Worth 1000 Words - Obama Re-Election Edition

Nov 7, 2012

Sleep tight, kids.

A Final Thought

Nov 5th, 2012

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Look, everyone who knows me knows where I stand.

I've blogged, I've argued, I've pleaded and I've explained.

I've fought steadily for what are basic progressive principles.

I slept in Zuccotti Park Liberty Square, for Christ's sakes.

That said, I've also backed many former GOP positions for years such as the health care mandate.

Watching the very party which birthed that fine idea use every means at their disposal to popularly pervert it into some allegedly "socialist scheme" is a testament to just how close our nation might be to the very end of a truthful exercise in Republican Democracy.

We are, as I have probably said often enough, through the looking glass.

After writing about politics nearly full time here at the Hand for three years, I don't have a lot to add.

I will simply say this...

Conflating the two parties, much as some very smart people I know insist upon it, is some seriously smug, destructive, self-serving and elitist horseshit.

I know many good Republicans.

For the most part, they're all smart enough not to be voting for the Republican Party this time around.

The reason for this is simple and obvious;

The contemporary GOP is a den of festering proto-Fascism in thrall to Dominionists and currying favor with tyrants who would have us all grovel while giving thanks for the privilege of dying at work punching holes in sheet metal for slave wages.

Period.

Obama is still a deeply flawed President, but he possesses greatness and has achieved much.

Romney is still a sociopath.

We haven't recovered enough from the Imperial trappings claimed during the Bush years to give the highest office in this country to a man so plainly monstrous.

There you have it.

I'm voting tomorrow and every other citizen should, too.

It's not a privilege.

It is my right.

It's also my responsibility.

The future of this nation depends greatly on the outcome of this election.

Whether or not, or perhaps in what manner, I continue this site remains to be seen.

See you on the other side.

-- Grey

The Mittiot Cometh

Nov, 1st 2012

There really has never been a candidate like this. For anyone to say that they know what he truly believes is sheer lunacy. Chait is right:

"The different iterations of his career differ so wildly, yet comport so perfectly with his political ambitions of the moment, that it is simply impossible to separate his panders from his actual beliefs, the means from the ends."

The following video drives home the point in a fashion that would be hilarious were the stakes not so damn high. 

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Wake Up. There's A Connection.

Nov 1st, 2012

Higher top marginal tax rates correspond to higher GDP and they always have.

Worth Repeating

Nov 1st, 2012

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"If the 1994 or 2003 version of Mitt Romney were running for president, I may well have voted for him..."
-- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg from his just released endorsement of President Obama

Mitt Watch: What Sandy Tells Us About The Candidate And His Party

Oct 31st, 2012

UPDATE 4pm CST 11/1/12: In this piece, I made mention of Gov. Christie's very public praise of the President's management of the disaster response. The GOP has begun to savage him for it. That didn't take long.

Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath are perfectly legitimate political issues. That anyone would argue otherwise is ridiculous.

Chait puts it best:

"What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They're right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies."

The GOP has directly targeted our national disaster response mechanisms, having gone so far as to threaten a total government shutdown last year while seeking a nearly forty percent cut to first responders. The outright elimination of FEMA has become a central position among the party's leadership.

Worth Repeating

Oct 26th, 2012
Note: I have changed the "Quote of the Day" to "Worth Repeating." Daily posting has become difficult do to my ongoing issues with my eyesight. Thank you. -- Grey

"Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits."

-- Thomas Jefferson

Quote Of The Day

Oct 17th, 2012

"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."

-- Erich Fromm

Quote Of The Day - Here And Now Edition

Oct 15th, 2012

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"Walsh is an insecure bully who needs to point out that Duckworth is more of a woman than he is to overcome the fact that she's also more of a man than he is."

-- Columnist Edward McClelland on the notorious Rep. Joe Walsh (deadbeat dad, lunatic) and his tactics against his challenger, Tammy Duckworth (war veteran who lost both legs in an act of heroism).

Quote Of The Day

Oct 14th, 2012

"You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance."

-- W. Somerset Maugham

Bringing Back The Journeymen

Oct 14th, 2012

Responding to a personal charge in Shawn Gude's interesting if overly floral argument on how we might reach "full employment" and what that would actually mean for the American worker's relationship with management, Matt Yglesias writes:

Much as consistently applied full employment policies will achieve many liberatory aims without employing especially radical means, centrist elites ought to consider that matching workers with in-demand job skills really ought to be the kind of thing a market economy can do reasonably well. Rather than skills-mismatch explaining high unemployment, it's the absence of full employment that explains skills-mismatch. If you want workers to learn to do something, you try to teach them to do it and if necessary pay them more money. 

Long story short: Full employment policies are great and we ought to be demanding them from our macroeconomic stabilization policymakers rather than accepting excuses about how it's hard. 

When the U.S. was actually creating jobs in far greater abundance, it was due neither to a massive distribution of diplomas nor to the stimulative effects of public spending alone; it was because job growth was largely a product of on the job training.

Indeed, what has happened to the journeyman path? One of the repeated explanations offered by our elites in explaining the stagnant job numbers is that we just don't have a qualified workforce for as many as three million open positions. What's never discussed is the fact that the managers who cannot fill these positions always blame someone else for the situation.

Everyone knows that the current metrics in our tax code richly reward outsourcing and off-shoring. Recent attempts to reverse these policies were, of course, filibustered by the GOP. In part, this opposition might be because we simply have to sweeten the pot enough for the lobbyists to get other marching orders. If our central policy makers were proposing benefits even a fraction as attractive as those received by, oh say, our petrol giants, a movement towards fuller employment might have more traction.

The again, maybe not. Gude's arguments key off of a radical 2010 essay written by Micael Kalecki the implications of which demand that we ask whether or not America's private power brokers aren't perfectly happy with the way things are?

It's not necessarily that macroeconomic policy isn't addressing this, as Yglesias argues. It's an ugly truth but the general stagnancy in our labor force and the desperation it has spawned are regarded as plainly beneficial to management.

Quote Of The Day

Sept 30th, 2012

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"Can I see another’s woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another’s grief, and not seek for kind relief?"

-- William Blake

In A Nutshell

Sept 28th, 2012
Clay Bennett's brilliant work can be found HERE

Quote Of The Day

Sept 27th, 2012

"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both."

-- Frederick Douglass

Mitt Watch: Ugly Deals And Not So Blind Trusts

Sept 25th, 2012

While everyone is debating either the fairness of the rate or the bizarre and hypocritical over-payment revealed in the release of Mitt Romney's 2011 tax returns, there are some darker and more complicated issues raised.

After reminding us that it was Romney himself who stated years ago "you can always tell a blind trust what it can and cannot do," FT reports that his investments in Chinese energy concern Cnooc, a group with direct dealings in Tehran and a history of human rights abuses, seem to have been made and sold with suspiciously convenient timing regarding his political ambitions.

The short version: his "blind trust" invested in Cnooc after their practices were raising eyebrows and under investigation here in the U.S. but divested late in the Summer of 2011 just before candidate Romney made talking tough on China one of his campaign's talking points. More on this HERE. 

The next time we hear anyone from Team Romney refer to the "morality of capitalism," it's worth asking them just what the hell they think they're talking about.

Quote Of The Day

Sept 24th, 2012

"Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike."

-- Alexander Hamilton

In A Nutshell

Sept 23rd, 2012

Quote Of The Day - Here And Now Edition

Sept 22nd, 2012

"The Romney campaign has to get turned around. This week I called it incompetent, but only because I was being polite. I really meant 'rolling calamity.'"

-- Peggy Noonan on the increasingly unglued display.

Quote Of The Day

Sept 21st, 2012

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed."
-- Herman Melville

In A Nutshell

Sept 20th, 2012