SuperJerk

Sen. Bernie Sanders rips on Milton Friendman: http://inthesetimes.com/article/4193/the_failed_prophet

I'm not surprised by this at all.... http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/12/gre...tion/index.html There's somethings Democrats and Republicans fundamentally disagree on. How they thought you could fit a conservative commerce department into a liberal administration is beyond me.

I went in and added an allusion to this in a re-edit of my post. We don't measure things the same way today as we did back then, so the author is really over-stating the conclusiveness of his evidence. The recession after WWI was not "probably" a post-war business cycle, it was a post-war business cycle after the crest, during the switch from a wartime to peacetime economy. Big understatement here. The farming sector collapsed. Well, I was trying to be cordial, but yeah...you're right. And for the last 80 years, conservatives have been struggling to find a way to blame government expansion for the Great Depression, as to not invalidate the argument for laissez-faire capitalism. Like I said, to blame government expansion for the Great Depression is a cause-effect paradox that ignore simple facts like when the Great Depression began and when the New Deal started.

That's because history classes usually don't spend time on things that didn't happen. Whoever wrote the piece apparently has the clairvoyance to not only predict what would have happened had Harding not implemented his policies, but can also draw conclusive conclusions from incomplete economic data (the modern means of measuring economic trends hadn't been developed yet) from over 80 years ago. The truth is that government spending as a percentage of GDP was too tiny in 1921 to have any real impact on the economy. Government spending had already declined following the end of World War I, and the post-war recession following World War I was most probably ended by a post-war business cycle, and the post hoc reasoning the author uses that the Harding economic policies caused the roaring 1920s (which we learned later weren't so great for farmers or long term growth). This whole article is one big reactionary fantasy about how the 1920s were this huge laissez-faire utopia that only ended because big government exploded onto the scene in 1929 (which, from a cause and effect standpoint, is an obvious paradox since so-called big government was a reaction to the Depression). Don't get me started on how wrong Harding's foreign policy ideas (the author calls them "non-interventionist", but was really the standard isolationism that was common up until World War II) were.

Most Republican members of Congress are just ignoramuses that recite whatever talking point their corporate masters feed them, encouraged by the paid propagandists that dominate AM radio. Exhibit A: http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004383 This is what we are dealing with, folks.

I'm not saying I agree with this, but you gotta admit the way Fox reported this story was pretty fucked up: 1) Set the viewer up to hear something crazy by yelling things like "are you ready for this?" 2) Have one guy come out and completely misrepresent the numbers. 3) Have person after person pile on about how dumb this is.

I saw the trailer for this in the theaters, the first thing I thought was that they should have just ponied up the extra $50, and gotten the America Pie name attached to this movie. I saw this trailer as well, then immediately turned to my friend and said "If this isn't rated R, there's no point." Well, it's not, and there isn't.

The first and third raps were funny because they openly mock rap music cliches like ego-centric proclamations of self-greatness based on random things like where you're from (50% of and over-reliance on electronic gimmicks (i.e. Lil Wayne), though the second was definitely the best.

I'm kind of curious to know what the Pussy Cat Dolls did to get nominated for a Nickelodeon Award.

I think Zarek was definitely a bad guy because he killed innocent people who didn't immediately fall in line with his agenda. Adm. Adama's mindset was finally explained with the line "They gave aid and comfort to ME." The Cylons he is defending, remember, were mostly defectors who helped destroy a Cylon resurrection hub and include 4 Cylons who have been loyal members of his crew (Tigh, Anders, Tyrol, and Athena), unlike Gaeta, Narcho, or Kelly. I think if they knew the exact role Caprica Six played in the destruction of the colonies, though, they might make an exception and chuck her out of an airlock. The last 2 episodes of this show have blown me away, and I hope the final 6 are just as intense.

At Home is my new TSM Hero. Also... I don't think people realize how fucked most school districts are because of declining property values and shrinking tax base due to foreclosures and the mortgage crisis.

Three things the Republican Party seems to have forgotten: -economic expansion in the 1980s was directly tied to the deficit spending by the Reagan Administration. -the Great Depression was ended because of government spending on military goods during World War II. -the LBJ tax cuts, combined with military spending in the late 1960s resulted in the inflation of the 1970s.

Someone made hillarious exerpts from the audiobook version of Dreams From My Father, in which the president tries to accurately impersonate a childhood friend: http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_BLAM.mp3 http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_NUMBER.mp3 http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_IGNORANT.mp3 http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OB...COMPLICATED.mp3 http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_THAT_GUY.mp3 And the best line ever: http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_FRIES.mp3

Someone's already beat me to saying everything I had to say on this subject. TSM, you complete me.

Nice reference to The Question with the facelss Rorscharch.

Reducing executive bonuses and salaries allows more funds desperately needed to keep the company running (i.e. the whole point of the bailout). Correct. And there are plenty of other historic examples of trickle-down economics failing miserably, the last 6 months doesn't really even need to.

Yes. However, in November of 2004, the war was only a little more than a year old and there was still a majority of voters who were willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt about it. There was even still a strong pro-war faction within the Democratic Party at that time. Had Bush been running for reelection in 2005 or 2006, Dean would have destroyed Kerry and Edwards in the primaries, and gone on to when the White House easily.

I've already gotten a lot of the Terra/Deathstroke era via tradepaperbacks...never read much before Dick became Nightwing. I guess the earlier the better.

Someone else has summed up my thoughts on the stimulus package.

2004 was a referendum on Bush. He had a 51% approval rating, and won 51% of the vote. You could move some demographics around, but ultimately the final election totals probably would have come out the same almost no matter who you put up against Bush.

Will the President go for six Senate appointments? We still got an HHS cabinet spot to fill.

Any chance of getting some Wolfman/Perez era Teen Titans?

His parents. Except no one referred to his middle name until the campaign picked up. And no one refers to him as "John F. Kerry" anymore. It was the lamest attempt at trying to make a Kennedy parallel, nothing more. I'm not disputing it was a silly tactic, but it was not unheard of for him to use it (though usually while running for office in Massachusetts), since it really was what his parents named him. Maybe someone realized if she went any further she'd sound exactly like Joe McCarthy.

His parents.