Recently in Politics Category

The more I read it, the more I like the analysis done by the History News Network blog. In this post he lays out some of the foreign policy problems facing Obama as well as some possible solutions. I'm not sure I totally agree with all of this, but it's an interesting take.

First, in Iraq, contrary to what most Americans have assumed, Obama has not called for the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq. Rather, he has called for the more limited withdrawal of combat troops, a policy that ultimately differs little from those advocated by President Bush and Senator McCain. All would leave tens of thousands of American soldiers permanently stationed in Iraq, much as they are in Germany, Qatar or South Korea.

Such a normalization of the occupation is morally and politically unacceptable to most of the world, including most Iraqis and a large percentage of the American public, all of whom expect American forces to withdraw fully from Iraq in a timely manner.

You can read the rest of the article here.

The Great Hack from The Great Hack on Vimeo.

#GreatHack

Go, vote no on prop 8.

(While you're at it vote no on 4 and if you're in SF, yes on H)

I've been meaning for the past couple of days to put together a summary of my arguments for voting for Obama. I may still get around to it, but in the meantime the New Yorker has posted a much better article than I could ever write.

You can read that article here.

Every few years the Republicans come out screaming about voter fraud. Anyone who has really looked at this knows it's basically BS. The reality isn't that there aren't people out there that might like to vote fraudulently, it's that there isn't a good way to actually do it. You just can't really cast enough ballots to move an election. Talking Points Memo has a really good breakdown/summary of the current ACORN mess.

Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.

I was talking to my girlfriend about this the other day. I don't think the people running the republican party really believe in the voter fraud. They just see it as a convenient way to whip up the base and also pass laws that restrict voting for the poor and minorities. The base I think actually buys into the whole scam, but then, the republican base isn't known for its keen intellect.

I was reading this entry on Feministe today and it really struck me as important.

"When anti-choice extremists were terrorizing American women and their doctors, John McCain had multiple opportunities to make what should have been an easy choice," said Kathryn Kolbert, President of People For the American Way, and a longtime women's rights advocate who successfully argued a crucial abortion rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992. "But he chose political expediency over law and order. He didn't say a word when Marylin Shannon sympathized with an attempted killer. He voted against the clinic access bill even as everyday Americans were being assaulted and besieged by domestic terrorists. As someone who faced repeated threats for work on behalf of reproductive rights, I am deeply disturbed by John McCain's willingness to stand with and side with sympathizers and enablers of domestic terrorism."

The Ayers connection to Obama is tenuous at best. He served on the board of an education nonprofit with the guy and it sounds like Ayers helped him get his political career started, but it's absurd to say that these connections suggest that Obama is sympathetic with the causes or methods that Ayers supported back in the sixties.

On the other hand, we have McCain opposing stopping domestic terrorism against abortion clinics. This isn't from back in the 60s, this is from the past few months. People who attack abortion clinics are terrorists by any reasonable definition. They attack in order to terrorize the doctors, staff and patients of the clinics.

Ugh.

I've been reading the "History News Network" for a little while now and sometimes there are really interesting articles. This one is a great example.

There is another way to explain the Great Depression, of course. It requires looking at the changing structure or "long waves" of economic growth and development, digging all the while for the "real" rather than the merely monetary factors. This explanatory procedure focuses on "the fundamentals," and typically treats the financial system as a tertiary sector that merely registers the value of goods on offer--except when it becomes the repository of surplus capital generated elsewhere, that is, when personal savings and corporate profits cannot find productive outlets and flow instead into speculative channels.

It's worth reading, but probably only if you actually like economic theory.

Another great post at Firedoglake.

Principle no 1.: No household should pay a housing cost (mortgage payment - principal + Interest) that exceeds 30% of their gross income( before any deductions) as reported on their latest Federal Tax Return.

I always thought that part was kind of obvious. Read the rest of it.

Firedoglake has a great post up about what the bailout bill should look like. To start with, only $150,000,000,000. That gives them enough to get through January. Next, we need to start looking at what the bill that Obama signs in January needs to look like:

The January Bill:

1) Buy up mortgages at a discount and give people new fixed rate mortgages. The government shares in further house appreciation (only fair since it bailed the homeowner out). This stabilizes mortgage prices and helps people and banks both. It is essentially identical to what FDR did with the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), and we know how to do it. Initial price tag? Probably around 20 billion.

2) Use the FDIC (the folks who take over failed banks) to take over failed mutual and money market funds, make sure the investors get as much money back as possible, liquidate the funds in an orderly fashion (or keep them operating if necessary) and if they are kept alive, kick the people who screwed them up to the curb and change how they do business.

...

In addition to this, the bill must include the necessary regulatory and tax changes to ensure that this does not occur in the future. I have listed the bare necessities after the jump.

I) All income over 1 million dollars a year from any source, including bonuses and options, to be taxed at 90%. As long as executives know that in 3 years they can make enough money so they never have to work again and will still be filthy rich, they will never manage their companies or the financial sector for the long term.

II) No loan can be sold more than two steps beyond origination.

It's a good post. I recommend reading the whole thing.

True Majority sent out this email this morning. I recommend everyone go fill out their form and send a message to congress.

Wall Street has actually convinced a lot of us that what's good for the Dow Jones Average is good for us real people. But for eight years while bankers raked in billions, ordinary Americans have seen their real wages drop, jobs sent overseas, health insurance rates skyrocket, and now thousands are losing their homes. We need our government to actively work for US in fixing this mess, so let's tell Congress it's time to start over and pass a New Deal for Main Street. Send your Representative a message right now: http://act.truemajorityaction.org/p/7002/advopetition?campaign_KEY=1549

Awesome Sarah Silverman Video:

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

I might not go to Florida, but I'm calling my Grandma and making sure she votes Obama!. (even if I think we don't have a snowball's chance in hell down there)

I'm going to write a post with a whole bunch of themes because a lot happened today, and some of this is inter-related.

First, the big news of the past week, and particularly of the past couple of days. The $700,000,000,000 bailout. I'd just like to say this is the most ridiculous thing ever. We have this quote from the treasury:

It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number.

WHAT?

You're kidding right. You just picked $700,000,000,000 out of thin air? Brilliant. I'll try doing that with my taxes. I wonder how well that will go over. I was having fun with math today. If you had that much money in $1 bills, you could cover more than the entire state of Delaware. In $100 bills, you can cover a good portion of D.C. or the entire island of Manhattan with extra left over. Seriously, that's 27 square miles of $100 bills. That, and nobody has any idea if this plan will really work.

I can't believe the Democrats are agreeing to this. First they should have laughed, and then they should have started from scratch on their own plan. I mean right now, it looks like the Dems and Bush are going to pass this and the Republicans are all going to vote against it. Perfect. Give them something rail against for the next 40 days. All I can say is: wow, we suck at winning elections.

Another note, does anybody get the feel that this is Bush trying to deny Obama any sort of FDR like legacy. I mean, now, the history books will all talk about how Bush saved the economy (that he messed up in the first place) right before leaving office. It might even salvage his legacy, even if it doesn't work, because Obama is going to come in and put a meaningful plan in place once he gets elected. Argh.

Slight topic shift. There's been action by True Majority to hold "emergency" protests against the bailout. I saw on their site that there would be on at the San Francisco Federal Reserve today, so I rode my bike by there on the way home. There was a pretty decent turnout for a protest thrown together in only a few days. Unfortunately, there were these 9/11 conspiracy theorists standing in front of all the protesters, and they had the biggest sign. I really hate this. I mean, I hate 9/11 conspiracy theorists in general, but I hate it more when random protesters, that may have some agreement with the original protest, show up. Counter-protesters are fine, but this "other random semi-related" crap seems to happen at every progressive rally/protest I ever go to and it's starting to piss me off.

I particularly hate 9/11 conspiracy theorists because they are viewed as fringe crazies and when they show up, they discredit the rally they are attending. They do measurable harm wherever they show up.

That's my rant for today. How was your day?

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."

* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.

* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

* If you teach teach children about sexual predators, you are irresponsible and eroding the fiber of society.

* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate laywer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.

* If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that hates America and advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now.

Flat out lies. Not exaggerations, lies.