Last Call

We end Labor Day tonight with this E.J. Dionne piece on the end of Labor Day as we know it.

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil — the phrase itself seems antique — as worthy of genuine respect.

Imagine a Republican saying this: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the Tea Party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861. Will President Obama dare say anything like this in his jobs speech this week?

I hope he does.  But even the idea that labor can create is anathema to the Republican worldview.  Today, we celebrate the American worker.  The other 364 days of the year, we celebrate the Almighty Job Creator Class that owns us.  And even that one day is too much for some.

Hope everyone had a good day today.

It's A Teenage Wage Land

Raise your hand if you think the problem with our economy right now is that teenage workers making minimum wage are in fact making too much money. Guess what?  That's exactly what FOX News analyst Gary B. Smith believes.



In Smith's world we could employ a hell of a lot more cheap teenage wage slave labor for peanuts if we got rid of the minimum wage. Stupid workers wanting to be paid! CUT TAXES!  BLARG!

Republicans Drop A Special Delivery

Here's an example of the Republican jobs program: a US Postal Service on the verge of collapse in mere months and the GOP is happy to see it go.

The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances. 

Yeah, and the odds of that are pretty much next to zero.  Add postal carriers and mail sorters to the list of evil, immoral government employees and retirees that are the bane of America's existence and must be made to pay.  Meanwhile, let's eliminate corporate taxes!

Seriously, Republicans now have the opportunity to extract even more concessions from middle-class America in order to transfer untold billions to the top of the pyramid.  But the problem is all those welfare queens delivering your mail, right?

[Postmaster General] Donahoe’s hope is to cut $20 billion of the $75 billion in annual costs by 2015. To do that, he wants to close many post offices and slash the number of sorting facilities to 200 from 500 and trim the agency’s work force by 220,000 people, from its current 653,000. (A decade ago, the agency employed nearly 900,000.)

Wait, we've already cut 250,000 postal workers over the last decade and now we have to cut 220,000 more?  You're telling me the problem in America is that we can't afford a postal service?  Seriously?  It's almost like massive tax cuts are a problem in the long run or something.  Here's the kicker:

Meanwhile, Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Oversight Committee, says the pension proposals would amount to an unjustifiable bailout that would not solve the agency’s underlying problems. He is pushing a bill that would create an emergency oversight board that could order huge cost-cutting and void the postal service’s contracts — a proposal that not just the unions, but Senators Carper and Collins oppose. 

That's the backbreaker, right there.  If that's allowed to pass, then Republicans will use the oversight board to void all government worker provisions and fire millions in an effort to privatize and monetize as many government services as possible.  It'll also mean the end of organized labor in America, for good.

And that's the real memo to be delivered.  PS, $75 billion a year, the entire bill for the Postal Service, is roughly one quarter of the average yearly cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last nine years.

But what we really need is more tax cuts.

Flaming Bank Statement

In which an artist shuts down stupid cops with a dose of common sense:

Twice they've come to investigate why the 41-year-old Eagle Rock artist is painting an image of a bank building going up in flames.

Schaefer had barely added the orange-and-yellow depiction of fire shooting from the roof of a Chase Bank branch when police rolled up to the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Sylvan Street on July 30.

"They told me that somebody had called and said they felt threatened by my painting," Schaefer said.

"They said they had to find out my intention. They asked if I was a terrorist and was I going to follow through and do what I was painting."

No, Schaefer said. He explained that the artwork was intended to be a visual metaphor for the havoc that banking practices have caused to the economy.

A terrorist certainly would not spend hours on a public sidewalk creating an oil painting of his intended target, he told the officers.

Not one visit.  Two visits.  Twice he had to answer subtle questions such as whether he intended to blow up a bank.  Because his art is slated to hang in a gallery, but made someone uncomfortable.  This is as depressing as it is stupid, which ranks a solid "Pretty Damn" on the Stupid-O-Meter.

A visual metaphor for how the banks burned us, and they just don't see it.

Happy 65th, Freddie!

Today would have been Freddie Mercury's 65th birthday.  Many remember him from Bohemian Rhapsody or maybe even the Flash Gordon theme (ahhahhhhh!).  His popularity often excluded him from the "classically sound" musicians, a mistake the he took with as much grace as possible.  A talented singer, he was really one of the best composers of our time.  He took risks and accomplished the true mark of success - his music transcended genre.

My friend Kate posted this in Google+ and I  knew I had to share it.

The GOP Assault On Voting

I firmly believe that the Republican war on voting is the biggest political story of 2011.  Nothing else comes close to the far-reaching and profound effects of the GOP efforts to reshape the electorate to suit their needs.  TPM's Ryan Reilly has an excellent piece recapping the Republican assault on voting rights in 2011 at the state and federal level.

It all started in January, as many new Republican state legislators who had been swept into statehouses across the country in the 2010 elections started pushing like-minded legislation soon after they took office.

"These bills started popping up everywhere and what started as a trickle almost seemed like a flood," Carolyn Fiddler of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told TPM.

Altogether this year, 20 states which did not have voter ID laws and 14 states that already had non-photo ID laws have considered legislation requiring citizens have a photo ID to vote, according to the latest figures from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Of those 34 states which considered voter ID legislation, six of them enacted laws: Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.

It's impressive on some level.  In just eight months, Republicans in 34 states pushed efforts to restrict voting.  That's what these efforts are, the quest to make voting more difficult.  Considering everything past Americans did to secure the right to vote for future generations, the notion that we have to restrict voting to "protect" it should be laughed out of the room.  It's completely obvious what the Republicans are truly up to on this issue.

Conservative columnist Matthew Vadum is just going to come right out and say it: registering the poor to vote is un-American and "like handing out burglary tools to criminals."

"It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote," Vadum, the author of a book published by World Net Daily that attacks the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, writes in a column for the American Thinker.

"Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor," Vadum writes. "It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers."

It really is that simple.  Conservatives believe that voting, and participation in government itself, should be restricted to the elite, the wealthy, and the powerful.  It's no longer John Birch fringe to believe that the underclass, those who don't belong in the lofty presence of the job creators, have no place in politics.  Conservatives are increasingly blaming them for all of society's ills, and are just wondering how hard they have to push in order for the dwindling middle-class to declare war on the poor, and leave the lords at the top to reap the spoils.

In short, Conservatives don't think everyone in America should have the right to vote, period.  They discovered their mistake in 2006 and 2008, and it was allowing the unwashed masses the right to vote.  And should they get back into 2012, they will eliminate that right.

Keep that in mind this Labor Day, and into November 2012.

Holy Hypocrisy, Batman!

Apparently, the Westboro group can dish it out but can't take it.  Surprise, surprise.

The Westboro Baptist Church has set its hateful sights on the movie, "Red State" -- which will be released in theaters later this month -- calling director Kevin Smith "a God-hating clown."

The Church spokesperson says, "God hates fags, God hates fag enablers, therefore God hates Kevin Smith."

The movie puts the spotlight on a fanatical church whose members kill "sinners" -- many say it bares a resemblance to Westboro.

Neener neener, assholes.  I guess it's hard to ignore the stupidity when forced to actually look at it.

Labor, Dazed, In America

McClatchy's Tony Pugh points out this Labor Day that the millions of long-term unemployed in America are the new untouchable class, and Republicans are wasting no time in demonizing them as the country's 21st century "welfare queens".

Many companies now shun the long-term unemployed when filling positions, fearing their skills have eroded or their talents don't measure up.

America's jobless also face increased hostility from conservative lawmakers, as more states cut the amount and duration of unemployment benefits, while making them harder to get and easier to lose.

In South Carolina, where state-funded jobless benefits were cut from 26 to 20 weeks, Republican state senator Kevin Bryant blogged in April that "Part of the unemployment problem is that our human nature is to take advantage of the ability to get paid to not work. ... I'm very sympathetic to those out of work desperately seeking it, but I'm disappointed that we have a significant segment of our society leeching (off) the system."

Similar comments from a variety of conservatives reflect a sneaking suspicion that 99 weeks of extended benefits have taken the urgency out of job searches.

"Two years is a long time. At some point you've got to provide more incentives to get people to do things," said Frederick Tannery, an associate economics professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania.

Leeches.  Welfare queens.  Lazy.  Immoral.  Evil.  Republicans are putting forth the illusion that there is no job creation crisis, that tens of millions of "good, high-paying jobs" are out there going unfilled because people are simply too shiftless to work.  Everything's a zero-sum game for them.

But it's head scratching.  Real corporate taxes are low.  Major corporations are making record profits.  It's absolutely an employer's market out there for labor as companies can hire people with four-year degrees for entry level positions.  It should be a boom time for hiring.

But it's not, because the problem is demand.  Even the Moonie Times admits the problem in the US is demand:  the middle-class consumer in the US has been so utterly crushed by the New Gilded Age that they're not buying anything because they can't afford to.  And if they can't afford to buy more, why hire more?

“There are no quick fixes on the horizon for the millions who are still unemployed,” said Richard Wahlquist, president of the American Staffing Association. “Until businesses see a significant and sustainable uptick in demand for their products and services, we will not see a meaningful increase in the number of new permanent jobs.”

According to surveys conducted by the National Federation of Independent Business, small businesses, which employ the most Americans, have complained for months that “poor sales” are their biggest problem and the reason they aren’t hiring.

Large businesses also have seen little reason to add to staff in a stagnant U.S. market and collectively are sitting on more than $1 trillion in profits that they otherwise could deploy to beef up employment and expand if new sales opportunities arose.

Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said Friday’s jobs report showed that businesses have no reason to hire. In fact, they even cut back the hours of their existing workforces last month.

“The main issue is lack of demand,” she said. Employers have “substantial room to meet unmet demand by increasing hours of existing workers; if private-sector employers were to simply restore the hours of their workers back to pre-recession levels, that would be equivalent to adding over 1.2 million jobs.”

This is the real issue in our economy:  lack of demand.  And Republicans see the government as having to tighten its belt too as millions of local, state, and federal government employees get furloughed and laid off completely, instead of the government being the demand generator of last resort.  Republicans have tied our hands on this, and more than a few Democrats have gone along.

You'd think pro-corporate Republicans would want to boost businesses in order to get more money into the economy, but they could care less.  All they see is the opportunity to yell and scream that "America can't afford to help the poor" anymore and to throw them down the nearest open manhole.  Not only are jobs being cut, but hours, overtime, benefits and wages as well for those of us that do have jobs.

No wonder corporate profits are sky-high...and yet we're told businesses are being crushed under taxes and regulations that are driving jobs offshore and putting companies out of business.  The truth is these companies are going where the demand is, and they are taking their jobs with them, while this Labor Day the American worker is being put out to pasture...and then the glue factory.

StupidiNews, Labor Day Edition!

• Some 29 are confirmed dead as Typhoon Talas slammed into Western Japan late Sunday, leaving record rainfall, flooding and wind damage.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party has suffered significant losses in elections in her home state of Mecklenburg as leftist and Green party candidates pushed conservatives to a distant second.
• Twenty years after a deadly chicken plant fire killed 25 in Hamlet, NC, progress in worker safety measures appears to be on the wane.
• The trial of deposed Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak continues in Cairo, but cameras have been banned from the proceedings.
• Smaller tech firms are the new big battlefield players in smartphone patent wars as they line up to get a piece of the multi-billion dollar market.

Last Call

MoDo The Red is totally breaking up with her crazy, phantom idealistic mirage of what she wanted President Barack Obama to be, which is probably healthy for her in the long run.  But the breakup itself is anguished enough to almost qualify her for a sliver of empathy...almost.  She pulls out every straw man argument she can find and then sets it on fire as the rant (and ladies and gentlemen, this is a rant) consumes her remaining few scraps of humanity as it's ScheduleGate that finally snaps her mind.

NY Times editors should not let Maureen Dowd pen columns while this effing smashed.

Republicans who are worried about being political props have a point. The president is using the power of the incumbency and a sacred occasion for a political speech.

Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.

The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.

The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant.

After pushing and shoving and caving to get on TV, the president’s advisers immediately began warning that the long-yearned-for jobs speech wasn’t going to be that awe-inspiring.

“The issue isn’t the size or the newness of the ideas,” one said. “It’s less the substance than how he says it, whether he seizes the moment.”

The arc of justice is stuck at the top of a mountain. Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for. 

He never really loved you, Maureen.  He has an entire country to govern, and despite all the times you watched The Legend of Bagger Vance or The Wiz or hell, even Eddie Murphy in The Distiguished Gentleman,  the entry of Barack Obama to the Oval Office didn't grant magical powers to the office of President of the United States.

There are constraints of the system that President Obama has to operate under, and with the Republicans working as hard as possible to trap him within those constraints and the Village working as hard as possible to create new ones, it's an absolute goddamn miracle that he's managed to accomplish the things he has done.  It's akin to loading a metric ton of Lego bricks into a giant cannon and shooting them straight up into the air with Republicans swooping by on their brooms to melt the bricks with flamethrowers and the Village scatter them with tornado machines only to have the efforts to destroy them be precisely the thing needed to make them all land in a perfect scale replica of Albert Einstein's brain or something.

Then MoDo comes along and kicks the thing apart because she really wanted a model of Shakespeare's Globe theater.  Hence, the breakup as she screeches to declare the end of the Failed Obama Presidency because moving his speech was the Intolerable Mortal Sin of our age.

Jesus wept, we actually do deserve President Bachmann or Perry or Romney, just to finish the country off.  They'll find a way to blame that on Obama too.  "If only he hadn't made me stay home with the crushing ennui of moving his jobs speech to one day later, we'd still have an America..."  Oh, but MoDo is far, far from being alone, just ask Matt Stoller.

No one, not even the president's defenders, expect his coming jobs speech to mean anything. When the president spoke during a recent market swoon, the market dropped another 100 points. Democrats may soon have to confront an uncomfortable truth, and ask whether Obama is a suitable choice at the top of the ticket in 2012. They may then have to ask themselves if there's any way they can push him off the top of the ticket.

That these questions have not yet been asked in any serious way shows how weak the Democratic Party is as a political organization. Yet this political weakness is not inevitable, it can be changed through courage and collective action by a few party insiders smart and principled enough to understand the value of a public debate, and by activists who are courageous enough to face the real legacy of the Obama years.

Obama has ruined the Democratic Party. The 2010 wipeout was an electoral catastrophe so bad you'd have to go back to 1894 to find comparable losses. From 2008 to 2010, according to Gallup, the fastest growing demographic party label was former Democrat. Obama took over the party in 2008 with 36 percent of Americans considering themselves Democrats. Within just two years, that number had dropped to 31 percent, which tied a 22-year low.

It would be amusingly tragic if Kafka were sill around to write this play.  And we're about to get exactly what we deserve.

Explanation Of Our Political Nation

Obey the frog and read:

Mike Lofgren's diatribe about the Republican Party ought to be required reading in all our high schools. It's not only a fine example of a political polemic written in excellent English, it's something everyone needs to internalize. Because Lofgren just retired after a 16-year career as a GOP staffer on the House and Senate budget committees, his criticism carries more weight than it would coming from a Democrat. It's a long piece that will take some time to complete, but it will be well worth the time.

And Lofgren's piece is notable, given the relative amounts of crap spewing out the works normally.  But as Steve M. points out, one Republican realizing the truth does not a revolution make.

Denunciations of the GOP, as I've said in the past, go into the political world's equivalent of a spam filter -- they're not allowed into the mainstream's in-boxes. Oh, sure, Lofgren will probably make the rounds of Rachel and Ed and Larry and Reverend Al on MSNBC, and maybe he'll be invited to address Netroots Nation next year. But other than that, what he says will be quarantined.

What might work someday is a mass defection from the GOP -- fifty or a hundred retired and current politicians, pundits, and staffers announcing in a press conference and a full-page ad that they've had it with the economic brinkmanship, the creationism, the tossing of sand in the gears of government whenever they don't get their way, and the willingness to watch people suffer and the nation crumble until we genuflect before them (all things that Lofgen's essay touches on). Maybe if, say, Colin Powell and Tom Kean and a few other media darlings led a mass, simultaneous resignation from the party, it would be enough of a surprise to cut through the "both sides are to blame" nonsense.

But that will never happen, will it? And so we go on as usual.

I was reminded today that both political parties are the responsibility of the American voter, not just the salvation of the Democrats.  The Republican Party needs to be rehabilitated as well, and on that point Steve is correct.  Nothing much will change until we demand it as an imperative.

There is a spine-crushing amount of work ahead of us to fix America.  But Lofgren's article is at least a start...and I'd be much more empathetic to his concerns if he had spoken them before retiring, for example.

We're Receiving A Broadcast Signal From The Death Star, Sir

So that you didn't have to slog through it, Dick Cheney's interview this morning on FOX News Sunday with Chris Wallace was everything you expected it to be: enough spin in the FOX echo chamber to pin a blue whale to the side of the wall.

Wallace noted that following Cheney’s interview on NBC’s The Today Show, the network showed a protester holding a sign saying, “Torture Is a Crime: Investigate Cheney.”

“Investigate Cheney,” Cheney repeated with a smile.

“I somehow doubt that if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were speaking they would have taken the shot and then suddenly a person with a sign would have been putting their picture up,” Wallace declared. “Do you think there is a liberal bias in the mainstream media?” Wallace asked.

“I think there probably is,” Cheney replied. “But I don’t spend time worry being it. I think that those of us right-thinking conservatives find that there are a lot of outlets out there now in the media, on the Internet that give us ample opportunity for our points of view to get across and heard.”

And yes, the entire interview was an opportunity for Chris Wallace to dispense absolution for Cheney's sins before the Church of the Almighty Talking Point.   Really, Cheney's war crimes and torture weren't anything wrong, and you're not a "right-thinking" American patriot if you believe otherwise.  Only dirty hippies would want to investigate our wonderful former VP, and America is better than that.  Isn't it wonderful to have FOX around to set the record straight, America?

Straight to hell, that is.  On, and Cheney wants to let the Left know you should have gone with Hillary.  I'm sure he has your best interests at heart.

Smoke And Mirrors

Yeah, I'm not exactly thrilled with President Obama rolling back the EPA's tougher smog regulations either, folks.  But there's a difference between constructive criticism of the President's policies, and firebagger nonsense like this.  The President's environmental record is rock solid, and Renee Schoof's piece at McClatchy this weekend is exactly what the anti-Obama left wants...along with Republicans who don't have to lift a finger to attack the President and demoralize the left.  We'll do it ourselves.  After all, President Obama is apparently the worse environmental Chief Executive of our age:

"The White House is siding with corporate polluters over the American people," Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke said in a statement. "The Clean Air Act clearly requires the Environmental Protection Agency to set protective standards against smog — based on science and the law. The White House now has polluted that process with politics."

Really?  Because a prudent observer would have figured out that Republicans made the protecting the environment political years ago, not to mention corporations themselves.  But it's President Obama's fault.  And the NRDC's statement implies that President Obama has eliminated protective standards completely, not kept them as is.  It's almost like they want you to believe that the President has weakened existing standards, which he has not done...but it sure gives the NRDC political ammo to fundraise, doesn't it?  God forbid anyone play politics with the environment.

Oh, but it gets worse in the article.

The retreat on the ozone standard is the latest decision Obama has made that appears to be a capitulation to Republicans, sparking growing disenchantment among his base.

In December, he agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. In April, he reached a deal to avert a government shutdown by agreeing to GOP demands for budget cuts. In early August, he signed a deal to lift the nation's debt ceiling and avoid a credit default, though the agreement doesn't guarantee that spending cuts will be balanced by tax increases, as he had insisted.

And this is a McClatchy news article saying this, not an opinion piece, not a Daily Beast article,  not George Will or MoDo the Red or Bobo in a weekend op-ed dump, not an FDL diarist, not a FOX Nation screamer or a Breitbart hit job...but a regular McClatchy national news article from their DC bureau saying this.  The message is clear:  Boy, why should you bother voting, Democrats?  You should stay home and teach Obama a lesson.  He has disappointed you!  The news says he has, so it must be true!  Behold the liberal media!

And then to top it off there's more firebagging.

"Many MoveOn members are wondering today how they can ever work for President Obama's re-election or make the case for him to their neighbors, when he does something like this after extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich and giving in to tea party demands on the debt deal," said Justin Ruben, the executive director of the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, which backed Obama in 2008.

Hey, it's like MoveOn.org would be happier with a Republican in the White House to focus on.  I wonder if MoveOn.org will still back President Obama in 2012.  You'd like to think they would be able to recognize the reasons why the President did what he did, but they have an awfully funny way of showing it.

Here's why the anti-Obama left is ready to stay home:

The 2008 rule put the ozone level at 75 parts per billion. The EPA in January 2010 proposed setting it at 60 to 70 parts per billion, the range recommended by its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee. The final rule was never released. The White House Office of Management and Budget had been reviewing it.

And for leaving it at 75 ppb, we're ready to hand the country over to the GOP, who will almost certainly eliminate the 75 ppb limit as too hard on businesses and kill the Clean Air Act completely.  Republicans threatened to wipe out the legislation totally within the first few days of taking over the House...which they did because Democrats stayed home in 2010 in order to "teach President Obama a lesson." When firebaggers do the same in 2012 and Republicans get the votes they need, the lesson they will teach President Obama is "You can't count on us, we're in it for ourselves."

And finally, Matt Osborne reminds us that this President has gone above and beyond on auto industry mileage and emissions standards.

Obama is a transportation progressive. Why should the White House choose to fight costly battles over EPA regulations, tar sands pipelines, or offshore drilling when they can win policy battles that reduce consumption? This is not eleventy-dimensional chess. It is not apologetics. It is solid policy.

One may still save thousands of lives from smog without new EPA regulations, as transportation policy is intimately linked to public health. Less smog from tailpipes means less smog-related illness.

Nor is this a sop to conservative framing. Indeed, the White House has produced a consistently progressive and aggressive transportation reform policy, standing firm behind rule changes that encourage walkable streets and bike lanes.

The administration still wants high speed rail, which would reduce highway and airport congestion and the emissions that come from them.

The “laserlike jobs focus” of the president’s speech this week will include plenty of transportation and infrastructure spending in this line, both vital to reducing emissions. This is a major progressive priority.

But no, Obama failed us, so you should stay home so President Perry scraps all of these green transportation initiatives the last week of January, 2013.  That'll advance the progressive agenda for sure, right?

3-D Takes Leap

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The worst thing about 3D technology -- other than "Conan the Barbarian" -- is the glasses.

They're clunky, they're uncomfortable, they're (sometimes) unsanitary and people hate 'em. Kind of like "Conan."

But Toshiba has solved that -- for TV viewing, at least.

The company has unveiled a 55-inch, glasses-free 3D television. A camera underneath the screen scans to see how many people -- up to nine -- are watching, and sends out the image.

It hasn't gotten the best of reviews, but it's the beginning of something cool.  Who knows, maybe those lame 3-D movies will get a boost, and we'll be able to enjoy Friday The 13th the way the good Lord intended.

Stimulus Debate Not Over Yet

CNN has recently run an opinion stating why the stimulus worked out for us. I usually defer to Z when it comes to economics, but my common sense and basic knowledge supports what I read here. Also, the author is reasonable about giving the "other side" their fair appreciation. That usually only comes from someone who is confident and open-minded, something that is usually lacking on a topic so heavily debated.  As he points out, this will be a major subject in the upcoming election, so we may as well talk it over.

(CNN) -- As others have, and more will as the presidential election heats up, David Frum went after the Recovery Act on these pages. I'll address his critiques in a moment, but first let's just get this right out there: Though we can never know alternative histories -- in this case, how the economy would have performed absent the stimulus -- the weight of the evidence is that the Recovery Act did what we expected it to do.

It created a few million jobs and shaved a few percentage points off the unemployment rate. But most important, it kept a bad situation from getting a lot worse.

I think that is the most frequent gripe I had. Opponents screeched that because this didn't bring us back to our former glory that the program was a failure. Quite the opposite. I believe turning a death spiral into some sort of stable status is a major victory. That type of hyberbolic stupidity is so upsetting because it snubs hard work and success, and the mentally weak fall for it because the can't see through it.

This type of evidence, which is very common among researchers who have examined the Recovery Act's impact, is clearly inconsistent with Frum's view that the act was a failure.

But in this case, two pictures are worth 2,000 words. The Zandi/Blinder analysis of the stimulus and accompanying measures -- and note that Frum claims there were no accompanying measures -- is called "How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End." The graphs embedded in this article show why.

Definitely read the article and check out the data. Again, if he is wrong I can't spot where. In a simple 1+1=2 manner, you cannot claim failure in the face of improvement. At best, opponents will say there was a better way, and maybe there was. But as the author points out in his closing, what we ended up doing worked pretty darn well.

Frum and others can argue that all of the above haven't made everything all better, but no conceivable monetary or fiscal stimulus could have fully offset the impact of a recession of this magnitude, particularly one with such highly leveraged banks and households at its root.
What they can't say, at least not without ignoring the evidence, is that the Recovery Act failed. It did what we expected it to do, creating jobs, lowering unemployment and preventing recession from morphing into depression. If anything, what the evidence shows is that it ended too soon. And that is why President Obama is, as we speak, crafting a smaller package of targeted jobs measures to build on the success of the Recovery Act.

Partisans thus need to put aside their talking points, absorb this evidence and get those measures to work in the economy as soon as possible.