Well the day I have been looking forward to-is getting closer. With luck I will be back across the Atlantic ocean this weekend. Romania has been nice-but ten weeks is about six weeks two much. I’ve seen the city pretty much through and through, driven around southern Romania and up into the mountains. I am very ready to go home. Last couple of nights all I have done is stay in and watch movies on my computer. Problem is, I either need to down load some new ones or get some new entertainment. I’ve pretty well been through all the ones on my external hard drive. Another reason to get back home-even if it is too Shopping Mall USA.
Speaking of movies, one thing I am excited about is that when I get back, the new Wall Street movie should be out. That I am going to go see. If I can’t get the S.O. to go with me-I will go by myself.
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Clive Crook has a great column up about how Obama has just folded like a cheap suit this fall-and he is right. If the Democrats get killed this fall, they will have no one to blame but themselves. It seems that no one, and I mean no one, will step to the plate and take leadership-and in the process show the country why the “Tea Party” solution is no solution at all.
His speech on Monday already said, in effect, that he is giving up the effort to pass another stimulus. The Labor Day address called for $50bn of new spending on infrastructure, but over six years, and the plan “will be fully paid for”, presumably meaning no increase in the budget deficit. It is a non-starter in any case, of course. But the messaging was revealing. The word “stimulus” was never mentioned.
This is a great mistake, as I argued here. The economy needs another stimulus, and can afford it. But Obama has decided that politics rules it out. He is in campaign mode, praising unions and beating up Republicans, evidently calculating that getting out the base is what matters. Meanwhile, economic policy is on hold.
Is there an alternative? I believe so, and made the case for it in the article I just linked to. A stimulus based on temporary tax cuts–extend all the Bush changes for two more years, and combine it with generous payroll-tax relief–would be difficult for the Republicans to block. Including an extension of the Bush tax cuts for high-income households alongside those for the middle-class might make the package less cost-effective in fiscal terms, though this is not clear. What is clear is that extending all the cuts would deny the Republicans their favorite excuse for saying no: “It’s a tax increase.”
I remain in complete agreement with Krugman-the stimulus was not big enough nor was it targeted enough ont the right sectors. The idiots who keep posting on their Facebook pages about “making their Congressman pay for voting in favor of the stimulus”-really have a short memory it seems. Had their been no stimulus things would be even worse than they are. If throwing the thugs the bone of extending the Bush tax cuts for a couple of years is necessary to get them to play ball on a stimulus-well then so be it. That’s practical politics, something my Tea swilling compatriots conveniently forget.
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Truer words have never been written:
Some folks might tell you that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer isn’t emblematic of modern Republicanism. I would tell you that they’re wrong. Brewer is the perfect symbol of everything that is devious, ignorant and generally wrong about the modern GOP. She’s a more retarded version of Sarah Palin, without Palin’s benefit of being hot enough to distract from just how dumb and allergic to personal responsibility she is.
There was a time when the GOP would have had someone like the governor deported at the end of a fucking rocket. But that was before the party made ignorance a virtue, and stupidity and laziness became campaign tactics. In so far as they have made proud and willful imbecility something to aspire to as a career choice, Jan Brewer is symbolic of your modern Republican Party.
Taking a tactic from Saint Sarah’s handbook-Jan Brewer has taken her ball and gone home.
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And finally, Negishi had an open base event the other day. Open to every one-except the French. As an aside when I first got to Japan, besides working on my onna no hito’s in my walking club, I also went through my “chase an English teacher” phase and that was how I learned that people who are from South Africa are also on the same list.