Friday’s Mini-Report

January 18, 2008

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* CNN: “President Bush on Friday proposed a temporary, broad-based tax relief package aimed at spurring the nation’s slowing economy…. It should equal about 1 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, or roughly $140 billion, he added. Bush said the economy will continue to grow but at a slower rate. The president offered no specific details of the proposed package, but he did insist that it include tax incentives for business, ‘including small businesses, to make major investments in their enterprises this year.’ Bush also said the economic package must include ‘rapid income tax relief’ for consumers to ‘lift our economy at a time when people otherwise might spend less.'”

* Paul Krugman summarizes the president’s rhetoric on tax cuts: “Wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, the Bushies could refrain from trying to con the public?” If I only had a nickel for every time I’ve thought that phrase over the last seven years.

* Speaking of Republicans, tax cuts, and lies, Jonathan Chait explains, “John McCain is a recent convert to supply-side economics and still working on getting the talking points down. Speaking yesterday in South Carolina, the straight talker ‘proclaimed himself a believer in the notion that cutting taxes increases revenue for the government by spurring economic growth. ‘Don’t listen to this siren song about cutting taxes,’ Mr. McCain told supporters gathered here under a tent in a driving rain. ‘Every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues.’ What? Every time?” Actually, no.

* Keith Olbermann made a mistake, so he apologized. Given that apologies from major news outlets are incredibly rare, I found this noteworthy.

* Iraq National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie: “Iraq’s government is at a stalemate…. I understand that the political objectives of Iraq’s three main communities are unrealizable within the framework of a unitary, centralized state. It has been impossible to maintain a political consensus on many important issues. For one thing, the U.S.-dominated coalition, which has its own objectives, must be accommodated. The regional “superpowers” (Iran and Saudi Arabia) meddle in Iraq’s affairs, and their own sectarian tensions are reflected in the violence here. The absence of truly national political parties and leadership that reach the Iraqi people exacerbates the problem.”

* NYT: Mitt Romney will be flying this afternoon from Reno to Burbank, Calif., for a taping of the ‘The Tonight Show’ with Jay Leno. ‘It occurred to us the best way to be in South Carolina and Nevada at the same time, was to be on the Tonight Show,’ said Eric Fehrnstrom, Mr. Romney’s spokesman. ‘Plus, it worked for Mike Huckabee, he won Iowa.'”

* McClatchy: “New data from the Labor Department confirm what most middle-class Americans already know: Inflation is squeezing them. As consumer prices rose by 4.1 percent last year, the highest rate since 1990, the prices of basic essentials such as food, gasoline and health insurance climbed far more steeply, explaining why so many Americans are telling pollsters that the economy is their chief concern. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday that the price of food and beverages rose 4.8 percent. At the same time, real weekly earnings failed to keep pace, rising 0.9 percent for the year. In the simplest of terms, a dollar earned bought less. This partly explains why the economy so frustrates Americans.” (thanks to R.K. for the heads-up)

* How strong is the animosity towards John McCain in some far-right GOP circles? Tom DeLay isn’t prepared to vote for the Republican ticket if McCain’s the nominee. “If McCain gets the nomination, I don’t know what I’ll do,” DeLay said at the Capitol Hill Club. “I might have to sit this one out.”

* The Pew Research Center has an interesting chart on how voters perceive themselves and the presidential candidates on the liberal-conservative spectrum. Take a look. (thanks to R.P. for the tip)

* Sweet Jesus I Hate Chris Matthews. I’m surprised this hasn’t come up sooner.

* Only a Fox News personality would say people who make $100,000 a year are “poor.”

* My friend Errington Thompson on what really happened in the Straits of Hormuz.

* Stephen Colbert’s portrait was “hung Wednesday at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington for a six-week showing in what the museum considers an ‘appropriate place’ — right between the bathrooms near the ‘America’s Presidents’ exhibit. Museum officials stress it’s only temporary. ‘We agreed to go along with the joke and hang it for a short time in between the bathrooms,’ said museum spokeswoman Bethany Bentley. ‘Let me tell you two key things here: His portrait is not coming into the collection, and it’s not hanging permanently.'”

* And finally, the latest gem from the incomparable Lee Stranahan: “The war on change.” Take a look; it’s a good way to end the week.

Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

“I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes.”

This feels like a bad prank by a bunch of elementary school students. I feel like the joke is on us [the public]…but I can’t figure out who’s playing us…Bush or the Iranians? I’m sorry to say it, but I suspect Bush.

  • Re Olberman, not the first time he has apologized, or made himself one of his worst persons in the world for mistakes he made.

  • “If McCain gets the nomination, I don’t know what I’ll do,” DeLay said…
    wanna suggestion, tom?

    btw, i haven’t watched leno in about a hundred years, but has he had a democrat on since kerry in ’04?

  • Sometimes I think that Bush doesn’t understand anything at all about economics, taxes, or simple arithmetic. (Make that most of the time.)

    So let’s see – we are going to add $140 billion to an already-bloated Federal deficit to encourage Americans to spend more money. I suppose that this is necessary because so many of us have already maxed out our credit cards and don’t have any money left to spend. Under conventional Republican economic theory, Federal tax revenues will then increase by more than $140 billion, so the tax rebate will be even better than a free lunch, which I have always understood does not exist. Do I understand this correctly?

    Wow! That’s cool! But why just $140 billion? Why not $280 billion?

    The absolute worst, most cynical “stimulus package” that I can recall was in the fall of 1992, when the first George Bush ordered the IRS to revise the income tax withholding tables just before the election (which Bush lost anyway), in effect giving everyone some of their tax refund early. The following April, everyone was wondering where their tax refunds had gone! Bush was trying to buy votes with the voters’ own money!

  • Hell, if Bush wants to make people spend more why doesn’t he make the relief package a trillion dollars, or two trillion dollars? The money isn’t there anyway so live large.

    The solution is to sell the Saudis, Dubai and any other country that wants them, the states that made up the Confederacy and be done with it. They’ll be happier, and we’ll be happier too – and solvent.

  • Everything you need to know about the “incident” in the Straits of Hormuz can be determined from the fact that the initial press release from the Navy described it as almost routine, with no mention of a serious threat, and then anonymous sources at the Pentagon decided to hype it up.

  • I wish MSNBC would catch wise and start repeating Olbermann later in the evening the way Faux does with BOR. That 8 – 9 timeslot is my time to watch Daily Show and Colbert, which, as good as Olbermann is, is newsier and funnier than Keith. If I didn’t have to work for a living I could watch Daily and Colbert 11 – 12. Such is life.

    I wonder if BOR and Faux is going to mention Olbermann’s apology? Nah they ain’t got the guts.

  • Majun, it’s not MSNBC, it’s your market. I am in the Chicago market and we see Countdown at 7:00 and 11:00 pm. As I travel alot, I note that alot of other markets offer it at one time only (like Butte, MT where I am at this week, offers it at 6:00 pm only).

    And KO is the only current news person who EVER says he was wrong. The others will skirt around or mumble some forced contrition. Olbermann seems to mean it. This alone sets him apart from the rest.

    I am eager to hear what happened to the AP guy who confronted Romney. I am waiting for the announcement of his execution. The fourth estate is no longer. Long live the fourth estate! And thank you Olbermann for being truly one of a kind these days.

  • Re: the McClatchy article, it would be helpful to understand how consumers feel if we knew what the price trends for the previous few years were, too.

  • * The Pew Research Center has an interesting chart on how voters perceive themselves and the presidential candidates on the liberal-conservative spectrum. Take a look. (thanks to R.P. for the tip)

    According to this more Democrats still see Hillary as more likely to win in the general election than Barack.

  • At first glance, the PEW Research Center chart CB mentioned appears to address something many of us have written about here — how far our political center has shifted to the right. Upon second look, I realized respondents position on the continuum was self-reported, using a simple 5-point scale (very or somewhat liberal, moderate, somewhat or very conservative). Thus, the chart shows where respondents perceive themselves to be rather than their actual positions on issues. I’ve got to wonder whether the center would have been shifted to the left somewhat had real issues been used as a proxy measures to determine how conservative or liberal a respondent was.

    Also interesting is how similarly Ds and Rs rate the R candidates, vs how differently they view the D candidates (not to mention that Rs flip Obama and HRC).

  • So the Bush Crime Family wants to give me $500 to spend as I see fit?! Wooooeeeeee!

    That amount of money won’t mean squat against the trillions he’s already borrowed from our grandchildren to “pay for” his time as Commander Codpiece in the Quagmire. All this “gift” will do is soften the blow of this fall’s elections, he hopes. And it will make Pelosi and Reid look as though they’re doing something.

    At least when the Romans gave their people “bread and circuses” it really was bread and it really was circuses.

  • Actually, there are several charts… comment above refers to the one at the bottom of the page.

  • said museum spokeswoman Bethany Bentley. ‘Let me tell you two key things here: His portrait is not coming into the collection, and it’s not hanging permanently.’”

    Why not?

  • Swan wrote:

    Re: the McClatchy article, it would be helpful to understand how consumers feel if we knew what the price trends for the previous few years were, too.

    Right. 4% is just .40 for every ten dollars spent– but if grocery prices had, say, already been going up a few percent a year for the previous past few years, or if it just worked out that the rises in prices over those years added up to more than the dips, then it makes sense that consumers would feel it and notice it more than if, instead of finally dropping, prices continued to rise over the course of another year another four percent. You notice there is less left-over once you’ve spent most of your paycheck.

  • consumers would feel it and notice it more than if, instead of finally dropping, prices continued to rise over the course of another year another four percent.

    You’d feel it and notice it more if the prices continued to rise (like they have), that is.

  • Well…Following Olbermann’s non addressing of the NBC/MSNBC prevention of Kucinich debate and then this interview…it was a last straw…a turn off….so I turned him off.

    Maybe we can all use the rebates to contribute to John Edwards’ campaign so his message is heard a little louder in the halls of corporate media and thus the livingrooms of non reading America.

    He needs our money to get his message heard since unlike C&O he is not on the corporate dole…and so doesn’t owe.

    Today was a major fund raising campaign day for Edwards and all of us nickle & dimers gave. Maybe you will too?

  • Admittedly, at 80K, we’re living in a step up from the poorest neighborhood, and spending a quarter of our net income on housing.

    …But that’s because we’ve chosen to live our lives and we don’t have two incomes to spread across the place we live – unlike most of the other families that live in our neighborhood.

  • […] the chart shows where respondents perceive themselves to be rather than their actual positions on issues.– beep52. @12

    Makes a diff, doesn’t it? I consider myself to be a “liberal-leaning moderate”. However, based on our discussions of issues, my husband — who *also* considers himself to be ‘liberal-leaning moderate” — thinks of me as “a flaming commie”. Of course, when I lived in a commie country — where I also considered myself “moderate” (or, at least, common-sensical) — the representatives of the government accused me of being a “d…d revisionist, bordering on treasonous”.

    Pee-you on Pew, BTW; they had room for comparing 4 Repubs, but only 2 Dems? 9iu11iani makes the cut but Edwards has fallen off the radar? What I did find interesting/amusing — and something I can confirm from my own experience, *even* “down South heah” — is that (on the Dem side) the more education you have (college+), the more likely you’re to be pro-Obama, while the HS and less is overwhelmingly for Clinton…

  • […] if grocery prices had, say, already been going up a few percent a year for the previous past few years […] Green Leaf, @16

    I’ve always felt that excluding food and gas prices from the Consumer Index was a corporation cop-out, intended to make us think that everything remained copacetic, as long as the money markets were on an even keel. But not everyone participates in the money markets; not everyone can afford to.

    The official rationale for the exclusion is that those prices are “volatile”. So they are, to an extent, but no more volatile than the price of a dot.com or an Enron.

    As the family’ chief cook and grocery buyer, I can attest that grocery prices always go up, never down (unlike stock and electronics). There may be a more noticeable hiccup once in a while — a frost in CA will bump the prices up for a couple of weeks before they re-settle (though never *quite* back to the original level; the assumption is that you’d gotten used to the “new standards” and forgotten what triggered them off in the first place) — but there’s always a creep upwards. In the really good days, the grocery prices flatline, or go up by very small increments; in the bad days… They don’t creep; they jump.

    They’ve been creeping up a-pace — a bit faster than usual — since ’01 but, during ’07, they really went athletic: jumps, with very short flatlines. Lemons: 2 for 79c. Two weeks later, 2 for 89c. 3 months later, 2 for 99c. Three weeks after that, 1 for 89 c. Now, 1 for 99c. That much change within about 6 months. All produce (except radishes; it’s a good thing we like radishes in our house ) has nearly doubled in price within a year. Milk (and dairy products) are now about 150% of what they’d been in ’06. Meat has reached what I call “museum prices” — a steak or a pork chop is now just an exhibit in the grocery store’s case.

    When I first noticed the trend — in ’01 — my husband pooh-poohed it; “nobody but you buys so many books in Europe; a dollar may be worthless there but, here, it’s worth the same as it had always been”. My argument that we depend so much on imports that, eventually, it’ll hit us at home also, was considered unduly alarmist… It was only when I wasn’t able to bring home the same amount of food for the same number of dollars, that he began to believe me.

    He reads the stock market pages; I go grocery shopping. That’s why I was aware of the economy tanking much earlier than he was.

  • Rolling (etc), @20,

    Many thanks; priceless. The baby seems to confirm CB’s evaluation of 9iu11iani’s standing among the candidates, no?

  • bubba –

    Re Olberman, not the first time he has apologized, or made himself one of his worst persons in the world for mistakes he made

    Very true. But from the link this actually goes beyond the “apologizing for getting facts wrong” which is where Olberman usually makes his apologies. This was an apology for having a guest on the air who had an unattributed bias making comments about the subject of his bias.

    On, say, Tweety’s show (just to pick one at random – they all do it) this is Standard Operating Procedure – something done literally every fricking day. Olberman apologizing for this is actually a condemnation of his fellow talking heads SOP. That’s a major thing, actually, even for a man who regularly differentiates himself from the rest of the pack by consistently making corrections and apologizing for screw-ups made by himself and his staff.

  • “I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes.”

    It sounded to me like a native speaker of American English faking either a middle eastern accent or trying to imitate Boris. The speed and rhythm of the words didn’t sound like someone who was speaking a second language.

    majun: That’s why you need a DVR. I watch KO in the evening after I walk my dogs and then watch the accumulated Daily Shows and Colberts on the weekend. It is much better than plopping down on the couch to watch KO at the given time and then remaining seated for the rest of the evening. The DVR is the best piece of exercise equipment (outside of a dog) that I’ve found.

  • Wall Street’s tepid to dismissive response to the Decider’s stimulus package is notable for several reasons: Bush doesn’t know what he’s doing and we shouldn’t be managing the US economy to make Wall Street happy. The Dow and other trading indices are a measure of the nation’s economy but only one facet of it. When your wages remain stagnant for extended periods Wall Street couldn’t be happier. When a business downsizes and people lose jobs to cut costs, these folks buy themselves another martini. Wall Street is essentially an insular world of people who are making decisions based on fear and/ or greed but not with the best interests of the average US citizen at heart. When that happens it is coincidence. The happiness of stock traders should not be how we judge the wisdom of our economic moves.

    I for one feel that it’s time for them to feel some pain. No bailouts. People who made bad decisions after bad decisions need to lose their jobs and broken business models need to be retired. But most of all people need to get pissed and start demanding some change in how those conducting business in this nation key economic machines do their business. Bailing out the S&Ls did nothing to teach lessons that the same industry-wide shady practices would have any bad repercussions. Just look at our buddy Neil Bush. We won’t learn any lessons from this current predicament if those that stuck the hand of this nation’s economy on a hot stove don’t feel the burn themselves.

    Those on the right and of the libertarian mold always mention that the government should not interfere with the markets because the markets self-correct. Just as they say the government should stay out of the social safety net business because how are the poor to better themselves if they don’t have incentive to improve their lot. For once I am thinking they have a point. Only that if the rich and powerful never feel the sting of losing other people’s money, how can they ever be trusted with it again.

    Bush is interested in softening the blow to his base of haves and have mores. W says he wants to buy this nation a drink to deal with our economic woes but he’s still going to stick us with the tab at the end of the night. The next time you pass an elementary school, daycare center or hospital birthing center, look at those infants and children and think why should they have to pay for my freebie check from George Bush — with interest?

  • Like father like son.
    Bush is trying the same thing his idiot father did.
    It did not work then, and it will not work now.
    Too bad they spent all that money to help other people.

    George Vreeland Hill

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