- A man was arrested in Milan after he tried to sneak into Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi’s hospital room. Can you imagine that happening in America, an uninvited person just wandering up to the president? Hahaha. (BBC)
- A drug manufacturer has recalled 800,000 doses of the Swine Flu Vaccine for Kids. But, um, don’t worry, they say? (San Francisco Chronicle)
- Britain will probably not be able to have a major role in the Middle East peace process if it insists on arresting Israeli officials whenever they think about entering the country. (Jerusalem Post)
- A University of North Dakota student has discovered that jokes about rape aren’t actually funny. Change we can believe in! (The Dakota Student)
- The economy is pretty terrible, but it could have been worse. Therefore, Ben Bernanke is your TIME Person of the Year. (TIME)
Archive for posts ‘economy’
How Much Will Wingnuts Pay for the Privilege of Sarah Palin Running for President?
- For the low, low price of $100,000, Sarah Palin will come to Iowa to run for President. But only once the check clears. (Politico)
- Nancy Pelosi and the House of Representatives are jumping on Harry Reid’s announce-a-healthcare-reform-bill bandwagon, with their own healthcare reform bill. (House Committee on Education and Labor)
- Speaking of which, the insurance industry is not a fan of this healthcare bill, which would allow Americans to get health insurance from somewhere that is not the insurance industry. (TPMDC)
- Chris Christie is a fatty-fat fatty! It’s okay, he wants people to talk about this instead of talking about the time he maybe ran some guy over in his car. (CNN Political Ticker)
- Oh look, your economy is getting better now, thanks to cash-for-clunkers and some other things that were totally Socialism until they started working. (NYT)
No one could have predicted…
…that the AIG execs who destroyed the economy would not voluntarily return their bonuses.
Showing Up to Events is “Politics as Usual”
- Your U.S. government finally came up with a program that everybody likes, the cash-for-clunkers program, so they are ending it for lack of funding. (WaPo)
- In addition to kinda being a wanker on healthcare reform, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) is also not sure if he’ll vote for Sonia Sotomayor. (The Hill)
- Is Rick “The Hair” Perry a gay? The guys who programmed Kay Bailey Hutchison’s website think so! (Austin American-Statesman)
- Sarah Palin’s first event as not-Governor was going to be a speech at the national shrine to Republican Jesus, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, but now she is just not going. Mavericky! (CNN Political Ticker)
In Which Mike Huckabee Proves My Point
I hope Republicans appreciate that they have an entire television channel, FOX News, which lets them go on America’s teevees and just make shit up.
Enter Mike Huckabee on FOX News this morning:
HUCKABEE: There’s one thing though that Biden and President Obama have got to get under control. And that is quit blaming George Bush. George Bush inherited an economy when he became president back in 2001 that was already beginning to show real signs of the stress from the breaking of the technology bubble. George Bush didn’t go out whining and complaining every day, he stood up like the president of the United States and he worked on trying to get it fixed.
Then 2001, 9/11 came, things really went tough, but he worked on the economy and it was in much better shape for most of his presidency. Then the recession started, wasn’t totally his fault for sure and all you hear from Joe Biden and President Obama is how, how terrible it was, what they inherited, how it wasn’t their fault. No, look, you own it now. You got elected, you wanted the job. Stand up and take it and get this thing rolling. But quit spending money.
Okay, so let’s address this in two parts. First, Huckabee’s claim that Bush inherited a recession from Clinton. Bullshit.
On November 26, 2001, the committee determined that the peak of economic activity had occurred in March of that year. For a discussion of the committee’s reasoning and the underlying evidence, see http://www.nber.org/cycles/november2001. The March 2001 peak marked the end of the expansion that began in March 1991, an expansion that lasted exactly 10 years and was the longest in the NBER’s chronology. On July 16, 2003, the committee determined that a trough in economic activity occurred in November 2001. The committee’s announcement of the trough is at http://www.nber.org/cycles/july2003. The trough marks the end of the recession that began in March 2001. The 2001 recession thus lasted eight months, which is somewhat less than the average duration of recessions since World War II. The postwar average, excluding the 2001 recession, is eleven months.
So not only did Bush not inherit the recession from Bill Clinton, he actually turned a decade of economic expansion into a recession. And the National Bureau for Economic Research, which was responsible for that report, is hardly a left-wing group. At the time, it was headed by Martin Feldstein, the chairman of Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors and an economic aide to Bush’s own campaign!
Now, on to the part where Republicans are all manly-men who never ever whined about the recession Bush inherited from Bill Clinton (even though we now know he didn’t). Wrong again!
- George W. Bush, 8/7/02: “When I took office, our economy was beginning a recession.”
- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 8/31/04: “Under President Bush and Vice President Cheney, America’s economy is moving ahead in spite of a recession they inherited and in spite of the attack on our homeland.”
- Rep. Rob Portman, 9/1/04: “This president inherited an economy spiraling into recession, and already losing jobs in states like Ohio.”
- Commerce Secretary Don Evans, 9/2/04: “The president inherited a Clinton recession and turned it into the early stages of Bush prosperity.”
- George W. Bush, 1/12/09 (his final press conference): “In terms of the economy, look, I inherited a recession, I am ending on a recession.”
Media Matters has dozens more examples just from the first half of the Bush presidency. And the whining and Clinton-bashing didn’t stop after Bush left office.
- Michael Steele, 2/8/09: “Bush inherited a recession,” Steele said when Stephanopoulos pressed him on Bush-era economic failures.
- Dana Perino, 3/14/09: “Remember, President Bush inherited a recession as well.”
Bush and his ilk were whining about Bill Clinton then, and they’re still whining about Bill Clinton now.
Like I said earlier, isn’t it lucky for Mike Huckabee that FOX News gives Republicans a 24/7 platform to lie.
Gays to Save New England Economy
- Suddenly all of the gays are moving to New England for who knows what reason and they are bringing their youth, talents, and wedding-planning money. And since they can’t leave without their marriages being invalidated, New England gets to keep all that. (Reuters)
- Today is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacare, but China is all “What? What Square?” (Washington Post)
- Cuba declared a “major victory” when the Organization of American States lifted Cuba’s 47-year suspension. Then Cuba declared “Fuck you!” and declined to join the OAS. (Voice of America)
- And on a distinctly not funny note, the New York Times’ “Motherlode” parenting blog is compiling stories from former patients of Dr. Tiller. They’re very much worth a read. (New York Times)
Don’t Regulate the Economy While Drunk
- Japanese Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa will resign his post after appearing drunk at a press conference. Honestly, with the Japanese economy in the tank, who’s surprised that he spent the night at the bar? (MarketWatch/YouTube)
- Speaking of economic disasters, California still has no budget thanks to Republicans who refuse to vote for one. Hmmm, where have we seen this before? Now the Governator will have to fire 10,000 state employees and cut 275 public works projects, including upgrades to bridges to prevent them from falling down in earthquakes. On top of that, the projects will also cost more money to shut down than it would cost to keep them working. Fiscal conservatism at its finest! (Los Angeles Times)
- Bill Clinton, who was almost the First Lady right now, says that Obama did the right thing with the stimulus package and that Republicans don’t really understand that bipartisanship means working with Democrats. (DailyKosTV)
- Four Tennessee Republican legislators have jumped on the “Obama is not an American” bandwagon and have joined a lawsuit demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate. Okay people, here it is. And for those who are freaking out about it being a copy of the certificate, read where it says, “This copy serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding.” Mmkay? (Tennessean/Fight the Smears)
- Ex-Presdent George W. Bush never did pardon Scooter Libby, and this has made Dick Cheney very, very angry. A warning to the former president: I wouldn’t go hunting with Dick any time soon if I were you. (New York Daily News)
You Will Never Escape from Sarah Palin
- Meet SarahPAC, the Palin counterpart to Hillary Clinton’s HillPAC. Because as we all learned this election, women will vote for any female candidate regardless of her political ideology! That’s why Vice President Palin needs all your hard-earned cash right now please! (MSNBC)
- Terry McAuliffe was in New York City last week throwing a party with Bill Clinton and some investment bankers (aka the only people in this country who still have money and haven’t donated it to SarahPAC) to raise money for his campaign for Governor of, um… Virginia. Which is not in New York. Hm. (Washington Post)
- President Obama remains the most popular man in America, which is impressive considering that his real supporters are still hungover from inauguration parties. (CNN)
- Back when Dick Cheney was in charge, the location of his Evil Doom Lair was blurred out on Google Maps, but Vice President Biden has opened up his residence for all to zoom-in on! Google says they have nothing to do with the blurring or unblurring of the Vice Presidential mansion. I suspect Cheney has Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his Jedi force choke. (Wired/Los Angeles Times/YouTube)
- For lack of any better way to say it, I’m just going to quote this directly: “The nation’s current recession is likely to be the longest since World War II, and by some measures could be the worst since the Great Depression, a new Congressional Budget Office forecast said Tuesday.” (McClatchy)
Update: For the lulz, take a look at the SarahPAC logo.
Basically her plan for America is to cut a huge Alaska-shaped hole out of it because Country First amirite? What’s really funny is that she’ll be taking out a good portion of “Real America,” which is defined as all the states that voted for her and that old guy who kept staring at her ass.
Fired Workers Occupy Factory
We could be seeing a lot more of this:
Laid off workers were camped out at their abruptly shuttered factory on Saturday, demanding that the bank which cut off credit to the Chicago window maker free up some financing so they could be paid their final wages and benefits.
The sit-in began on Friday morning, just hours after the Labor Department reported that a stunning retrenchment cut 533,000 jobs from US payrolls in November, sending the nation’s unemployment rate to a 15-year high.
…
Company officials told the plant’s union that they were being forced to close because their main lender, Bank of America, had withdrawn their financing.Federal law mandates that workers get paid for unused vacation time and are either given 60 days notice of a mass layoff or paid for that time.But company officials said they could not make those payments because the bank was “basically controlling all expenditures at this point… and was not allowing it,” said United Electrical union representative Leah Fried.
“There’s a whole other level of shamefulness given the bailout (of financial institutions) and that Bank of America didn’t extend credit as they were supposed to,” Fried told AFP.
Franken Claims Recount Lead, and more
- Marc Elias, chief recount lawyer for Al Franken’s campaign, announced that Franken now leads Coleman by 22 votes according to the campaign’s recount results tracking. This is the first time in the entire process that the Franken camp has claimed a lead. Could we have 59 Democratic Senators when Congress convenes in January? (TPM Election Central)
- 75% of Americans approve of Obama’s Cabinet picks so far, according to a CNN poll. And then, of course, the rest of the poll is about whether Obama or Clinton will actually be president. Good times. (CNN)
- And in other Cabinet news, could the first black president appoint the first openly gay secretary? Mary Beth Maxwell, a labor activist and out lesbian, is reportedly on the shortlist for Secretary of Labor. (Wall Street Journal)
- The economy is so bad that the Bushes are only buying a house for Christmas. Yeah, you read that right. While you’re all having you homes foreclosed, George and Laura Bush are buying a house that’s two hours away from the ranch they already own. Also, we can all eat cake for Christmas. (ABC News)
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