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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Arid-zona
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Jun 21, 2010 - 05:33pm PT
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Yes Fatty the banking crisis is the one exception. Keep hanging on to that one. I mean you "called it" like right before it happened which is like predicting rain when there are clouds in the sky but good show nonetheless. Make sure to email me the article from our invasion HQ in Syria and Iran.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Jun 21, 2010 - 05:34pm PT
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"1983 began for Reagan with a 35% job approval rating -- the worst of his administration".
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Arid-zona
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Jun 21, 2010 - 06:33pm PT
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Fatty said Actually I made the comments on 12/31/05, PM your address and I'll send the article.
The peak of the RE market was the summer of 2005. I know cause I was working in RE at the time.
Still waiting on all the other things to happen.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Jun 21, 2010 - 08:56pm PT
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huh? from nyt?
The Agony of the Liberals
By ROSS DOUTHAT
They doubted him during the health care debate. They second-guessed his Afghanistan policy. They’ve fretted over his coziness with Wall Street and his comfort with executive power.
But now is the summer of their discontent. From MSNBC to “The Daily Show,” from The Huffington Post to the halls of Congress, movement liberals have had just about enough of Barack Obama.
The catalyst was last week’s lackluster Oval Office address, but the real complaints run deeper. Many liberals look at this White House and see a presidency adrift — unable to respond effectively to the crisis in the gulf, incapable of rallying the country to great tasks like the quest for clean energy, and unwilling to do what it takes to jump-start the economy.
American liberalism has always had a reputation for fractiousness and frantic self-critique. But even by those standards, the current bout of anguish over the Obama presidency seems bizarrely disproportionate.
This is the same Barack Obama, after all, who shepherded universal health care, the dream of liberals since the days of Harry Truman (if not Thomas Paine), through several near-death experiences and finally into law. It’s the same Obama who staked the fate of the American economy on a $787 billion exercise in Keynesian pump-priming. It’s the same Obama who has done more to advance liberal priorities than any president since Lyndon Johnson.
Yet many on the left are talking as if he’s no better for liberalism than Bill Clinton circa 1996 — another compromiser, another triangulator and another disappointment.
At work in this liberal panic are two intellectual vices, and one legitimate fear. The first vice is the worship of presidential power: the belief that any problem, any crisis, can be swiftly solved by a strong government, and particularly a strong executive. A gushing oil well, a recalcitrant Congress, a public that’s grown weary of grand ambitions — all of these challenges could be mastered, Obama’s leftward critics seem to imagine, if only he were bolder or angrier, or maybe just more determined.
This vice isn’t confined to liberals: you can see it at work when foreign policy hawks suggest that mere presidential “toughness” is the key to undoing Iran’s clerical regime, or disarming North Korea. But it runs deepest among progressives. When Rachel Maddow fantasized last week about how Obama should simply dictate energy legislation to a submissive Congress, she was unconsciously echoing midcentury liberal theoreticians of the presidency like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who often wrote as if a Franklin Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy could run the country by fiat. (They couldn’t.)
The second vice is an overweening faith in theory. It’s now conventional wisdom among Obama’s liberal critics that the White House has been insufficiently ambitious about deficit spending. The economy is stuck in neutral, they argue, because Obama didn’t push last year’s recovery act up over a trillion dollars, and hasn’t pressed hard enough for a second major stimulus.
Technically, they could be right — but only in the same way that it’s possible that the Iraq War would have been a ringing success if only we’d invaded with a million extra soldiers. The theory is unfalsifiable because the policy course is imaginary. Maybe in some parallel universe there’s a Congress that would be willing to borrow and spend trillions in stimulus dollars, despite record deficits, if that’s what liberal economists said the situation required. But not in this one.
Yet the liberal drumbeat continues. As Tyler Cowen wrote last week: “advocates of fiscal stimulus make it sound as simple as solving an undergraduate homework problem and ... sometimes genuinely do not realize how much the rest of the world, including politicians, views them as simply being very convinced by their own theory.” Nor do they acknowledge how much risk those same politicians have already taken on (with the first stimulus, the health care bill, and much else besides) in the name of theoretical propositions, while reaping little for their efforts save an ever-grimmer fiscal picture.
But it’s here, with the looming fiscal crisis, that the more legitimate liberal fear comes in. Liberals had hoped that Obama’s election marked the beginning of a long progressive era — a new New Deal, a greater Great Society. Instead, from the West Coast to Western Europe, the welfare state is in crisis everywhere they look. The future suddenly seems to belong to austerity and retrenchment — and even, perhaps, to conservatism.
In this environment, the rage against Obama for not doing more, now, faster, becomes at least somewhat understandable. It’s not that he hasn’t done a great deal for liberals during his 18 months in office. It’s that liberalism itself may be running out of time.
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Gary
climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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Jun 21, 2010 - 09:29pm PT
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So, bookworm, does this mean you like Obama? After all, the liberals hate him.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Jun 21, 2010 - 09:30pm PT
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Bookie...is that really the best you can do?
Ross who??? A 31 one year old ass-wipe conservative.
You have a far right writer/blogger telling the world how much far left liberals are disappointed in Obama. Fecking hilarious.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Jun 21, 2010 - 10:04pm PT
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Bookie...and of course the far left will vote for Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin in 2012. LOL
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Arid-zona
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Jun 21, 2010 - 10:31pm PT
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Bookworm: Liberals are capable of introspection and self-critique. It's a pretty amazing tool. It comes along with the ability to formulate and articulate ideas in original posts.
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apogee
climber
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Jun 21, 2010 - 10:39pm PT
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I'm thinkin' about voting for Sarah for POTUS, because she has nice ta-ta's.
Can I be a Repugnican now?
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dirtbag
climber
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Jun 21, 2010 - 10:41pm PT
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That's probably the best reason to vote for her, sadly.
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Arid-zona
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Jun 21, 2010 - 10:43pm PT
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/nyregion/22terror.html?hp
Times Square Bomber pleads guilty in Federal District Court yet again proving that Obama is soft on terrorism. I mean seriously what is that now...400 convictions of terror related charges in civilian courts since 9/11? OUR COUNTRY IS DOOMED.
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jstan
climber
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Jun 21, 2010 - 10:54pm PT
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So there you have the proof.
The US is in deep trouble.
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dirtbag
climber
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Jun 21, 2010 - 10:55pm PT
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Is that what passes for serious discussions in right wing circles these days?
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apogee
climber
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Jun 21, 2010 - 10:55pm PT
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Yes. That's about it.
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apogee
climber
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Jun 21, 2010 - 11:04pm PT
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It's hard to have serious discussions with people who post stoooopid arse shite like that 'spelling lesson' Krap®. For every 2 Repugs on this thread that do that kinda shite, there's about 1 who is capable of intelligent discourse. Which one do you want to be?
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jstan
climber
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Jun 21, 2010 - 11:10pm PT
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Were he alive I think William Buckley would have come back today with a discussion of the weekend's public release by China's central bank as regards flexibility in managing their economy and exchange rates. It is a major issue not only because of the economic impacts but also because the ability our two countries have to find common cause will be affected. We very much need to hear reasoned counsel such as he offered.
Yesterday I said I thought China would continue to decrease its holdings of dollars just as they have been doing in the recent past. But no, they have now indicated they will reverse that trend - for whatever reason and for whatever length of time.
We have a President who can deal with such subtleties and is willing to take whatever heat comes down, no matter how outlandish, as he deals with the reduced situation in which we find ourselves.
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dirtbag
climber
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Jun 21, 2010 - 11:14pm PT
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Is there another reason to vote for her?
Intelligence?
Policy acumen?
or
Ta-Tas?
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Arid-zona
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Jun 21, 2010 - 11:17pm PT
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Cragman quipped The last four letters in "Republican" = I Can
Ironic then I guess that they are the party of "can't" these days.
dirtbag said Is there another reason to vote for [Palin]?
She made 12 million dollars in the first QUARTER of this year, dirtbag. How much did Obama make? A paltry $125,000 in salaried income. Palin has the economic knowhow that we need to make our economy strong again, and if one thing is for sure Palin sees things through to the end. Palin ain't no quitter.
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apogee
climber
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Jun 21, 2010 - 11:17pm PT
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"Apogee, the epitome of intelligent discussion."
That would actually mean something to me if it came from someone besides you, Cragman!
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