POLITICS - "Pressing" Matters

Two articles....

"REPORT: GOP Lawmakers Outnumber Democratic Lawmakers 2 To 1 In Stimulus Debate On Cable News" Think Progress

UPDATE: Two more appearances by Democratic lawmakers have been brought to ThinkProgress’s attention, one on CNN and one on MSNBC. They have been added to our tally.

As Media Matters has documented, during the Bush administration, the media consistently allowed conservatives to dominate their shows, booking them as guests far more often than progressives. The rationale was that Republicans were “in power.”

It appears that old habits die hard. Even though President Obama and his team are in control of the executive branch and Democrats are in the majority in Congress, the cable networks are still turning more often to Republicans and allowing them to set the agenda on major issues, most recently on the debate over the economic recovery package.

On Sunday, conservatives began an all-out assault on President Obama’s economic recovery plan, with House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) both announcing that they would vote against the plan as it stood. Despite Obama’s efforts at good faith outreach, congressional conservatives have continued to attack the stimulus plan with a series of false and disingenuous arguments.

The media have been aiding their efforts. In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that the five cable news networks — CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business and CNBC — have hosted more Republican lawmakers to discuss the plan than Democrats by a 2 to 1 ratio this week.

In total, from 6 AM on Monday to 4 PM on Wednesday, the networks have hosted Republican lawmakers 51 times and Democratic lawmakers only 26 times. Surprisingly, Fox News came the closest to offering balance, hosting 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. CNN had only two Democrats compared to 7 Republicans.

The drastically imbalanced coverage isn’t the first time that the news networks have effectively supported attacks on the recovery plans. As ThinkProgress reported on Monday, the cable networks, the Sunday shows and the network newscasts promoted a controversial CBO non-report 81 times before the actual CBO analysis of the stimulus plan was released.

"Right on cue, the White House press awakens from its Bush slumber" by Eric Boehlert, Media Matters

Pulling a collective Rip Van Winkle, the White House press corps has awakened from its extended nap just in time to aggressively press the new Democratic administration, just as it dogged the last Democratic president during his first days in office back in the 1990s. Conveniently skipped over during the press corps' extended bout of shut-eye? The Bush years, of course.

Suddenly revved up and vowing to keep a hawk-like watch on the Obama administration ("I want to hold these guys accountable for what they say and do") and all of a sudden obsessed with trivia, while glomming onto nitpicking, gotcha-style critiques, Beltway reporters have tossed aside the blanket of calm that had descended on them during the previous administration, a blanket of calm that defined their Bush coverage.

Can't say I'm surprised about the sudden change in behavior, though. Taking the long view, I recently went back and contrasted how the press covered the first days and weeks of Clinton's first term in 1993 with its coverage of Bush's arrival in 2001. The difference in tone and substance was startling. (Think bare-knuckled vs. cottony soft.)

One explanation at the time of the Bush lovefest was that reporters and pundits were just so burnt out by the Clinton scandal years that they needed some downtime. They needed to relax; it was human nature. Conversely, the opposite now seems to be true: Because the press dozed for so long -- because it sleepwalked through the Bush years -- it just had to spring back to life with the new administration. It's human nature.

When contrasting the early Clinton and Bush coverage, I noted it would be deeply suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn up the emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic administration. But wouldn't you know it, the press corps' alarm went off right on time for Obama's arrival last week, with the Beltway media taking down off the shelf the dusty set of contentious, in-your-face rules of engagement they practiced during the Clinton years and putting into safe storage the docile, somnambulant guidelines from the Bush era. In other words, one set of rules for Clinton and Obama, another for Bush. One standard for the Democrats; a separate, safer one, for the Republican.

"I don't think there is a honeymoon" for Obama, Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC's World News, announced last week. "The accountability starts immediately." See, accountability suddenly reigns supreme. Just like right after Clinton was sworn in. But Bush in 2001? Not so much.

For folks who, understandably, weren't paying attention 16 years ago or who haven't read up on their White House media history, it's hard to appreciate just how uncanny the similarities are between how the suddenly hyperactive, conflict-driven press corps (baited by the right to prove their independence) is dealing with Obama's first days and how the hyperactive press dealt with Clinton's opening days, as journalists then also seemed determined to prove their un-liberalness.

The early Clinton and Obama scripts are at times interchangeable (i.e. baseless, negative stories like the cost of Obama's inauguration and the cost of Bill Clinton's haircut). The only part that doesn't fit in with the rest of the mosaic is how the press lovingly treated the Republican in 2001 during his arrival in town.

The media's abrupt transformation last week in terms of greeting the new president -- a transformation that unfolded with great pride and even apparent glee among reporters -- was showcased during the new administration's first White House press briefing, where many reporters, previously comatose during the news-free Bush-era briefings, rose up in anger and demanded answers during a contentious session.

"Game On! Obama's Clash With The White House Press Corps" announced The Daily Beast. And under the headline, "Obama press aide gets bashed in debut," The Washington Times' Joseph Curl reported:

Although President Obama swept into office pledging transparency and a new air of openness, the press hammered spokesman Robert Gibbs for nearly an hour over a slate of perceived secretive slights that have piled up quickly for the new administration. It wasn't pretty.

[...]

And so it went at the first official White House briefing of the new Obama administration -- a fiery back and forth dispelling the notion that journalists would go easy on the guy that many reports show it went easy on during the marathon primary and general election campaigns.

Halfway through the interrogation, a reporter asked succinctly: "Is the honeymoon over already?"

Curl also reported there was yelling and shouting from journalists inside the White House press room that day. (One "spat.") Now, if you're having trouble recalling all the times the same press corps "hammered" Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer for nearly an hour -- yelled, shouted, and spat questions at him -- back in January 2001, don't worry, your memory isn't going bad. It's just that those contentious hardball sessions never actually happened.

In fact, the media's lullaby treatment of Bush at the outset of 2001 became so pronounced that even some members of the Beltway press corps acknowledged the unfolding phenomenon and how it so obviously contrasted with the high-octane coverage the outgoing Democratic administration had been bombarded with. "The truth is, this new president [Bush] has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton," Politico's John Harris, then with The Washington Post, wrote during Bush's first months in office. (Harris went on to cheer, "[G]ood for Washington in giving a new president a break at the start.")

The other Clinton/Obama connection is how the press detests the way new Democratic White Houses treat the media. Of course, the irony is thick, considering the utter contempt the Bush White House displayed toward the press. The way former chief of staff Andrew Card famously dismissed the press as just another D.C. special interest group desperately seeking access, the way aides quickly formed habits of not returning reporters' calls for weeks and months, and the way the Bush White House waved in a former male prostitute using an alias and without any valid journalistic credentials to toss softball questions during briefings. That's how Republicans brushed back the press. But it's the Democrats whom reporters lash out at. It's the Democrats whom reporters denounce with righteous indignation within days of the new administration's taking office.

Back at the outset of 1993, journalists complained that the new Clinton communications team limited their access by closing off portions of the White House to reporters, that aides didn't sufficiently schmooze journalists, and that the new president did not have enough formal press conferences. (And don't even ask what reporters did when their pals in the White House travel office got fired.) "They're dissing us," Los Angeles Times California editor David Lauter, then-White House reporter, complained in April 1993.

Well, fast-forward to last week, and it's déjà vu all over again. Here's how Politico cataloged the media's petty laundry list of grievances that sparked the press "frustration":

There have been a handful of rocky moments so far. Some press staffers found their name cards misspelled on Wednesday and phone lines weren't properly hooked up. Reporters trying to reach the press staff got emails bounced back.

[...]

And in the hours before Gibbs' briefing, the northwest gate of the White House started running out of temporary passes.

No wonder NBC's Chuck Todd compared the White House press room to Gitmo -- reporters' names were misspelled!

It was telling that in its piece about Obama's press woes, Politico noted how the Clinton administration had also run into trouble with the press over issues of access. Noticeably absent from the Politico article was any mention of how the Bush administration dramatically limited media access, regularly cordoned off information from the press, and warned reporters that edgy questions posed at the daily sessions were "noted in the building." That's all been tossed down the memory hole. It's only new Democratic presidents who are asked to play nice with the press and get badgered when they do not.

But back to the showdown at the White House briefing last week: CNN's Ed Henry, while appearing on The Situation Room, stressed to host Wolf Blitzer that he didn't think the new White House press secretary had answered his query that day about Obama's pick to become deputy defense secretary. Think about that premise for a moment (i.e. a White House press secretary artfully dodges a reporter's question) while recalling what the White House press briefings were like for reporters under Bush. Dan Froomkin at Washingtonpost.com did his best to capture the vacuous nature of those exercises:

The spin, the secrets, the non-answers and the unprecedented lack of access are an insult not only to journalists, but to the public that depends on us to fully inform them about what's really going on in the White House.

Added blogger and J-school professor Jay Rosen:

The point here was to underline how pointless it was even to ask questions of the Bush White House. And reporters got that point, though they missed the larger picture I am describing. Many times they wondered what they were doing there.

And TNR's Jonathan Chait:

Much of the time [Ari] Fleischer does not engage with the logic of a question at all. He simply denies its premises -- or refuses to answer it on the grounds that it conflicts with a Byzantine set of rules governing what questions he deems appropriate. Fleischer has broken new ground in the dark art of flackdom: Rather than respond tendentiously to questions, he negates them altogether.

But suddenly for Henry, when a Democrat's in power, it's news when a White House press person doesn't answer a reporter's question during a daily briefing. After eight years of having a succession of Bush flacks who, almost with robotic precision, refused to answer weeks, months, and years' worth of daily briefing questions from reporters -- to the point where journalists stopped showing up at the daily briefings or even trying to draw out useful information from the uncooperative White House press operation -- against that backdrop, the CNN correspondent thought it was newsworthy that his question wasn't answered by the new Democratic White House spokesman.

In other words, a routine, everyday press occurrence under Bush (a reporter gets a non-answer) suddenly transformed itself into a news event under Obama.

Do reporters deserve to get straight answers at the White House? Yes. Was Henry's query a legitimate one? Absolutely. But when the non-answers came from Bush spokesmen and women, the working press corps seemed to shrug it off. On Obama's first day, though, an unsatisfactory response was suddenly worthy of discussion on cable television. Why? From the press' perspective, Democratic administrations are supposed to answer all questions. They're supposed to grant carte blanche access to the press. Republicans could do whatever they wanted to the daily briefing and defang the process to the point of irrelevancy. But Democrats? Sorry, a different set of rules apply.

That double standard explained why there was so much media chatter last week after Obama, while making a good-natured social visit to the White House press workspace, waved off a substantive question about a high-level appointment of his. Pressed again by Politico's Jonathan Martin, Obama responded good-naturedly, "We will be having a press conference, at which time you can feel free to [ask] questions. Right now, I just wanted to say hello and introduce myself to you guys. That's all I was trying to do." ("A testy exchange," gasped Politico.)

But did the press ever needle Bush with uncomfortable questions when he made social calls? Please note that in August 2006, when Bush made a rare unannounced visit to the White House press room -- and this was years after Bush had broadcast his open contempt for the press -- there were no tough questions. As Froomkin reported at the time:

So there was something entirely appropriate about Bush stopping by the briefing room yesterday not to answer (or even be asked) a single substantive question -- but to insult pretty much everyone in spitting distance.

Bush mocked members of the media to their face that day by tossing out several insults, and none of them asked a substantive question. Obama was gracious with reporters and was rewarded with a gotcha moment, which the press corps then obsessed over.

More proof that the Rip Van Winkle press corps has been stirred from its slumber.

Today's media, of all pedigrees, are not at all balanced. Then again, the fair and balanced media could be a myth from the days when the media was actually about News and not entertainment.

POLITICS - Bush He Ain't

"Obama and the audacity of putting blame on his own shoulders: 'I screwed up.'" by CALVIN WOODWARD, AP

The White House approaches each day with talking points but none like this one.

Normally the picture of calm and confidence, Obama performed mea culpas in a series of TV interviews following Tom Daschle's withdrawal from consideration as health and human services secretary.

Daschle and Obama's pick for federal spending watchdog both pulled out of contention Tuesday because of personal tax problems. Earlier, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson withdrew as Obama's choice as commerce secretary because of an ethical investigation in the state. Timothy Geithner won Senate confirmation as treasury secretary despite $34,000 in tax arrears he had belatedly paid.

The president invited network news anchors into the Oval Office one at a time and offered basically the same message, that he had been slow to recognize the double standard obvious to ordinary Americans who are cut no slack if they fall behind on their taxes.

Obama to Fox: "I take responsibility for this mistake." He vowed his best effort to "make sure we're not screwing up again."

Obama to ABC: "This is a self-induced injury that I'm angry about, and we're going to make sure we get it fixed."

Obama to CBS: "It's frustrating for me, and it's something that I take responsibility for."

The audacity of acknowledging — even emphasizing — poor judgment came in marked contrast to his predecessor. George W. Bush pronounced himself stumped when asked, midway through his presidency, to name mistakes he'd made. Much later, he thought of some.

Obama didn't just do a lightning round with top names from the five networks; he did it in the Oval Office, the hallowed room that is not often used for such a rapid-fire succession of interviews. The setting showed Obama in the very seat of power as he owned up to mistakes on a rocky day.

Still, Obama denied that his vetting process for nominees was flawed or that his promise to set new ethical standards in Washington was at all tainted by his decision to exempt several high-level appointments from his restrictions on hiring lobbyists.

The mistake, he said repeatedly in interviews with Charles Gibson of ABC, Brian Williams of NBC, Anderson Cooper of CNN, Chris Wallace of Fox and Katie Couric of CBS, was in seeming to give credence to the notion that one set of rules exists for VIPs and another for average Americans.

Like many presidents before him, Obama lamented that the towering business of the day — in this case saving the economy — had been obscured by dust kicked up over something else.

Unlike many, he said he only had himself to blame for that.

"I'm frustrated with myself, with our team" he told NBC.

"And I'm here on television saying I screwed up and that's part of the era of responsibility, is not never making mistakes; it's owning up to them and trying to make sure you never repeat them and that's what we intend to do."

How refreshing.

POLITICS - Bush Missing Memos

My readers, I suggest you look at the following ProPublica page.

"The Missing Memos" by Dan Nguyen and Christopher Weaver

The Bush administration’s controversial policies on detentions, interrogations and warrantless wiretapping were underpinned by legal memoranda. While some of those memos have been released (primarily as a result of ACLU lawsuits), the former administration kept far more memos secret than has been previously understood. At least three dozen by our count.

The decision to release them now lies with President Obama. To help inform the debate—and inject an extra dose of accountability—we’re posting the first comprehensive list of the secret memos. (The ACLU first compiled a list, which ProPublica verified and expanded on.)

Note: Our list is quite inclusive, but we have chosen to leave off some documents, such as early drafts of later memos.

Go to the page to see their list and what they have.

POLITICS - The GOP, Dumb and Dumber

"They (the Republicans, of course) still don't get it" by Deb Della Piana, OpEdNews

You know, you've got to love the Republicans if for nothing other than the entertainment value. Let me preface the heart of this article by telling you where the Republicans are in the scheme of things. They are no longer the majority on Capitol Hill. They do not occupy the White House either. They lost the 2008 election on all fronts, not because Sarah Palin is a fool and John McCain is a mean-spirited hothead, but because the American people had absolutely no faith in their ability to get the country out of the economic mess it's in (especially if left to a fool and a mean-spirited hothead). We know they can get us into an economic mess because, well, here we are! Getting us out of one, however, is another thing entirely. The Republicans also lost because the American people have had just about enough of their mean-spirited, partisan attitude that, frankly, has been amply on display in the early days of the Obama presidency.

So what is it that the Republicans don't get about what the American people want? How many different ways do they need to be told something? I thought being voted out of power in such a decisive fashion might help them get it, but apparently it didn’t. Maybe there is something to this theory that the Republican Party is the party of non-thinkers. Their media mouthpiece is, after all, Rush Limbaugh – a moronic blowhard who hides behind a microphone and says he hopes Barack Obama “fails.” Now, it seems to me that if Obama fails, America fails. It’s hard for me to label anyone wishing that as being either ‘patriotic’ or a thinking man, but that’s what Rush and the GOP want you to believe. Where were the Republicans to tell Rush Limbaugh that he did not speak for them? They were missing in action, because Limbaugh does indeed speak for them. As it turns out, that was just the passive-aggressive part of the program. The GOP wasn’t done yet.

If that wasn't insult enough, not one Republican voted for an economic stimulus package that is finally aimed at the American people. They voted to bail out the greedy Wall Street financial firms who played fast and loose with everyone else's money. They bailed out the greedy banks that then sent their executives on high-flying spa junkets and handed out bonuses like it was ice water on a hot summer day. Hell, our government even bailed out the American auto industry, an industry that hasn’t had an forward-thinking idea in what seems to be centuries. White-collar crime has become so commonplace in America that Bernard Madoff, the poster boy for greed, isn’t even behind bars after defrauding billions of dollars from the unsuspecting. He's sitting in his penthouse with some bling on his ankle, watching a big ole' flat screen TV and eating caviar. We finally have a piece of bailout legislation that gives the American people some hope that they haven’t been forgotten (make no mistake about it, the people want this package passed), and instead of showing their support for the American people, the Republicans band together to deliver a big, fat zero.

After this move, we got the typical Republican response: You know, it's fiscally irresponsible to spend money we don’t have. Really? Well, that doesn’t stop us from borrowing money from China to fund the war in Iraq. Hell, we might as well label ourselves a wholly owned subsidiary of China. Bailing out the taxpayers is not fiscally irresponsible when compared to a $12 billion a month illegal war and the $700 billion, no-strings-attached and no-need-to-change-your-bad-behavior-bailout given to the greedy and corrupt financial world. This bailout was passed with nary a blink of the eye. Yet, the House Republicans collectively thumbed their noses at the American people by voting 'no' on the Obama stimulus package. You know what? The package passed easily without them, but somebody might want to tell the Republicans that this new tactic may not play in their favor. At the end of the day, the American people can see through the Republican excuses for not supporting the package. The 'no' vote is less about wanting more tax cuts than wanting Barack Obama to fail. There's chatter out there that, should Obama's economic policies succeed, the Republicans could be out in the cold (and out of power) for years to come. Wouldn't want that.

Someone should tell the Republicans they are irrelevant for a good reason. It's not like Barack Obama didn't try to appease them. He did. In fact, many feel Obama went too far trying to attract the Republicans and, in doing so, compromised the package. We all know by now (and if we don't, we all should know) that the Republican tax-cut strategy did not stimulate the economy. It never does when the tax cuts are going to those who don't need it (like the nation's top earners). We've been working this losing formula since Ronald Reagan postulated his 'trickle down' theory. The only problem is that the trickle never trickled. That tax cuts stimulate the economy is absolute urban legend. It sounds good. Tax cuts. The Republicans have been insisting tax cuts are the answer since the economy began to falter and their tax cut package has done absolutely nothing to stop the hemorrhaging. Yet, how did John McCain respond to the Obama plan? He called for making the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy permanent. These tax cuts haven’t helped stimulate anything but anger over the past couple of years. Then McCain (you know, the man who helped to invent the Blackberry) complained about the inclusion of a $6 billion investment to expand Internet access and services.

With the stimulus package now moving upstream to the big fish, the smell from the senate isn't much better. A conservative faction, led by Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss), has vowed to fight the package. Wicker said, “A trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste.” You know what, I couldn't agree more. How's that for common ground! I sure wish the Republicans had adopted that attitude before we bankrupted this country on the black hole known as Iraq. Washington has managed to bail out just about every white-collar dirt bag it could find, yet it has taken it's sweet time making an investment in tax-paying citizens who are losing their jobs and homes at an alarming rate. You remember them, don't you? Hell, you work for them, Senator Wicker.

Pssst. Come here. I don't want my Democrat friends to see or hear me aiding and abetting the enemy. But in the true spirit of bi-partisanship, I'd like to tell the present crop of Republicans that they no more look like the party of the common man (read: poor-to-middle class) than did the version that was in power prior to the 2008 election. That doesn’t bode well for the future. Millionaires are in the minority, and their ranks are falling fast.

Sock-it-to 'em, Deb

ECONOMY: The Proposed Stimulus Plan

The following transcript is the best I've seen on the subject of what a Stimulus Plan can, and cannot do, and why.

"Reporters Assess Effectiveness of Proposed Stimulus Plan" NewsHour Transcript, PBS

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour Reporter): Even as the Senate now takes up the nitty-gritty details of a stimulus plan -- the particular programs and tax cuts, the exact dollars and cents -- larger questions abound about short-term needs, longer-term goals, and the ambitions and tensions of tackling so much at one time.

David Leonhardt of the New York Times tackled these questions in a story titled "The Big Fix" that appeared in yesterday's Times magazine. Greg Ip has been watching and writing on them as U.S. economics editor for the Economist magazine.

Welcome to both of you.

David, in terms of balancing short term and long term, how do you define the ambitions and tensions that arise?

DAVID LEONHARDT; New York Times: Clearly, the first goal here is to stimulate the economy, which is the short-term goal. You want to get money out and you want to try to make this recession less deep than it would otherwise be.

But given that you're going to spend $800 billion or $900 billion by the time the Senate is done with it, you want to try to also do some good. Yes, you could just dig ditches and then fill them again and that would be stimulus, but obviously wouldn't do any good, long-term good.

And given we're spending this vast amount of money, it would be a waste not to try to accomplish some long-term good. That's the theory. The tension is that it is hard to accomplish long-term good and to spend it quickly.

JEFFREY BROWN: Because?

DAVID LEONHARDT: Because long-term good is often investments. You want to be careful with it. You don't just want to dig ditches. You want to think about where the ditches should go and what you should then do with this hole.

JEFFREY BROWN: What they connect to and all, right?

DAVID LEONHARDT: Exactly. And how do you spend the money in education? How do you spend it in health care?

And so there are some projects that clearly can do both the short and the long term, but there aren't enough to spend $900 billion doing both short-term and long-term good, and that's where you get into trade-offs.

• Setting long-term priorities

JEFFREY BROWN: How do you see the trade-offs, the tensions here?

GREG IP, The Economist: Very similarly, Jeff. I mean, you can stimulate the economy two ways, basically. One is by spending more, and the other is by taxing less. And they both have advantages and disadvantages.

As David said, with spending, if you want to do it well, it takes a very long time. The advantage, however, is that every dollar the government spends will generally result in at least a dollar of additional economic output and maybe more, if it's done the right way.

Now, with tax cuts, the issue you face there is that, if you give a person a dollar more of after-tax income, you can't guarantee they'll actually spend it. They may save it. And, in fact, in the temporary tax cuts that we had last year, we think that two-thirds to three-quarters of that money was saved.

Now, the advantage of those tax cuts is you can do them fairly quickly. You can actually reduce the tax withholding in people's paychecks within a matter of months.

And they're also less distorting. And by that I mean, when you let households and businesses decide how to spend the money, it will happen in a way that maximizes their welfare instead of having the government trying to guess at the best way.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, things like education, health care, energy, infrastructure you named, are these kind of debates seeping into -- you guys both cover these things -- are people worrying about those things while they worry about the short-term stimulus? How much is that getting into the discussion right now?

DAVID LEONHARDT: It is getting into the discussion. I mean, President Obama has very clearly said he doesn't want this just to be a stimulus package. He wants it to be a down payment on some longer-term things.

And so that then gives rise to two debates. The first is, well, what should our long-term priorities be? Should they be alternative energy? Should they be education? Should they be infrastructure?

And the second debate is, well, in the course of doing that, do you end up slowing down how quickly you're spending this? As Greg was just saying, when you do government spending, it tends to be slower than tax cuts. And certain forms of government spending are slower than other forms of government spending.

• Using stimulus for health care

JEFFREY BROWN: But when you translate these kind of big ideas into legislation, then we get down to what I was referring to as nitty-gritty, right?

GREG IP: Yes. And from where I sit, the nitty-gritty has not been pretty to watch, Jeff. I do not see any of the long-term sort of thought going into this fiscal stimulus. It ought to be associated with what, as David said, could be some very profound changes in the way we run social programs in this country.

Just to give you a simple example. Obama during the campaign had many thoughtful ideas on how to increase health care coverage for lower-income and poor people. Instead, what we have here is a one-time block grant to the states to aid with Medicaid funding and a supplemental payment to people who are unemployed to help keep their private-sector health care coverage.

There might be merits to both those ideas, but I don't see any way that those are integrated with a more comprehensive health care proposal.

DAVID LEONHARDT: I actually think health care is a nice way to see both the good sides and the bad sides about it. I agree with Greg. That's a real downside of this. You're building on already this very inefficient health care system through the programs that he's talking about.

The good side of health care is that they're also going to spend money to install these electronic medical records, which we hope will...

JEFFREY BROWN: Long-term goal?

DAVID LEONHARDT: Long-term goal. Well, it should provide some stimulus in the short term, installing them, employing people to do that, giving subsidies for them. But we also hope that it will give us enough information about how our health care system works and doesn't work so that down the road we'll be able to reform it and basically make it more efficient.

• U.S. economic epicenter in D.C.

JEFFREY BROWN: I want to ask you something about -- another thing you wrote in your article, a very provocative thing from your piece. I'll quote it. "For the first time in more than 70 years, the epicenter of the American economy can be placed outside of California or New York or the industrial Midwest. It can be placed in Washington."

So not Wall Street, not manufacturing companies out there, Detroit or wherever anymore? Washington.

DAVID LEONHARDT: Yes. And I know that will rub a lot of people the wrong way. They'll say, "Private enterprise is the heart of our economy," and it is the heart of our economy. I don't question that for a second.

But what we need Washington to do is really two things fundamentally. One, we need it to regulate in ways that it hasn't been doing over the last decade or two, to make sure that we don't have the Bernie Madoffs or that, when we do, they're caught.

And the second thing it needs to do is it needs to make investments that the private sector will not make to a sufficient degree on its own. Most of those investments will still be made by the private sector. But we now see Wall Street shrinking. We see, obviously, Detroit shrinking.

And so I think there's really a role here for Washington to come in and not only regulate and not only stimulate the economy, but try to make the kind of investments we've made in the past, things like building the Internet. The government did that. Building the highway system, the government did that. Funding biotechnology so that we have an industry that's the envy of the world, the government did that, and try to find more things along those lines.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you want to weigh in? A little skepticism?

GREG IP: Well, I'm just a little bit worried about mission creep here, Jeff, which is that there are certain things we do need the government to do because there is nobody else well suited to do it. And regulating certain business activities is definitely one of them and, quite clearly, not enough of that went on in this country in the last 10 years, especially in the financial area.

But government doesn't do a lot of things well. Among those are deciding, for example, who should -- what businesses should we lend money to? What businesses should get capital? I mean, Silicon Valley didn't need government's help deciding how to, you know, develop the Internet and so forth. That was the creativity of American entrepreneurs.

And when I hear people in Congress saying, well, if we're going to give banks this money, we need to tell them how much to lend and to who, I get very worried, because I haven't seen any evidence that, bad as the private-sector bankers have been, the government bankers are necessarily any better.

• The fine line of intervention

JEFFREY BROWN: But, of course, out in the world, you hear a lot of public uproar saying, "Well, if we're going to give them the money, we should be telling them things like that," right?

DAVID LEONHARDT: Yes, and it's true. I mean, the government's record on things like that, on these fine-grain things is really not good, with setting prices and telling businesses when to do what.

The problem is now, because we didn't have enough government role before, we find ourselves in the situation of having to bail out these companies for the good of the whole economy and now we're in this difficult situation.

To me, one of the arguments for smarter and a little bit bigger government intervention -- maybe more than a little bit bigger -- is that it saves you from having to nationalize entire sectors down the road.

JEFFREY BROWN: But you're saying part of the debate here is this -- finding that fine line between more government and letting the private sector do its thing?

GREG IP: Right. And, for example, just to look at the banks for a minute, absolutely the taxpayer should get some upside from this. You know, and they can do that by purchasing common shares in these banks.

And if in the case of the weakest banks that need the most capital, that results in the nationalization of that bank, so be it. But it should not be the premise of the government's intervention that they want to own the banking system.

And if there are certain things that we as a society want to do, for example, to encourage a less energy-intensive society or one that uses less fossil fuels, let's look at the most economically efficient way to do that.

For example, if you want people to use less gasoline and to conserve on that and to reduce our dependence on Middle East oil, raise the gasoline tax. You know, you can ask 1,000 economists -- Republican, Democratic -- they'll agree that is the most efficient way to do that.

DAVID LEONHARDT: And that's a great example of how short and long term are hard to do together. A reasonable gasoline tax would be the very opposite of stimulus, and so it's not something we can do now.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, thanks very much. To be continued. Thanks very much. David Leonhardt, Greg Ip, thanks.

DAVID LEONHARDT: Thank you.

GREG IP: Thank you.

POLITICS - GOP, Not On Our Watch

"Daughter of working-class immigrants as Labor Secretary? Not on our watch say Republicans" by Ron Moore, San Francisco Examiner

Senate Republicans are dismayed that a daughter of working class immigrants who respects the dignity of work may be the next Labor Secretary. Some conservative lawmakers are vowing to hold up a vote on Rep. Hilda Solis’ (D-Calif.) confirmation as labor secretary because of their opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act, which she supports.

Solis, who comes from a union family, has been a champion of workers for more than 15 years combined in Congress and the California legislature, where she was the first Latina elected to the state Senate.

Solis backers have created two Facebook groups in support of her nomination: ”Americans for Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor,” and “1,000,000 Strong For Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor“. The groups give information on how to contact senators to urge that Solis be confirmed.

"During the Bush administration, working women were left to fend for themselves; but under Solis, that will change because she understands the challenges personally as well as professionally," said SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger in an article featured in today's Women's ENews.

Solis comes from a union family and has never forgotten her roots in her public service career. "As a member of the California Legislature, Solis pushed for pay equity legislation," says Burger. "She also marched with our union in Los Angeles to support low-income workers, many of them women, because she wanted them to have the same opportunities she has had."

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney also praised Solis’ nomination, saying:

“We’re confident that she will return to the Labor Department one of its core missions—to defend workers’ basic rights in our nation’s workplaces.

She’s proven to be a passionate leader and advocate for all working families. In fact, she’s voted with working men and women 97 percent of the time.”

WAAAA... The GOP (aka God's Own Party, in their minds) still sticking to their posture even after being rejected by the majority of American voters. This also continues to highlight that the GOP does not really give a damn about the little-guy.

They just refuse to even think that their core beliefs just may be wrong or NOT what Americans truly support.

ENVIRONMENT - Global Warming, Long Term Outlook

"Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says" by Richard Harris, NPR

Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering new scientific study.

As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if, emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is among the world's top climate scientists.

"We're used to thinking about pollution problems as things that we can fix," Solomon says. "Smog, we just cut back and everything will be better later. Or haze, you know, it'll go away pretty quickly."

That's the case for some of the gases that contribute to climate change, such as methane and nitrous oxide. But as Solomon and colleagues suggest in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is not true for the most abundant greenhouse gas: carbon dioxide. Turning off the carbon dioxide emissions won't stop global warming.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years," Solomon says.

This is because the oceans are currently soaking up a lot of the planet's excess heat — and a lot of the carbon dioxide put into the air. The carbon dioxide and heat will eventually start coming out of the ocean. And that will take place for many hundreds of years.

Solomon is a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her new study looked at the consequences of this long-term effect in terms of sea level rise and drought.

If we continue with business as usual for even a few more decades, she says, those emissions could be enough to create permanent dust-bowl conditions in the U.S. Southwest and around the Mediterranean.

"The sea level rise is a much slower thing, so it will take a long time to happen, but we will lock into it, based on the peak level of [carbon dioxide] we reach in this century," Solomon says.

The idea that changes will be irreversible has consequences for how we should deal with climate change. The global thermostat can't be turned down quickly once it's been turned up, so scientists say we need to proceed with more caution right now.

"These are all ... changes that are starting to happen in at least a minor way already," says Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University. "So the question becomes, where do we stop it, when does all of this become dangerous?"

The answer, he says, is sooner rather than later. Scientists have been trying to advise politicians about finding an acceptable level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The new study suggests that it's even more important to aim low. If we overshoot, the damage can't be easily undone. Oppenheimer feels more urgency than ever to deal with climate change, but he says that in the end, setting acceptable limits for carbon dioxide is a judgment call.

"That's really a political decision because there's more at issue than just the science. It's the issue of what the science says, plus what's feasible politically, plus what's reasonable economically to do," Oppenheimer says.

But despite this grim prognosis, Solomon says this is not time to declare the problem hopeless and give up.

"I guess if it's irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it," she says. "Because committing to something that you can't back out of seems to me like a step that you'd want to take even more carefully than something you thought you could reverse."

POLITICS - GOP Definition of Bipartisanship, Our Way or No Way

"Time for the kick ass part of bipartisanship" by Steve, Democracy Café

Call us a cynical bunch if you must, but the biggest question most hardcore liberal Democrats have had about Barack Obama’s very public love affair with bipartisanship has been the following: how will he respond when it finally bites him in the ass? And at least in the case of his economic stimulus package, his ass is already starting to look a little red.

There’s no denying that Obama tried; his initial stimulus package seemed designed as much to placate Republicans, as to please Democrats. His hope seemed to be that he could buy a little right wing love by putting way too much of the proposal’s spending into (relatively ineffective as stimulus) tax cuts, instead of public spending.

But congressional Republicans are having none of it. They may not have much actual power left, but that doesn’t seem to have put them in a mood to compromise. Either send up a pure George W. Bush-style tax cut package, they insist, or they’ll vote against the bill.

The major media, speaking right on cue, is spinning this as a test of Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship. I suppose they think that makes for a better story than the truth of Republican obstructionism. To these media “elites” the question now is whether Obama will be a good little post partisan president by giving GOP representatives everything they want, or an evil partisan politician (because he stands by his own principles as well as what might actually work).

So exactly what is it that the GOP wants?

This from The New York Times:

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all of the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” the House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And so if it’s the plan that I see today, put me down in the no column.”

While the plan can potentially pass the Democratic-dominated House without Republican support, it will continue to face opposition when it comes before the Senate, said Senator John McCain of Arizona, speaking on “Fox News Sunday.” At least two Republicans will need to approve the bill for a filibuster-proof majority vote of 60.

Senator McCain, who lost the presidential election to Mr. Obama in November, said that he planned to vote no unless the bill were changed.

So what sort of proposal will McCain and his defeated brethren support? From the same Times article:

“We need to make tax cuts permanent, and we need to make a commitment that there’ll be no new taxes,” Mr. McCain said. “We need to cut payroll taxes. We need to cut business taxes.”

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s extend and even expand Bush’s tax giveaways to the rich. I mean, that’s worked out real well for us so far, hasn’t it?

There’s no mystery about what’s going on here, of course. The GOP smells blood. What Obama intended as an extended hand they took as evidence of a weak spine: they’re starting to think — or at least to hope — they can push him around, at least a little. For what it’s worth, I strongly suspect they’re wrong. Underestimating Barack Obama’s political skill has generally proven to be a mistake. But Obama’s the only person who can prove it, and the way he can prove it, of course, is by pushing a strong stimulus package, reflecting Democratic Party values, through Congress.

The message would be unmistakable: if Republicans want to participate in the formation of future legislation in good faith, his door is open. But pure obstructionism will not be tolerated.

And all he has to do is to say the word. As he himself said, he won the election. And you can forget about the filibuster. There’s no way the GOP would use it to kill the stimulus bill. If they did, they would own the resulting economic carnage lock, stock and barrel, and they know it.

Obama’s path seems clear enough. The time has come for the kick ass part of bipartisanship.

HUMAN RIGHTS - Comment on California's Prop-8

Gay Marriage is a Question of Love
Keith Olbermann

Visit MSNBC.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

ENVIRONMENT - More on Global Warming

The following are a set of articles updating the impact of Global Warming.

"Enormous Ice Shelf Collapse Imminent in Antarctica" ChattahBox

The enormous Wilkins Ice Shelf, running the span of several thousand kilometers, is on the verge of collapse, due to melting caused by global warming.

Scientists have returned to Antarctica, after a scope last summer showed that the last threads of ice that kept it from collapsing into the ocean were nearly melted through, making it one of 25,000 square kilometers of ice shelf that has disappeared in recent years.

The phenomenon is being caused by global warming, as temperatures in the area drastically increase. Many are worried about the long term, or even permanent damage, this event points to.

“This ice shelf and the nine other shelves that we have seen with a similar trajectory are a consequence of warming,” David Vaughan, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey, told local science journals.

“Miraculously we’ve come back a summer later and it’s still here. If it was hanging by a thread last year, it’s hanging by a filament this year.”

"Study: Antarctica joins rest of globe in warming" by SETH BORENSTEIN, AP

Antarctica, the only place that had oddly seemed immune from climate change, is warming after all, according to a new study.

For years, Antarctica was an enigma to scientists who track the effects of global warming. Temperatures on much of the continent at the bottom of the world were staying the same or slightly cooling, previous research indicated.

The new study went back further than earlier work and filled in a massive gap in data with satellite information to find that Antarctica too is getting warmer, like the Earth's other six continents.

The findings were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming," said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. "Now we can say: no, it's not true ... It is not bucking the trend."

The study does not point to man-made climate change as the cause of the Antarctic warming - doing so is a highly intricate scientific process - but a different and smaller study out late last year did make that connection.

"We can't pin it down, but it certainly is consistent with the influence of greenhouse gases," said NASA scientist Drew Shindell, another study co-author. Some of the effects also could be natural variability, he said.

The study showed that Antarctica - about one-and-a-half times bigger than the United States - remains a complicated weather picture, especially with only a handful of monitoring stations in its vast interior.

The researchers used satellite data and mathematical formulas to fill in missing information. That made outside scientists queasy about making large conclusions with such sparse information.

"This looks like a pretty good analysis, but I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical," Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said in an e-mail. "It is hard to make data where none exist."

Shindell said it was more comprehensive than past studies and jibed with computer models.

The research found that since 1957, the annual temperature for the entire continent of Antarctica has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, but still is 50 degrees below zero. West Antarctica, which is about 20 degrees warmer than the east, has warmed nearly twice as fast, said study lead author Eric Steig of the University of Washington.

East Antarctica, which scientists had long thought to be cooling, is warming slightly when yearly averages are looked at over the past 50 years, said Steig.

However, autumn temperatures in east Antarctica are cooling over the long term. And east Antarctica from the late 1970s through the 1990s, cooled slightly, Steig said.

Some researchers skeptical about the magnitude of global warming overall said that the new study didn't match their measurements from satellites and that there appears to be no warming in Antarctica since 1980.

"It overstates what they have obtained from their analysis," said Roger Pielke Sr., a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado.

Steig said a different and independent study using ice cores drilled in west Antarctica found the same thing as his paper. And recent satellite data also confirms what this paper has found, Steig added.

The study has major ramifications for sea level rise, said Andrew Weaver at the University of Victoria in Canada. Most major sea level rise projections for the future counted on a cooling - not warming - Antarctica. This will make sea level rise much worse, Weaver said.

"N.C. among most at risk to rising seas" by Wade Rawlins, Charlotte Observer

With its long low coastline and large land area less than two feet above sea level, North Carolina is among the states most vulnerable to sea-level rise, a new federal report warns.

The new report focuses on the coastal states from North Carolina to New York where the rates of sea level rise are moderately high. The region has extensive coastal development, a high population and is likely to be at increased risk.

After Florida and Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas have the largest land areas threatened by sea-level rise.

“You're vulnerable,” said Jim Titus, project manager for sea-level rise for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and lead author of the report, “Coastal Sensitivity to Sea Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region.” “The people whose land could be permanently submerged aren't even flooded today.”

A rise in sea level increases the vulnerability of development in coastal floodplains and diminishes the rate at which low-lying areas drain. It will result in a loss of wetlands in the mid-Atlantic.

Rising temperatures cause ocean waters to warm and expand, like water heated in a tea kettle. In addition, rising temperatures near the poles cause massive ice sheets to melt, adding to the volume of water.

The report predicts that coastal erosion will occur at higher rates as sea level rises. Particularly in the sandy shore of the mid-Atlantic coast, the report says, it is nearly certain that barrier islands, spits and coastal headlands will erode faster due to sea-level rise. The Outer Banks are particularly vulnerable.

The report, produced by a collaboration among agencies including the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Transportation, offers three scenarios for sea-level rise by 2100: A rise of about 16 inches; of about two feet, and of about three feet.

In 2007, an international scientific panel projected that sea level would likely rise between 7 inches and two feet by 2100. Those estimates do not take into account any contribution from rapid changes in ice flow from Antarctica or Greenland.

Rising sea levels might be especially disastrous to North Carolina, as some sections of the coast are slowly sinking, magnifying the effects of rising seas.

Tide-gauge readings in the mid-Atlantic indicate that relative sea level rise (the combination of rising waters and sinking land) was generally higher – by about a foot – than the global average during the 20th century.

If sea level should rise more than three feet during the 21st century, the report says, “it is likely that some barrier islands in this region will cross a threshold” destabilizing and breaking apart.

Rob Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, said the report underscored that sea-level rise is a real management concern.

“There is some very important stuff in here that North Carolinians should take seriously,” said Young, who said state policy-makers and coastal communities should use a three-foot sea level rise by 2100 as a target.

“Whether sea level is rising is not something scientists argue about it,” Young said. “It is. It's different than an argument about whether humans are causing global warming. We have directly measured an acceleration … over the last two decades.”

As sea level rises, the most basic decision that states and beach communities must wrestle with is whether to try to hold back the sea or let nature take its course. Both have costs. Replenishing sand on eroding beaches allows houses and businesses to remain in place for a period of time, but is expensive to maintain. Retreating from the rising sea avoids the costs but concedes a loss of land and, in a worse case, entire communities, the report notes.

Greg Rudolph, shore protection officer for Carteret County, said people generally accept that sea level is rising. But planning for something that is occurring over decades is difficult.

“Let's face it, we live on four-year cycles when people are elected,” Rudolph said. “Not many people are going to plan out 14 years or 21 years in advance.”

Beach towns representing about a third of the North Carolina's 325 miles of coastline are seeking to replenish the sand on their beaches. But holding the beach may be an increasingly expensive response if erosion rates increase. “One size does not fit all,” Rudolph said.

Titus, of EPA, said the report shows it is rational to take into consideration the risk of accelerated sea-level rise.

“A reasonable hope is people making decisions will start factoring it in, rather than continuing to assume that sea level is stable,” Titus said. “Anyone who is making an investment, a regulation or a policy, has good reason to ask: how does sea level change the outcome of my decision?”

POLITICS - Talk About CHANGE!

The following is an excerpt of the transcript from the Newshour (PBS)

"Change Comes Quickly to the White House Web Site"

Obama wants to keep Blackberry

RAY SUAREZ: The transition team has posted video of policy team meetings. And with an eye toward moving the entire government toward better use of digital technology, the new administration is expected to name a chief technology officer, a newly created position, in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, they're throwing out ideas for new uses of the Internet, including connecting supporters to various forms of service and activism in their own communities.

One recent example: the Obama Web site raised money for the victims of the Southern California fires.

Some who logged on during the campaign now have high hopes for continuing the connection.

RON STEVENS, Obama supporter: This was a revolutionary kind of campaign. What they're trying to do is to maintain that sense of engagement, meaningful, substantive engagement, that so many people felt they had during the campaign itself.

RAY SUAREZ: The president and his top aides regularly communicate by BlackBerry. And despite legal and privacy concerns, President Obama himself said in a weekend interview he may opt to keep his personal BlackBerry after all.

U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: What this does -- and it's just one tool among a number of tools that I'm trying to use to break out of the bubble, to make sure that people can still reach me, that if I'm doing something stupid, somebody in Chicago can send me an e-mail and say, "What are you doing?" You know? Or, "You seem detached," or, "You're not listening to what is going on here in the neighborhood."

I want to be able to have voices other than the people who are immediately working for me to be able to reach out and send me a message about what's happening in America.

RAY SUAREZ: Obama says he'll keep in mind anything he writes could become public.

Whitehouse WEB Site

AMERICA - History in the Making

Obama's Inaugural Address

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AMERICA - A Definition of True Patriotism

"For Progressive Patriotism" by John Nichols, The Nation

This is a long article, but it is so to-the-point that I had to post it in its entirety.

If George Bush and Dick Cheney accomplished anything during the eight long years of their misrule, it was to confirm Dr. Johnson's observation that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. The soon-to-be-former president and vice president wrapped everything--from their initially illegitimate claim on the White House to undeclared wars, spying on Americans and even torture--in a red-white-and-blue flag of convenience. Borrowing more heavily from Joe McCarthy than Thomas Paine, Bush/Cheney gave a bad name not just to America but the to honorable inclination of Americans to express pride in their country.

Now it falls to Barack Obama to confirm the less commonly quoted but no less true adage of a World War II hero named George McGovern: "The highest patriotism is...a love of one's country deep enough to call [it] to a higher standard." Obama's challenge is neither romantic nor rhetorical. It is a practical responsibility, and the extent to which he accomplishes it will determine the success of his presidency and of the process of American renewal that begins with his inauguration.

How should Obama--a man whose reluctance to play the flag-pin game drew a campaign season inquisition by the media--approach the matter of patriotism? Not by avoiding it, and not by falling back on cheap symbolism. As Obama the candidate observed last year, "When we argue about patriotism, we are arguing about who we are as a country, and more importantly, who we should be." With that in mind, Obama the president must make it his mission to give voice to a patriotism dramatically more enlightened and inspiring than that preached by his predecessor.

For one thing, he can extend the definition of patriotism to include not just civic virtues but economic rights. It is a given that if Obama takes the oath he swears on January 20 seriously, he will restore executive branch respect for the system of checks and balances; he'll renounce torture; he'll restore the rule of law. But if there is hope for turning the American experiment in a more responsible and sustainable direction, the process must begin with a new understanding of patriotism that includes, finally, guaranteed healthcare for all, access to a good education and a fair distribution of this nation's resources.

Obama has already sketched the soft outlines of a liberal patriotism, with its respect for dissent and reverence for equal opportunity, which takes on new meaning when expressed by the nation's first African-American president. In one of the most important, if underreported, speeches of the campaign, he told a Missouri crowd, "I remember, when living for four years in Indonesia as a child, listening to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' I remember her explaining how this declaration applied to every American, black and white and brown alike; how those words, and words of the United States Constitution, protected us from the injustices that we witnessed other people suffering during those years abroad. That's my idea of America."

As president, Obama has the position and the pulpit that will allow him to help us embrace a deeper, richer, more progressive patriotism. This, far more than any program, is where presidents define not just the transitory debates of their day but a fundamental understanding of America. Conservatives know this, and it is why they devote so much time to challenging the patriotism of all who stand to their left. Great progressives have known it as well. Franklin Roosevelt did not place his imprint on America with mere programs; he used every available means--from inaugural addresses to Thanksgiving proclamations--to foster a patriotism that included not just civil rights but economic rights. "There is, I fear, too great a tendency to give to patriotism merely an interest in making our country unconquerable in war, a feeling that our chief aim is to see that our army and our navy are sufficient for our protection. That is but a part of our patriotic duty," he declared on a distant Armistice (Veterans) Day. "Our country is in a sense continually at war against the ramparts of liberty, equality and justice on which our Republic is founded. Surging constantly are the evil forces of greed, of materialism, of selfishness, headed by those who cynically deny that there is any prosperity that cannot be expressed in dollars and cents, or happiness except in bank balances."

It falls to Barack Obama to tip the balance once more. Recent Democratic presidents have fallen short in this work--Jimmy Carter offered too much malaise and too little inspiration; Bill Clinton was too much of a tinkering technocrat to think big. John Kennedy was better at it, but his truncated presidency was always more about traveling hopefully than arriving. So FDR remains the touchstone. But he is no more than that. From Roosevelt we learn that it is possible for a president to speak seriously of grafting an economic bill of rights onto the founding documents of the Republic. But even if the current economic crisis recalls the mess Roosevelt inherited in 1932, these are different times, and America is a different country. Obama will have to find his own language of American renewal. This new president does not need to borrow words from his predecessor, but he should borrow FDR's determination to take one word--patriotism--and give it a definition as visionary, and as progressive, as this moment, with all its peril and potential, demands.

POLITICS - On Unions

"Employees' Free Choice?" Bill Moyers Journal

This week, the JOURNAL explored the present state – and potential future – of America’s unions.

As of 2007, approximately 12 percent of America’s workforce was unionized, down from 20 percent in 1980 and a height of more than a third of U.S. workers in the mid-1940s. Last year unions spent heavily on campaign contributions for Democratic candidates and to promote controversial legislation known as the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT summarized EFCA as follows:

The key provision of the Employee Free Choice Act could make it more feasible for the workers of smaller businesses to unionize. Under current law, in order for a union to be recognized at a business, 30 percent of the workers of the business in question must express support for joining a union. This is then followed by a secret ballot election where half of the workers must vote in favor of joining. The Employee Free Choice Act would make this election unnecessary and allow the union to be recognized through a process known as "card check." A majority of workers simply need to sign cards expressing their intent to join the union, and this process need not be secret.

Supporters of EFCA contend that larger unions might empower workers and help rebuild the middle class, while opponents argue that scrapping the secret vote could subject workers to coercion and intimidation. Former Senator George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, explained his opposition to EFCA in a column for the WALL STREET JOURNAL:

As a longtime friend of labor unions, I must raise my voice against pending legislation I see as a disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor... There are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked and intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues. Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal... To fail to ensure a vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.

Responding to critics' objections, JOURNAL guest and EFCA supporter Leo Gerard, International President of United Steelworkers, said:

“What is a greater vote than putting my name on a card, signing my name and saying I want this union?... The fact of the matter is that kind of myth is the myth that's created by the union busters... [Bosses] come into the workplace now and call the worker into the room and say, 'you know, buddy, if you join this union we're gonna move this plant to Mexico. Now go out and decide to vote.' What are you going to do when your family and you are making $9 an hour, $10 an hour, and the boss is taking home $10 million? What are you going to do with your so-called 'secret ballot' vote?"

What do you think?

POLITICS - Lesson on "How to be Insulting" by Bush Administration

MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast Jan. 6, 2009



Ah, yes. The "We don't need to be nice," Administration.

POLITICS - Shakin' Them Up

"New Sheriff Time: Obama Shakes Up The Senate" by Jane Hamsher, FireDogLake

It may not have been intentional. Obama was still in his first term when he hit the campaign trail, so it was only natural that he would forge most of his close connections to DC insiders within the Senate. But as he filled out his administration with one Senator after another, he precipitated a desperately needed shakeup in that musty, ancient, bloviating and self-important entity that considers itself "the most exclusive club in the world."

The musical chairs began when Democratic leadership decided the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is in charge of disbursing more than $1 trillion a year in federal spending, was too important to be chaired by the 91 year-old Robert Byrd (who was sending his aides to the meetings he didn't sleep through). But they observed those august rules of Senate seniority and replaced him with the largely ineffectual Daniel Inouye, 84, so that hardly signaled radical change.

Inouye's decision to take over Appropriations meant he had to give up Commerce. Then Biden's departure from Foreign Relations triggered a mad scramble for powerful committee chairmanships that ended with Kerry taking over after he failed to receive a cabinet appointment. Mary Landrieu took over Kerry's chair of small business. Rockefeller gave up Intelligence and took Inouye's seat at Commerce, and Diane Feinstein assumed the Intelligence helm.

And that was that. The Senators decided amongst themselves how power would be distributed -- they swatted away the pesky gnats who questioned their right to decide what goes on in their club and handed a gavel back to Joe Lieberman, and everyone set out to assert their new authority and exercise control of their new turf.

We are not amused howled Feinstein when Obama had the temerity to offer Leon Panetta the helm of the CIA without consulting her. Jay Rockefeller and Evan Bayh were sighing about how this is very disconcerting indeed, and they are hailing Feinstein's decision to do something she never did to George Bush -- put forward her own candidate, Stephen Kappes. They are flashing the ever fashionable fuscha terror alert button and wagging their fingers about Panetta's lack of intelligence background, but the message was clear -- this challenge to their authority was not acceptable.

They all sound like Sally Quinn.

There is insufficient space here on this blog to recount all the things that the Intelligence Committee has screwed up in recent years, but suffice to say that Feinstein enabled most of it. She has been a key Bush ally who cast critical votes in support of his most extremist assertions of power. Her default position is consistently to protect establishment power, and she never batted an eyelash about casting votes that were worth billions in defense contracts to firms owned by her husband. There are few people in public office more territorial and consumed by a sense of entitlement than Diane Feinstein.

Bush neutralized meaningful opposition to his worst, most extra-legal and noxious actions from Congressional Democrats by bringing them into the fold, flattering them and playing to their own sense of self-importance as he explained to them the things he hid from the public. Chief among those were Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Jane Harmon (who was evidently a Feinstein favorite for the CIA post).

If someone truly were to come in from the outside and try to find out what happened at the CIA with regard to torture and illegal spying, the complicity and ensuing silence of this entitled crew risks exposure. They've already demonstrated they'll do just about anything to keep that from happening -- that's how we got retroactive telecom immunity in the first place.

It's notable that Ron Wyden, who also sits on the Intelligence Committee, was consulted about Panetta and approved of his choice.

I have no idea if Panetta would make a good CIA chief or not. But if there is a better place for someone to come in and start shaking up Washington DC, I can't think of a better place for Obama to start than the club currently in high caterwaul about his appointment.

HAPPY NEW YEAR - What's Bogus 2008

"Year-end Whoppers" FactCheck.org

This is just the Summary from their full article

We've often said that the spin never stops in Washington. And the weeks since Nov. 4 offer further evidence of that.

Consider some of the bogus claims we've debunked just since Election Day:

• It's not true that unionized auto workers at Detroit's Big Three make more than $70 an hour, as claimed by some opponents of federal aid.


• And no, 3 million workers won't be tossed out of work if aid is not forthcoming, as claimed by those favoring a taxpayer bailout.


• President-elect Obama never promised to seek a ban on all semi-automatic weapons, as claimed by some fearful gun owners.


• And no, Obama did not propose a Gestapo-like civilian security force as claimed by a Republican member of Congress from Georgia and any number of overwrought bloggers.


• Democrats in Congress are not discussing any plan to confiscate the assets in 401(k) retirement accounts, another falsehood spread about by chain e-mails and Internet postings.


• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not demand a 757-size personal jet, a false claim resurrected when Democrats criticized Big Three executives for flying to D.C. on their own private jets to beg for aid.


• And Pelosi's husband doesn't own a $17 million stake in a food company that she may (or may not) have tried to help with an exemption from a new minimum wage law.

For details, plus bonus features including video of misleading TV spots by the United Auto Workers and by auto dealers, please read on to the Analysis section.

Watch our "Ask FactCheck" space for new items in the next few days. We'll post the truth about a claim that the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to levy a tax on farmers' cows and hogs. And we'll give you the real story behind a widely circulating (and false) claim that the murder rate in counties that voted for Obama is six times higher than in counties that supported McCain.

And if history is any guide, we'll have much more to debunk in the New Year, too.

POLITICS - Good Ole' Republican Welfare for the Rich

"Executive Pay Limits May Prove Toothless" by Amit R. Paley, Washington Post

Page 1 of 2:

Loophole in Bailout Provision Leaves Enforcement in Doubt

Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

"The flimsy executive-compensation restrictions in the original bill are now all but gone," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), ranking Republican on of the Senate Finance Committee.

The modification reflects how the rapidly shifting nature of the crisis and the government's response to it have led to unexpected results that are just now beginning to be understood. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, issued a critical report this month about the financial industry rescue package that said it was unclear how the Treasury would determine whether banks were following the executive-compensation rules.

Michele A. Davis, spokeswoman for the Treasury, said the agency is working to develop a policy for how it will enforce the executive-compensation rules. She would not say when the guidance would be issued or what penalties it might impose. But she said the companies promised to follow the rules in contracts with the department.

The final legislation contained unprecedented restrictions on executive compensation for firms accepting money from the bailout fund. The rules limited incentives that encourage top executives to take excessive risks, provided for the recovery of bonuses based on earnings that never materialize and prohibited "golden parachute" severance pay. But several analysts said that perhaps the most effective provision was the ban on companies deducting more than $500,000 a year from their taxable income for compensation paid to their top five executives.

That tax provision, which amended the Internal Revenue Code, was the only part of the law that contained an explicit enforcement mechanism. The provision means the IRS must review the pay of those executives as part of its normal review of tax filings. If a company does not comply, the IRS can impose a tax penalty. The law did not create an enforcement mechanism for reviewing the other restrictions on executive pay.

If a firm violates the executive-compensation limits, department officials said, the Treasury could seek damages, go to court to force compliance, or even rescind the contracts and recover the bailout money. "We therefore have all the remedies available to us for a breach of contract," Davis wrote in an e-mail.

Legal experts said those efforts could be complicated if the Treasury outlines the penalties after companies have received bailout money. David M. Lynn, former chief counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission's division of corporation finance, said courts have sometimes placed limits on the government's ability to impose penalties if there was no fair warning.

Hay, come on people. Those "poor" CEOs may have to give up a mistress or two AND their Ferrari if their "compensation" is cut.

POLITICS - Changes On the Way

Denise McCluggage (1927)

Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin.

Richard Hooker (1554–1600)

Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.

The following are only excerpts from these articles, there's more.

"Obama Teams Are Scrutinizing Federal Agencies" by Shailagh Murray and Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post

Wearing yellow badges and traveling in groups of 10 or more, agency review teams for President-elect Barack Obama have swarmed into dozens of government offices, from the Pentagon to the National Council on Disability.

With pointed questions and clear ground rules, they are dissecting agency initiatives, poring over budgets and unearthing documents that may prove crucial as a new Democratic president assumes control. Their job is to minimize the natural tension between incoming and outgoing administrations, but their work also is creating anxiety among some Bush administration officials as the teams rigorously examine programs and policies.

Lisa Brown, who served as counsel to Vice President Al Gore and is helping manage the reviews, said typical questions include: "Which is the division that has really run amok? Or that has run out of money? If someone is confirmed, what's going to be on their desk from Day One? What are the main things that need to happen, vis-a-vis Obama's priorities?"

Every presidential changeover includes some type of review of the federal landscape, but some have succeeded more than others, experts say. Obama's teams -- 135 people divided into 10 groups, along with a list of other advisers -- started earlier than most, gearing up months before Election Day with preliminary planning, and will work until mid-December preparing reports to guide the White House, Cabinet members and other senior officials.

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"Gates: Military looking at quicker Iraq withdrawal" by Lolita C. Baldor, Boston Globe

Defense Secretary Robert Gates signaled a willingness yesterday to forge ahead with two key priorities for the incoming Obama administration: accelerating the US withdrawal from Iraq and shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

As the only Republican Cabinet member asked to stay on by President-elect Barack Obama, Gates told reporters that military commanders are looking at ways to more quickly pull troops out of Iraq in light of the 16-month timetable that was a centerpiece of the Democrat's campaign.

He also said it will be a high priority to work with the new Congress on legislation that will enable the United States to close the detention center at the US naval base in Cuba, where about 250 terrorism suspects are still being held.

In a blunt and occasionally personal briefing, Gates acknowledged his unique position in the new Democratic administration.

"I guess I would say that I was engaged in my own form of strategic deterrence," said Gates, who for two years has talked of his desire to return home to Washington state. "It was my hope that if I made enough noise about how much I did not want to stay here and how much I wanted to go back to the Northwest that I wouldn't have to worry about the question ever being asked."

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"Generals to urge quick action on torture by Obama" by Randall Mikkelsen, Reuters

Barack Obama should act from the moment of his inauguration to restore a U.S. image battered by allegations of torturing terrorism suspects, said a group of retired military leaders planning to press their case with the president-elect's transition team on Wednesday.

"We need to remove the stain, and the stain is on us, as well as on our reputation overseas," said retired Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, former Navy inspector general.

Gunn and about a dozen other retired generals and admirals, who are scheduled to meet Obama's team in Washington, said they plan to offer a list of anti-torture principles, including some that could be implemented immediately.

They include making the Army Field Manual the single standard for all U.S. interrogators. The manual requires humane treatment and forbids practices such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning widely condemned as torture.

Other immediate steps Obama could take are revoking presidential orders allowing the CIA to use harsh treatment, giving the International Red Cross access to all prisoners held by intelligence agencies and declaring a moratorium on taking prisoners to a third country for harsh interrogations.

ECONOMY - The Keystone Cops

Should the recession persist for another five months, consistent with Fed and private forecasts, it would become the longest since the Great Depression.

At 12 months, the current contraction is already the longest since the 16-month slump that ended in November 1982, and exceeds the postwar average of 10 months.

The contraction is the second under President George W. Bush’s watch, making him the first U.S. leader since Richard Nixon to preside over two recessions.

"AP IMPACT: They warned us, but US eased loan rules" by Matt Apuzzo, AP

The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

"Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

"These mortgages have been considered more safe and sound for portfolio lenders than many fixed rate mortgages," David Schneider, home loan president of Washington Mutual, told federal regulators in early 2006. Two years later, WaMu became the largest bank failure in U.S. history.
The administration's blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of a philosophy that trusted market forces and discounted the need for government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.

"We're going to be feeling the effects of the regulators' failure to address these mortgages for the next several years," said Kevin Stein of the California Reinvestment Coalition, who warned regulators to tighten lending rules before it was too late.

Many of the banks that fought to undermine the proposals by some regulators are now either out of business or accepting billions in federal aid to recover from a mortgage crisis they insisted would never come. Many executives remain in high-paying jobs, even after their assurances were proved false.

In 2005, faced with ominous signs the housing market was in jeopardy, bank regulators proposed new guidelines for banks writing risky loans. Today, in the midst of the worst housing recession in a generation, the proposal reads like a list of what-ifs:

• Regulators told bankers exotic mortgages were often inappropriate for buyers with bad credit.


• Banks would have been required to increase efforts to verify that buyers actually had jobs and could afford houses.


• Regulators proposed a cap on risky mortgages so a string of defaults wouldn't be crippling.


• Banks that bundled and sold mortgages were told to be sure investors knew exactly what they were buying.


• Regulators urged banks to help buyers make responsible decisions and clearly advise them that interest rates might skyrocket and huge payments might be due sooner than expected.

Those proposals all were stripped from the final rules. None required congressional approval or the president's signature.

"In hindsight, it was spot on," said Jeffrey Brown, a former top official at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, one of the first agencies to raise concerns about risky lending.

Federal regulators were especially concerned about mortgages known as "option ARMs," which allow borrowers to make payments so low that mortgage debt actually increases every month. But banking executives accused the government of overreacting.

Bankers said such loans might be risky when approved with no money down or without ensuring buyers have jobs but such risk could be managed without government intervention.

"An open market will mean that different institutions will develop different methodologies for achieving this goal," Joseph Polizzotto, counsel to now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, told U.S. regulators in a March 2006.

Countrywide Financial Corp., at the time the nation's largest mortgage lender, agreed. The proposal "appears excessive and will inhibit future innovation in the marketplace," said Mary Jane Seebach, managing director of public affairs.

One of the most contested rules said that before banks purchase mortgages from brokers, they should verify the process to ensure buyers could afford their homes. Some bankers now blame much of the housing crisis on brokers who wrote fraudulent, predatory loans. But in 2006, banks said they shouldn't have to double-check the brokers.

"It is not our role to be the regulator for the third-party lenders," wrote Ruthann Melbourne, chief risk officer of IndyMac Bank.

California-based IndyMac also criticized regulators for not recognizing the track record of interest-only loans and option ARMs, which accounted for 70 percent of IndyMac's 2005 mortgage portfolio. This summer, the government seized IndyMac and will pay an estimated $9 billion to ensure customers don't lose their deposits.

Last week, Downey Savings joined the growing list of failed banks. The problem: About 52 percent of its mortgage portfolio was tied up in risky option ARMs, which in 2006 Downey insisted were safe — maybe even safer than traditional 30-year mortgages.

"To conclude that 'nontraditional' equates to higher risk does not appropriately balance risk and compensating factors of these products," said Lillian Gavin, the bank's chief credit officer.

At least some regulators didn't buy it. The comptroller of the currency, John C. Dugan, was among the first to sound the alarm in mid-2005. Speaking to a consumer advocacy group, Dugan painted a troublesome picture of option-ARM lending. Many buyers, particularly those with bad credit, would soon be unable to afford their payments, he said. And if housing prices declined, homeowners wouldn't even be able to sell their way out of the mess.

It sounded simple, but "people kind of looked at us regulators as old-fashioned," said Brown, the agency's former deputy comptroller.

Diane Casey-Landry, of the American Bankers Association, said the industry feared a two-tiered system in which banks had to follow rules that mortgage brokers did not. She said opposition was based on the banks' best information.

"You're looking at a decline in real estate values that was never contemplated," she said.

Some saw problems coming. Community groups and even some in the mortgage business, like Welch, warned regulators not to ease their rules.

"We expect to see a huge increase in defaults, delinquencies and foreclosures as a result of the over selling of these products," Stein, the associate director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, wrote to regulators in 2006. The group advocates on housing and banking issues for low-income and minority residents.

The government's banking agencies spent nearly a year debating the rules, which required unanimous agreement among the OCC, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Federal Reserve, and the Office of Thrift Supervision — agencies that sometimes don't agree.

The Fed, for instance, was reluctant under Alan Greenspan to heavily regulate lending. Similarly, the Office of Thrift Supervision, an arm of the Treasury Department that regulated many in the subprime mortgage market, worried that restricting certain mortgages would hurt banks and consumers.

Grovetta Gardineer, OTS managing director for corporate and international activities, said the 2005 proposal "attempted to send an alarm bell that these products are bad." After hearing from banks, she said, regulators were persuaded that the loans themselves were not problematic as long as banks managed the risk. She disputes the notion that the rules were weakened.

Marc Savitt, president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, said regulators were afraid of stopping a good thing.

"If it seems to be working, if it's not broken don't fix it, if everybody's making money, then the good times are rolling and nobody wants to be the one guy to put the brakes on," he said.

In the past year, with Congress scrambling to stanch the bleeding in the financial industry, regulators have tightened rules on risky mortgages.

Congress is considering further tightening, including some of the same proposals abandoned years ago.

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"U.S. Recession Started in 2007, Longest Since 1980s" by Timothy R. Homan and Steve Matthews, Bloomberg

The U.S. economy entered a recession a year ago this month, the panel that dates American business cycles said today, making this contraction already the longest since 1982.

The declaration was made by a committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, nonprofit group of economists based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The last time the U.S. was in a recession was from March through November 2001, according to NBER.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke today said the economy “will probably remain weak for a time” and the Fed may use unconventional methods, such as buying Treasury securities, to spur growth. Should the recession persist for another five months, consistent with Fed and private forecasts, it would become the longest since the Great Depression.

“It is clearly not going to end in a few months,” Jeffrey Frankel, a member of the NBER committee and a professor at Harvard University, said in an interview. “We would be lucky to get done with it in the middle of next year.”

Separate reports today showed the recession has deepened. U.S. manufacturing contracted in November at the fastest rate in 26 years, according to the Institute for Supply Management, based in Tempe, Arizona. The Commerce Department said construction spending fell more than forecast in October as a slump in homebuilding spread to non-residential projects.

Stocks Slump

Stocks worldwide tumbled and yields on U.S. Treasury securities fell to the lowest ever on concern a lack of financing will stunt consumer and business spending.

The NBER designation means the U.S. was the first country to have slipped into a contraction. While definitions differ, the economies of both the euro area and Japan fell into a slump in the second quarter of this year, making it the first simultaneous recession in the three regions in the postwar era.

The loss of 1.2 million jobs so far this year was the biggest factor in determining the starting point of the U.S. recession, the NBER said. By that measure, the contraction probably deepened last month.

Payroll employment probably fell by 325,000 in November, the most since the last recession, according to the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News ahead of a Labor Department report due Dec. 5. The jobless rate is projected to increase to 6.8 percent, the highest level since 1993.

Payrolls Drop

U.S. employers cut 240,000 jobs in October, a 10th consecutive decline. The unemployment rate rose to 6.5 percent, the highest level in 14 years, according to Labor Department statistics.

At 12 months, the current contraction is already the longest since the 16-month slump that ended in November 1982, and exceeds the postwar average of 10 months.

The contraction is the second under President George W. Bush’s watch, making him the first U.S. leader since Richard Nixon to preside over two recessions.

“The most important things we can do for the economy right now are to return the financial and credit markets to normal, and to continue to make progress in housing, and that’s where we’ll continue to focus,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto, said in an e-mailed statement. “Addressing these areas will do the most right now to return the economy to growth and job creation.”

Summers, More Action

Lawrence Summers, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for White House economic adviser, said the economy is getting worse and requires more legislative action.

“Recent economic evidence suggests that the pace of this downturn is accelerating,” Summers said in a statement. He said Obama wants to enact a recovery package “soon after taking office.”

The likely length of this downturn may cast doubt on economists’ view that the business cycle was moderating in recent decades.

“Everyone had thought long, deep recessions were a thing of the past,” Frankel said. “There was a lot of talk of the new economy.”

Although a recession is conventionally defined as two quarters of successive contraction in gross domestic product, the private committee doesn’t require supporting GDP data to make a recession call. Its members focus on month-to-month changes in the economy.

The NBER committee defines a recession as a “significant” decrease in activity over a sustained period of time. The decline would be visible in gross domestic product, payrolls, industrial production, sales and incomes.

Getting Worse

The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.5 percent pace in the third quarter after expanding 2.8 percent in the previous three months. Economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley in New York are among those projecting the economy will contract at a 5 percent pace this quarter.
Members of the committee are Frankel; Stanford University professor Robert Hall; Martin Feldstein of Harvard University; Northwestern University economics professor Robert Gordon; NBER president James Poterba; David Romer of the University of California at Berkeley; and Conference Board economist Victor Zarnowitz.

Do you hear the GOP mantra in the background? NO Regulation, No Regulation, No Regulation. We feel your pain.