GOP sees Franken as top public enemy
By ALEXANDER BURNS 1/10/09 2:56 PM EST
The Politico
Marty Seifert, the Republican leader in the Minnesota House of Representatives, said Franken’s long record of antagonizing conservatives would make it difficult for him to connect with voters who supported Coleman.
Prominent conservative Rush Limbaugh, who Franken mocked in the title of one of his books, has already jabbed Franken on his radio show, telling listeners in December that Franken “won’t quit [the Senate race] because he doesn’t know how to get a real job…He’s a pathetic figure.”
Republican activist Joe Repya, a retired military officer who considered running against Coleman in the GOP primary, said Franken is “viewed by both sides as a mean-spirited, carpet-bagging, foul-mouthed sexist supported by Hollywood money.”
After being shown a clip of Couric complaining to David Letterman that no post-election interviewer has asked Palin why she would not tell the CBS anchor what newspapers she reads, the Alaska governor responded: “Because, Katie, you’re not the center of everybody’s universe.”
On a Deadly Day in Iraq, Republicans Step Up Debate Over Whether Rumsfeld Should Stay
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: December 20, 2004Over the weekend, Mr. Rumsfeld's critics gained some new ammunition with the disclosure that the defense secretary had not personally been signing condolence letters to the families of soldiers killed in Iraq.
In a statement first issued to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, Mr. Rumsfeld said he would now begin signing the letters himself. A Defense Department official said Sunday that Mr. Rumsfeld had used an automated signing machine, a tool commonly used by public officials, but only to ensure that families received their letters quickly.
Army Sends 'Dear John Doe' Letters to Families of Fallen Troops
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2009; Page A05
The Army mistakenly sent letters addressed "Dear John Doe" to 7,000 family members of soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, unleashing calls from troubled relatives and prompting a formal apology yesterday from the Army's top general.
The letters, mailed late last month by the Army's Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operation Center in Alexandria, contained information about private organizations that assist families of the fallen. But in what the Army called a printing error by a contractor, the letters did not contain specific names and addresses; instead, they had the placeholder greeting "Dear John Doe."
... I think what people will see is that we are putting together a top-notch intelligence team that is not only going to assure that I get the best possible intelligence -- unvarnished -- but that the intelligence community is no longer geared toward telling the president what they think the president wants to hear but instead are going to be delivering the information that the president needs to make critical decisions to keep the American people safe.
I think what you're also going to see is a team that is committed to breaking with some of the past practices and concerns that have, I think, tarnished the image of the agencies and intelligence agencies and U.S. foreign policy.
COULTER: The point is, I was canceled twice. And it wasn't until the Drudge Report ran a headline on its own reporting -- and the Drudge Report has never had to retract a report the way --
LAUER: You know -- you know what -- you know what that expression is --
COULTER: -- NBC News has.
The GOP's number one priority politically is to set into motion a series of events that will make Obama look more ineffective, partisan, and unpopular than he is today.
State could be out of money by next month
AZ fund balance might fall to negative $50M on Feb. 23
The Associated Press
Tucson, Arizona Published: 01.05.2009
PHOENIX — Arizona could run out of money to pay its bills as early as next month and may have to borrow money in the short term for the first time since World War II, state Treasurer Dean Martin said.
An analysis by the treasurer's staff shows that the state's fund balance could dip to negative $50 million on Feb. 23 at the earliest and mid-March under a more optimistic scenario.
"No matter what (lawmakers) do with the budget, we'll be negative in March or April," Martin said.
With no reserves to cover the bills, that could force the state to borrow at least that much, if not far more.
Article Seventeen: The Role of Muslim Women
The Muslim women have a no lesser role than that of men in the war of liberation; they manufacture men and play a great role in guiding and educating the [new] generation. The enemies have understood that role, therefore they realize that if they can guide and educate [the Muslim women] in a way that would distance them from Islam, they would have won that war. Therefore, you can see them making consistent efforts [in that direction] by way of publicity and movies, curricula of education and culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like. All of them are nests of saboteurs and sabotage. Those Zionist organizations control vast material resources, which enable them to fulfill their mission amidst societies, with a view of implementing Zionist goals and sowing the concepts that can be of use to the enemy. Those organizations operate [in a situation] where Islam is absent from the arena and alienated from its people. Thus, the Muslims must fulfill their duty in confronting the schemes of those saboteurs. When Islam will retake possession of [the means to] guide the life [of the Muslims], it will wipe out those organizations which are the enemy of humanity and Islam.
Since his left wing vetoed John Brennan for the crime of having served while W was President, even though he opposed most of the programs they hate
But, basically, they fail because they and their readers are, well, pretty stupid.
Twitter, shmitter. The problem facing "conservatives" is that there is no brand of "conservatism" that is not completely insane.
Fed Officials Endorse ‘Big Stimulus’ to Battle U.S. Recession
By Scott Lanman and Vivien Lou Chen
Jan. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve officials, after taking the historic step of cutting the benchmark interest rate to as low as zero, are calling for greater government spending to help revive the U.S. economy.
San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen said yesterday at an economics conference in San Francisco that “it’s worth pulling out all the stops” with an economic recovery package. Charles Evans, president of the Chicago Fed, told the same gathering he believes a “big stimulus is appropriate.”
Milton Friedman, in particular, persuaded many economists that the Federal Reserve could have stopped the Depression in its tracks simply by providing banks with more liquidity, which would have prevented a sharp fall in the money supply. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, famously apologized to Friedman on his institution’s behalf: “You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”
It turns out, however, that preventing depressions isn’t that easy after all. Under Mr. Bernanke’s leadership, the Fed has been supplying liquidity like an engine crew trying to put out a five-alarm fire, and the money supply has been rising rapidly. Yet credit remains scarce, and the economy is still in free fall.
Friedman’s claim that monetary policy could have prevented the Great Depression was an attempt to refute the analysis of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that monetary policy is ineffective under depression conditions and that fiscal policy — large-scale deficit spending by the government — is needed to fight mass unemployment. The failure of monetary policy in the current crisis shows that Keynes had it right the first time. And Keynesian thinking lies behind Mr. Obama’s plans to rescue the economy.
As Paul De Grauwe, Leonardo Iania, and Pablo Rovira Kaltwasser pointed out in "How Abnormal Was the Stock Market in October 2008?":We selected the six largest daily percentage changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average during October, and asked the question of how frequent these changes occur assuming that, as is commonly done in finance models, these events are normally distributed. The results are truly astonishing. There were two daily changes of more than 10% during the month. With a standard deviation of daily changes of 1.032% (computed over the period 1971-2008) movements of such a magnitude can occur only once every 73 to 603 trillion billion years. Since our universe, according to most physicists, exists a mere 20 billion years we, finance theorists, would have had to wait for another trillion universes before one such change could be observed. Yet it happened twice during the same month. A truly miraculous event. The other four changes during the same month of October have a somewhat higher frequency, but surely we did not expect these to happen in our lifetimes.
Obama Considers Major Expansion in Aid to Jobless
By JACKIE CALMES and CARL HULSE
Published: January 3, 2009
NY Times
One proposal, as described by Democratic advisers, would extend unemployment compensation to part-time workers, an idea that Congressional Republicans have blocked in the past.
If you work for the enforcement division of the S.E.C. you probably know in the back of your mind, and in the front too, that if you maintain good relations with Wall Street you might soon be paid huge sums of money to be employed by it.
The commission’s most recent director of enforcement is the general counsel at JPMorgan Chase; the enforcement chief before him became general counsel at Deutsche Bank; and one of his predecessors became a managing director for Credit Suisse before moving on to Morgan Stanley.
A cornerstone of the right-wing worldview is the belief that most Americans — most white Americans, anyway — believe the same things righties believe. If they see another American expressing a different worldview, either this person is “loony” — an aberration; not to be taken seriously — or “they’re just being PC,” meaning most Americans who express liberal ideas are just saying what they are supposed to say, not what they really believe. And if conservatives lose elections, it’s either because of voter fraud or media bias, not because most American don’t think the way righties do.
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