Monday, March 09, 2009 - Posts
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Monday, March 9, 2009
When I read the headline "Limbaugh: Kennedy Will Be Dead By the Time Health Care Bill Passes," I just sort of assumed that Limbaugh had said something like "Kennedy will be dead by the time the health care bill passes." Those talk radio hosts always have to generate controversy. etc. Here's what he actually said:
We have a banking and a credit crisis. Obama and his team had a show gathering to focus on the problem, but they have done little, if anything, to so much as start fixing it. Any leader would keep focused on fixing that mess, but that's not the stuff that makes approval numbers rise, because there really isn't much he can do except shift people's attitudes about it.
So he's moved on to health care. This is highly visible, it's news leading, gets a great focus, plus it has the great liberal lion Teddy Kennedy pushing it. Before it's all over it will be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care Bill. So when you have the banking and the credit problem still unfixed and with health care still unfixed, they'll move on to another caring story: alternate energy -- I don't know; your guess is as good as mine.
Not quite the same thing, is it? Limbaugh's not saying, "Nyah, nyah, the bill will take so long to pass that Kennedy will be dead." I'm not sure he's even saying Kennedy will die--couldn't you have a "memorial" to him while he's alive? He's mainly arguing that Obama will try to boost his approval by playing to emotions and "caring," and that he and his allies will use sympathy for the illness of the "great liberal lion" to generate support for a health care bill (as they undoubtedly will). ... I don't agree with Limbaugh's argument--I think Obama wants to actually pass health care, not just distract attention from his failure to solve the banking crisis. But the statement isn't really disrespectful of Kennedy. If anything, it's the other way around.
Shame on me for believing a HuffPo headline.
P.S.: The whole Begala-Carville coordinated campaign against Limbaugh seems misguided when Obama is supposed to be leading the nation out of crisis (see Warren Buffett's comments, below). Quite apart from whether it's a good idea to take one of your smarter opponents and build him up, the campaign seems petty, partisan and poll-driven--not designed to produce any kind of national pulling-together. If Begala weren't around I'd suspect Chris Lehane of thinking it up. ... 8:11 P.M.
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First Time The MSM Has Ever Ignored Warren Buffett: The press accounts I've read have wildly underplayed Obama supporter Warren Buffet's criticism of the President on CNBC today. It's fairly pointed, and Buffett comes back to it, suggesting he has a message he's trying to deliver. [E.A.]:
BUFFETT: ...And, Joe, it--if you're in a war, and we really are on an economic war, there's a obligation to the majority to behave in ways that don't go around inflaming the minority. If on December 8th when--maybe it's December 7th, when Roosevelt convened Congress to have a vote on the war, he didn't say, `I'm throwing in about 10 of my pet projects ... [snip] ...
JOE: Yeah, but you might--might not have fixed...
BUFFETT: But I say...
JOE: You might not--you might not have fixed global warming the day after--the day after D-Day, Warren.
BUFFETT: Absolutely. And I think that the--I think that the Republicans have an obligation to regard this as an economic war and to realize you need one leader and, in general, support of that. But I think that the--I think that the Democrats--and I voted for Obama and I strongly support him, and I think he's the right guy--but I think they should not use this--when they're calling for unity on a question this important, they should not use it to roll the Republicans all.
JOE: Hm.
BUFFETT: I think--I think a lot of things should be--job one is to win the war, job--the economic war, job two is to win the economic war, and job three. And you can't expect people to unite behind you if you're trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat. So I would--I would absolutely say for the--for the interim, till we get this one solved, I would not be pushing a lot of things that are--you know are contentious, and I also--I also would do no finger-pointing whatsoever. I would--you know, I would not say, you know, `George'--`the previous administration got us into this.' Forget it. I mean, you know, the Navy made a mistake at Pearl Harbor and had too many ships there. But the idea that we'd spend our time after that, you know, pointing fingers at the Navy, we needed the Navy. So I would--I would--I would--no finger-pointing, no vengeance, none of that stuff. Just look forward. ..[snip] ...
BUFFETT: Well, I was going to mention to Joe that you've heard this comment recently from some Democrats recently that a `crisis is a terrible thing to waste.'
BECKY: Yeah.
BUFFETT: Now, just rephrase that and since it's, in my view, it's an economic war, and--I don't think anybody on December 7th would have said a `war is a terrible thing to waste, and therefore we're going to try and ram through a whole bunch of things and--but we expect to--expect the other party to unite behind us on the--on the big problem.' It's just a mistake, I think, when you've got one overriding objective, to try and muddle it up with a bunch of other things.
P.S.: He's against "card check." ("I think the secret ballot's pretty important in the country.") ... 7:19 P.M.
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Least convincing editorial ever?** WaPo's ed board admits 1) earmarks aren't the problem 2) the "omnibus" spending bill now before Congress would mean a "significant jump in domestic spending" of either 6 or 8 percent 3) this increase will be "built into the annual baseline" and as a practical matter, set the floor for future spending; 4) if you add in the already-passed stimulus, the "overall increase in domestic spending is a staggering 80 percent;" 5) Obama's 2010 budget "appears to envision another increase in excess of 6 percent in this category."
Yet the Post endorses the omnibus bill. It argues the only alterntive is the GOP's spending freeze. Huh? Why not block the bill, cut the increase in across-the-board spending on existing agencies in half, and substitute equivalent spending on stimulus programs that actually are reversible once the economy recovers? A Third Way! It's the sort of thing a presidential veto might accomplish, if there were a president around. ... [via Corner]
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** Harmless bloggy hyperbole. But it's a pretty strange editorial. ... 6:19 P.M.
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Creeping Multiple Interstitialism as a Negative Indicator of Web Site Health: Often, when you click on an appealing headline at the home page of a Web aggregation side, you're taken, not to the original source, but to another page on the aggregator site that summarizes the story. This second page, known (at least around here) as an "interstitial," allows the aggregator web site to get another "page view" and maybe satisfy readers before they leave the site, perhaps never to return. (Here's one example of such a page.) Interstitials can be seen as a consumer convenience or a cheap, parasitic, hit-inflating trick. But over at TIME, Mark Halperin's The Page appears to have take the technique a step further. Last week, when I hit on Halperin's home page reference to Politico's hot story of an "Ominbus Confrontation" between Pelosi and Reid, I got sent, not to the Politico story but to this page on Halperin's site. OK--but from there I could get to the Politico story, right? Nope. From there I could click to a yet another page on Halperin's site that gleaned the juicy bits from Politico's report. A double interstitial. Innovative! Only from this third Page page could you get to the original Politico story Halperin was cribbing from ... Is Time that desperate? ... 1:46 A.M.
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An American car worth buying? USA Today's James Healey raves about the Ford Focus SES. Some patriotic recessionary boosterism is probably at work--I don't believe the Focus has "upscale ambience inside." I've looked inside. But still. ... Fits with my non-expert theory that the old, obsolete Focus chassis in the current U.S. model is actually better balanced than the much-hailed modern chassis underneath the European version of the Focus and the tragic Mazda 3. ... P.S.: The U.S. car looks cheesy but reliability has been good, according to Consumer Reports. ... Made in Wayne, Michigan. ... 1:24 A.M.
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