Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Where's Neil Young?

It's not Kent State, but this is getting close. How long 'til some overzealous trigger-happy cop actually kills somebody at one of these protests? These peaceful protests. Well, peaceful except for the thug cops.

And where are all the right-wing wankers that scream "BLU BLUGH BLARGH MUH FURST 'MENDMENT!!eleven!" when a citizen criticizes the stupid shit they say (not an infringement of their speech), now that, the state is actively infringing "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" -- an actual infringement of protester's first amendment rights.

Fuckers.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Not Different Enough

I don't like Ezra, so no surprise I don't like his latest.

The cool kid mostly glosses over TARP and "too big to fail" whereas I think it was kind of notable that Bush and congress wrote a basically blank check to bail out the banks, with no oversight and nearly no discussion. TARP/TBTF was then pinned entirely on the Kenyan Usurper (who admittedly was for it), and: OMG soshumalism! We now know it didn't end up costing what the stimulus did, but we thought it was going to be $700 billion at the time. He also doesn't discuss how easy that was to do, where the blame has been placed for it, and the backlash it caused. After that, try to get any sort of real stimulus passed. Good luck. I'm fairly amazed they got what they did.

He doesn't discuss what might have been if use of "too big to fail" funds would have been spent or controlled differently, perhaps they could've been tied to some real reform or items that might actually stimulate the economy rather than just being sure that some 1%ers could afford a third yacht. A discussion of how some of those items could've changed the initial debate of the stimulus, or even if anybody in DC had thought about any of that stuff would've been nice. You know, some stuff a beltway insider might've been able to get access to.

Teh coolest kid in DC also seems rather obsessed about OMG BIGGEST $TImULOUS EVAR!!one! like that means anything. Not mentioned: the 1.3 trillion we've spent in Afghanistan and Iraq so far, and the money we'll spend on everlasting war and "defense" this year, and next year, and next year... And no, sssh, we can't talk about that.

The stimulus should have been a lot bigger, but at least we got what we did at the time, as meager and misdirected (yay moar tax cuts!) as that was.

Could it have been different? Could you ask a dumber or more open ended question next time, Ezra?