deadissue.com

I didn’t get a chance to see any of the inaugural address today but I liked this part as reported at the washingtonmonthly.com

Consider some of the examples Obama held up as things to reject: “petty grievances,” “short-cuts,” “those who prefer leisure over work” — qualities reminiscent of adolescence. And who was held up for praise: “workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job,” “a parent’s willingness to nurture a child,” troops who volunteer to serve as the “guardians of our liberty” — examples of maturity.

the best part for me was the idea of people willingly cutting their hours so a friend can keep their job, although I think this attitude might lead to a little more leisure, and perhaps people spending more time with their children. I hope the idea here is to spend less time chasing material goods and more time trying to make the country better and more equitable for everyone who lives in it.

I have high hopes right now I guess in a few years we will see if those hopes are justified.

I am starting to think that someone has to be held accountable for the last eight years specificaly for the torturing of people and the wat profiteering that has taken place. At the very least anyone who has profited from the war, like oh say Dick Cheney, should face a civil suit and asset forfieture. Anyone who has condoned torture should see the inside of a jail cell.

As much as it would be nice to move foreward and look the other way, at some point we as a country have to show that our laws matter and that world law matters as well. An investigation and trial of Dick Cheney and George Bush would show that as a country we do in fact respect the law and that no one is above it. If Cheney and Bush are allowed to go unpunished we are saying that certain people are above the law, and our laws are meaningless.

Obama needs to do the unpopular thing, and prosecute anyone who committed a crime in the Bush administration; if he doesn’t he risks letting his presidency seem to condone the torture and other crimes committed over the last eight years.

Looks like Bank of America needs more money to save Merril Lynch. My guess is we will see many banks coming back for more money so that they can continue making bad investments and loaning money to people who have no prospect of repaying the loan. I don’t know the exact figure but I would guess that a large percentage of the typical consumers income is going to debt servicing, that is the money paid in interest late fees and overlimit fees, all the things that made credit card companies profitable for many years. I dont get why no one is talking about the failure of our credit based economy. The solution is not to give people more credit, that just creates a bigger hole down the road.

A better sollution is to figure out a way to get people out of debt, perhaps make it easier and less stigmatizing to go bancrupt on credit cards, or start forgiving student loans; maybe even allow people to refininance their home at its current value and forgive the extra debt. If people didn’t have to spend so much of their income on debt service they might actually spend more money on consumer goods, which people keepsaying will jump start the economy. The problem right now is that the economic plan seems to entail people getting easy credit so that they can buy more stuff and in a year or so we will be right back in the same place, just with a larger deficit. If consumer debt was forgiven people might be able to get back to buying stuff but they would not be using borrowed money to do it, which might lead to a sustainable recovery.

The bailout should focus on the consumer and how to get the average borrower to a functional level. Obviously the people who borrowed more money than they could hope to repay are not without blame in this mess, but a bailout that encourages banks to keep giving them more money is crazy.

UPDATE: Looks like somebody said this much better than I did

Matthew Yglesias comments on the “non-conservative” lunch with Obama:

…everyone who’s not a card-carrying member of the conservative movement is counted, essentially, as a liberal. Or, rather, that the essential dichotomy is held to be between conservatives and not-conservatives rather than between conservatives and liberals. But this group isn’t at all the mirror image of the conservative roster we heard about last night. Some people on it are, but others really aren’t. It’s like the common description of Brookings (rather than, say, CAP/AF) as a “liberal” think tank simply because it’s not a conservative one

This might be a byproduct of the fact that almost anyone who acknowledges reality is kicked out of the conservative movement, and is labeled as a “liberal” by the grand poubahs of conservatism. This, I think can be a good thing for liberals and liberal ideas as conservatives seem willing to define most of their thoughtful members as liberals leaving nothing but the hardcore idiots as true conservatives.

This should be good news for anyone who wants t see a progressive agenda enacted in the next four years:

Barack Obama is apparently planning to create a permanent political organization designed not just to help him win reelection in 2012, but to help him get his policy agenda passed in the meantime

For me, one of the main for supporting Obama was his wiliingness to think outside the box and he seems to be making a an orginization that can compete with the religous right for grassroots organizing, who ever thought this up is very smart.

Sarah Palin continues to talk:

“Bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie annoy me….I’ll tell you, yesterday the Anchorage Daily News, they called again to ask — double-, triple-, quadruple-check — who is Trig’s real mom,” she said, in an interview to be published in the magazine’s March issue.

“And I said, Come on, are you kidding me? We’re gonna answer this? Do you not believe me or my doctor? And they said, No, it’s been quite cryptic the way that my son’s birth has been discussed. And I thought, Okay, more indication of continued problems in the world of journalism

The Trig story was mostly followed by Andrew Sullivanwho can definitely be annoying but he is not anonymous. I think conservatives are definitely going to be entertaining for the next few years.

This is hysterical looks like Huckabee was for sodomy before he was against it.

I would love to see the away teams do well today and tomorrow, especially Philly and Arizona but my guess is that in the NFC the home teams win. If Arizona can generate a runing game they have a chance and Philly is playing pretty well but I think most people see Carolina and New York winning these games.

In the AFC I think San Diego has a very good chance against Pittsburg as for whatever reason San Diego seems to play really well in the post season and Rivers may be the best quarterback playing right now. Tenessee wins easily today.

Let me know what you think

The unemployment numbers don’t tell the whole story:

Brad DeLong offers some further context for the jobs numbers, observing that “And U-6–unemployed plus discouraged workers plus unable to fond a full-time job–is now at 13.5% of the labor force–and BLS ‘discouraged workers’ are a big undercount of the concept.” With so many able-bodied, working age people not actually working, we’re producing many fewer goods and services than we have the capacity to produce.

I know the free market types are goiing to say that “if we just let the market do it’s job we would be fine” although to me it looks like the market has spoken and without easy credit people don’t want a bunch of marginally useful consumer goods. Even things like cars are probably not going to be replaced every few years.

Maybe their is something else at work here, like we are starting to reach a level of population that we cannot support, or support in the style that most people have become accustomed too.

Obama has made quite a few right moves and a couple bad ones. First, what was he thinking making Hillary Clinton Secretary of State, she has not shown herself to be competent in any office she has held, and her silence on the mess in Gaza makes me think that she OK with the situation.

Second mistake, Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General, he is what is wrong with the medical profession and the media all rolled up in one self-aggrandizing package.

Looks like the market may not lead people to the best health care choices, but at least they die on nice sheets.

Looks like Apple has another cool sounding gadget coming out this fall. I will proably buy it cause for some reason I cannot say no to Apple stuff and I will probably be dissapointed once again. When the Ipod Touch came out I had to have it, I quickly discovered it was too delicate to take snowboarding and was too bulky to run with, so I bought a shuffle which also seems too delicate for snowbaording. It really sucks to have your Ipod conk out on you at the same time you are sitting next to a Texan on the chairlift and that has happened to me twice this year.

With all that said I am already starting to covet the new large screen touch I am sure this time I wont be dissapointed, just like the girlfriend that keeps cheating on you. Apple lures you back with an attractive but very high maintenance product.

Thanks to the bad economy illegal immigration is way down. I bet if McCain had won the election a we might have had a few more of republican economic policies and Mexico probably would have been trying to figure out what to do with all the impoverished people from the north sneaking across their border in search of work.

Looks like 2008 is going to end with an enviromental dissaster comparable if not worse than the Exxon Valdeze

We seem to discuss agriculture quite a bit here and this post seems to explain the problems with moder agriculture really well. Essentially modern agriculture enables larger populations but it doesn’t improve the quality of life for that population.

This post talk about why we don’t need to keep producing babies to insure social security stays
solvent. It also begs the question of why Rommesh Ponnuru is ever taken seriously.

And this one about what is wrong with the right. Basicaly the only measure of success for the right wing is how bad they can piss off liberals.

Merry Christmas to all

“So Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Karl Rove all claim that the financial crisis was a liberal conspiracy, generated either by evil mastermind Chuck Schumer or by wily journalists.

Why does such stuff flourish? Probably because there is no punishment for it — as long as you’re on the right, and I mean right, side. Let Michael Moore point out, entirely correctly, the close ties between the Saudis and the Bush family, and he’s blasted as a crazy conspiracy theorist. On the other hand, let Donald Luskin suggest, in 2004, that George Soros is planning to engineer a financial crisis to defeat Bush, and he gets to publish front-page articles in the Washington Post Outlook section declaring that there isn’t a recession.” – Nobel-muckedymuck Paul Krugman

This one seems suspicious to say the least.

The Republican consultant accused of involvement in alleged vote-rigging in Ohio in 2004 was warned that his plane might be sabotaged before his death in a crash Friday night, according to a Cleveland CBS affiliate

If he really had anything to do with vote rigging I don’t doubt that certain people might want to keep him quiet about it.

Sarah Palin and her “cool mom” friends are back in the news:

WASILLA — A 42-year-old Wasilla woman was arrested Thursday at her home by Alaska State Troopers with a search warrant in an undercover drug investigation. Sherry L. Johnston was charged with six felony counts of misconduct involving a controlled substance.

Johnston is the mother of Levi Johnston, the Wasilla 18-year-old who received international attention in September when Gov. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, announced their teenage daughter was pregnant and he was the father. Bristol Palin, 18, is due on Saturday, according to a recent interview with the governor’s father, Chuck Heath.

I think this has been discussed here a few times.

Via Felix Salmon, Grace Wong does an empirical survey on the impact of home ownership on 809 women in Columbus, Ohio, in 2005:

An interesting portrait of homeowners emerges from my analysis. I find little evidence that homeowners are happier by any of the following definitions: life satisfaction, overall mood, overall feeling, general moment-to-moment emotions (i.e., affect) and affect at home. Several factors might be at work: homeowners derive more pain (but no more joy) from both their home and their neighborhood. They are also more likely to be 12 pounds heavier, report lower health status and poorer sleep quality. They tend to spend less time on active leisure or with friends. The average homeowner reports less joy from love and relationships. She is also less likely to consider herself to enjoy being with people… The results are robust after controlling for reported financial stress.

Count this as another reason that public policy aimed at subsidizing home ownership is misguided. I bet Ed Glaeser’s new book on rethinking federal housing policy is interesting, and am looking forward to reading it.

I wonder if some of this research might also apply to marriage and children as well

This is a really good idea:

The need for change is increasingly obvious, for health, climate and even humanitarian reasons. California voters last month passed a landmark referendum (over the farm lobby’s furious protests) that will require factory farms to give minimum amounts of space to poultry and livestock. Society is becoming concerned not only with little boys who abuse cats but also with tycoons whose business model is abusing farm animals.

An online petition that can be found at www.fooddemocracynow.org calls for a reformist pick for agriculture secretary — and names six terrific candidates, such as Chuck Hassebrook, a reformer in Nebraska. On several occasions in the campaign, Mr. Obama made comments showing a deep understanding of food issues, but the names that people in the food industry say are under consideration for agriculture secretary represent the problem more than the solution.

Change we can believe in?

The most powerful signal Mr. Obama could send would be to name a reformer to a renamed position. A former secretary of agriculture, John Block, said publicly the other day that the agency should be renamed “the Department of Food, Agriculture and Forestry.” And another, Ann Veneman, told me that she believes it should be renamed, “Department of Food and Agriculture.” I’d prefer to see simply “Department of Food,” giving primacy to America’s 300 million eaters.

From the daily dish:

As a religious holiday, pre-modern Christmases were rather austere celebrations defined by lengthy church services. That this coincided with pagan culture’s raucous celebrations of the winter solstice was a source of great displeasure to institutional Christianity for centuries. The “kitsch” that Harris discusses (Evergreen Trees, the man from the north who brings us goodies) are pagan icons. Giving gifts and spending time with your family and friends (instead of spending the day in mass) are also holdovers from popular tradition of drinking and reveling which the church had been actively hostile to.

In short, everything WE secularists value in Christmas has been entirely appropriated by the Christian world.

I think you can also look at it as cultural evolution, we have kept the good things about the holidays i.e. Celebrating with friends and family and for the most part gotten away from spending too much time in a musty old church with people we hardly know and probably wouldn’t like if we did.