New Post on Stinque

I've got a new post up on Stinque.

(Blame daylight savings for me posting that darned thing at 5:00 AM)

Fox "Experts"

Gotta love Fox News. Today they're running a story about Barack Obama's impending Trip to Asia. The front page blurb reads:

Bruised by Tuesday's election losses, President Obama heads to Asia today in an effort to improve U.S. trade relations — but experts say the trip probably won't benefit the American economy.

And who are these experts? Open up the article and those "experts" magically shrink down to one, Daniel Griswold, who works for the CATO instiute --not exactly a non-partisan source. And furthermore, Griswold does not actually make the claim that the trip "probably won't benefit the American ecnomy." In fact, nowhere in the body of the article is such a claim made by anyone, expert or not.

I've seen this sort of move from Fox before. My suspicion is that the propaganda ministers at Fox realize that many of their readers don't actually scan beyond the front-page blurb, so it's essential to trash the President there, even if the claims are unsupported in the body of the article itself. An added bonus is that it's not possible to create a permanent link to the front page blurb, so these are lies that won't live on for future fact checkers to reference.

Omnipotent FAIL...

So Jesus went mano-a-mano with Barack Obama and the best he could do was flip the House of Representatives? He couldn't even deliver the Senate?

(Via Wonkette)

The Other Big Loser

Maybe I should have titled this post simply "The Big Loser." Because, let's face it: everyone expected the Democrats to get hammered. After all, the economy is still on the rocks, unemployment remians high, and Wall Street and Big Business, having gotten what they wanted out of the Obama adminsitration (a bailout and a stabilized economy) now want to get the party back in power that will allow them to go back to doing what they were doing before the economy collapsed, and thanks to the Supreme Court's recent Citizens United decision, they had carte blanch to throw money at the race. Seen in historical context, then, the Democratic losses are about what one would expect from the party in power during a mid-term election taking place before the backdrop of a very sour economy. This really is little different from what happened to Bill Clinton in 1994. So all in all, it's not a terrible night for the Obama adminsitration. And it should not be forgotten that keeping the Senate in Democratic hands was a major plus for the Administration.

Which brings me back to the real loser of last night: Sarah Palin. Because, let's face it, Democrats kept the senate largely by winning races Nevada and Delaware, two states where the most extreme of Palinite, Tea Party candidates faced off against mainstream Democrats. Nevada is perhaps the most important bellweather. Harry Ried was (unfairly) highly disliked in Nevada, but apparently voters were even more mistrustful of the radical right-wing candidate with the Sarah Palin press strategy (run awaaaaaaay!). And in Delaware, Chris Coons, the Democratic candidate soundly trounced a pretty, perky and oh so dumb Christine O'Donnell (basically a younger version of Sarah Palin). These were races the Democrats would probably have lost if Republicans had chosen a more moderate opponent. As much as the Tea Party movement helped energize Republicans, last night's elections proved that there is definitely such a thing as too much tea in many parts of the country (even in Alaska, it seems, where Lisa Murkowski's write-in candidacy appears to be on a path to defeat Joe Miller, for whom Sarah Palin campaigned exhaustively). So I think we can officially announce, from this, that last night constituted the nail in the coffin of any presidential aspirations that Sarah Palin may have harbored.

Yes, gridlock will be the order of the day for the next two years, but it's not all bad. After all, despite what you may have read, the Democrats actually managed to push through a pretty astonishing agenda these past two years, including an ambitious health care reform package that will bring coverage to 95% of Americans for the first time in history, important Wall Street and Financial industry reforms, the rescue of the U.S. and World Economies from a potential depression, the rescue of General Motors (a leaner, more survivable company) and a host of smaller issues as well. Ezra Klein has a good summary of what was accomplished here.

These next two years are going to be rocky, but at least the Democrats don't have to deal with the illusion (and it was really more illusion than reality) that they have a fillibuster proof majority in Congress and can get anything they want. It's going to be interesting seeing things unfold.

On the economic front, however, things look much gloomier. If Paul Krugman is right (and he's been right about almost everything so far) then we're looking forward to a decade or two of high unemployment, rising debt and slow economic growth. My guess is that the debt situation will only be exacerbated by the resulting swings in voter loyalty over that time as the country bounces between Democratic administrations pushing stimulus and successive Republican administrations chocking off whatever green shoots might sprout by mandating austerity when it's their turn to govern.

HCR in action

For all the handwringing about Health Care Reform, it looks like the law is starting to have a positive effect on people's lives. According to the Wall Street Journal:

The number of small businesses offering health insurance to workers is projected to increase sharply this year, recent data show, a shift that researchers attribute to a tax credit in the health law.

Many small businesses, however, remain opposed to the law. Some small businesses are benefiting from portions of the law, which includes a tax credit beginning this year that covers as much as 35% of a company's insurance premiums.

According to a report by Bernstein Research in New York, the percentage of employers with between three and nine workers and which are offering insurance has increased to 59% this year, up from 46% last year. The report relies on data from a September survey by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

This strikes me as especially significant in an economy characterized by high unemployment, a situation that naturally reduces the need for employers to provide new incentives to find good workers.

Of Ladybugs and Hypocrisy

Yesterday afternoon, the gossip website Gawker posted a rather tawdry, crude and tasteless account of an evening that a shamless sleazebag of a man spent with Christine O'Donnell, the current GOP candidate for U.S. Senator from Delaware. And while the story does reveal a certain hypocrisy on O'Donnell's part when it comes to the issue of sexual morality, on the whole it says much more about the writer's low ethical standards and classless conduct than it does about Ms. O'Donnell. And I say this as no fan of the dangerously unqualified and recklessly incompetent Pepublican Senate candidate.

Yet with all that, it took the O'Donnell campaign very little time to respond to the story in such a fashion as to erase any sympathy I might have developed for her in the course of these sadly uneccesary events:

Wilmington, DE – Communications Director Doug Sachtleben stated in response to the universal condoning of the Gawker story:
"This story is just another example of the sexism and slander that female candidates are forced to deal with. From Secretary Clinton, to Governor Palin, to soon-to-be Governor Haley, Christine's political opponents have been willing to engage in appalling and baseless attacks — all with the aim of distracting the press from covering the real issues in this race. Even the National Organization for Women gets it, but Christine's opponent disturbingly does not. As Chris Coons said on September 16th he would not condone personal attacks against Christine. Classless Coons goons have proven yet again to have no sense of common decency or common sense with their desperate attacks to get another rubber stamp for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda. Such attacks are truly shameful, but they will not distract us from making our case to Delaware voters — and keeping the focus on Chris Coons' record of higher taxes, increased spending, and as he has done again here, breaking his promises to the voters."
The National Organization for Women (NOW) on Thursday condemned the tabloid website Gawker for publishing an anonymous account: NOW issued a statement late Thursday stating that "sexist, misogynist attacks against women have no place in the electoral process, regardless of a particular candidate's political ideology."
"NOW repudiates Gawker's decision to run this piece. It operates as public sexual harassment. And like all sexual harassment, it targets not only O'Donnell, but all women contemplating stepping into the public sphere," said NOW president Terry O'Neill.

And so with this statement Christine O'Donnell continues in the great tradition of Repubilcan hypocrites who spend careers savaging civil rights and civil liberties organizations such as the National Organization for Women, but then embrace these groups when doing so suits their immediate purposes. Anyone remember Oliver North, the darling of the crypto-fascist Right and current Fox News "analyst", who nonetheless gladly accepted the help of the ACLU lawyers who helped overturn his perjury convictions in the Iran Contra affair? And one sees echoes of Sarah Palin's hypocritical play for female votes in O'Donnell's sisterly embrace of Hillary Clinton. One recalls that in Palin's case, the former half-term Alaska governor first criticized Clinton for her feminist "whining" until she was tapped as John McCain's running mate and decided to make a play for disaffected Hillary Clinton voters. From then on (and once it became clear that Barack Obama was to be the Democratic nominee for president) Palin spoke of Clinton as a fellow traveller unjustly slandered by a sexist press establishment.

And finally there is the purely political attempt by the O'Donnell campaign to turn the episode around and use it to attack Chris Coons by baselessly suggeting that the Coons campaign was somehow behind the story. Not only does O'Donnell provide no proof of these allegations, but Coons was running 20 points ahead of O'Donnell long before the story surfaced. He gains nothing from promoting these tawdry revelations, and indeed and would risk turning off women voters by doing so.

I don't want to suggest that this episode is a case of the chickens somehow coming home to roost, but the fact is that Ms. O'Donnell's private behavior is far more responsible for this episode than anything Chris Coons appears to have done.

All The News That's Fit To Print (And More!)

Are PBS characters Ernie and Bert gay lovers? That's the pressing question that Fox is pursuing on the FoxNews website today. Their evidence:

On June 11, the famous puppet tweeted about the recent "A-Team" remake by comparing himself to A-Team star Mr-T, saying, "Ever notice how similar my hair is to Mr. T's? The only difference is mine is a little more 'mo,' a little less 'hawk.'"
To some the comment was just a cute quip about hairstyles, but to others, "mo" was short for "homo" and this was Bert's way of coming out at the perfect time.

Typical Fox News petty vindictiveness in the wake of the Juan Williams termination. Ooooh, PBS (and by extension NPR) are secretly trying to gay your kids!