Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

It hardly matters at this point.  Barack Obama has said in so many words that he’s perfectly willing to let the U.S. Government default on our National Debt unless he gets cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Even after the Republicans have capitulated on these issues.

It is no wonder that he loses to ‘generic Republican’ by 8 points.  People who claim to believe in ‘Electoral Victory’ are lying to you.

Obama is ensuring he is a one term failure by rushing to enact his Republican agenda with the complicity of corporatists who wear a D only because it’s convenient.  His highly paid and constantly wrong (2010) consultants contend ‘not as scary as that guy over there’, combined with ‘I’m a blind partisan’ will defeat the truth of ‘I don’t care about you’.

Barack Obama doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you and by the way clap harder for the Confidence Fairy, Invisible Bond Vigilantes, and Tinkerbell, otherwise you’ll die.

And so that’s where I’d have a selling job, Chuck, is trying to sell some of our party that if you are a progressive, you should be concerned about debt and deficit just as much as if you’re a conservative. And the reason is because if the only thing we’re talking about over the next year, two years, five years, is debt and deficits, then it’s very hard to start talking about how do we make investments in community colleges so that our kids are trained, how do we actually rebuild $2 trillion worth of crumbling infrastructure.

If you care about making investments in our kids and making investments in our infrastructure and making investments in basic research, then you should want our fiscal house in order, so that every time we propose a new initiative somebody doesn’t just throw up their hands and say, “Ah, more big spending, more government.”

It would be very helpful for us to be able to say to the American people, our fiscal house is in order. And so now the question is what should we be doing to win the future and make ourselves more competitive and create more jobs, and what aspects of what government is doing are a waste and we should eliminate. And that’s the kind of debate that I’d like to have.

It’s hard to figure out exactly what his motivations are since his policy doesn’t make any kind of sense at all, even for rich people.  When ‘The Great Hair Cut’ takes place it will be all about deleveraging that $600 Trillion of Derivative Notional Value in the Shadow Markets.

Why?  Because there’s no place else to get the ‘money’.  It’s at least 10 times the ‘book value’ of all the World’s goods and services annually.  So while the slave owner may starve and whip his chattel, and force them to sleep naked in the cold, there is only so much blood in the turnip.

Bootlickers think they will somehow survive I suppose, who can have enough jesters and toadies?  Having been Capo di Tutti I’ll tell you they’re the first on the list.  They’ll continue to suck up anyway seeking to worm their way back into favor (see Pavlov).

Frankly it’s co-dependent behavior.  I’ve seen enough abusive relationships to know and I have an opinion- toleration is complicity.

How then to have an impact?

I call you to a life of resistance in the small and easily done things.  Move your money.  Use cash when you can.  Turn off your lights when you leave the room and properly inflate your tires.

I don’t think any amount of complaints will convince the Tsar he has bad councilors, but it’s certainly a minimum.  I do think that only votes get counted and I encourage you to do so early and often.  The thing about shunning is that it’s critically important that it be public and express the clear disapproval of the community.

Their guilty souls can’t stand that, witness the howls of outrage.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

“F-f-f-f-f-f-f-fire!” – Beavis

I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I’ve been mostly impervious to the wonders of the natural world though I believe I have mentioned that it takes only some disappearing clouds and a bench to amuse me for hours.

Fireflies are a phenomena I knew only in the abstract until fairly recently.  I had never seen any.

And it wasn’t some sort of great paradigm shifting universe changing moment either.  I was walking to my car and I looked across the field where I was parked and saw lights moving around and then winking out and after a few moments of brain churning I snapped my fingers and said (audibly and to myself because I’m not at all worried people will think I’m crazy, I know it’s true), “Dang, those are Fireflies.  So that’s what they look like.”

Ok, so maybe I didn’t use the ‘dang’ word.

Now like ear worms they turn up all over and moments ago I had one dangle six inches in front of my nose until I finally had to shoo them away because I don’t much like bugs.

I’m not sure this story has much of a point except to remind myself that as Yogi (Berra) says- “You can see a lot just by observing.”

And now for some pic-a-nic baskets Boo-Boo.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

About That McConnell Deal…

By: Jane Hamsher, Firedog Lake

Thursday July 14, 2011 6:36 am

The irony is that the Obamabots are so out of touch with who Obama is and what he wants they don’t realize that by cheering for the McConnell deal, and his prowess in making McConnell “blink,” it amounts to twisting the knife for him. It makes it impossible for him to reject the deal (in) the end – which empowers the GOP to hold out.

Cantor offered a temporary extension three times last night, and by both Democratic and GOP accounts, that’s what made Obama snap. He wouldn’t be rejecting it “even if it brings my presidency down,” and taking his case to the American people, if he thought he had scored some big victory.

You gotta feel sorry for the guy. His most ardent supporters are the dumbest motherfuckers in the world, and they don’t  realize he thinks they are digging his political grave.

What Obama wants is to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

dday–

Obama reiterated that his “strong preference is not just to raise the debt ceiling but also to take significant steps to restrain borrowing.” As I’ve said repeatedly, by his own words, he wants to use this as a leverage point. The family of the hostage victim has become the hostage taker. So you have to believe that this Reid/McConnell deal, which mandates spending cuts even though the Republican leader in the Senate took them off the table, is being tailored to placate a Democratic President.

He’s threatened to veto any bill that doesn’t do that.  He and the advisers he’s personally picked to listen to and put in positions of policy influence believe in provably false economic theories and ‘political science’ that’s equally suspect.

Electoral victory my ass.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

“Neoliberal Economics has as much credibility as Stalinist Genetics.”- ek hornbeck

Some people point out that Evolution is just a theory despite a clear fossil record, the evidence of written history (parts even since 4004 B.C. and so Bishop Ussher approved), St. Bernards and Chihuahuas, corn and potatoes, the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon.

And Molecular Biology, one of those pesky ‘hard sciences’ with mathmatical models that predict replicable observable results that can be tested by experiment and when tested have proven true.

Economics?  Not so much.  One could credibly argue that as currently practiced it has all the mathematical certainty of Astrology (the planetary alignment is what it is and stars do chart their courses) and all it’s credulous superstitious magical thinking non-underwear changing during a hitting streak nonsense too.

As practiced currently by the constantly wrong and surprised it’s equal mixtures perfect markets and Jungian mystical mass psychology.

It’s fueled by enormous vanity and a refusal to admit one’s failure in theory given the evidence of experimental results that equals or exceeds the defenders of phlogiston and Ether.

Herr Doktor Professor–

If you come at the current Lesser Depression from my angle, there’s no great mystery. Consistency in modeling isn’t always a virtue, but still, it’s striking how much continuity there is in the analysis of slumps: there’s a clear line of descent with only moderate modification running from Hicks 1937 to liquidity-trap models of Japan (pdf) to models that add in debt/deleveraging. The situation we’re in seems fully comprehensible.

But at Chicago and elsewhere in the freshwater universe they’re playing Calvinball (and what a good coinage that was from Mike Konczal). All kinds of novel and implausible effects – effects that weren’t in any of the models they were using before the crisis – are invoked to explain why we’re in a sustained slump; strange to say, all of these newly invented models just happen to imply the need for tax cuts and a shrunken welfare state.

But I don’t think it’s just political bias: part of what’s happening, I’m sure, is intellectual embarrassment. These people come from a movement that declared, with great arrogance, that Keynesian economics was dead – then failed to produce a workable alternative, and now finds itself in what is very recognizably a Keynesian world. Recognizably, that is, to everyone but them, because admitting that Keynesian-type thinking is useful now would just be too humiliating.