Pollster.com discusses the questions circling amongst Dems as to what might have been different had Edwards gotten out of the race earlier. Mark Penn thinks everybody would have swung for Hillary. That’s because Mark Penn is a hapless douchebag. Who really thinks that the uber-Liberal Edwards supporters would have broken for Hillary who doesn’t also think that naked racism is the way to win a Democratic primary? Show of hands?
Interesting discussion, but Hill and ‘Bama are bestest buddies now. Let’s not get this shit started again. . .
Following on from my previous post about the Student Loan Corporation email I got this morning, it looks like the plan President Obama is proposing is basically to eliminate a subsidy system for private loan corporations that the government has been running for the last fifty years. This WaPo op-ed does a great job of laying out the history.
In short, the government has been insuring low-interest student loans for all this time by basically guaranteeing profits for private banks like Citi Corp who give out those loans. Its a classic Frankenstein Washington program where those who insist on free market rules and those who insist on government assistance get together and insure that neither happens. The Obama plan eliminates the cost of maintaining this facade by letting the Department of Education provide the loans through Treasury.
How much will tax payers save because of this new plan, if adopted? Estimates put that number between $40 and $100 billion annually.
Citi’s email is, typically, effusive with unsupported “facts” about how this will negatively impact both the government’s bottom line and consumers. The claim that this new plan will increase the federal deficit “substantially” is unsubstantiated as yet: there’s no concrete plan that I can find on how the loans will be doled out. Logically, if we can afford multi-trillion dollar bailouts to banks like Citi, I’m sure we can handle a few student loans. The word “substantial” is subjective and relative. Meanwhile as a matter of bookkeeping, since student loans can last for decades without defaulting, they are a relatively stable investment. At the risk of recalling the Subprime problem, student loans can be handled as assets, not debts.
Their claim that this is an anti-choice plan presupposes that those of us who go to college are really in control of where we get loans from. In reality, the student loan game is a rigged one, just like health care. The word “choice” is a double entendre: it sounds like the choice is yours, but the choice is really made by corporations and large institutions – colleges or hospitals, depending on the example.
Citi lists a number of advantages of student loans that it claims are the result of competition, such as default prevention services, education and web access. It is debatable whether web access is an advantage or an inevitability, but default protection and education will surely both continue under the new plan. The problem with this entire line of argument, though, is that if there’s no risk then there’s no real competition. The current system is not a free market system and so the entire argument breaks down right there.
Readers of this website know I have made no secret of my support for President Barack Obama. That support remains unflagging to this point. But politicians have one set of agendas, and the people another, so there is a time for all of us to break with our supported politicians and pressure them to do things they don’t want to do. I say this not as an apologia, but because the media’s insistence on a purely dualistic world of supporters and detractors completely obscures the meaning of the term “loyal opposition.” Opposition to your president does not necessarily presuppose hateful invectives.
Such is the case with the torture investigations. Clearly, Obama is not in favour of going forward with them. And as a practical matter, I don’t necessarily blame him: he’s not just the president, he is also a president, which means he has the power to make or break precedent in the Oval Office and so does his next successor. The precedent set here might be that a sitting president can prosecute a former president for misdeeds in office. Presidents have generally been very reluctant to do this for a simple reason: regardless of the justness of a given prosecution, the precedent leaves itself open to politically-motivated abuse down the line. Just as many of us have argued in the cases of eavesdropping and other violations of civil rights under the Bush Administration, the justness of motivation does not always outweigh the potential for abuse in the future.
And mindful as I am of that dangerous precedent, there has to be some point at which the potential threat of abuse is outweighed by the clear danger presented by the violations of the former administration. In this case, we’re not dealing with illegal actions that lived in a bubble, cut off from effect the moment President Bush left office. What we have is, again, a dangerous precedent that says that when a president wants to do something, all he needs is a few pliable lawyers to write grade-school legal justifications and he’s off to the races. And not just “something.” We’re talking about torturing human beings. . . on top of wrongful incarceration and illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens. Taken as a whole, the Bush Administration opened up a little slice of totalitarianism that must – must – be closed, nailed shut and boarded up forever.
And what’s more, I think that there is also a political reality right now that cannot be ignored and in this one case, should not be ignored. The same wave of realization and needful correction that brought Barack Obama to power also drives the need to redress this most awful of crimes against the American consciousness. He cannot turn that tide back without crushing himself in the process.
Between the American public’s obvious need for self-correction and the institutional need for justice, the need to break with the president and make him do something unprecedented is overwhelming. And for the first time, we see Barack Obama being overtaken by the wave rather than riding it. This is what it means to be president, sometimes. This is what it means to elect one, too. As troublesome as the situation is and as dangerous as the path before us may be, for the benefit of our president and our nation, we must continue to push him to investigate the torture policies instituted by the Bush Administration.
This woman is fucking nuts. I thought Minnesota was kind of a liberal place? And the woman running the show is worse than Bachman.
Not with money, of course. That will have to wait for later. Right now, one big challenge for the Obama Administration is getting seats filled in key Treasury positions without getting blocked by the Republicans.
Three more nominees have been announced. Here’s to hoping we can get Geithner some help up there. At least someone to answer the freakin’ phones.
Paul Krugman checks in with a well-constructed, common sense explanation for why the recently-leaked Geithner plan is a crappy one. Basically, the plan only works if there isn’t any underlying problem beyond a market panic, which I think any reasonable person paying a modest amount of attention has to realize is simply not the case.
I’ve always admired Barack Obama for his ability to surround himself with good people who are competent at what they do. His financial team makes plain the down-side of this: without good people, he’s stuck in the mud on the most pressing issue of our day.
Finally for this post, let me also counterbalance these negative thoughts with ones perhaps more calm: the man’s been at work for not quite 60 days. There’s time for him to get things right and maybe if enough smart people tell him what a mistake this plan is – Krugman, Baker, I’m looking in your direction – he can reverse course. The media’s insistence on drumming up fears for the sake of ratings notwithstanding, we’ve managed to bumble along for five months without a permanent solution. I’m sure a little bit more time is not going to break us.
OK, I’m not too interested in getting into a big discussion of Obama’s Special Olympics comment on Jay Leno the other night. But for the short time that this story will be out there, it’s worth putting in my two cents.
When Bill Clinton made his South Carolina gaff; when Geraldine Ferraro made her gaff on The Today Show; when locally, Bob Lonsberry has made his many comments on the radio, I’ve always said that it’s not about whether you find the comment offensive as the speaker, but whether the listener finds the comments offensive. The same is true for Barack Obama, and irrespective of how many people are saying “come on, let’s get over it,” clearly some people found it offensive.
The Obama people are making statements of contrition, which is more than I can say for any of the aforementioned politicos. But this isn’t one of those “have my people call your people” situations: he’s going to need to just come out and put this one to bed with a heart-felt apology.
I know his handlers will say that this will “feed the beast.” I say fine: feed the beast. And at the end of this very short story, let the record show that our president had the courage to be a decent person and simply apologize for a simple mistake.
Clearly, Paul Krugman is in no mood to be charitable to the Obama Administration or Tim Geithner. Not that there’s very much reason to be charitable to an administration that’s floundering badly right now.
There’s gotta be some people who know what the hell they’re doing with money who aren’t still sucking the balls of the Captains of Industry, right? Someone else who can steer the Treasury in a way that benefits someone other than the banks?
So saith McClatchy News Service.
But as it’s been said over and over again, the tax cuts under George Bush were irresponsible in the first place, and Obama’s plan merely restores the tax code to it’s Clinton Era state, when the rich were doing just fine as I recall. It would be nice if the journos over there at Micky-C’s would point that out.
Fighting29th.com has a post stitching together local media expectations of the president’s speech tonight. As usual, there’s nothing terribly original from local media, which takes it’s queues from the national. In fairness, I suppose we’re all guilty of that.
But what is genuinely breathtaking is the ability of the media to go from zero to one hundred in less than three seconds of self-critique. How did we go from a president of whom no one thought much and no one asked much to a president whose expected to deliver Olympic-quality oratory every single time? We just wanted something that looked kind of like a plan before, and sage talking heads would bobble up and down that yes, he kind of made sense. Now, discussion of Barack Obama’s latest speech looks like Monday Night Football pregame discussion. Bet that someone is mapping the progress of Obama’s “stats” for later discussion.
Ask and they will tell you that there’s no question about it: Barack Obama’s got a tall order ahead of him. He needs to reassure the public that he knows what’s going on and what to do next. He needs to steady panicked markets. He needs to use inclusive language to bring Republicans onboard.
But while that’s great for MSNBC’s ratings, a rational assesment of the situation doesn’t look nearly like that. The support of the public has been iron-clad so far, though in truth, the administration is new enough to be experiencing some of the forgiving nature of a public that so recently voted for him. Given his ability to speak – of hope and of challenges, both – we can be assured that Americans will largely stay put in their opinion polls.
As for the panicked markets, I’ve discussed before the fact that much of the marketplace today is absorbed in the fate of banks. They’re not going to be improving their mood while the bank situation resolves itself because no option that makes sense makes them happy. Tough shit, kiddies: you break it, the government may need to buy it.
And as for Republicans, I’m afraid its going to be up to them to get on board. Left as they are with such preposterous wingnuts, the more sensible members of that party, such as exist now, are going to need to find away to get a voice in the discussion. They’ve done OK in the Senate in terms of voting for the stimulus, but the problem on their side of the isle is largely rhetorical. It’s the kind of challenge where the most extreme elements of the party scream that day is night and the more moderate voices are forced to speak in that same language.
And to an extent, we are all stuck speaking the language of the hard right. How else could we end up talking about “nationalizing” banks and “bankruptcy” for GM as though they were two different things?
