12/30/2010
Exclusive: Merle Haggard on His Kennedy Center Honor, Meeting Obama and Oprah and More | Rolling Stone Music
via rollingstone.com
A nice interview with a tremendous musician, my dad's favorite singer, Merle Hagggard.
12/28/2010
12/24/2010
12/20/2010
Products You Shouldn't Buy During The Holidays - The Consumerist
Kiplinger identifies 10 things you shouldn't buy for Christmas, offering the times of the year market forces cause certain items to dip to their lowest prices.
Here are a few of the items Kiplinger says you should hold off on buying:
Computers — Other than Black Friday, they hit their lowest prices in August, during the back-to-school frenzy, dipping 10 to 20 percent below average prices.
TVs — January and February are the best times to buy, thanks to a Super Bowl-driven supply gut and the urgency to move them out of the way to make room for new models hitting shelves in March.
Cameras — Late February sees 30 percent discounts, because early-year trade shows announce newer models, decreasing demand for the soon-to-be outclassed cameras.
via consumerist.com
12/16/2010
12/13/2010
Seth's Blog: You will be misunderstood
If you want to drive yourself crazy, read the live twitter comments of an audience after you give a talk, even if it's just to ten people.
You didn't say what they said you said.
You didn't mean what they said you meant.
Or read the comments on just about any blog post or video online. People who saw what you just saw or read what you just read completely misunderstood it. (Or else you did.)
We think direct written and verbal communication is clear and accurate and efficient. It is none of those. If the data rate of an HDMI cable is 340MHz, I'm guessing that the data rate of a speech is far, far lower. Yes, there's a huge amount of information communicated via your affect, your style and your confidence, but no, I don't think humans are so good at getting all the details.
Plan on being misunderstood. Repeat yourself. When in doubt, repeat yourself.
A very good follow-up point to "keep it simple": "Repeat"
Seth's Blog: "The answer is simple"
...is always more effective a response than, "well, it's complicated."
One challenge analysts face is that their answers are often a lot more complicated than the simplistic (and wrong) fables that are peddled by those that would mislead and deceive. Same thing is true for many non-profits doing important work.
We're not going to have a lot of luck persuading masses of semi-interested people to seek out and embrace complicated answers, but we can take two steps to lead to better information exchange:
1. Take complicated overall answers and make them simple steps instead. Teach complexity over time, simply.
2. Teach a few people, the committed, to embrace the idea of complexity. That's what a great college education does, for example. That's what makes someone a statesman instead of a demagogue. Embracing complexity is a scarce trait, worth acquiring. But until your customers/voters/employees do, I think the first strategy is essential.
You can't sell complicated to someone who came to you to buy simple.
12/09/2010
Heilemann: Why the Tax Fight Is Obama’s Pivotal Moment -- Daily Intel
Heilemann: Why the Tax Fight Is Obama’s Pivotal Moment
We in the media are admittedly given to hyperbole, but it’s no exaggeration to say that this week — and especially the past 24 hours — is shaping up to be a pivotal moment in the arc of the Obama presidency.
For more than a month since the “shellacking” administered by the Republicans to the Democrats in the midterms, the White House has seemed adrift, with no clear strategy, no effective tactics, and no evident answer to the central question facing the administration: What now?
For better or worse, that period of lassitude is over. In terms of both policy and politics, the White House has embarked on a dramatically new path. Much of the left is furious. Democrats in Congress are no less so. And some conservative Republicans are threatening to revolt, alongside their liberal foes, against what Senator Mary Landrieu yesterday decried as the “Obama-McConnell plan” on taxes. At this hour, whether the deal will survive or not is an open question — though I suspect it will, in something close to its current form.
The conservative objections to the plan, voiced by the Club for Growth and ultra-con Republican senator Jim DeMint, are that it (a) fails to extend the Bush tax cuts forever and (b) “blow[s] a hole in the deficit,” as the Club president, Chris Chocola, put it. The inherent contradiction between these complaints is so obvious that it renders them too absurd to merit further comment.
The liberal objections to the plan are mainly political, but on substance they are focused on the cost of extending the tax cuts to Americans making more than $250,000 a year and the estate tax: $125 billion combined. Even by the fiscally debased and debauched standards of Washington, that’s not chump change, especially at a time of dangerously mounting deficits. But it’s small beer compared to the parts of the package that Democrats favor: $360 billion in income-tax cuts for those earning under $250K, $56 billion in unemployment insurance, and more than $350 billion in tax goodies that Obama championed — from payroll-tax cuts, the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, education tax credits, and business-investment tax incentives.
As David Leonhardt wrote in this morning’s Times, the deal amounts to a trade: Republicans get tax cuts for the rich, and the broader economy gets what amounts to a second stimulus worth hundreds of billions of dollars more — the kind of stimulus that Republicans resisted for the past year and that seemed inconceivable even two weeks ago. This is why left-leaning policy wonks such as Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute support the deal, despite objecting (rightly) to the high-bracket tax cuts. And it’s one reason that congressional Democrats should shut up and support it, too.
But it’s not the only reason. An equally substantial one is that they are primarily to blame for putting Obama in the position where he had to make the trade he did. Although the White House didn’t push the matter hard, the president is correct when he says that he preferred to see Congress deal with the tax-cut extension issue in the fall, before the midterms, in which all but certain Republican gains might rob him of his negotiating leverage (as they did). Congressional Democrats, however, were fearful of taking a controversial tax vote in the heat of an election season. Out of sheer cowardice, they postponed that vote until the lame-duck session — and now they are whining about an unpalatable situation of their own creation. So again, I say, shut up.
What makes the moaning of congressional liberals more intolerable is they proffer no plausible alternative endgame. To the extent that they proffer one at all, it seems to rest on the idea that if Congress were to simply let all the Bush tax cuts expire, the president, having now drawn “a line in the sand,” could then sit down after the new year with Republicans — now holding a majority in the House — and negotiate a better deal.
This argument is not only hair-curlingly ludicrous on its face, but it contains within it a deep internal contradiction. One consistent strain of contention on the left has been that Republicans are so intent on making Obama a one-term president that they’re willing to crash the economy to do it, and so callous that they don’t give a shit about allowing unemployment benefits to expire. But if that’s the case, what on earth would bring them back to the table early next year in a mood to give Obama the stimulus he wants (and the economy he needs) without demanding the same things (and almost certainly more) that they are demanding now?
The final reason that congressional Democrats should shut up is this: For nearly two years, a great many of them have complained that Obama has been focused on grand (too grand) attempts to reshape the foundations of the economy, as with health-care reform, while neglecting the short-term imperatives of a fragile economic recovery.
Well, it’s now clear that the administration is focused like a laser beam on the short term — on stimulus, on jobs, on the needs of the unemployed. And yet suddenly liberals in the House are fired up about deficit reduction? Please.
This short-term economic focus is the major substantive shift signaled by the White House this week. But even more dramatic is the political about-face that Obama is now apparently undertaking — and it’s this element of his course correction, not the tax-cut deal itself, that is the real reason why so many Democrats are up in arms.
In essence, what Obama’s news conference yesterday amounted to was a declaration that he is divorcing himself politically from the congressional wing of his party. On background, White House aides were thrilled with the performance, believing that it began the process of establishing their preferred leitmotif for the months ahead: that in a town full of petulant and posturing adolescents, the president will stand as the presiding adult.
That Obama’s putative allies in the House and Senate Democratic caucuses would object to being, in effect, cast as snotty children — as much or more so than Republicans! — is in no way surprising. But they should not be surprised either. For all the talk in recent weeks about how Obama should take a page from Bill Clinton’s post-1994 playbook — working with the GOP where possible, confronting the opposition where necessary — what’s often forgotten is the approach that WJC took toward congressional Democrats in 1995 and 1996. On budget balancing, on welfare reform, on civil liberties post–Oklahoma City, 42 flagrantly disregarded the views of congressional Democrats and progressive activists at every turn.
But Clinton’s tenor in doing so was rather more benign than the manner adopted by Obama at his presser. In the New York Post this morning, the conservative columnist John Podhoretz described his lecturing of the left and his likening of Republicans to “hostage-takers” as a “near-tantrum.” And though I wouldn’t go quite that far, the presidential peevishness on display was faintly breathtaking. (Whenever Obama lunges into media-critic mode — complaining about the relative play that the breakdown and then resolution of his South Korean trade talks received in the papers, knocking the editorial pages at both the Times and Wall Street Journal — you know he’s in a pissy mood.) The message he sought to convey, that compromise is not just a necessary element of governance but a virtue in its own right, is at once salutary, politically wise, and true to his essential character. But the aggravated tone was so distracting that the message was nearly lost.
It’s been clear for a while now that one of Obama’s greatest errors in the first two years of his term was tying himself too closely to the congressional Democratic leadership. Freeing himself from those shackles is necessary, but it’s insufficient to lead to his revival.
If he is going to position himself as Washington’s last adult standing, he will need to be bigger, showing more equanimity and less irritation than he did yesterday. And if he is going to climb up on top of Casa Blanca and urinate all over congressional Democrats, he will need to learn the trick that Bill Clinton mastered: doing it with such big bright smile that they mistake his piss for Champagne.
12/06/2010
Mr President, Ignore Frank Rich Please - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
I enjoy reading Frank Rich's column every week. It's usually a deeply researched, beautifully constructed, passionate read. But I wish it varied a little more. Longing for Barack Obama to be some kind of Huey Long, opening can after can of whup-ass on Rush Limbaugh's jiggly behind seems, well, quixotic to me. And if I thought there was some way to win a culture and rhetorical war against the FNC/RNC vortex, I could see the point of this very elegant sentence:
No one expects Obama to imitate Christie’s in-your-face, bull-in-the-china-shop shtick. But they have waited in vain for him to stand firm on what matters to him and to the country rather than forever attempting to turn non-argumentative reasonableness into its own virtuous reward.
This strikes me as grotesquely unfair. I sure know what maters to the president, and a brief survey of his first two years would reveal it rather baldly. "Non-argumentative reasonableness" so far has prevented a second great depression, rescued Detroit, bailed out the banks, pitlessly isolated Tehran's regime, exposed Netanyahu, decimated al Qaeda's mid-level leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan, withdrawn troops from Iraq on schedule, gotten two Justices on the Supreme Court, cut a point or two off the unemployment rate with the stimulus, seen real wages for those employed grow, presided over a stock market boom and record corporate profits, and maneuvered a GOP still intoxicated with failed ideology to become more and more wedded to white, old evangelicals led by Sarah Palin. And did I mention universal health insurance - the holy grail for Democrats for decades?
Ah, yes: Obama's restraint has been such a disaster, hasn't it? I'm with Carpenter:
Obama of course did stand firm on upper-end tax cuts throughout the 2008 campaign and continued standing in like manner as president -- until, that is, it became all too obvious that success in Congress was not an option.
The timing of Obama's D-Day offensive against the recalcitrant GOP remains precarious. My initial thoughts were, for reasons explained, that he'd dismiss the tax-cut issue as his artillery-opening opportunity, but use it to assault Republicans when they then denied him a vote on New Start. Some reasonably lengthy demonstration of presidential good faith is incumbent on Obama in order to persuade independents that he's the reasonable One; and, it seems to me, on tax cuts Republicans are playing right into his carressing hand.
Yet, as I noted earlier, such timing might be aggressively premature. Obama might yet delay his assault well into 2011, and, my guess, initially over some relatively insignificant piece of legislation (for what else will we see next year?) -- a political skirmish on which he can build, more and more thunderously, more and more Trumanesquely, heading into 2012.
I couldn't agree more. Its too easy to forget all that was done in 2 years. And its even easier to get caught up in the schoolyard antics that political commentators so love to egg on.
12/04/2010
garfield minus garfield is my favorite comic strip
My favorite comic strip. If you don't recall, the idea is just that since cats cant talk, Jon is actually not talking to anyone. So the cat is removed from the panels, clarifying that Jon is a man either completely depressed and on his way to complete insanity, or he's already there.
Sometimes, though, he belts out a wonderful insight
12/02/2010
Tea Party Caucus Takes $1 Billion In Earmarks - Hotline On Call
Tea Party Caucus Takes $1 Billion In Earmarks
Most offices did not respond right away to a request for comment. Those that did said they supported Republicans' new efforts to ban earmarks.
Alexander, for one, "stands with his fellow Republicans in the House in supporting the current earmark ban. Since joining the Tea Party Caucus in July, he has not submitted any earmark requests and has withdrawn his outstanding requests that were included in the most recent Water Resources Development Act," said Jamie Hanks, his communications director.
Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.), who requested 25 earmarks in the last Fiscal Year at a total cost of just over $80 million, has agreed to abide by the Republican earmark ban, according to spokesman Adam Buckalew. "He supported the moratorium and the prohibition adopted recently by the Conference on House earmarks for the 112th Congress," Buckalew said of Harper.
"It's easy to be a member of the TEA Party Caucus because, like them, I agree that we're Taxed Enough Already and we've got to balance the budget by cutting spending instead of raising taxes. Deficit spending is not new, but the unprecedented rate of spending in Congress is," Rehberg said in a statement emailed by his office. "Montanans have tightened their belts, and it's way past time for Congress to follow their lead. The TEA Party Caucus is about listening to concerned Americans who want to fundamentally change how Congress spends their tax dollars. On that, we're in total agreement."
Bachmann's office did not respond to emails or phone calls seeking comment.
Still, some Republicans -- albeit none who belong to the Tea Party caucus -- have said they will not abide by the voluntary earmark ban. And, said CAGW's Williams, the anti-spending organization isn't waiting with baited breath.
"Seeing is believing. It's going to take a lot more than rhetoric to convince us," he said.
A list of Tea Party Caucus members and their earmark requests in Fiscal Year 2010, courtesy of Citizens Against Government Waste's Pig Book:
NAME EARMARKS AMOUNT Aderholt (R-AL) 69 $78,263,000 Akin (R-MO) 9 $14,709,000 Alexander (R-LA) 41 $65,395,000 Bachmann (R-MN) 0 0 Barton (R-TX) 14 $12,269,400 Bartlett (R-MD) 19 $43,060,650 Bilirakis (R-FL) 14 $13,600,000 R. Bishop (R-UT) 47 $93,980,000 Burgess (R-TX) 15 $15,804,400 Broun (R-GA) 0 0 Burton (R-IN) 0 0 Carter (R-TX) 26 $42,232,000 Coble (R-NC) 19 $18,755,000 Coffman (R-CO) 0 0 Crenshaw (R-FL) 37 $54,424,000 Culberson (R-TX) 22 $33,792,000 Fleming (R-LA) 10 $31,489,000 Franks (R-AZ) 8 $14,300,000 Gingrey (R-GA) 19 $16,100,000 Gohmert (R-TX) 15 $7,099,000 T. Graves (R-GA) 11 $8,331,000 R. Hall (R-TX) 16 $12,232,000 Harper (R-MS) 25 $80,402,000 Herger (R-CA) 5 $5,946,000 Hoekstra (R-MI) 9 $6,392,000 Jenkins (R-KS) 12 $24,628,000 S. King (R-IA) 13 $6,650,000 Lamborn (R-CO) 6 $16,020,000 Luetkemeyer (R-MO) 0 0 Lummis (R-WY) 0 0 Marchant (R-TX) 0 0 McClintock (R-CA) 0 0 Gary Miller (R-CA) 15 $19,627,500 Jerry Moran (R-KS) 22 $19,400,000 Myrick (R-NC) 0 0 Neugebauer (R-TX) 0 0 Pence (R-IN) 0 0 Poe (R-TX) 12 $7,913,000 T. Price (R-GA) 0 0 Rehberg (R-MT) 88 $100,514,200 Roe (R-TN) 0 0 Royce (R-CA) 7 $6,545,000 Scalise (R-LA) 20 $17,388,000 P. Sessions (R-TX) 0 0 Shadegg (R-AZ) 0 0 Adrian Smith (R-NE) 1 $350,000 L. Smith (R-TX) 18 $14,078,000 Stearns (R-FL) 17 $15,472,000 Tiahrt (R-KS) 39 $63,400,000 Wamp (R-TN) 14 $34,544,000 Westmoreland (R-GA) 0 0 Wilson (R-SC) 15 $23,334,000
Join the Discussion (0)More to come in 2011, I'm sure. Its how Congress works. They just blew smoke up people's asses during the election season.
12/01/2010
The End of Birthers
Anderson Cooper more or less calmly and methodically takes down a birther. The birther in question seems like a good guy in the sense that he's well spoken and apparently served his country with some distinction. However, its arguments like his, and willfulness in holding false beliefs in the face of facts like his, that lead me to conclude that birthers are simply racists who are looking for any thing at all on which to peg the ideas that President Obama is "too different", "unamerican", "not like us", all of which really amount to the fact he's not a caucasian male.
At any rate, this is the last post on the subject you'll see from me.
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