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Thursday, November 04, 2010

The unforeseen consequence that no Democrat thought about
Posted by Jill | 7:05 AM
In recent months, we've started to see little tiny tiny tiny signs that the economic conditions in this country HAVE been improving. It's barely perceptible, and certainly not perceptible at all to the millions of people who lost their jobs in 2008, voted for Barack Obama in the hope that he could help their situations improve, and are still out of work two years later. But the signs ARE there:
How's this for some perverse, twisted irony? On Tuesday, voters cited worry about the economy as their primary concern. Throw away the conflicting ideologies battling for supremacy: The simplest explanation for yesterday's results is that incumbent parties always suffer when the economy is down.

But on Wednesday, a batch of new economic indicators offered more scope for optimism than we've seen all year.


It's not enough, but it's real. Whether this is just the proverbial dead cat bounce or if this is really the glimmer of a beginning of a recovery remains to be seen, but it's definitely there.

The problem that the Democrats face now, and it's hard to have any confidence in their ability to frame it to their advantage, is that if the economy continues to improve, the Rand Paulite teabaggers who now control the Republican Party will take the credit and say it's because of THEIR policies -- despite the fact that for the last three decades, pee-on-the-poor economics have never, ever been shown to result in economic growth over the long term.

We are a nation of babies: id-dominated creatures who want everything we want and we want it now, and when we don't get everything we want RIGHT NOW we scream bloody murder and throw a tantrum. However, we're highly selective about the things for which we demand instant gratification. We gave George W. Bush eight years of war and demanded nothing in terms of resolution -- or how much it cost. We gave him the ability to squander the surplus that was left to him by Bill Clinton and turn it into a deficit of over a trillion dollars. We arguably allowed him to steal not one but two elections. Americans looked the other way because the media told us he was a great guy, one of us, the guy you'd like to have a beer with, the guy who did the equivalent of puttering around his lawn when he went on vacation. He was the war president; the guy who stuffed the crotch of his flightsuit and strutted around like he was the biggest swingiest dick in the universe. He made Chris Matthews go all weak in the knees. But it was OK, because ENOUGH of us were OK.

Then in the fall of 2008, it all fell apart, and Barack Obama was swept into office. Had John McCain chosen one of the colorless white men he wanted, he might very well have been elected, but he didn't, and when push came to shove, the smiling black guy seemed like a better chance to take than the aging high school mean girl who couldn't put together a coherent sentence. We'd already had eight years of that. Too many people pinned a paper suit on Barack Obama and turned him into something he never was. He was the guy who DIDN'T feel "icky" about Teh Gays...except that he did, but he just never said it (until recently). He was the smart guy, the anti-Bush, the guy who pushed all our buttons and promised that he would make it all go away. The problem was that he was never what anyone thought he was.

He was never the progressive champion. This was a guy who chose Joe Lieberman to be his senior mentor in the Senate. This is a guy who as a new Senator sat on his hands when Stephanie Tubbs-Jones asked for a Senator to stand up with her and protest the vote in Ohio in 2004. But he's not a secret Musliim terrorist communist either. This is a very cautious, centrist guy, who is the living embodiment of Wanda Sykes' comedy bit about her mother always telling them as kids, "White folks are looking at you." The problem is that he was elected and ran straight-on into the brick wall that is today's Republican Party -- so-called "patriots" who would rather see this country die a slow, painful death rather than work together with those who don't see the world the way they do.

I've been in Florida this week -- a state that went about as hard to the right on Tuesday that it's possible to go. Florida has been the receipient of a shitload of Federal stimulus funds, but not one Democratic candidate in this state made note of that. And Florida is just one example. Fox News has shown that you can sell people a shit sandwich through fear. Apple shows that you can sell people products they don't need though sheer coolness. I see an iPad, and despite the fact that I have a desktop PC, two notebooks and a netbook, all I can thing of is WANT. SRSLY. NOW.

Marketing is everything, and the Democrats have shown absolutely no ability to do it. We have an awful health care reform bill that for most Americans who already have insurance is resulting in huge premium increases NOW -- no matter how it helps later on. And it has the Democrats' name on it because they capitulated to Republicans and the insurance industry in an effort to be "bipartisan." We have a defanged Wall Street reform bill. And now we have a just-maybe recovering economy -- but it's going to have the Republicans' name on it. Not because of their policies, which will cause collapse in the long term but keep them in power in the short, but because the Democrats were too damn lame, too damn lazy, too damn afraid of Glenn Beck, or too damn inept, to even tell Americans about their own achievements.

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Monday, March 02, 2009

And some good news, for a change
Posted by Jill | 7:56 AM
This morning the lead stories on the major networks' morning shows were as follows: CBS' The Early Show has an exclusive interview with the frighteningly Botoxed Vicki Iseman, who mysteriously disappeared last year after the New York Times published a report indicating that her relationship with John McCain was at the very least "inappropriate." Considering that McCain lost and everyone's forgotten about her, her reappearance at this time is baffling. Meanwhile, Today is leading with the vitally important story about Caylee Anthony's mother, and Good Morning America leads with whether Rhianna and Chris Brown are still together.

And you wonder why Not-Joe Not-a-Plumber is a Republican hero?

Meanwhile, CNN still has Rush Limbaugh's unhinged rant from CPAC in heavy rotation, and Pat Buchanan's head is exploding over on Morning Schmeggegge about Barack Obama's declared war on conservatism.

But amidst all the lunacy is a tidbit of good news, brought to us via Blue Girl:
(Washington, DC) The Vice President today commended the new owners of Republic Windows and Doors, a Chicago window manufacturing plant that was shuttered late last year, resulting in the lay-off of its 250 union workers. Republic was purchased in bankruptcy court last week by Serious Materials, a California-based company that makes energy efficient windows. Serious Materials has announced plans to reopen the Republic factory and to eventually rehire all 250 of its laid-off workers at their former pay levels. Serious Materials said it purchased Republic because the Recovery Act will increase demand for its products.

"The reopening of this factory and the rehiring of these workers provide an excellent example of how the money in the Recovery Act is targeted to spur job creation quickly," said Vice President Biden. "These workers will not only earn a paycheck again; they will go back to work creating products that will benefit America's long-term economic future."

At the request of President Obama, Vice President Biden is overseeing the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, working with federal, state and local officials to ensure that money moves quickly and is spent appropriately so that the President's goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs is achieved.

"When Republic shut its doors in December, the jobs Illinois lost were not only good paying jobs, they were good for the environment too," said Senator Durbin. "Those are the very jobs we need to preserve in order to put our economy back on track. The economic recovery package has recreated a market for energy efficient materials that virtually disappeared as our economic crisis deepened. With $16 billion available for weatherization programs, companies like Republic will be able to reopen their doors and put people back to work."

Last Friday the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Energy announced an historic partnership to streamline and better coordinate federal weatherization efforts to make it much easier for families to weatherize their homes and spur a new home energy efficiency industry that could create tens of thousands of jobs.

HUD and DOE have created a high level interagency task force to coordinate home weatherization efforts under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and to leverage those funds to build a home energy efficiency industry in the U.S. that will: create or retain tens of thousands of jobs, lower energy costs of vulnerable low-income households, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. HUD and DOE will allocate $16 billion in economic recovery funds to retrofit existing homes.


If this is what war against conservatism looks like, I say bring it.

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