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Once again, can we stop pretending that the private sector can do everything right. or that BP can do anything right for that matter.

In an op-Ed Mitt Romnet forgot about a few wars.. I guess you can make a case that Obama has done such a good job in the war on terror that most conservative seem to have forgot about it.

You also can make a case that Mr. Romney should hire better Op-Ed writers.

I got this from Kevin Drum:

So sure, maybe Britain and France should have more planes and more bombs. But really, there’s not a lot of point to arguing over nits like this. For them to project power effectively, even in nearby Libya, would require not just a bit of shoring up here and there, it would probably require a doubling or tripling of their defense budgets. Likewise, cutting the U.S. defense budget by bits and pieces wouldn’t really change our posture. If we want to project power all over the world, it’s going to continue costing us roughly what it costs us today. If we don’t want to, we could cut our defense budget by two-thirds in a stroke. There’s not a lot of room in between.

It seems that Obama is becoming good at articulating a vision for America that is much more optimistic than what conservatives have going.

What happened over the past two weeks, then, was more about staking out positions than about enacting policies. On one side you had a combination of mean-spiritedness and fantasy; on the other you had a reaffirmation of American compassion and community, coupled with fairly realistic numbers. Which would you choose??

I guess there was a speech tonight, and I guess it wasn’t too bad, but something Krugman wrote really sticks out:

I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no — better to pursue the zero option of just doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts as a whole expire

The zero option seems like a no-brainer at this point, especially once you realize that if congress doesn’t increase the debt limit it’s mostly republican leaning groups that will be effected.

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With school and other things it’s been a while since I posted anything. It seems like things are really not going well for the nuclear power industry, and maybe Obama should have let all the Bush tax cuts expire.

And the government shutdown seems like more culture war crap

One of the major sticking points in negotiations remains the GOP demand to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. Talk of this being about abortion isn’t quite right — Planned Parenthood is already prohibited from using public funds to terminate pregnancies, and has been for many years. What we’re talking about here is Republicans balking at access to contraception, family planning services, pap smears, and cancer screenings.

Hopefully I will think up something to say about this stuff soon

I think this explains the Tea Party and why it isn’t so much a movement as an angry group therapy session:

The point is, we should stop looking for ideological consistency from a group of well-intentioned but easily-misled conservative activists. As I’ve mentioned before, if you were to make a Venn Diagram of the issues Tea Party members care about, and the issues Tea Party members are confused about, you’d only see one circle.

A while back I saw a TV special on Chernobyl, and most of the area around the reactor uninhabitable. I wonder if Japan is not going to have vast areas that are also uninhabitable for many years.

This latest string of nuclear mishaps probably won’t end construction of more nuclear plants, but it probably should.

Looks like the recall effort is starting to gather some steam.. If working people can pull this off and get some of these douche bags out of office politicians might think twice before doing the Koch’s dirty work.

I think I have posted this before but it seems like a good idea. Not only is it good for humane reasons it’s also good for health reasons.

I came across this strategy memo by Mark Penn, and realized that he wasn’t a complete idiot, he anylized the republican lizard brains quite well. ( BTW I did not mean to insult lizards with that last remark.

Penn Strategy Memo, March 19, 2007: More than anything else, this memo captures the full essence of Mark Penn’s campaign strategy–its brilliance and its breathtaking attacks. Penn identified with impressive specificity the very coalition of women and blue-collar workers that Clinton ended up winning a year later. But he also called Obama “unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,” and wrote, “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” Penn proposed targeting Obama’s “lack of American roots.”

I think this explains a lot of our current problems pretty well:

In general, I feel like there’s huge denial around the role of petroleum in America’s trade deficit. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, US firms had a dominant position in the automobile industry and the USA was a major oil exporter. And we’ve never switched away from industrial policy oriented around suburbanization, auto dependency, and high per capita levels of oil consumption even though nowadays it’s an industrial policy only Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Norway could love.

i am starting to think that by trying to kill oraganized labor the GOP may have revived it. and Kieth Olberman is back

People don’t seem to get healthier as health spending goes up.. Part of the reason healthcare spending is not raising overall levels of health is that generally the most unhealthy people are the ones spending the most on healthcare. This is a function of a system that puts treatment over prevention and makes it easy for older people (through Medicare) to access the system, while making it very difficult for younger people to access the system.

Modern conservatism is a coalition of libertarians and theocrats, neither of which have ever successfully governed any where. A couple of states are starting to show why, like here: A couple of states are starting to show why and here. In Florida they need the jobs and a high speed rail might help draw tourists and anyone with an ounce of common sense, even Republicans can see that. In Wisconsin the governor has decided he wants to emulate the wrong side of the Egypt conflict.

Perhaps it’s good that the tea-party crowd won a few elections as now people can see what they mean when they are really all about, which is nothing.

The happenings in the Middle-East may be much more significant than people most people seem to realize. It will be interesting to see how the US deals with this new and more democratic Middle-East, hopefully we learned a few things about what not to do from places like Lebanon.

It’s also interesting that much of the information available about these countries comes from wikileaks.

It seems like Egypt went about like George Bush and co said Iraq would go. People were unhappy with a dictator and wanted him gone and in the case of Egypt he is gone with no American bloodshed and relatively few casualties in general. And Obama may deserve a lot of the credit for this.

Here is another article on why Egypt may be the first of many regime changes

Looks like the NFL is headed for a lockout.. Which if you are a Bronco fan may be a good thing. The NFL is starting to remind me of much of corporate America, where profits have become the only goal, producing a quality product should at least be in the mix, and in the NFL it isn’t.

I wonder how long before the games are outsourced to China or India because the people there will play for less money.

Looks like Micheal Vick is back.. Towards the end of the season Vick’s game seemed to return, and by that I mean a running quarterback that could throw a long pass; but not win games. It looks like the rest of his old ways are starting to make a comeback as well.

I can’t decide if the Black Eyed Peas were the worst part about yesterdays Superbowl or if the game was the worst part.

Five-years ago the Peas were cool and so was the NFL now they both suck.

One of the reasons that I don’t get that enthused about more funding for science is that the powers that be NIH, FDA and the USDA seem to be wholly owned subsidiaries of big business and not particularly interested in advancing science.

I just saw this the last part made much of the economiic problem in the U.S clear to me:

Young Americans already face a future defined by an inescapable reckoning. They already tend to look at our grand entitlements as phantoms, as dead entitlements walking. They already know the problem isn’t that we have too few college graduates, but that we — like Tunisia and (gasp!) China, to mention a few — have too many for the market to absorb. And they already know that all the science and math in the world can’t serve to nourish our personal and cultural convictions about the purpose and character of American life in transformed times.

When will Obama’s generation reckon with that?

without avialable jobs we just get very well educated waiters, with a lot of debt in many cases. Again maybe population is a problem.

I wasn’t able to watch the State of The Union speech last night or actually watch either of the rebuttals, but I was able to listen to most of it (I guess Sirrius radio is not a complete waste of money). What stood out for me was the lack of specifics, in Obama’s case I think it reflects the political reality it will be almost impossible to get anything big through the Senate and House in the next two years.

More shocking to me was that Paul Ryan architect of the GOP road map didn’t mention what programs he wants to cut, specifically Social Security and Medicare, his claim is the roadmap that calls for dismantling the social safety net, why not tout it. I think most people know why he doesn’t want to get into specifics, they are pretty unpopular ideas, so instead he relies on scare tactics talking about a “day of reckoning” without really talking about how he would avoid the scary “day of
reckoning”. Michelle Bachman is a train wreck.

The problem for republicans is that most of their plans sound good in general “reduce the deficit” blah blah blah, but they don’t sound so good when you say let’s end social security, or when you talk about raising taxes on the middle class, all ideas in Paul Ryan’s road map. So they are kind of stuck in a place where they can win elections by speaking in generalities but cannot govern because they are afraid of the specifics.

The sad part about the lack of specifics on the republican side is that it has leaked over to the democratic side of the isle as well, hopefully someone will come forward with some real specific ideas rather than just platitudes.

It looks like some states may be filing bankruptcy if congress can get a law passed that will allow them to do it.. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Texas is leading the push for this, conservatism always leads to both moral and financial bankruptcy.

At least one scientist seems to think religion gives people an advantage when it comes to long term survival.. But I am not so sure they should be happy about the traits he lists:

Rowthorn contended that scientists widely agree that religion has biological foundations. Belief in the supernatural, obedience to authority, and affinity for ceremony and ritual depend on genetically based features of the human brain, he wrote, citing several influential studies.

He also goes on to talk about how shared myths can bring people together. I am pretty sure nothing he mentions is really a good thing.

Looks like apple is making more money from Apps than from music, which seems odd to me, I am somewhat addicted to my Ipad, but I don’t think I have ever paid for an App and the only two Apps I ever use are netflix and text plus, and the netflix website seems to do all the same things the app does.

A couple of other apps that I have tried like the New York Times and ABC news are not anywhere as good as the websites. Maybe I am wrong here (that seems to happen a lot, especially when I pick football games) but for the most part I don’t see the value in paying for programs that are mostly available if you type in a web address.

Wikileaks has some interesting stuff to say about tax evaders.

Everyone seems to be ignoring the foreclosure crisis.. I don’t really know what to say about the crisis other than a bunch of vacant homes seems like a waste, if banks are going to foreclose on them they should be required to sell them quickly. The other weird thing is that people are still building homes even when their is a glut. What’s up with that?

Sarah Palin is starting to sound very defensive about some of her statements that may have incited violence.. The entire Palin schtick is to say something inflammatory and then basically say “just kidding” kind of like any mean kid in school, and now someone is calling her out for what her minions are doing; and she doesn’t like it.

UPDATE: looks like Palin’s attempt to make it about her may have backfired

Maybe people are starting to realize that the stock market is not much more than a casino: