Month: March 2010

Ryan Avent reads a report (pdf) on small businesses, which are a major driver of new jobs:

[Small business] owners continued to report that their single-most important problem, by far, is low sales levels (rather than taxes, interest rates, or labour quality). That's worth keeping in mind as conservatives increase the volume at which they argue that high unemployment is due to extensions of government unemployment benefits. The problem is clearly not labour supply. Rather, the economy's principal job creators are seeing too little demand to justify increases in hiring.

Stanley Fish uses one billboard and a Newsweek article to claim Bush is being rehabilitated:

Bush’s policies came to seem less obviously reprehensible as the Obama administration drifted into embracing watered-down versions of many of them. Guantanamo hasn’t been closed. No Child Left Behind is being revised and perhaps improved, but not repealed. The banks are still engaging in their bad practices. Partisanship is worse than ever. Obama seems about to back away from the decision to try 9/11 defendants in civilian courts, a prospect that led the ACLU to run an ad in Sunday’s Times with the subheading “Change or more of the same?” Above that question is a series of photographs that shows Obama morphing into guess who — yes, that’s right, George W. Bush.

Oy. James Joyner's two cents:

This all strikes me as reasonable up to a point. Frankly, given how low the opinion of Bush was when he left office — with many proclaiming him The Worst President Ever — he has nowhere to go but up.

Will Bush ever be regarded as a great president in the tradition of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, TR, FDR, and Reagan?  Nope.  But he wasn’t an awful president, either.   And, depending on how Iraq shakes out, he might even be thought of as a pretty good one.

My three cents: no president in the twentieth century did as much damage to this country as Bush: in terms of unfathomable debt, unwinnable wars, political cynicism, the dangerous fusion of politics and religion, the integration of torture into the DNA of America, the squandering of American soft and hard power, the lost years on non-carbon energy, the trashing of constitutional balance, and the immiseration of most ordinary Americans, he was a disaster. The only way in which Fish is correct is that the damage was so deep and so intractable that Obama, perforce, cannot undo it overnight and so cannot help but be tarred with its consequences, including a brutal recession.

But for Fish, there is no actual reality, remember, just post-modern illusions. Which is why the pomo-left and the shameless-right were made for each other.

If we only create reality, what is, after all, wrong with Fox News? They do it rather well, don't they?

Brendan Nyhan dismisses "an array of silly narratives blaming the tactics of Obama and his staff for the President's current political standing":

[T]his entire genre of political coverage is useless. If/when the economy picks up, Obama's speeches will start "connecting" and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become.

And Halperin will be right there for the spin then.

George Packer goes another round.

McCain and Lieberman have introduced one of the most despotic bills in memory:

The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act of 2010, a legislative monstrosity produced by John McCain and Joe Lieberman, goes further than any Bush-era legislation in abrogating the core principle of Anglo-American justice: that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty. While the bill is deplorable in every detail — it denies terrorist suspects their Miranda rights and codifies indefinite detention without trial — one particular provision effectively ends the presumption of innocence for all of us. That provision codifies the President's right to define any criteria he chooses to deliver any individual into the legal Twilight Zone defined by the bill.

"Marc Thiessen’s work at the Washington Post looks like the work of a third-rate publicist—promoting the Cheney-Kristol Keep America Safe project. Just what is his relationship with this project? And why does Hiatt let him do this for free from the editorial pages of the Washington Post? Hiatt owes his readers some explanations," – Scott Horton.

Glenn Beck's hero:

The House ethics committee has received allegations that former Rep. Eric Massa groped at least three male staffers and conducted himself improperly with interns as well as full-time aides, a source familiar with the matter tells POLITICO.

One incident allegedly occurred when Massa traveled to San Francisco with an aide for a fundraising trip, a second source said.

Now it's getting closer to home:

The pope's brother said in a newspaper interview published Tuesday that he slapped pupils as punishment after he took over a renowned German boys' choir in the 1960s. He also said he was aware of allegations of physical abuse at an elementary school linked to the choir but did nothing about it.

The Rev. Georg Ratzinger, 86, said he was completely unaware of allegations of sexual abuse at the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir, part of a string of charges of sex abuse by church employees across Europe in recent days.

Ratzinger led the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir for thirty years. He says he knew nothing about the allegations of sex abuse, says they all occurred before his tenure in 1964, but admits he did slap boys in the face repeatedly as punishment.

As this poll of polls shows, if Obama keeps up his performances like yesterday and campaigns like this day after day after day, the first poll – from YouGov/The Economist – showing a clear 53- 47 majority in favor of his reform will become a harbinger of the future. The data is already there that passing this will help the Democrats against the Republicans this fall, if you can get past the Washington bullshit. The last month has been clearly a net positive in public opinion.

Moreover, Obama's strategy of exposing the nihilism and obstructionism of the GOP is working. One YouGov question asked: How much do you think President Obama is trying to work with Republicans in Congress? 48 percent said a great deal or a fair amount. Compare it to this: How much do you think the Republicans in Congress are trying to work with President Obama? 28 percent said a great deal or a fair amount. 60 percent said not much or not at all.

Know hope.