I’m in full weekend mood already. Nevermind the venison stew that’s marinating and awaits cooking. Nor the laundry, nor the fact that I have to get up at five tomorrow morning for a trip to Geneva. Stupid me, I should have remembered not to sign up for that one. What’s up in your corner of the world? Hey! Sanity will be restored this weekend and I am looking forward to seeing as much as I can from that rally on the internet.
This is our Open Thread and it’s Friday, so let’s chill a bit.
This is for everyone heading to Washington for the rally.
My sanity will be restored at the Temple/Kent State football game played at Lincoln Field, home of the Philadelphia Eagles on Saturday. Sunday later afternoon will be spent with a large group of friends and acquaintences at a pot luck dinner fund raiser for a local environmental group. This is the fun weekend before the stressful tiring election day Tuesday.
I wish that PA had mail in voting. Spoke with my daughter yesterday that moved to a state that has mail in voting. This is the first time that she voted in that manner and she really likes it.
Pachy – I was going to go to Washington DC and then I looked at the calendar and noticed that I had already made a date with my husband. A friend organized a bus which quickly got filled so they had to get a second bus. It’s probably going to be a big rally. I’m really nervous about Tuesday’s election. I don’t want the Republicans to win in PA because PA will be losing two seats so there will be redistricting and Repubs always make a mess of things. They are such slobs.
I just finished watching Olbermann from last night and see the Sestak is again trailing Toomey, this time by four points. What happened to the momentum? And what in the world is Toomey’s appeal? He seems to be such a classic butthead, one ruled by greed and power with zero influence of common sense, zero concern for the common person, for the country as a whole. And he leads?
I realize the same atrocity is going down in numerous other states, so I guess the question should be, WTF is wrong with the American people?
Disgusting. And to think we went from cloud nine to the outhouse basement in just two short years.
frugalchariot
Have you read TP’s last post yesterday
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/28/thinkprogress-media-chamber/#comments
There’s no doubt in my mind that there’s been a lot of manipulation of news and polls coupled with multiple layers of lies from those who control our media outlets and their “employees” beyond the ones who draw regular paychecks.
Relax, stock up on popcorn and remember we have our own psychologist, Zooey, who can “talk you down” if need be!
Did anyone see this? The Rand Paul Stomp….
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/28/914609/-DEVASTATING-Curbstomping-Ad-from-Kentucky-Democratic-Party
The scary part is that brutality is supported by the tea baggers.
Carbon County is in Pennsylvania.
I’m very anxious about Tuesday. I’m feeling pretty good about California, but there’s just too many crazies in other states that are either ahead or running even with the Dems. I am hoping that as in the TP post yesterday that Pachy mentioned that things aren’t quite as rosy for the teabaggers as it might seem.
I’m doing a 5K in the morning and lucky me, it’s supposed to rain. At least it’s a short race and I’ll be done early. Then I’m making hubby take me out for a nice hot breakfast.
pawz, enjoy your Saturday run and breakfast!
If anyone here isn’t yet a fan of the Tavis Smiley show, check out this interview with Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. It’s well worth the 23:26 minutes.
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/201010/20101026_josephwilsonvaler.html?vid=1625682046#video
frugal, that was a great interview. Thanks for finding the entire segment. I’d only seen a vid with two minutes.
This is low tech, but the words are right on target. Sorry for keep posting this election day stuff because some of you may have already voted while others are still fighting to GOTV. Pass this onto your friends and relatives that live in states that don’t have early voting.
Paul Krugman wrote a very good op-ed today.
Divided We Fail
I am afraid this is going to be very bad indeed. I just don’t understand how reasoning people cannot see this..
NWMuse, there’s a subscription firewall on your link. I was able to get to the article with a Google search using New York Times Krugman Divided We Fail.
Krugman’s spot on, no doubt about it. I’ve been saying much the same, and don’t even have a Nobel Prize in Economics! Of course, when Republicans are involved, all one needs is enough of a mind to understand that actions (and inactions) can have consequences, a very non-teaparty trait.
U.S. Companies Hoarding Almost $1 Trillion Cash: Moody’s
Are these the same companies that need their taxes cut, in order to create jobs? What ever happened to supply-side economics, that demand is driven by availability of desirable goods and services created by entrepreneurs? Seems that an overabundance of investment cash is of no value to job creation, because if all the money is hoarded by the wealthy, there exists no demand to incentivize these companies to increase production. Because of this, Friedman economics is proven to be flawed, in my opinion.
This form of economic entrenchment proves self-defeating to the strength of the economy. Without an increase of demand for their products, employers won’t hire. Without an increase in disposable income, through more jobs and better wages, consumers won’t buy. The old school solution to inject money into the system through government spending can’t work, if the demand is temporary, because increased production no longer happens inside our country. Thus, Keynesian economics won’t work either. We can’t deficit-spend to prop up the economy indefinitely, so what economist can we turn to for a solution?
Having just read the Krugman article NWMuse linked, I am of the opinion that the wealthy are attempting to extort the US voter with a threat of “put us in charge, and let us have our way, or we will make everything worse”.
I didn’t just whip this out in the last few minutes, I started on it earlier when I heard the Moody’s report on Progressive Talk Radio. This is part one, if I can manage to put part two together in my mind.
house, waiting for part 2 as this posting was very thought provoking. I like the way you think!
I’ve about reached the point where I think capitalism needs to be either severely regulated and/or converted to an open-minded ‘democratic socialism’ platform. The way we’re headed, where the sole goal is upward trickling of wealth to the already wealthy, a modern rehash of the old castle-serfdom scenario of the Middle Ages in Europe, is not going to fly no matter how strongly the emergent American oligarchy wants it to become the global standard.
Speaking of which, this election cycle makes me wonder just how many of the serfs, or how many members of Robin Hood’s band, would have voted to reelect the Sheriff of Nottingham and his cronies? Has America, perchance, sunk far enough down to where an electoral majority enjoys the abuse so much they’ll vote it back in?
It almost looks that way. We should know by Wednesday at this time.
In about 12 hours (give or take an hour), Jane and I will be leaving for DC to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive. We’re gonna spend Saturday night there and drive home Sunday. I was really looking forward to it, until I spent $350 getting new tires for my car. Now I’m poorer and slightly less enthused, but I’m still looking forward to it. Jane has to work Monday but I’m taking that day off. We’re both going to go into work for the morning on Tuesday, then cut out after lunch, come home, and settle in to watch Election returns. (After watching the three or four hours before the polls close.) We’re gonna stay up late to see just how badly Joe Miller does, then we’re taking Wednesday off. We both go back to work Thursday for a “two-day week”. Woo-hoo!
Wow, the whirl-wind world of the Schneider’s.
Looking forward to your reading about the adventure and the rally.
Safe journey!
Thanks, ebb.
Wait a minute. I’m not going to be reading about it, and I’m going to be there!
I knew what you meant. Just having fun.
Enjoy the rally, Wayne (and Jane)! I can’t wait to hear your report.
The insanity of this election year just keeps reaching new heights. The sheer hatred and violence alone is like nothing I’ve seen in my adult lifetime. I think there’s going to be a lot of cries of ‘fraud!’, no matter how things go. The right wing has people so agitated–Malkin has been screeching non stop about this. And what do you bet all the drooling idiots will be trying to blame ‘ACORN’? I’ve already seen references to ACORN fraud on some of the right wing sites. Don’t they know they already killed that boogeyman?
The stupid is just astounding.
House, I’m thinking of an intervention or rescue – taking you out of ‘the state of confusion’ that’s called Alabama!
2ebb, I saw that over at TP. Bring at least two car haulers and three large U-Haul vans when you come for me.
part two
Today is the anniversary of Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the day when the majority of Wall Street investors had their epiphany, and realized the markets were vastly overvalued, resulting in an unprecedented panic selling of 16 million shares, a record that was not broken for nearly forty years. The Senate was debating the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, and Wall Streeters feared it would pass and Herbert Hoover would sign it into law. Smoot was a Republican from Utah and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and Willis C. Hawley, a Republican from Oregon, was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Hoover had campaigned on increasing agricultural import tariffs in 1928, and the House version of the bill passed in May 1929, but it included increases in industrial import tariffs as well, which Hoover opposed. Although the Senate didn’t pass their version of the bill until March 1930, it was that uncertainty in October 1929 that spooked the investors. Conservative economist and author Jude Wanniski (look up the Two Santa Claus theory) has correlated the market instability leading up to the crash as having been caused by the debate in the Senate, much as the healthcare debate caused fluctuations in health insurer stock prices last year.
When the bill passed the Senate and was reconciled in the conference committee, it maintained the larger tariff amounts from the House version, and although Hoover was now against the bill, his party, the Republicans, and business leaders convinced him to sign it. A petition from over 1000 US economists couldn’t persuade him to issue a veto. As could be expected, foreign trading partners retaliated with tariffs of their own, although exports would have declined anyway since the Depression was worldwide and incomes in other countries suffered also. Today’s conservatives try to use the logic that Smoot-Hawley made the Depression worse by reducing US exports, and even if it did, the US maintained trade surpluses in all years of the 1930s except 1936, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The question I have to ask today, is, given huge US trade deficits, a condition directly opposite from that which existed in the 1930s, what negative effect could a new Smoot-Hawley Act have on US jobs? The economist that can make our leaders see the logic of protecting and enabling US manufacturing will not only save our economy, he or she will have their name mentioned as the saviour of the time when neither Friedman nor Keynesian economics worked!
House, I think you might be the only normal person in Alabama.
Nah, there’s about 39% of the state that votes Dem, they just get very little press!
Thank goodness, House.
Lauren Valle is an incredible young woman:
What Doctor Who did you watch last night?
House, my son and I watched “The Pandorica Opens” again.
I love Rory as a Roman Centurion.
Will do! We can arrange for that after Mel and I pull into your driveway.
I’m on The Lodger today. I’ll get to The Pandorica when BBCA gets me there. Yesterday was Vincent and the Doctor, still my favorite ep with Matt Smith.
I agree, House. Vincent and the Doctor is the best of the season.
You haven’t seen the full season yet? I thought you had. I gave something away.
No, these are reruns! I made it through the whole series for 2010!
Whew.
Funny how easy it is to discern that Lauren Halle is neither a Republican nor a teabagger.
The difference between progressive and regressive comes through clearly, though I doubt that was her intent.
Fascinating. The difference between someone who cares and someone who is only capable of hatred and fear intertwined.
I fail to see the connection between a duly appointed Federal judge applying the constitution against a group that has suffered discrimination; and a band of extremists who murdered thousands.
Only in the twisted and DeMinted mind of a right-winger are those two things equivalent.
Apparently Pristine had a one night stand and is all upset we found out.
Oh, it’s not true? My bad…
I love Lauren’s response. I’m afraid it’s going to fall upon deaf ears on the right. Afterall, they don’t want compromise at all. Their goal is for the president to fail.
I’m impressed! They got that Beck thread up over 300 comments even without EugeneDebs’ help!
I had hoped that was over with, due to the new system, but the same ones want to wallow with the trolls, no matter what.
Fortunately the violence Lauren Valle encountered was not as violent as that Luke encountered.
In that these are examples of what can transpire with a failure to communicate I want to share with you a story about the rewards of making an effort to overcome barriers to communication.
When I lived in Columbia, Maryland in the 1980′s I was addicted to Ms. Pacman and frequented a local watering hole that had a sit down two player machine that was popular with many of the regulars. One night while waiting for a couple of new aficionados of the game to go through a roll of quarters, I sat at the end of the bar “people watching”. There was a man and woman I had never seen before sitting at the bar about 10 feet away. The man was doing all the talking. The woman never said a word, until she got off the stool and walked over to me.
“Excuse me”, she said, “can you help me? My friend is deaf and blind and he needs to go to the bathroom. This is our first time here and he doesn’t know where the men’s room is.”
I said I would and followed her to her friend’s stool. I observed her put her hand in his and sign in ASL that she had someone to lead him to the men’s room. She put his hand on my arm and I lead him to the men’s room. Along the way he told me to just show him the door and when we arrived there he instructed me to wait for him outside.
I never got to play Ms. Pacman that night. I did learn that John, who was in his mid 30′s was 21 when he broadsided a car while driving his motorcycle in California. After ten years of anger his parents sent his to a school for the deaf and blind in New York. It was at that school where he met Maureen who had German Measles when she was pregnant and had a deaf/blind daughter at the school.
John said that since he had once had vision and hearing he was out of place at the school designed to teach children who had never had vision or hearing. One day he packed his bags and made his way to Maureen’s apartment in Columbia.
John taught me to respond to his yes or no questions by pinching him for no and tapping on him for yes. I didn’t sign, but I could spell out words, letter by letter, with a finger “drawing” them on his hand or back.
My friendship with John and Maureen lasted until I moved to Florida. The three of us went out to eat frequently with a mission to teach restaurants about many potential new customers if they employed wait staff that could sign and had menus written in braille.
One of the most rewarding experiences in my life was the night John and I went out alone after telling Maureen we didn’t need her to go along with us.
We as progressives are in a situation where we are unable to communicate with people who don’t listen to us and don’t see the world like we do.
If we as progressives believe that our fellow Americans are deaf and blind to the truth then it is we who need to step forward to break down the barriers.
Pachy, that is a very thought provoking story. Thank you.
Pachy, you and Auggie lead very interesting and full lives!
Pachy,
I feel like I would really like to meet you. Perhaps after the elections are over, we can meet at a lunch setting like Sonney’s. The only brew there is iced tea, but I am off alcohol until I get over a Coumadin issue. That is a anticoagulant drug that I take and the two do not mix at all.