US payrolls are up by 243,000 in January (vs. expected 150,000) and the jobless rate has dropped to 8.3% in January, the lowest level since February, 2009.
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Tag Archives: Obama
Political quote of the day
For many right-wingers, Obama was a foreign object, whose unexpected entrance into the body politic activated their immune systems — hence the ‘birther’ movement and other bizarre right-wing obsessions. Whether the right’s aversion to Obama constitutes classic racism is a Talmudic question; what is undeniable is that his race activated a horde of (literally) white cells, rushing to expel the invader. Like organisms, cults always delineate themselves by drawing sharp lines between Us and Them.
Andrew Sullivan v. Stephen Colbert
You can read Sullivan’s powerful defense of President Obama in Newsweek here.
Sullivan pushes back against the right
Imperialism quote of the day
Glenn Greenwald
“Every now and then it’s worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody — certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people’s lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids — in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts.
– Glenn Greenwald, “The killing of Awlaki’s 16-year-old son“. (via The Quotation of the Day Mailing List)
Related articles
- New reality: US assassinates it own citizens with no due process (boingboing.net)
- Awlaki’s 16-year-old son killed by US drone (boingboing.net)
- Ron Paul Condemns Obama Admin For ‘Assassinating’ U.S. Born Anwar al-Awlaki (mediaite.com)
- White House “Star Chamber” recommended killing US citizen al-Awlaki; evidence of operational role “patchy” (americablog.com)
- Al-Awlaki And The Law (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
Political quote of the day 2
This is not class warfare. It is math. The money is going to have to come from someplace.
– President Obama making the case for a new tax on the very, very wealthy, who also happen to capture an overwhelming share of the benefits from the economy as a whole.
Political quote of the day (updated)
By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over.
– Representative John Fleming, (R-LA) explaining why a small business owner like him cannot afford a tax increase. The more these guys talk like this, the stronger will be the support for Obama’s tax proposal among the millions in this country who are not in the top 1% of earners and many of which are unemployed.
Update:
Related articles
- Feeding your family: almost as bad as paying taxes (themoderatevoice.com)
- Idiot Quote of the Day (bokertov.typepad.com)
- Wealthy Republican congressman apparently pays workers less than $11,400 per year (dailykos.com)
Political quote of the day
Image via Wikipedia
Fire somebody. No — fire a lot of people. This may be news to you but this is not going well. For precedent, see Russian Army 64th division at Stalingrad. There were enough deaths at Stalingrad to make the entire tea party collectively orgasm.
– James Carville, giving advice to President Obama.
Close up reporting on the bin Laden raid
The New Yorker this week has an article detailing the killing of Osama bin Laden. Worth a full read.
Excerpt:
When the helicopter began getting away from the pilot, he pulled back on the cyclic, which controls the pitch of the rotor blades, only to find the aircraft unresponsive. The high walls of the compound and the warm temperatures had caused the Black Hawk to descend inside its own rotor wash—a hazardous aerodynamic situation known as “settling with power.” In North Carolina, this potential problem had not become apparent, because the chain-link fencing used in rehearsals had allowed air to flow freely. A former helicopter pilot with extensive special-operations experience said of the pilot’s situation, “It’s pretty spooky—I’ve been in it myself. The only way to get out of it is to push the cyclic forward and fly out of this vertical silo you’re dropping through. That solution requires altitude. If you’re settling with power at two thousand feet, you’ve got plenty of time to recover. If you’re settling with power at fifty feet, you’re going to hit the ground.”
The pilot scrapped the plan to fast-rope and focussed on getting the aircraft down. He aimed for an animal pen in the western section of the compound. The SEALs on board braced themselves as the tail rotor swung around, scraping the security wall. The pilot jammed the nose forward to drive it into the dirt and prevent his aircraft from rolling onto its side. Cows, chickens, and rabbits scurried. With the Black Hawk pitched at a forty-five-degree angle astride the wall, the crew sent a distress call to the idling Chinooks.
James and the SEALs in helo two watched all this while hovering over the compound’s northeast corner. The second pilot, unsure whether his colleagues were taking fire or experiencing mechanical problems, ditched his plan to hover over the roof. Instead, he landed in a grassy field across the street from the house.
No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. Mark and his team were inside a downed helicopter at one corner, while James and his team were at the opposite end. The teams had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course.
Political quote of the day
Voters’ Pavlovian reaction may simply be that fiscal austerity equals pain, which could complicate Republican messaging in the long-run.
– Nate Silver, counter-intuitively arguing that yesterday’s stock market crash could help the President’s re-election chances.
Be careful what you wish for…
From the LA Times:
Two years after the last recession ended, Wall Street is showing rising fear that the U.S. economy could be headed for a new downturn….Despite some relief that Washington could forge an eleventh-hour compromise on the debt ceiling, analysts said the prospect of even modest federal budget cuts in an anemic economy was spooking markets.
“Investors are looking past the budget situation and realizing this is an austerity plan,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago. “We have an economy that’s struggling to stay afloat and we don’t have the ammunition to keep prodding it forward.”
(Mother Jones via Balloon Juice)
For extra credit, answer the following questions:
- Are some (meaning those who have the most to lose financially) now waking up to the fact that cutting governmental expenditures while the economy continues its swoon might somehow further damage the economy?
- Are there many economists available to provide expert advice cautioning against the adoption of such damaging policies?
- Is America now officially certifiable?
The correct answers are yes, yes, and, by far the most damaging of all, yes.
What the “deal” means to the economy
Unemployment will be higher than it would have been otherwise. Growth will be lower than it would be otherwise. And inequality will be worse than it would be otherwise.
We have a very weak economy, so withdrawing more spending at this stage will make it even weaker.
– Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco.
The ransom paid to the GOP to increase the debt limit, an increase caused by the unpaid for wars, Bush tax cuts, and Medicare Part D, all of which were implemented by the Bush Administration, will be truly paid the the continued pain of the unemployed in America. The deal is a 100% Republican victory, embraced by the President.
Related articles
- PIMCO CEO: Debt Deal Only Short-Term Relief (abcnews.go.com)
Who really busted the budget?
Did George W. Bush or Obama policies cost the most? Check out the numbers.
A curse on both their houses
The President and the Republicans are both fiddling while Rome burns. Neither is addressing the real economic problem which is extremely high unemployment and suffering of families as a result.
George Parker, writing in The New Yorker, describes the situation accurately. An excerpt is below but the full essay is worth a read.
In Washington, President Barack Obama and Congress are engaged in high-drama brinksmanship, like members of an ordnance-disposal unit arguing about how to defuse a huge ticking bomb. Obama, securely in character, called on all sides to rise above petty politics, acknowledged the practical realities of divided government, and proposed a grand compromise that would lower the deficit by four trillion dollars. According to the Times’ Nate Silver, Obama’s offer, in its roughly four-to-one balance between spending cuts and revenue increases, falls to the right of the average American voter’s preference; in fact, it may outflank the views of the average Republican. Among other drastic cuts to domestic spending, the President proposes a ten-year, hundred-billion-dollar reduction in federal contributions to Medicaid, a program that helped provide new sets of teeth for Danny Hartzell and his wife just before their move.
The Republicans are also securely in character. They’ve rejected everything that the President has proposed, because Obama’s deal includes tax increases and the closing of loopholes for hedge-fund managers and corporate jets and companies that move offshore. Ninety-seven per cent of House Republicans have taken something called the “No Tax Pledge.” Some Republicans have also proposed that any deal require Obama to repeal the country’s new health-care law, which, had it been in place last year, would have provided the Hartzells with medical insurance, instead of forcing them to rely on charity hospitals for their daughter’s cancer treatment. Representative Paul Ryan’s ten-year budget plan, which remains his party’s blueprint for the future, would impose a fifty-per-cent cut on programs like food stamps and Supplemental Security Income, which, as long as Danny Hartzell remains jobless, represent the Hartzells’ only income. By the last day of June, the Hartzells had twenty-nine dollars to their name. The Republicans in Congress won’t be satisfied until the family is out on the street.
Related articles
- Obama, Moderate Republican (krugman.blogs.nytimes.com)
- George Packer: The Debt-Ceiling Fight Continues : The New Yorker (policyabcs.wordpress.com)
Another new (Obama) war
I am certain that the Obama administration does not view this action as “hostilities” triggering the War Power Act, but we are now bombing in Somalia.