According to Krugman , Bush saved Social Security.
Posted by peter at March 26, 2008 11:40 AMThen there's the Hugo Chavez for anybody but McCain campaign...he's aligning with Democrats.
Posted by peter at March 26, 2008 11:54 AMDoes this disqualify McCain for Commander-In-Chief? What does that say about somebody's judgement?
Posted by Bob In Pacifica at March 26, 2008 12:05 PMthe stoopid, it BURNS! guess pants pissing peter doesn't understand that Dear Leader increasing the Federal debt by 70% ultimately harms both Social Security and Medicare
as for McCain, his economic judgement is about as worthy as his foreign policy judgement: ZERO
Posted by Gay Veteran at March 26, 2008 12:21 PMYour Krugman says it's looking the best since 1993. I'm sorry you failed your short arm inspection GV, explains the burning.
Posted by peter at March 26, 2008 12:27 PMDoes this disqualify McCain for Commander-In-Chief? What does that say about somebody's judgement?
Yes but don't go by me. I thought McCain was disqualified years ago.
Posted by Daryl at March 26, 2008 12:50 PMPeter fails reading comprehension 101.
Incidentally, for all of McCain's idiocy, have either Obama or Hillary said anything useful about the mortgage crisis, financial meltdown, and bailout? I have been too lazy to go find out for myself.
Posted by space at March 26, 2008 12:54 PMAccording to Krugman , Bush saved Social Security .
No, it shows he lied about Social Security. As I, and others, noted so long ago, the only way to get to the Buschco dire predictions about Social Security would have been to have zero population growth for the next 40 years. Oops! So he was caught in another lie. He's a neo-con and a conservative, like you. Those -isms are also lies as far as -isms go, so there can be little wonder when their proponents are liars.
Posted by phidipides at March 26, 2008 12:55 PMMcCain said speculators and people who were struggling with second home mortgages shouldnt get bailed out - that is how he gets middle class people to agree with him. I cant tell you the number of people who have said to me - why should we help out some dopes who bought properties way beyond their pocketbooks? Who is going to help me?
True or not, it is a line of reasoning that is persuasive to a bunch of people.
Posted by Judith at March 26, 2008 01:21 PMTrue or not, it is a line of reasoning that is persuasive to a bunch of people.
True, Judith. It's because there are only two types of republi-cons: Millionaires and suckers.
Posted by phidipides at March 26, 2008 01:34 PMHillary gave a big speech on the mortgage crisis Monday, you can check it out. It's a real slog, and mostly about very small "reforms" IMO.
If McCain thinks that the Bear bailout "passed his test" then he can't even apply his own principles.
I don't think that the investment banks should be bailed out, at all. They certainly should not have been given industry-wide access to loans from the Fed! Their whole schtick and raison d'etre was that they were "free" from gub'mint regulation and thus could engage in whatever shenanigans they wanted to get higher returns for their high income sophisticated investors.
Now they demand to be bailed out or some will fail----well, let them fail, that's the "free market", that's "capitalism", as we've been told ad nauseum.
Giving them access to the Fed's discount window was a radical proposal and action, and will cost us plenty. McCain doesn't even mention this and likely wasn't even briefed on it--and of course the press can't ask.
My guess is that anything to help the investment banks and big banks "meets the criteria" for McCain and that floundering homeowners can never meet the criteria.
Based on these platitudinous quotes, McOld isn't saying anything, as Turkana rightly concludes--this is just a meaningless speech that accepts the ongoing staus quo (i.e. radical Fed action to benefit the wealthy), says nothing about any legislative proposals (such as giving bankruptcy judges the power to reform principal dwelling mortagages) and is filled with "no bailout" conservative claptrap goobledy-gook to sound good to the nitwit conservatives, who can't understand that bailouts are ongoing every week.
Posted by euzoius at March 26, 2008 01:37 PMWrong again Phid. We might have the millionaires, Democrats have the billionaires. Why haven't those Dems had a box installed that allows them to pay at a higher rate if they want to. Mass. has it on their state income tax(5.3 vs. 5.8%), several lawmakers have said the state needs more money, but, when asked if they are paying at the higher rate, they went silent. Only 249 of the states population have paid at the higher rate.
Posted by peter at March 26, 2008 01:42 PMeuzoius, the Fed is accepting as collateral from the banks the crap mortgages.
pants pissing peter, why haven't those right-wingers who support Dear Leader's war of aggression in Iraq had a box installed that allows them to pay at a higher rate in order to actually PAY for the occupation
you yellow curs are willing to sacrifice NOTHING
Posted by gay veteran at March 26, 2008 02:28 PMOnly 249 of the states population have paid at the higher rate.
Because conservatism has a built in fatal flaw.
Can you figure out what it is?
Posted by snark at March 26, 2008 02:30 PMabout leadership
Wellesley College
1969 Student Commencement Speech
Hillary D. Rodham
May 31, 1969
Ruth M. Adams, ninth president of Wellesley College, introduced Hillary D. Rodham, '69, at the 91st commencement exercises, as follows:
In addition to inviting Senator Brooke to speak to them this morning, the Class of '69 has expressed a desire to speak to them and for them at this morning's commencement. There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be -- Miss Hillary Rodham. Member of this graduating class, she is a major in political science and a candidate for the degree with honors. In four years she has combined academic ability with active service to the College, her junior year having served as a Vil Junior, and then as a member of Senate and during the past year as President of College Government and presiding officer of College Senate. She is also cheerful, good humored, good company, and a good friend to all of us and it is a great pleasure to present to this audience Miss Hillary Rodham.
Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of the Wellesley College Government Association and member of the Class of 1969, on the occasion of Wellesley's 91st Commencement, May 31, 1969:
I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us -- the 400 of us -- and I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give. Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3% of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective. The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade -- years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program -- so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: "Why, if you're dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?" Well, if you didn't care a lot about it you wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother used to say, "I'll always love you but there are times when I certainly won't like you." Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education. Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder's parking lot. We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirement. We worked for a pass-fail system. We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision making. And luckily we were in a place where, when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning. So we have made progress. We have achieved some of the things that initially saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality. Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know. We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here. We questioned about what responsibility we should have both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group.
Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We were lucky in that one of the first things Miss Adams did was to set up a cross-registration with MIT because everyone knows that education just can't have any parochial bounds any more. One of the other things that we did was the Upward Bound program. There are so many other things that we could talk about; so many attempts, at least the way we saw it, to pull ourselves into the world outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will be an Upward Bound program, just for one example, on the campus this summer.
Many of the issues that I've mentioned -- those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words -- integrity, trust, and respect -- in regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.
Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive -- now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see -- but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.
But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity -- a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.
And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word "consequences" of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.
There are two people that I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing that I would like to read:
My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To transform the future into the present.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer exist.
Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.
Whoopsie - posted this on the wrong thread:
Just a few months ago the conventional wisdom was that President Bush would get his way on Social Security. Instead, Mr. Bush's privatization drive flopped so badly that the topic has almost disappeared from national discussion.
Hummm. Not seeing the part where petey thinks Krugman credits Bush with "saving" Social Security. You mean, because Bush failed in his effort to give Social Security to Wall Street, he ended up saving it? Whew. I guess that's what they mean by unintended consequences.
Whaddya know gov't run social security is in much better shape and successful after all. Gee do you think they (the Bushies) were so overly pessimistic about the condition it was in all these years in order to frighten the masses into something stupid like say maybe privatization of it...you know financial gift giving to all their wall street investment firm buddies like Bear STearns who most likely were chomping at the bit to get a piece of it? Well it proves there's obviously no need for people to privatize any part of their contributions ..especially in lieu of the current unregulated situation now created by these same types of irresponsible greedy institutions who just proved they can't manage finances.
Anyway, amazing how it's the socialize the losses and privatize the profits
And amazing at the the reading comprehension level of some people....you know Bush's and McBush's base.
Posted by emal at March 26, 2008 03:11 PMTurkana,
As much as I like your other posts, you are wrong about bailing out subprime mortgage people. All they need do is to move into a smaller, environmentally less damaging house. I know how heartless that sounds, but do a little research and look at the size of the houses that are being foreclosed on. Okay, not every house is a McMansion, but many are. In Florida, they are now starting to build smaller houses (only 3500 square feet). I bought an 1200 sq. foot house to fit my family of four. And guess what? We're making our mortgage payments every month. The people across the street? I can see their speed boat, their quad, their brand spanking new SUV's from my door step. They live a monsterous place that could fit two of mine, and those poor folks may go into foreclosure. Do you really think my family should pay for that? They have a big freakin dog short tied to a cage as well, and they are quite nasty as is the dog. And I'm a socialist who believes in most government programs, particularly food stamps. Think about that before you bring out the violins and rant against what McCain said. Big houses actually kill other people in other countries as does all waste.
Hey Dennis,
Thank you so much for posting Hillary's speech - that was absolutely amazing!
Posted by Judith at March 26, 2008 05:38 PMWell Ann, he's leaving it in better condition than he found it. the personal accounts would have fixed it even better, within three generations, everyone would be completely covered for retirement. But, hey, why do that when you can just pontificate "all is fine". We'll see around 2022 or so how well the fund is, how much of an impact it makes on our budget, when it becomes a line on the US budget.
Posted by peter at March 26, 2008 06:11 PMthe stoopid, it BURNS! hey pants pissing peter, the Social Security SURPLUS is masking the true size of Dear Leader's annual deficits
amazing, Bush inherited a balanced budget then proceeded to increase the Federal debt by 70%
oh, but conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed
Posted by gay veteran at March 26, 2008 06:44 PMAnd Hillary wants to appoint Alan Greenspan, Paul A. Volcker, and Robert E. Rubin, to lead a “high-level emergency working group” to solve the problem. IOW, Hillary's "solution" is to appoint two of the architects of this disaster and toss in Volker just so no actual Democrats have a say in solving the problem.
Here's an idea: Since Hillary is not President and currently has ZERO power to appoint anybody to anything, why not float some names of people who (a) actually have a fucking clue, (b) aren't so corrupt that they will refuse to implement necessary regulatory reforms, (c) generally support DEMOCRATIC monetary policies, (d) will appeal to Democrats, and (e) have shown her some loyalty in the past. You know. Like Paul Krugman.
I know Krugman's just an economist and not a central banker. But since Hillary has no more power than I do to convene this "high-level emergency working group", why not use the opportunity to demonstrate her monetary philosophy rather than just reaching for the stock N.Y.-D.C. "serious" names that any random Republican would toss out? Why not use the opportunity to, you know, criticize the decisions of the Greenspans and Rubins that created this mess.
Maybe Hillary will convene a "high-level emergency working group" for Iraq composed of Rumsfeld, Schwarzkopf, and James Baker.
Posted by space at March 26, 2008 07:30 PMWould the person using the name Judith please identify yourself by something other than Judith?
I've been posting here for four years at least, and it gets confusing on which Judith is posting. Maybe Judith2 or something.
it is my name and I have had it awhile as well. This blog does not require a registration so very truthfully, I doubt I will remember to adjust just for here. For your comfort, no one here has seemed to confuse me with you - no one has addressed me as though they thought they knew me...but I will truly try not to post here in future.
Posted by my name is Judith, too at March 26, 2008 08:48 PMFor your comfort, no one here has seemed to confuse me with you -
Imposter! Remove your rubber mask! As I always suspected...it's peter in a Judith mask and a yellow sundress!
I knew you weren't Judith when you drank the bottle of Moet et Chandon and passed out under the buffet serving carts at the last TLC convention. We all know Judith prefers hard liquor, and can do 3 or 4 bottles of Johnny Walker and a six-pack of pool boys before she even shows a wobble in her gait.
Posted by phidipides at March 27, 2008 06:28 AMsheet.
Posted by busted at March 27, 2008 06:53 AM