No, I’m not talking about the death of celebrities. No, that’s not what I’m here to discuss. Lots of news happened, importantly, on the political front, as of late. Many of these articles are outdated now, but I’ll give you the excerpts anyway.
Look for a post about Pride 2009 in Baltimore later this week. It will have photos, once I buy a pro membership to Flickr. That’s how they make their money, obviously. Smart. Also, Kim is again stateside, so my mood is likely to improve. Yea.
Also, make sure you’re keeping up with “What I’m Followin’” tab over there on the right column. There is lots of good stuff to read that may or may not appear in the Required Readings.
What you should be reading
This one isn’t “news” but analysis. It’s great though. I love how Taibbi can sit even the most talented and gifted writers down.
Fareed Zakaria’s Manifesto
Matt Taibbi
This is a beautiful piece of writing. Describing the misdeeds of Wall Street in the last decade by saying “few people acted… nobly” is sort of like saying that Stalin was “not always sociable” or O.J. Simpson was “not always committed to preserving life.” I mean, talk about a freaking understatement. Forgetting entirely the other insane lies in this passage (my favorite being the one about bureuacrats not taking cash for favors — I guess he means except for Bob Rubin taking $130 million or whatever from Citi after pushing through that merger), that “not so noble” bit is where Zakaria earns his money.
Because if you get into the actual gory details of what went on in those years, there’s just no way you come out of that story not wanting to see every banker on Wall Street strung up by his testicles.
This one is about the Supreme Court and it’s potentially landmark ruling about searches in schools.
SCOTUS: Teen Strip-Serach Unconstitutional, But …
Adam B, Daily Kos
This is depressing:
Another casualty of the recession: Recent college grads
Tony Pugh, McClatchy Newspapers
New monthly survey data from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston finds that during the first four months of 2009, less than half of the nation’s 4 million college graduates age 25 and under were working in jobs that required a college degree. That’s down from 54 percent for same period last year.
For some discussion surrounding the recent passage of the Waxman-Markey energy bill, pre passage.
Climate Change Protection, or Climate Change Assurance?
Devilstower, Daily Kos
So what kind of bill can put Greenpeace and the clean coal folks on the same side of the aisle? One that’s far weaker than we would hope for. It may not give the clean coal team everything they would wish for, but it certainly gives them a stocking full of goodies.
This won’t help anyone’s disaffection with the political system.
Another bangin’ Krugman column. He continues to be my hero:
Not Enough Audacity
Paul Krugman, New York Times
The point is that if you’re making big policy changes, the final form of the policy has to be good enough to do the job. You might think that half a loaf is always better than none — but it isn’t if the failure of half-measures ends up discrediting your whole policy approach.
Which brings us back to health care. It would be a crushing blow to progressive hopes if Mr. Obama doesn’t succeed in getting some form of universal care through Congress. But even so, reform isn’t worth having if you can only get it on terms so compromised that it’s doomed to fail.
[...]
And that’s why the public plan is an important part of reform: it would help keep costs down through a combination of low overhead and bargaining power. That’s not an abstract hypothesis, it’s a conclusion based on solid experience. Currently, Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance companies, while federal health care programs other than Medicare (which isn’t allowed to bargain over drug prices) pay much less for prescription drugs than non-federal buyers. There’s every reason to believe that a public option could achieve similar savings.
Indeed, the prospects for such savings are precisely what have the opponents of a public plan so terrified. Mr. Obama was right: if they really believed their own rhetoric about government waste and inefficiency, they wouldn’t be so worried that the public option would put private insurers out of business. Behind the boilerplate about big government, rationing and all that lies the real concern: fear that the public plan would succeed.
Tarnished Shields: Mark Sanford And The Morally Bankrupt GOP Leadership
Walter Brasch, The Public Record
Basically, the articlerehashes recent political history and is all about how hypocritical Republicans are when they claim to be the party of family values.
Another post, below, along the same lines:
Clinton impreachment manager: GOP should lose “stinking rot of self-righteousness”
kos, Daily Kos
Like the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalists, conservatives seek to impose their morality on the rest of us via governmental coercion (legislation and the bully pulpit). They are incapable of minding their own business, and seek to stick their noses into peoples’ bedrooms and doctor offices. Yet time and time again, their relentless moralizing is proven to be hypocritical grandstanding, as they are unable to meet even the lowest of bars they try to impose on others.
We don’t care if Republicans want to fuck around on their wives and husbands. Those are private affairs. Yet Republicans seek to criminalize such behavior in a bid for votes and social approbation.
So yeah, we’ll laugh and mock when Republicans are busted as hypocrites. If you want to make “family values” the centerpiece of your political persona, then don’t ditch your kids on Father’s Day to fuck your mistress!
The amazingness continues. Read it for a little fun!
One more post on health reform:
The Netroots and the House Progressives: Toward More Progressive Policy
mcjoan, Daily Kos
As part of the progressive movement, we’re in a sort of a feedback loop with the Caucus, working on both the policy formation and policy framing efforts–sort of the stick part of the process, as well as the “amplification” side–more the carrot part where we do our best to shore up their good efforts, provide them the public support, the financial support and, frankly, the ongoing pressure they need to have to become what will essentially be a progressive stop to the Senate.
Don’t ever underestimate the pressure part of this, on the House, on the Senate, on the White House.
Good stuff. And goodnight.
