Crackers in my soup

Apparently I’m not the only person spitting pea soup over the Righty obstruction — even the Pub Governors are at odds with their comrades in the House. Here are the best op/ed’s of the weekend from Frank Rich, Bob Herbert, Richard Reeves and Eugene Robinson — and a Don’t Miss crackerjack piece from Greg Palast suggesting that Obama may, indeed, be a Progressive.

And NO, the Prez is not keeping back a Constitution-busting Bushy-bit allowing him to torture covertly — there is a big difference between rendition and extraordinary rendition; here’s Harper’s Scott Horton to explain it. If we want to cry foul over this, then we need to be informed about what it actually is.

It’s as if there is no news to report, so they have to make stuff up — which is hardly the case. Watching the daily White House briefings has me shaking my head; we used to get no news except the propaganda and watched to see how the Press Secretary would bob and weave should a courageous reporter question. Now, with more access than they know what to do with, the press have all turned into proctologists, trying to dissect the slightest little bit of tissue to see if its a tumor. Too much tunnel vision, not enough big picture. Hopefully things will balance out after awhile, and these nabob’s will remember what real reporters are supposed to do.

Besides, anyone who can give Hawk-in-Chief and Bush boot-licker, Saint Dave Petraeus, sleepless nights is just fine by me. This, by the way, is your wake-up call to sign on to your anti-war websites and urge Obama forward in his plans to vacate Iraq. If we’d “won the war” there, as the Pubs all trumpet, there would be no reason for hesitation in pulling out — quite obviously, we only won the regime change … and when we leave, it will have to be won again by those who live there.

As Barney Franks insisted this weekend, THAT money is what pushed us over the cliff — you remember: the war that would pay for itself? And let us NEVER forget the human cost here at home, and there as well.

After the op/ed’s, there’s a couple of bonus reads on Obama’s plan to clean up the banking business; spare but encouraging — as my own Senator, Claire McCaskill [about as Dem as we've got here, even if Digby and others are bitching about her Blue Dog status], proposing caps on bonus money by those who took Federal welfare, had to say:

“They don’t get it. These people are idiots. You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses… What planet are these people on?”

and

“Right now, they’re on the hook to us. And they owe us something more than a fancy waste basket and a $15-million dollar jet. They owe us some common sense.”

So it isn’t just the Pubs who are clueless that people are sharpening their pitchforks and boiling their oil — last week it was CitiBank whooping it up on public money, this week it’s Bank of America, who spent $10m on Super Bowl parties, explaining it as part of their ‘growth strategy.’

The high rollers know no shame at this point — counterpoint them to the poor Madoff relatives who are running around with their heads down and all want to change their name. Madoff, as a private broker, seems to be the whipping boy — we need to enlarge that picture to include corporations, acting as private entities, and Just As Responsible.

First things first — take Madoff out of Penthouse Arrest and slam him in the poky! Then let’s look at the party boyz to see just how bad it is. I’m with Bernie Sanders, courageous Vermont Independent, who wants to put all of Wall Street under oath. It worked in FDR’s day and gave us a platform for restoration.

In other Pub news, they have elected a new RNC chairman, Michael Steele, a black man they hired to run for Lt. Gov. of Maryland awhile back. He beat out the guy who passed around the “Barack the Magic Negro” song. He says the RNC is alive and well, and doesn’t have to change much. Every time I see him, I think of the little black kid on South Park whose name is Token. Ba-dah bump!

David Duke, Klu Klux Klan political wannabe from Louisiana … who evidently wasn’t given a vote … had this to say:

To Hell with the Republican Party! GOP traitors appoint Obama Junior as Chairman of the Republican Party

And from the Why Am I Not Surprised Department, it appears to be volcano season — here and here.

As Phil the Groundhog saw his shadow, we have some Winter yet ahead — yeah, huh! Happy Imbolc to those of us who dance anyway.

Jude

THE REPUBLICAN IDIOCY
Richard Reeves, Yahoo

LOS ANGELES — It was John Stuart Mill in the middle of the 19th century who
dismissed Great Britain’s Conservative Party as “the stupid party.”

Commenting on that immediately after last year’s presidential election, The Economist, published in London, said this:

“The title of the ’stupid party’ now belongs to the Tories’ trans-Atlantic cousins, the Republicans.

“There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on Nov. 4. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000 — many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases — by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.”

The proof of that pudding was dramatized last week in Washington when every single Republican in the House of Representatives voted against the new president’s economic stimulus plan. It is not that the nay-saying Republicans have a plan of their own; they agree on nothing except cutting taxes. Their leader, Rush Limbaugh, the entertainer, has told them that their job is to make sure that Obama fails.

In an American context, Republicans have been called America’s stupid party for much of their history, but that title clearly passed to the Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s, and perhaps for most of ’90s and on into the 21st century. Now, led by wacko pundits like Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and a bunch of less-prosperous firebugs, the Republicans have lost all sense of what is happening in the country.

Their boy, George W. Bush, left the country in fear and loathing. Obama was seized on as something of a savior, and he has shown he knows how to play the role. There is no way Obama, or perhaps anyone, knows how to get out of the current mess. But he does know what most people want at this uncertain moment. As he made clear in his Inaugural Address:

“The stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.”

We are going to see a lot of trial and error from the White House, as generations before us did in the 1930s. But the point is, we have to try — and odds are we’ll figure something out.

If ideologically driven Republicans are seen as nothing more than obstructionists, they will end up in the worst place in their history. They are flirting with irrelevance these days, while Obama is dancing as fast he can, trying to extend a hand if they are willing to unclench their fists.

It wouldn’t hurt either if Democrats in Congress unclenched their fists, too. There is more to political life than saying over and over again that we won the election and we can do anything we want. That, it could be argued, is how the Republicans destroyed themselves over the past few years.

“The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. … During the primary debates, three out of 10 Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution,” wrote the Economist.

“Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled ‘Ideas Have Consequences’; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.” ++

Blind Unanimity
Congressional Republicans, Meet PATCO
Eugene Robinson, WaPo
Friday, January 30, 2009

Watching the House Republicans vote unanimously against President Obama’s economic stimulus package, I thought of Ronald Reagan, the air traffic controllers and the potential consequences for those who fail to recognize that one political era has given way to the next.

You may recall that the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike in August 1981, seeking better working conditions and more pay. Reagan had been in office just seven months, and the nation still wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. The controllers union had legitimate gripes and calculated that the new president would deal rather than risk a disruption of air travel. The union knew that strikes by government workers were illegal, strictly speaking, but it also knew that other organizations of federal employees had gotten away with similar walkouts in the past.

Reagan declared the strike a “peril to national safety” and gave the more than 13,000 air traffic controllers 48 hours to return to work. A few complied. When the deadline expired, Reagan fired the 11,345 controllers who had defied him. Two months later, the union was decertified. Years passed before any of the strikers were allowed to work as controllers again.

The point isn’t to revisit the merits of the strike or the wisdom of Reagan’s hard-line stance. The point is that the controllers’ union failed to realize that the dawn of the Reagan administration represented a rare fundamental shift in American politics. Under Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford or even Richard Nixon, the controllers might well have won their strike. Under Reagan, they had no chance — not only because of his stubborn resolve but also because American voters had given him a broad mandate for change.

That episode turned out to be just the beginning. Before Reagan, the economic beliefs that came to define the modern Republican Party — always cut taxes, always slash government spending, always deregulate — were associated with the conservative fringe. He brought them into the mainstream, effectively shifting the whole political spectrum sharply to the right.

Reagan’s new orthodoxy wouldn’t have been possible unless Americans had the sense that the old orthodoxy had reached a dead end. Carter had famously talked about “a crisis of confidence.” There was the feeling that America’s greatness was somehow slipping away, that things were out of control, that the old rhetoric was empty, that the old solutions wouldn’t solve anything, that we needed to try something new.

Um, is this ringing any bells for Republicans on Capitol Hill?

Scratch that question. When not one single, solitary Republican vote can be found in the House of Representatives to support the president’s $819 billion stimulus package, it’s pretty clear that the GOP caucus has been meeting in a soundproof room.

What I’ve been hearing from Republicans in both the House and Senate has been a kind of attenuated, distorted echo of the economic doctrine that the party has preached, if not always practiced, since the Reagan years. It’s perfectly appropriate, of course, to ask whether a specific spending proposal would have the desired stimulative effect; indeed, some items were removed from the stimulus bill for that reason. But underlying the Republican criticism has been a familiar formula: more tax cuts, fewer spending initiatives.

But Americans know that this philosophy has already taken us as far as it could. Americans know that taxes can be cut by only so much before the federal government’s effectiveness inevitably suffers. Americans know that spending money doesn’t necessarily mean wasting it. Americans know that the economic crisis means that taking the position that government is inherently oppressive, if not fundamentally evil, is now intellectually bankrupt, because government is the only instrument we have in the high-stakes attempt to induce financial and economic recovery.

If Republicans hadn’t broken the bank with drunken-sailorish spending during most of George W. Bush’s time in the White House, their complaints about the cost of the stimulus package and its impact on future deficits would be more credible. As things stand, we have to let actions speak: absolute solidarity among House Republicans in voting no.

It was a triumph of discipline over reason, of doctrine over observation. There is abundant evidence suggesting that we are in a new political era with new rules and a new lexicon. Those who ignore that evidence will have only themselves to blame if, like the air traffic controllers, they end up losing their jobs. ++

Herbert Hoover Lives
FRANK RICH, NYT
January 31, 2009

HERE’S a bottom line to keep you up at night: The economy is falling faster than Washington can get moving. President Obama says his stimulus plan will save or create four million jobs in two years. In the last four months of 2008 alone, employment fell by 1.9 million. Do the math.

The abyss is widening. Of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones industrial index, 22 have announced job cuts since October. Unemployment is up in all 50 states, with layoffs at both high-tech companies (Microsoft) and low (Caterpillar). The December job loss in retailing is the worst since at least 1939. The new-home sales rate has fallen to its all-time low since record-keeping began in 1963.

What are Americans still buying? Big Macs, Campbell’s soup, Hershey’s chocolate and Spam - the four food groups of the apocalypse.

The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us - and, for a time, united us - after 9/11. Which is why the antics among Republicans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same politicians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s “war on terror.” Where is their own patriotism now that economic terror is inflicting far more harm on their constituents than Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D.?

The House stimulus bill is an inevitably imperfect hodgepodge-in-progress. Obama’s next move, a new plan to prevent the collapse of America’s banks, may prove more problematic still, especially given the subpar record of the new Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, in warding off calamity while at the New York Fed. No one should expect the Republicans to give the new president carte blanche, fall blindly into lock step or be “post-partisan.” (Though that’s exactly what the G.O.P. demanded of Democrats with Bush: You were either with him or with the terrorists.)

But you might think that a loyal opposition would want to pitch in and play a serious role at a time of national peril. Not by singing “Kumbaya” but by collaborating on possible solutions and advancing a policy debate that many Americans’ lives depend on. As Raymond Moley, of F.D.R.’s brain trust, said of the cross-party effort at the harrowing start of that presidency in March 1933, Hoover and Roosevelt acolytes “had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats” as they urgently tried to rescue their country.

The current G.O.P. acts as if it - and we - have all the time in the world. It kept hoping in vain that the fast-waning Blago sideshow would somehow impale Obama or Rahm Emanuel. It has come perilously close to wishing aloud that a terrorist attack will materialize to discredit Obama’s reversals of Bush policy on torture, military tribunals and Gitmo. The party’s sole consistent ambition is to play petty politics to gum up the works.

If anything, the Republican Congressional leadership seems to be emulating John McCain’s September stunt of “suspending” his campaign to “fix” the Wall Street meltdown. For all his bluster, McCain in the end had no fixes to offer and sat like a pet rock at the White House meeting on the crisis before capitulating to the bailout. His imitators likewise posture in public about their determination to take action, then do nothing while more and more Americans cry for help.

The problem is not that House Republicans gave the stimulus bill zero votes last week. That’s transitory political symbolism, and it had no effect on the outcome. Some of the naysayers will vote for the revised final bill anyway (and claim, Kerry-style, that they were against it before they were for it). The more disturbing problem is that the party has zero leaders and zero ideas. It is as AWOL in this disaster as the Bush administration was during Katrina.

If the country wasn’t suffering, the Republicans’ behavior would be a laugh riot. The House minority leader, John Boehner, from the economic wasteland of Ohio, declared on “Meet the Press” last Sunday that the G.O.P. didn’t want to be “the party of ‘No’ ” but “the party of better ideas, better solutions.” And what are those ideas, exactly? He said he’ll get back to us “over the coming months.”

His deputy, the Virginia congressman Eric Cantor, has followed the same script, claiming that the G.O.P. will not be “the party of ‘No’ ” but will someday offer unspecified “solutions and alternatives.” Not to be left out, the party’s great white hope, Sarah Palin, unveiled a new political action committee last week with a Web site also promising “fresh ideas.” But as the liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga observed, the site invites visitors to make donations and read Palin hagiography while offering no links to any ideas, fresh or otherwise.

For its own contribution to this intellectual void, the Republican National Committee convened last week under a new banner, “Republican for a Reason.” Perhaps that unidentified reason will be determined by a panel of judges on a TV reality show. It had better be brilliant given that only five states (with 20 total electoral votes) now lean red in party affiliation, according to Gallup. At this rate the G.O.P. will be in Alf Landon territory by 2012.

The Republicans do have one idea, of course, but it’s hardly fresh: more and bigger tax cuts, particularly for business and the well-off. That’s the sum of their “alternative” stimulus plan. Obama has tried to accommodate this panacea, perhaps to a fault. Mainstream economists in both parties believe that tax cuts in the stimulus package will deliver far less bang for the buck than, say, infrastructure spending. The tax-cut stimulus embraced a year ago by the G.O.P. induced next-to-no consumer spending as Americans merely banked the savings or paid down debt.

We also now know conclusively that the larger Bush tax cuts, besides running up record deficits and exacerbating income inequality, were also at best a placebo on our road to ruin. In a January survey of economists, including former McCain advisers like Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Mark Zandi, The Washington Post determined that the job growth the Bush administration kept bragging about (”52 straight months!”) was a mirage inflated by the housing bubble. Job growth - about 2 percent - was in fact the most tepid of any eight-year period “since data collection began seven decades ago.” Gross domestic product grew at a slower pace than in any eight years since the Truman administration.

But even if tax cuts alone could jump-start a recovery, they couldn’t do the heavy lifting that Obama has promised and the country desperately needs: a down payment on a new economy to replace our dilapidated 20th-century model and bring back long-term growth. The Republicans don’t acknowledge the need for this transformation, or debate it in good conscience, preferring instead to hyperventilate over the contraceptives in a small family-planning program since removed from the stimulus bill. All it takes is the specter of condoms for the party of Vitter, Foley and Craig to go gaga.

The Republicans’ other preoccupation remains Rush Limbaugh, who is by default becoming their de facto leader. While most Americans are fearing fear itself, G.O.P. politicians are tripping over themselves in morbid terror of Rush.

These pratfalls commenced after Obama casually told some Republican congressmen (correctly) that they won’t “get things done” if they take their orders from Limbaugh. That’s all the stimulus the big man needed to go on a new bender of self-aggrandizement. He boasted that Obama is “more frightened” of him than he is of the Republican leaders in the House or Senate. He said of the new president, “I hope he fails.”

Obama no doubt finds Limbaugh’s grandiosity more amusing than frightening, but G.O.P. politicians are shaking like Jell-O. When asked by Andrea Mitchell of NBC News on Wednesday if he shared Limbaugh’s hope that Obama fails, Eric Cantor spun like a top before running off, as it happened, to appear on Limbaugh’s radio show. Mike Pence of Indiana, No. 3 in the Republican House leadership, similarly squirmed when asked if he agreed with Limbaugh. Though the Republicans’ official, poll-driven line is that they want Obama to succeed, they’d rather abandon that disingenuous nicety than cross Rush.

Most pathetic of all was Phil Gingrey, a right-wing Republican congressman from Georgia, who mildly criticized both Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to Politico because they “stand back and throw bricks” while lawmakers labor in the trenches. So many called Gingrey’s office to complain that the poor congressman begged Limbaugh to bring him on air to publicly recant on Wednesday. As Gingrey abjectly apologized to talk radio’s commandant for his “stupid comments” and “foot-in-mouth disease,” he sounded like the inmate in a B-prison-movie cowering before the warden after a failed jailbreak.

“It’s up to me to hijack the Obama honeymoon,” Limbaugh soon gloated, “and I’ve done it.” In his dreams. He has hijacked what’s left of the Republican Party; the Obama honeymoon remains intact. The nightmare is that we have so irrelevant, clownish and childish an opposition party at a moment when America is in an all-hands-on-deck emergency that’s as trying as war. To paraphrase a dictum that has been variously attributed to two of our most storied leaders in times of great challenge, Thomas Paine and George Patton, the Republicans should either lead, follow or get out of the grown-ups’ way. ++

The Same Old Song
Bob Herbert, NYT
Tuesday, January 27, 2009

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” said Representative John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who is House minority leader. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Boehner said of the plan: “Put me down in the ‘no’ column.”

If anything, the stimulus package is not large enough. Less than 24 hours after Mr. Boehner’s televised exercise in obstructionism, the heavy-equipment company Caterpillar announced that it was cutting 20,000 jobs, Sprint Nextel said it was eliminating 8,000, and Home Depot 7,000.

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)

The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:

“Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money.

The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.

“With that capital in hand,” said Mr. Pressey, “not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession, but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

Obama Is a Two-Faced Liar. Aw-RIGHT!
Greg Palast, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 30 January 2009

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn’t give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as “tax refunds,” and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin’ man. Covering over his break-your-face power play with a “we’re all post-partisan friends” BS.

And it’s about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama’s appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as “Economics Czar,” made me fear for my country, that we’d gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.

Then came Obama’s money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It’s as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan’s carcass and put a stake through The Gipper’s anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter, to pay for their own protection. S’OK with me.

And here’s the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican congressman voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn’t compromise, the way Clinton and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn’t need’m. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama’s weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say, it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama’s “post-partisanship.” Heh heh heh.

Love it. Now we know why Obama picked that vindictive little viper Rahm Emanuel as staff chief: everyone visiting the Oval office will be greeted by the Windy City hit man who would hack up your grandma if you mess with the Godfather-in-Chief.

I don’t know about you, but THIS is the change I’ve been waiting for.

Will it last? We’ll see if Obama caves in to more tax cuts to investment bankers. We’ll see if he stops the sub-prime scum-bags from foreclosing on frightened families. We’ll see if he stands up to the whining, gormless generals who don’t know how to get our troops out of Iraq. (In SHIPS, you doofuses!)

Look, don’t get your hopes up. But it may turn out the new president’s … a Democrat! ++

bonus

Obama Planning Bailout Board
Zachary Roth, TPM
February 2, 2009

In an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer that aired this morning, President Obama offered a concrete proposal intended to help his administration ensure that bailout money is spent more wisely than it has been until now.

Obama referred to “an independent board … that actually looks at these programs, and the money, before it goes out the door.”

[Open to] Watch the clip:

Of course, how effective such a board will be is still entirely to be determined. But at least nominally this adds to the evidence that the new Congress and administration appear to understand the need to exert much tighter control over the bailout money than we saw initially. ++

US set for ‘big bang’ financial clean-up
Krishna Guha, Financial Times in Washington
January 31 2009

The Obama administration is gearing up for a “big bang” announcement within the next two weeks that will combine a bank clean-up with measures to reduce home foreclosures and probably steps to kick-start credit markets.

The plan will involve an overhaul of the troubled asset relief programme - the $700bn bail-out fund - including strict curbs on compensation at banks receiving public aid. The Tarp overhaul is intended to restore public confidence in what is a deeply unpopular programme and ensure that taxpayer money is not used to fund excessive pay, bonuses and dividends to shareholders.

There will definitely be a cap of some sort on bonuses,” said a Wall Street executive who has taken part in talks with the authorities. “The political climate is such that there is a need to punish Wall Street.”

The announcement, which officials said was likely late this coming week or the week after, will follow Friday’s news that the US economy contracted at an annualised rate of 3.8 per cent in last year’s final quarter - less than analysts were expecting, but still the worst quarter since 1982. The fall was cushioned by ballooning inventories, which suggest the economy could shrink faster than expected in the first quarter.

The “big bang” approach reflects the belief of Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, and Lawrence Summers, National Economic Council director, that the Bush administration was wrong to dribble out policy initiatives. Mr Geithner intends to present a “comprehensive” plan that policymakers hope will command market confidence.

Details of the financial overhaul are being finalised and have yet to be approved by President Barack Obama, but it may include both the purchase of toxic assets by a “bad bank” and insurance-style guarantees for problem assets remaining on bank balance sheets.

Anti-foreclosure efforts are likely to focus on subsidising programmes that reduce unsustainable monthly mortgage payments, though there may also be support for schemes that subsidise the partial writedown of loans that exceed the value of the home. Treasury may also unveil new efforts to revitalise dysfunctional securitisation markets. ++

Additional reporting by Francesco Guerrera

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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