Skip to content

A Multi-pronged plan to save the economy

John Hodgman provides a few easy steps to recovery:

Share

Late Night Political Humor

“Well, it’s Thursday. You know what that means? Another Obama Cabinet member nominee has quit.” -Jay Leno

“It’s a great day for America, everybody, but a very tough day for the President. Another Obama Cabinet pick has withdrawn his name from contention. Obama ‘s nominees are dropping faster than babies out of that octuplet mother.” -Craig Ferguson

“Well, just a few days after being nominated, New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg has withdrawn as the nominee for Commerce Secretary. In a statement explaining why he turned it down, he cited ‘irresolvable conflict.’ So, apparently, he must have paid his taxes.” -Jay Leno

“Happy birthday to Abraham Lincoln, who was born 200 years ago today. And to mark the occasion, former Vice President Dick Cheney, earlier today, went into a theater and shot a guy.” -David Letterman

“Don’t you have a feeling it’s going to be a long time before we have a vice president who shoots a guy in the face? Just doesn’t happen that often.” -David Letterman

“It’s Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday, and to honor the occasion, the U.S. Mint is releasing a new penny that shows Lincoln’s house. That’s appropriate because that’s about how much a house is worth these days.” -Craig Ferguson

“I tell you, the economy is in bad shape. In fact, airlines are now charging extra if you want peanuts without salmonella.” -Jay Leno

“Michigan Congressman John Dingell has set the all-time record as the longest serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He’s been there 19,421 days. That’s the longest a member of Congress has ever been in one place well, if you don’t count federal prison.” -Jay Leno

“I don’t know what the deal is, but all of a sudden, we have 40- and 50 mile-an-hour gusts of wind blowing around outside. In fact, it is so windy, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s hair actually moved.” -David Letterman

“John McCain’s in the news. This week, Sen. John McCain sent out an e-mail to his supporters announcing that he’s running for re-election in 2010. Yeah. Isn’t that incredible? John McCain knows how to use e-mail.” -Conan O’Brien

Share

The real cause of the economic slowdown

Andy Singer
© Andy Singer

Share

How can you take credit for a bill you voted against?

McClatchy, probably the only remaining decent news service, has an interesting article pointing out GOP congress-critters who are taking credit for parts of Obama’s economic stimulus bill, even though they voted against the bill itself! Not only that, but they are boasting about changes they pushed into the bill, while simultaneously complaining about the lack of bipartisanship.

For example, Don Young (R-Alaska) recently said that he would have included earmarks in the bill if it had been permitted, and then turned around and blasted the bill, saying “This bill was not a stimulus bill. It was a vehicle for pet projects, and that’s wrong.” Young even bragged that he “won a victory for Alaska Native contracting program and other Alaska small business owners.” It is amazing hypocrisy when you complain about all the pet projects in a bill while at the same time bragging about the pet projects that you put into a bill.

And John Mica (R-Florida) issued a press release gushing about the inclusion of high-speed rail projects in the bill: “I applaud President Obama’s recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America’s future.” When asked why Mica failed to mention his vote against the bill in his press release, a GOP committee spokesman said “It’s not really secret. I guess it just wasn’t the focus.”

Share

Gandhian Hardball

To partisan or bipartisan, that is the question. The New Yorker has an excellent article about partisan politics, which ends with the following paragraph:

Fifty years ago, the civil-rights movement understood that nonviolence can be an effective weapon even if—or especially if—the other side refuses to follow suit. Obama has a similarly tough-minded understanding of the political uses of bipartisanship, which, even if it fails as a tactic for compromise, can succeed as a tonal strategy: once the other side makes itself appear intransigently, destructively partisan, the game is half won. Obama is learning to throw the ball harder. But it’s not Rovian hardball he’s playing. More like Gandhian hardball.

Share

Sense and Census

Chip Bok
© Chip Bok

Share

Republicans impeach Obama (SNL)

Share

Republicans against tax cuts!

One of the interesting ironies about the economic stimulus bill that just passed is that by most any measure it is the largest tax cut in US history. It includes $282 billion in tax cuts over two years. In comparison, Bush’s largest tax cuts (in 2004/2005) totaled $231 billion.

So why did the Republicans just vote overwhelmingly against the largest tax cut in history? Obama’s tax cuts are aimed mostly at the middle class, families and people who work. While Bush’s tax cuts primarily benefited the rich.

Share

Bipartisanship

Tom Toles
© Tom Toles

Share

Late Night Political Humor

“Well, today, the heads of the eight largest banks testified before Congress. Bank C.E.O.’s in a room full of politicians — they had to flip a coin to see who’s going to tell the first lie.” -Jay Leno

“You know, this Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner? He gave testimony on Capitol Hill today, but it drew lukewarm response. So, Timothy, welcome to the club!” -David Letterman

“I hate to be critical this early into the new administration, but I don’t know if this Timothy Geithner is the guy for the job. He may not be up to it. Turns out, he thought the Treasury Secretary was in charge of buried treasure.” -David Letterman

“Prosecutors have asked a Federal judge to send Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington, D.C., to jail for failing to file tax returns for the eighth time in nine years. Hasn’t paid taxes for eight years straight. So for Barry, it’s either jail or a cabinet position in the Obama administration. Either one.” -Jay Leno

“How about this? It’s a good example of how strange things are and how time flies. On this date in 2006, then-Vice President Dick Cheney shot his buddy in the face. Tell me again why he’s not in jail? How did that work?” -David Letterman

“How about this? A celebrity birthday. Today is Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s birthday. I’m not saying how old is, but from her house, she can see 50.” -David Letterman

“Sarah Palin is actually 45 years old today, and just to tell you a little something about me — Sarah Palin, I think, is the first vice presidential candidate that I have pictured naked. Well, since Lloyd Bentsen.” -David Letterman

“But Sarah Palin had a big birthday celebration up there in Alaska. She celebrated by shooting wolf cubs from a helicopter. Later, she shot the cake.” -David Letterman

“Happy birthday, Governor Sarah Palin, who turned 45 years old today. Hey, I thought this was nice. She got a lovely card in it with $5 from John McCain. After Palin opened her card, she did some shots – two moose and a caribou.” -Jay Leno

“And as you know, pro baseball player Alex Rodriguez, or A-Rod, has admitted to using steroids. He said he feels bad because he was stupid for three years, to which former President George W. Bush said, ‘Hey, try it for eight years.'” -Jay Leno

Share

What if the terrorists come to the US and realize they’ve already won?

Ted Rall
© Ted Rall

Share

The Republican Economic Mistake

Two days ago I posted a story about a Republican Congressman who claimed that FDR caused the Great Depression though his deficit spending (“borrow and spend”) — which would have been a neat time-travel trick since FDR didn’t get elected until almost four years after the Great Depression started. But as we know, most “big lies” are based (however tenuously) on some small kernel of truth. Bruce Bartlett identifies this kernel of truth and exposes the lie built on it in a clear (but wonky) article in Forbes magazine.

First, I feel the need to point out that nobody would consider Forbes a hotbed of liberalism, and Bartlett himself is a Republican economist who worked for Reagan, Bush I, and several staunch conservative groups, and wrote a book about supply-side economics. Bartlett explains in the article that FDR did indeed make the depression worse, but not by borrowing and spending, but by the exact opposite — by attempting to shrink the deficit in the middle of the depression by reducing spending, even running a budget surplus in 1937. Bartlett says “Economists are unanimous in their view that this was one of the greatest economic mistakes in history.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell claims “We know for sure the big spending programs of the New Deal did not work.” But Bartlett demonstrates (and has the numbers to back it up) that this is simply wrong: “the true failure of the New Deal was that deficits were much too small, not too large.”

Ironically, Republicans implicitly acknowledge the truth of this when they argue that “the only thing that brought us out of the depression was World War II,” as Sen. John Ensign explained on Feb. 7.

Yet Republicans conveniently overlook the fact that it was massively larger budget deficits–which averaged close to 20% of GDP from 1941 to 1945–that were the principal contribution of the war to economic recovery.

It is ironic that it takes a staunch conservative Republican economist to point out that the current Republican leadership is lying to you, and proposing that we repeat one of the greatest economic mistakes in history. The last eight years have dramatically demonstrated the disastrous results of neoconservative economic policy. When the Republican party loses even the Reagan era conservative economists, you have to wonder what the current leadership is drinking.

Via untravel. The same blog entry has an interesting discussion about the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable disagreement and how it applies to bipartisanship.

Share

Late Night Political Humor

“Last night, Barack Obama held his first press conference as President of the United States, and it was fascinating because his press conferences are very different than the George Bush press conferences in many ways. There were verbs. There were syllables. There were complete sentences.” -Jay Leno

“Obama said he still believes in bipartisanship and he pledges to work with the Republicans to reduce the size of Jessica Simpson, who has reportedly put on some weight.” -David Letterman

“All the Democrats in the Senate and three Republicans voted for the stimulus bill. President Barack Obama says it’s going to take a lot of time before Republicans warm up to his many appeals for bipartisanship. The biggest hurdle, I guess, is how do you convince Republicans that being bipartisan doesn’t mean you have to have sex with other dudes.” -Jimmy Kimmel

“I miss the President Bush news conference. Like when they asked him a question, he’d go, ‘Uh, can I have a hint?'” -Jay Leno

“Yesterday, when President Obama — this is true — was getting into his helicopter, he accidentally bumped his head on the door. It was in the news, and when he heard about it, President Bush said, ‘See, it’s complicated, right? It’s not so easy. Doors are hard.'” -Conan O’Brien

“Now it’s time for another installment of ‘They took away Bush, but, by God, they gave us Joe Biden.’ As you know, Barack Obama out there selling this stimulus package. He believes in it. He can change America. Here’s Joe Biden talking: ‘You know, if we do everything right, we do it with absolute certainty, we stand up there and we make really tough decisions, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re gonna get it wrong’. You think Obama’s sitting up there going, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’?” -Jay Leno

“Today, Barack Obama went to Florida and gave a big speech on the economy. Obama’s speech was interrupted five times by applause and six times by old people whispering, ‘Is he Cuban?'” -Conan O’Brien

“The Senate has passed an $838 billion stimulus bill. That is just under $3,000 for each person in America. And here’s how it’s going to work. On March 1st, every American will receive a roll of 30 $100 Obama stimulus coins. And you can either trade the coins with your friends or you can use them in special machines to buy stimulus nutrition bars.” -Jimmy Kimmel

“And in Minnesota, Republican Norm Coleman, who is in a legal fight with Al Franken over who won the election for Senate, said, ‘God wants me to serve.’ But here is my question. How bad a candidate are you if you can’t win an election when you have the creator of the universe on your side?” -Jay Leno

“Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, has filed to run for governor of California. Well, that makes sense. I mean, the state’s broke. If we’re going to start selling stuff, who better to be governor than the head of eBay?” -Jay Leno

“Down in Louisiana, a porn star named Stormy Daniels announced that before she commits to running for U.S. Senate, she will go on a statewide listening tour. Daniels added, and I’m quoting here, that she may ‘be a slut and a whore, but’ she is ‘not a criminal.’ But this is why she will never win. See, in the Senate, you have to be all three.” -Jay Leno

Share

Japanese Blackface Obama

Japanese TV is totally bizarre:

from Huffington Post.

Share

Pin the tail…

Steve Sack
© Steve Sack

Share