back to work that both parties can agree to,” because not agreeing is, for today’s Republican leadership, a paramount goal.

Brad DeLong’s post James Fallows: I Wonder If President Obama Really Believes This makes the following remark:

Put me down as somebody who believes that the President of the United States should not say things that he believes to be untrue. He is then relying on people’s believing that they know what you really mean–that they are in on the con–to keep them from thinking that he is a fool.

Brad DeLong has captured exactly what it is that makes me so upset when the President acts like he can get some agreement from the Republicans.  Does Obama think it is Presidential to act the fool?

Obama’s recent pronouncements where he talks about what he almost really wants for tax policy and talks about veto if he doesn’t get what he wants is the beginning of the reversal of playing the role of the fool.  Let’s see if his actions back up his words.  Too many times before we have seen Obama negotiate with himself and lose.

The point of not responding to Obama’s latest remarks with “All is forgiven” is to keep the pressure on him to follow through with actions commensurate with the talk.

“Days of Rage” Occupy Wall St. on The Real News talks about,

Five thousand people demand Wall St. pay for the crisis

Here is the video clip.

Funny I haven’t heard about this demonstration on the Nightly Business Report nor any of the main stream media.

In the video below, Michael Moore describes how he thinks that liberals will come back to Obama.

I have perverted a reader’s emailed comment that talk is cheap to mean that it is one thing for President Obama to say he will veto the Republicans’ attempt to cut Medicare without also raising taxes on the wealthy. It is quite another to see him actually do it.

When Obama actually follows through on his threat, you may see the liberals coming home.

The summary of the video below comes from the article Occupy Wall Street organizer: Republicans are the ones waging class warfare on the Raw Story web site.

David Graeberm, one of the organizers of the “Occupy Wall Street” protest, said Monday on Democracy Now that it was Republicans, not President Barack Obama, who were engaged in class warfare.

“Well, generally speaking, when you hear a Republican talk about class warfare, you know they’re waging it,” he said. “I think that the easiest way to put what’s going on in perspective is to think the situation in the ’50s under Eisenhower, who was of course a Republican president, when tax rates on the wealthiest were actually 90 percent. I don’t remember the economy freezing up and falling apart in the 1950s. In fact, it was booming.”

“I think that for the last 30 years we’ve seen a political battle being waged by the super-rich against everyone else,” Graeberm added.

The more significant part of this video may be the discussion at the end about debt restructuring. David Graeberm talks about how debt restructuring between the wealthy or between countries is common place, yet debt owed by the poor to the rich is considered to be sacrosanct and should not be restructured.

Maybe this difference is a natural consequence of the wealthy and nations having the resources to hire good lawyers and large armies to fight their creditors whereas the poor have no power to resist their creditors if the poor should default.

Below is a video from NBC’s Today show.

Matt Lauer asked President Clinton what business leaders say is the thing that most prevents them from investing their hoards of cash in new hiring. The number one thing that Clinton mentions is the fact that demand is weak. The business leaders are not sure that if they hire, the products they make will get sold. (It’s funny how Nightly Business Report is asking the same question of business leaders night after night and they never get that answer at all let alone as the most important problem. Notice also that this issue is not the one NBC chose for the headline.)

I think President Clinton gets it mostly right. He goes a little off track in answering how to get the consumer to spend more. Rather than telling the consumer to buck up and have a little courage, he could have reiterated his ideas on mortgage relief as a way to free up the consumer from the fear of the loss of their house. I imagine that for some people the thought of being 10s of thousands of dollars underwater on their mortgages doesn’t make them feel confident to go out and spend a lot of their $1,500 tax cut.

Then he could have talked about the government consumption stimulus in spending for public works and supporting the rehiring of teachers. People who have jobs tend to spend more freely than the unemployed do. The spending by the newly employed makes consumer demand increase to the point where other people are hired to satisfy this new demand – rinse and repeat.

He could then mention that after these two major ways of stimulating the consumer spending had been put in place, a little political jaw-boning might help.

An action like the tax cut that will only stimulate the economy if those darn real people would only behave the way we wanted them to, reluctant though they may be, is not nearly as effective as one that takes the more direct route of the government just spending the money to buy stuff.

Maybe instead of giving the $1,500 tax rebates in cash, the government ought to run it like a credit card company’s reward redemption plan. The rebate could be redeemed for products, but not for cash.

The Boston Globe ran the story headlined Obama backs off from summer deals. The first pargraph says:

When President Obama announces at least $2 trillion in long-term deficit reduction measures today, he will not include all the compromises he reached with House Republican leaders before budget cutting talks broke off.

Since when are bargaining positions in negotiations that never reach a conclusion called deals? Is this an attempt by The Boston Globe to outfox Faux Noise in the field of biased journalism?

Perhaps The Boston Globe has never heard the negotiating ploy, “This is the deal, take it or leave it.”  The Republicans decided to leave it.  They cannot expect to take it latter.  Once the left it the proposed deal was “off the table” to put it in words that Republicans understand.

Obama’s taking up proposals that Republicans once made and reject after he proposes them is not quite the same thing as choosing a different strategy when your first one is rejected.  Yet there is enough similarity that the Republicans ought to understand a deal is not a deal until both sides agree to it.

Conveniently, the new incarnation of The Boston Globe web site does not allow comments yet.  Perhaps this blog post will have the same effect as my other post, The New York Tines Wages Class Warfare, had on The New York Times.

In the story America’s debt battle about the President’s latest tax the rich scheme, the article states:

In a defiant note, administration officials made clear Sunday that Mr. Obama would veto any Medicare benefit cuts that aren’t paired with tax increases on upper-income people.

Nice counter to the Republicans’ claim that tax increases are off the table.

Where has this Obama been hiding for the last three years?  Maybe all the grumbling and grousing from Obama’s base of supporters has finally gotten through.  You don’t suppose the letters I sent to his re-election campaign explaining why I am not sending a donation had an effect?

An article on the UK Daily Mail, Gamers solve puzzle which stumped scientists for years and could hold key to curing AIDS, starts off with:

Videogame players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years and could hold the key to finding a cure for AIDS.

A team of gamers needed just ten days to produce an answer to an enzyme riddle that had eluded experts for more than a decade.

All you parents (and spouses) who think game playing is a waste of time, take heed.