Pelosi, Reid, and Obama make history.
David Leonhardt dives into the numbers behind the talking point you may have heard about 47% of American households owing no income tax for 2009. Suffice it to say, the talking point is misleading.
Justice Stevens, who is soon retiring from the Supreme Court, is the only Protestant member of the court and the only member of the court who did not go to Harvard or Yale for law school.
Being, I suppose, a sort of defense of Sarah Palin’s unique brand of speechifying.
Why does Sarah Palin talk the way she does? Just what is this sort of thing below?
We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we’re confident that we’re going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?
Just forty years ago people would be shocked to read something like this as a public statement from someone even pretending, as Palin pretty much had to have been by the time of this quote, that they were going to be serving in a Presidential Administration.
It’s not quite Bushspeak, which, with the likes of “I know what it’s like to put food on my family,” was replete with flagrantly misplaced words with a frequency that made for guesses, not completely in jest, that he might suffer from a mild form of Wernicke’s aphasia, interfering with matching word shapes to meanings. (Bush the father wasn’t much better in this regard—there just wasn’t an internet to make collecting the slips and spreading them around so easy.)
Rather, Palin is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. Or at least, insights that go beyond the bare-bones essentials of human cognition — an entity (i.e. something) and a predicate (i.e. something about it).
The easy score is to flag this speech style as a sign of moronism. But we have to be careful — there is a glass houses issue here. Before parsing Palinspeak we have to understand the worldwide difference between spoken and written language — and the fact that in highly literate societies, we tend to have idealized visions of how close our speech supposedly is to the written ideal.
J. K. Galbraith says there’s nothing to worry about when it comes to the current government budet deficits, unless you’re a banker.
Bankers don’t like budget deficits because they compete with bank loans as a source of growth. When a bank makes a loan, cash balances in private hands also go up. But now the cash is not owned free and clear. There is a contractual obligation to pay interest and to repay principal. If the enterprise defaults, there may be an asset left over—a house or factory or company—that will then become the property of the bank. It’s easy to see why bankers love private credit but hate public deficits.
Howard Fineman on the end of the press infatuation with Obama:
I asked the White House for the president’s daily reading material. Here is the list I got back: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, NEWSWEEK (a man of taste, this president), Time, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, “blogs,” Foreign Affairs, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN.com. “Bottom line is that he reads a ton,” I was told. Sure, we need the readers, but maybe that’s a few pounds too many.
The president’s problem is not that he is “professorial.” It’s worse: He’s journalistic. His conceptual and even operational home base doesn’t seem to be the South Side of Chicago; it’s the op-ed page of the Times, where he’s spent lots of time wooing the likes of conservative columnists David Brooks and Ross Douthat. But grass-roots conservatives do not trust those guys (how could they? They write for the Times). And most voters don’t read those pages in any case.
If you are wondering how the health care bill will affect your health care coverage, check out this interactive graphic from The New York Times.
Pelosi, Reid, and Obama make history.
He’s a Republican.
As the old saying goes, you are entitled to your own opinion, but you can’t have your own facts. Texas disagrees.
After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
John Quiggin writes about the Republicans’ attempt to put Reagan on the $50 bill. He asks why the Republicans seem so intent on naming everything after Reagan. His conclusion is that Reagan, Washington, and Jefferson are the only remaining presidents who can pass the “purity test”. And by “Jefferson” he means Jefferson Davis.
The Republican campaign to rename everything after Ronald Reagan has reached new heights of absurdity with the suggestion that Reagan should replace Ulysses S. Grant on the $US50 bill. A couple of questions struck me here
(a) Wasn’t Grant a Republican himself ?
(b) Don’t the Repugs have anybody other than Reagan to name things after?
The answer to the second question turns out to be “No”, and explains the first. Looking back at Republican presidents, nobody is really keen to remember Bush I and II, Ford or Nixon, and the same applies to Hoover, Coolidge and Harding. But at least some effort is required to forget these guys, unlike the non-entities who followed and immediately preceded Grant.
