MSNBC has been reporting on the huge tent city forming outside Sacramento, including a remarkable photo essay on the encampment. Similarly, a Daily Mail piece offers more detail:
As Chris Jansing reports, this isn't the only "tent city" gaining in size: So are similar encampments near Seattle, and Reno, and Nashville. Down in Dallas, the need for an encampment is rising quickly.
In other words, by mid-summer, we may see these encampments around the country. And they deserve a name:
Bushvilles.
When Americans had to endure such hardships 80 years ago -- forming shantytowns made of wood shacks and canvas tents -- they named them in honor of the president who had done nothing to prevent the oncoming recession and ultimately Depression into which he had led them.
Doesn't it somehow figure that he was a Bush administration appointee to the USDA panel charged with overseeing the quality and safety of peanut products?
The president of the peanut company linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak serves on an industry advisory board that helps the U.S. Department of Agriculture set quality standards for peanuts.
Stewart Parnell, president of Peanut Corp. of America, based in Lynchburg, Va., was first appointed to the USDA’s Peanut Standards Board in July 2005 and was reappointed in October for a second term that runs until June 2011, according to the USDA.
Bitterness generated by the bruising battle between Betsy Markey and Marilyn Musgrave apparently lingers days after voters decided the winner of the 4th Congressional District.
Incumbent Republican Musgrave, who lost to Democrat Markey by a 56 to 44 percent margin Tuesday, has yet to call and congratulate Markey on her win.
Musgrave also hasn't conceded the race, said Markey spokesman Ben Marter. "She has yet to admit defeat," he said. "It's a little bizarre."
Calls to Musgrave's campaign and congressional office went unanswered Friday.
Bill Bennett last night on CNN put the most sickening spin possible on Barack Obama's victory (which at that point was only looming):
Anderson Cooper: I mean, if he does become president, and it still is an if, does anyone know what this means in terms of change of race relations in the United States, or perception of?
Bennett: Well, I'll tell you one thing it means, as a former Secretary of Education: You don't take any excuses anymore from anybody who says, 'The deck is stacked, I can't do anything, there's so much in-built this and that.' There are always problems in a big society. But we have just -- if this turns out to be the case, President Obama -- we have just achieved an incredible milestone. For which the rest of the world needs to have more respect for the United States than it sometimes does.
Wow, Obama is even more powerful than I thought. I guess his election just wiped out all the remaining institutional bigotry -- particularly the persistent job discrimination against black men -- with a magical wand. Whoda thunk?
I guess Bennett wants us to forget that this "milestone" was achieved over the strenuous opposition of people like himself. Funny how he seems to want to claim credit for it.
Fortunately, David Gergen (who has been a consistent voice of conservative good sense throughout this election, actually), chimed in to observe: "I don't think we have taken care of the issue of racial prejudice."
Nonetheless, I'm sure we can count on the wingnutosphere reiterating this little nugget a lot over the coming four years.
But the real bile has been saved for those conservatives who have balked at the selection of Sarah Palin.
In addition to Mr Frum, who thinks her not ready to be president, Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's greatest speechwriter and a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, condemned Mr McCain's running mate as a "symptom and expression of a new vulgarisation of American politics." Conservative columnist David Brooks called her a "fatal cancer to the Republican Party".
The backlash that ensued last week revealed the fault lines of the coming civil war.
Rush Limbaugh, the doyen of right wing talk radio hosts, denounced Noonan, Brooks and Frum. Neconservative writer Charles Krauthammer condemned "the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama", while fellow columnist Tony Blankley said that instead of collaborating in heralding Mr Obama's arrival they should be fighting "in a struggle to the political death for the soul of the country".
During the primaries the Democratic Party was bitterly divided between Barack Obama's "latte liberals" and Hillary Clinton's heartland supporters, but now the same cultural division threatens to tear the Republican Party apart.
Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin's critics as "cocktail party conservatives" who "give aid and comfort to the enemy".
He told The Sunday Telegraph: "There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?"
But the best quote in this UK Telegraph piece was this one from Nuzzo:
"Win or lose, there is a ready made conservative candidate waiting in the wings. Sarah Palin is not the new Iain Duncan Smith, she is the new Ronald Reagan."
No doubt Palin is already the GOP frontrunner for 2012. (Sorry, Mitt.) Guess we'll be seeing the Republican Party finally decay into all-out right-wing populism. Which means: It's gonna get real ugly over the next four years.
When I was in Wasilla a couple of weeks ago I had dinner one night with the crew from The Wasilla Project, which has been busy producing first-rate videos about Sarah Palin's background in her Alaska hometown.
After 8 years of a Republican White House, there still seems to be a reality distortion field around the concept of “Fiscal Conservative”. Governor Palin presents herself as a fiscal conservative who has a record of helping taxpayers in her state. The reality has often been quite different.
It’s surprising that someone who came into office as mayor to cut wasteful spending and lower property taxes, actually left office with Wasilla over $20 million in debt, when records show that she entered office with city debt at one million or less.
Some $14-15 million of that debt was due to a hockey rink she built while in office, land for which Wasilla negotiated the purchase for $145,000. They eventually paid out nearly $1.5 million for the land, not counting legal fees, due to Palin moving forward on the project before the city had clear title to the land. This echoes in significant ways Palin’s later negotiations as governor on the Alaskan pipeline, where she committed $500 million in taxpayer money, without assurances that a Canadian company would even build the pipeline.
As the economy worsens in the United States, markets around the world are crashing and people are losing their homes and pensions, it’s irresponsible not to question the economic positions and records of the candidates. In the case of Palin, her record has been extremely troubling and reflects part of the reason that she has lost credibility with so many Alaskans in recent weeks.
It's true that the current economic mess was a bipartisan affair -- Democrats participated almost as eagerly as Republicans in the whole deregulation of the financial sector that occurred in 1997-2006, which was the root of this disaster. But regardless of party, the entire philosophy behind deregulation was conservatism -- it's been one of its economic cornerstones.
So this economic disaster is best understood as a failure of conservatism generally. And no one better exemplifies the misbegotten nature of conservative governance -- particularly in the way it bankrupts the public while claiming to be "responsible" -- than Sarah Palin.
The Federal Reserve will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system, flooding banks with cash to alleviate the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression.
The Fed increased its existing currency swaps with foreign central banks by $330 billion to $620 billion to make more dollars available worldwide. The Term Auction Facility, the Fed's emergency loan program, will expand by $300 billion to $450 billion. The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan are among the participating authorities.
The Fed's expansion of liquidity, the biggest since credit markets seized up last year, came hours before the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion bailout for the financial industry. The crisis is reverberating through the global economy, causing stocks to plunge and forcing European governments to rescue four banks over the past two days alone. Read on...
I'm not an expert on the economy or Wall St., but this sure looks like an end-around by the Bush administration to give away hundreds of billions of dollars without the approval of Congress.
As Barney Frank announces that he's pulled together a deal that will get the votes needed to pass through Congress, economists from some of the top schools in the country ask, "What's the hurry?":
As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:
1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers' expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.
2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.
3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, America's dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.
For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.
As the Wall Street meltdown causes John McCain to throw in the towel and George Bush attempts to pull off the biggest heist in history, it's becoming clear that pushing any bailout legislation too far, too fast, could be a total disaster for our country. The Democrats need to listen to people who really know economics, keep a tight leash on Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, say no to Disaster Capitalism and take the time to get this right the first time.
The list of economists who signed the letter is below the fold.
