This is why every Democratic blogger in the known universe advises their readers not to donate to the DSCC, DCCC, or DNC, and only to donate directly to individual candidates. If I send money to the DSCC and they use that money to help Ben Nelson, then I've just effed myself in the a, have I not?

John Murtha has passed away from complications arising from his gall bladder surgery last week. He was a controversial congressman, but he served his country both as a serviceman and representative. He will long be remembered for his turn against the war in Iraq. My thoughts are with his family.

Maybe I am a poor judge of the mood of the electorate, but it seems to me that people are pissed off right now. And I don't think they are pissed off that those people living on Staten Island who make more than a quarter million dollars a year in gross income are paying too much in taxes. I don't think people are looking to the government to extend the tax cuts that the well-to-do received under President Bush. I know that the populist mood of the country is a bit inchoate and not necessarily logically consistent, but a common theme of anger is that we're running deficits that are too big. Since no one wants to pay for our government, it seems only natural that most people would support making people who make over $250,000 a year pay for it.

Yet, once again, we have a bunch of Democrats who don't want to change the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. They say it will be a tough sell. Maybe it will be, I don't know. However, I think most people want to see financial services workers drawn and quartered, not extended more tax breaks. Is it me, or is everyone in Washington friggin' crazy?

I like Steve Clemons even though he occupies a place in Washington that I distrust pretty deeply. Clemons is a progressive-minded fellow who successfully maintains relationships on both sides of the aisle and gets along well with some people like Grover Norquist who I have no respect for whatsoever. But, these are the kinds of things you have to do to have a place at the table on foreign policy issues. To have your voice mean something to our permanent establishment, you have to become part of it in some ways. Clemons's reward is not only influence, but access. I think there are some serious compromises that have to be made to play that game, but I understand those compromises and respect them. In any case, I wouldn't say that I read Clemons with a jaundiced eye, just with a certain detachment. I don't want to shake hands with people like Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and Zbigniew Brzezinski because I see all three of them as causing America to make some pretty disastrous foreign policy blunders that we're still paying for. I think they all share a fatally flawed view of American power and its proper role in the post-Cold War world. It's true that they aren't neo-conservatives, but they're not terribly different in the larger picture. Yet, they do represent a kind of center-right position when you compare them to loonies like John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham. And if you want any kind of bipartisan agreement on foreign policy...if you want any kind of cover from the right for tough decisions...these are folks you need to respect and cultivate. I get that.

On the other hand, Clemons's decision to sign-on with Richard Luce's Financial Times (subscription required) criticism of Obama's inner sanctum on Chicago advisers strikes me just a tad too Sally Quninish for my tastes. It wouldn't be so hard to take the criticism if the solution wasn't to listen more to Katrina vanden Heuvel, Arianna Huffington, and Fareed Zakaria. Not to be a rube, but Obama isn't going to benefit from listening to those creatures of Washington so much as he'd benefit from listening to his Secret Service detail, or the White House pastry chefs and florists. He should spend a little time (not too much) reading political commentary from people who live outside the beltway and have no pretensions to power. That's the beauty of the internet. The opinion gatekeepers are long gone.

It may be that Obama's closest advisers (Axelrod, Jarrett, Emanuel, and Gibbs) are mucking things up. Maybe they are better at campaigning than governing. Maybe they have too much influence. That's a conversation I'm willing to have. But the solution ain't to listen to more Washingtonian old-hands. Old hands are invaluable for some things and can be of some assistance in helping you figure out how to strategize getting stuff through Congress. You can't come to Washington without massaging some of the egos around town because you'll pay a price that hurts your agenda and the people who are depending on your help. But you can take it too far. I'm happier having some new blood in the president's inner circle. If there's a problem with Emanuel it wouldn't surprise me. He's not new blood. He's there because he is supposed to know how to get things done. And he didn't do it on health care. I just don't know how much he is to blame for that. I do know that almost no one seems to like the guy and the long knives have been out for him since the day he took the job.

I can't say that I know where this is going, but its got the wingnuts in a tizzy, so it has that going for it. Obama is going to hold a bipartisan, bicameral health care meeting at Blair House on February 25th. It's supposed to last half the day and be broadcast on CSPAN. Here is how Obama explained it to Katie Couric:

“I want to come back [after the Presidents Day congressional recess] and have a large meeting — Republicans and Democrats — to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward,” Obama said in an interview with Katie Couric during CBS’s Super Bowl pre-game show Sunday.

Obama said he wants to “look at the Republican ideas that are out there.”

“If we can go, step by step, through a series of these issues and arrive at some agreements, then, procedurally, there’s no reason why we can’t do it a lot faster the process took last year,” he said.

That basically tracks what he said at the DNC.

“Let's just go through these bills — their ideas, our ideas — let's walk through them in a methodical way so that the American people can see and compare what makes the most sense,” Obama said.

Here's why this is important. Listen to what Minority Leader John Boehner has to say:

"Obviously, I am pleased that the White House finally seems interested in a real, bipartisan conversation on health care,” said House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Oh.) in a statement Sunday. He added: “The problem with the Democrats' health care bills is not that the American people don't understand them; the American people do understand them, and they don't like them.”

Actually, Boehner is dead wrong. The American people have been subjected to an unrelenting misinformation campaign without a fair referee.. Almost everything the Republicans say about the health care bills is wrong, and the rest is distorted. Making the Republicans sit down in a room with independent budget experts and health care experts and accept the facts that they've been lying and that they have no alternative plan, and doing it on television in order to keep a campaign pledge to negotiate on CSPAN? Well, for those who watch it (hopefully, it will be broadcast on cable news as well) it will probably be a slaughter in the president's favor, which is why this strange little man has the following advice for the Republicans:

Republicans would be crazy to rise to this bait. A big photo-op for Obama with zero chance for any meaningful changes to a bill that steals liberty from American citizens. Kill the bill(s) and start over from scratch.

Do not walk into this, Republicans. Standing strong against this abomination has worked so far and the American public is grateful. (Need proof? Look to Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey.)

You really do not want to follow George Armstrong Obama to the place he is leading his cavalry. This is really shaping up to be a throw the bums out election.

Bad time to join the bums.

You can see the concern. Supposedly, this is a terrible idea on Obama's part (an auto-de-fe, he calls it). But then he warns the Republicans not to let the president get a giant photo op where he'll make no concessions. The bottom line? The Republicans thought they had this health care bill whipped when they won the Massachusetts election and now they're getting nervous that the president is going to pull some kind of stunt at the last minute and save the day for the Democrats. Well, I hope so, too, but I don't write confusing posts about Little Big Horn and inviting the Republicans to join in the slaughter.

Now, as far as I am concerned, the virtue of this plan is that it will do a lot to expose the Republicans for what they are. But it won't convince any of them to vote for any health care bill of any kind. As far as I'm concerned, Rep. Joseph Cao and Sen. Olympia Snowe were the only Republican members of Congress who ever considered voting for a health bill, and Snowe's probably out of reach now. The problem is still Democrats who are looking at bleak re-elect numbers. They're spineless and stupid, and some are just corporate shills. So, this meeting has to address that problem more than it has to do anything else. I like the idea, even if the Republicans think discussing health care on teevee is a way to bore us to death.

These things are supposed to have funny ads.

I'm not sure why Kevin Drum is neutral on a sugared beverage-tax. I like to drink soda that has cane sugar in it every once in a while, but I've done my best to completely eliminate high fructose corn syrup from my diet. You should do the same. And diet sodas are just as nasty. Our society pays an enormous price in health-related costs due to the omnipresence of high fructose corn syrup in our diets. It's on a par with tobacco use, and we have no problem forcing smokers to subsidize everything from our health, to our roads, schools, and property taxes. Why should users of high fructose corn syrup get a break?

Peyton Manning is a very, very good quarterback. But he hasn't come close to proving himself the best quarterback ever. He hasn't even proved himself to be better than his contemporary, Tom Brady. Brady had an off season after losing the prior season to injury. But, Brady's resume is much more impressive than Manning's.

He has played in four Super Bowls, winning three of them (XXXVI, XXXVIII, XXXIX). He has also won two Super Bowl MVP awards (XXXVI and XXXVIII), has been selected to five Pro Bowls (and invited to six, although he declined the 2006 invitation), and holds the NFL record for most touchdown passes in a single regular season. Brady has the sixth-highest career passer rating of all time (93.3) among quarterbacks with at least 1,500 career passing attempts. He was named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year in 2005. He also helped set the record for the longest consecutive win streak in NFL history with 21 straight wins over two seasons (2003-04).

Manning has won four Most Valuable Player awards and was the MVP of the one Super Bowl he has been to before today. His stats are incredible. But the test of a quarterback is in the playoffs. The Colts have won at least 12 games every year since 2003, but this is only their second Super Bowl appearance. Two of those years, it was Tom Brady's Patriots that knocked the Colts out of the playoffs.

In my opinion, Joe Montana is the greatest quarterback to ever play the game, followed by Tom Brady and John Elway. For Manning to move up the list, he must win today, and then win at least one more Super Bowl.

And Drew Brees ain't chopped liver. That boy can play.

"The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience." - Kleinheider at the Nashville Post.

I knew I should have gone to that damn Teabagging Convention. Just standing around in the halls talking to those nutters would have been high comic relief. I could have even called myself a journalist and compared notes. But, seriously, it's belly-achingly funny to picture Andrew Breitbert and WorldNetDaily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah having a public argument about who is and isn't a real journalist. It's also hilarious that the subject of contention was whether the Obama birth certificate issue is divisive to the nascent Tea Bagging Party. And the guy arguing that Birtherism is dumb is the guy who brought you the ACORN-steals-elections nonsense.

Hey, their bullshit is effective in its own way. But to argue that any of it is true, or journalism? Yeah, it makes me giggle.

By the way, how'd Palin do? I was too busy watching real hypnomedia. That shit is hilarious. And I say that as a non-Guido Jersey Boy.

What do you want? It's a snow-day.

Finn's thoughts on the snow:

How are things at your house?

Hard to believe that a renowned conservative journal would suggest that the Obama administration didn't spend enough to stimulate the economy and create new jobs, but that's what this article from The Economist seems to be saying about our jobless recovery:

Most troubling of all is the continued failure of economic growth to benefit the labour market. Employment fell by over 300,000 jobs during the last three months of 2009, despite strong expansion in GDP. The first quarter of 2010 is unlikely to show as big an output gain, suggesting that the pace of improvement in employment may be slowing, even as regular job growth has yet to return. And the situation may be more dire still; initial jobless claims have grown in recent weeks, indicating that what momentum there was in labour markets has been lost. [...]

[W]ith the revelation that labour markets early last year were far weaker than expected and the growing indications that the recovery will be jobless, the country's leaders may be wishing they had done more to boost the economy sooner. The longer it takes to achieve steady job creation, the more uncertain recovery will become.

Well, I suppose Real Conservatives will claim The Economist was never a "real" conservative journal, just like they claimed that Bush hadn't been a "real" conservative, too. Denial is so easy to do when the alternative is admitting that maybe you were wrong --about everything.

You might have heard, but there is about two feet of snow on the ground here. Luckily, we have a very kind neighbor who plows our long driveway whenever it snows. He's been by twice. However, there is still the walkway to deal with. Just looking at it is giving me a pain in the back. I get back spasms at the drop of a hat, and shoveling this is going to cripple me for a day or two. I hope we have plenty of Tylenol in the cabinet. The band of heavy snow has moved out of my area but it is still hammering Wilmington, Delaware, which is about 15-20 miles south of here.

We still have electricity, although there will be high winds for a while and it only takes one branch to knock us out. If we do lose it, it could be several days before we get it back, so we'd have to seek alternative shelter. Wish us luck.

I just caught the end of an NPR interview of Henry "Hank" Paulson, Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, who was hawking his new book about the financial crisis of 2008. Several things struck me about what he said:

1. He referred to the Ronald Reagan Library as a "Temple of Capitalism."

I can't think any more revealing quote I've heard from a "Wall Street" Republican -- the ones who really control the GOP, at least in terms of the ideology of free markets which has a firmer hold on the actions of Republican politicians than even Fundamentalist Christianity.

Here was a man who had made the decision to bailout Wall Street (I doubt we can credit Bush with coming up with this idea), a man who was the overseer of a massive government intervention in which billions of dollars were funneled to the largest banks and financial firms in the country, frankly saying that this action was necessary to prevent a 2nd Great Depression. Nonetheless, you could tell that he felt distressed by the mere thought that the Federal Government had to be a prominent actor in stabilizing financial markets.

He literally seemed ashamed that he would be known as the Treasury Secretary most associated with bailouts. No wonder he kept so much of the actual transfers of funds secret, and placed little if any controls on how the bailed out banks could use the funds. We all know that while he was in charge of the Treasury special deals and favors were given to his "friends" at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Yet, deep down his actions were triggered by more than these close associations. He only acted after it was too late to do anything to prevent the collapse of the derivatives bubble other than a bailout. To men like Henry Paulson, capitalism as we know it in the late 20th Century isn't an economic system which has flaws and often creates extreme inequalities in wealth and speculative "bubbles" that lead to wild swings in economic activity, it is a God they worship, and places like the New York Stock Exchange, the University of Chicago and Ronald Reagan's library are his God's most sacred, holy places.

So who does Paulson blame for what happened in the great financial meltdown of 2008? You and me. Which brings me to my second point:

2. Paulson stated that the fault with the American economy lies in the fact that Americans spend too much on consumer goods and do not save enough.

An interesting viewpoint to be sure. You see, Paulson has to literally go against the tenets of his own religious faith in Free Markets here when he blames you and I (and the Government also) for spending more than we save. Yet, the reality is that Paulson was part of a system that provided no incentive to save. He had watched for years as Alan Greenspan kept interest rates low, fighting the dragon of inflation. He knew that such low rates were in large part responsible for the speculative bubbles in High Tech stocks and later in real estate. He also knew that de-regulation of financial institutions had allowed investment banks and insurance companies and stock brokers to all come together under one roof to create "financial products" which were of little value other than as a scheme to milk money from investors large and small.

He also knew that our economy has been based on ever increasing consumerism since at least the beginning of the 20th Century when Henry Ford and others revolutionized our economy through the the mass production of cheap goods and the rise of advertising and marketing to create a "need" in the minds of consumer for such goods.

Paulson had promoted policies which made it difficult for average Americans to aggregate wealth, since the rise in income among the poor and middle class has been stagnant (if not negative) since 1980. Policies of "free trade" under which which large corporations sent high paying jobs overseas to lower "labor costs" and laws that allowed corporations to avoid taxation through the use of off shore tax havens. Policies which promoted the profitability of large multinational corporations at the expense of smaller companies, thus eliminating creativity and competition in every industry.

It is no surprise that in 2010 we have a few large corporations which dominate entire industries, corporations which are ever more controlled by the managers who operate them rather than the shareholders. Mega-Corporations which have in large part created the economy we now have in America: one where we produce fewer and fewer manufactured goods, where good paying jobs are scarce, and where corporations have been allowed to gouge and take advantage of consumers because the regulatory institutions and structures which limited such predation have largely been eliminated or so weakened that they cannot protect consumers.

Yet, because Paulson sees his brand of Capitalism as a God that can do no wrong, he had to direct the blame for its failures elsewhere. So, like the God of Abraham in the Old Testament whose prophets blamed the Israelites' lack of faith for all their troubles, he blames average Americans for not saving enough of their meager incomes. Like any man of faith, he is blind to the deficiencies and contradictions which are part and parcel of his "religion."

When Scott Simon, the NPR interviewer called him on this (much too politely I thought) by pointing out that now, because of the current economic situation which Paulson failed to prevent, we need more spending by governments and individuals to fuel job growth (i.e., increasing demand), Paulson's response was a feeble one indeed.

He said (and this is from memory so it might not be completely accurate, but the gist of his response is here), "Well, that's the conundrum" before returning to his talking point about the necessity to curb government spending and increase individual saving. How this would magically happen, of course, was not explained by him. Presumably it would require all of us to have more faith in the Marketplace, to return to the fold of that Old Time religion to which Paulson bears his allegiance: unfettered, unregulated Capitalism.

Indeed. To men of faith any answer which their God cannot provide is a "conundrum" which, for the purposes of preserving their faith, must be ignored or elided. And to think that this was the quality of mind, the mindset of a religious fanatic, that directed our nation's economy straight off a cliff during the Bush years.

Paulson, however, is but a symbolic stand-in for all those who subscribe to this dogmatic ideology. And sadly, many of these same "believers" are also members of the Democratic Party, both in Congress and in Obama's administration. They may differ with Paulson on small matters, but on their larger faith in Free Markets, Free Trade and Raw Capitalism they all worship at the same Church.