President Obama is on vacation this week, sort of. Him and about a thousand other people, bringing him information, taking his orders, blah, blah. I don’t know why he bothers, but… he does. With that job, you may as well assume that you’re going to be working straight for four to eight years. Even so, every American president since Carter has been determined not to seem like he’s barricaded in to the White House, manning his vigil in vain. So Obama, like his predecessors, takes a ceremonial vacation, and his detractors take aim. Of course, they would anyway. He has locked himself into Washington! He’s out of touch with (white) America! they would cry if he were to cancel his outing. May as well go, Barry.
Frankly, if he were to come back from the Vineyard with a Jobs / Recovery Act proposal that involves bold efforts to fund infrastructure projects, incentivize hiring, raise taxes on the rich, and so on, I would be the first to say that the man has earned his rest. But that is an extremely unlikely scenario. Obama, smart as he is, does not want to have to walk back every statement he has made about the debt since last year. That’s my best take on that. My worst is that he really believes that cutting spending, basic social safety net programs, and government investment in the short term will, as his Republican opponents believe, create jobs. If he doesn’t know they’re smoking crack on that one, we could be in for Japan in the 1990s.
Speaking of smoking crack, Texas Governor Rick Perry has launched himself headlong into the race to defeat Obama, entering amid a flurry of wild claims and random threats against the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Here’s a guy who has publicly referred to Social Security and Medicare as “ponzi schemes.” Seriously? This should not be hard to beat. Honestly, if Obama had just done what he needed to do, none of these freaks would stand a chance of winning. That it’s a race at all speaks to the weakness of his policies, not the strength of theirs…. because clearly, they’ve got nothing except tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts. And that’s nothing.
Will the president suggest a solution that is on the same grand scale as the problem, or is it small-bore policy all the way from here on out? We shall see.
luv u,
jp
Oh, hi. You’re getting us in the middle of a band meeting, as you can see. (Murray, present. Bret, present…) Kind of an ugly look at how the sausage of Big Green’s music is cranked out. Okay, so our production values are not the best, and our process is flawed. So we hear stuff in our recordings we didn’t even know was there when we were tracking them. That’s part of the Big Green method, man. It’s a bit like found sound; it’s basically lost sound. Somebody misplaces a trombone part somewhere in the known universe (or perhaps in any one of an infinite number of possible universes), and it turns up embedded in one of our tunes like a foreign correspondent on a battlefield assignment.
of corporate America, was driven by its most radical faction (the so-called “tea party”) to manipulate the once mundane process of raising the debt ceiling for political gain. S&P’s judgment that our government can no longer make rational decisions about its debt is based on their recognition that, from now on, raising the debt ceiling will involve a similar political standoff.