Fact-esque

We Could Have Had Caroline

What in the world was David Paterson thinking? Kirsten Gillibrand? For gawd's sake, why? As Gregg Levine notes, she's everything Paterson isn't: conservative.

Gillibrand is a member of conservative Blue Dog caucus. She is the only NY Democrat to have voted against the TARP legislation both times it came before the House, and has supported the renewal of Bush tax cuts.

Gillibrand has also been criticized for her close ties to the NRA. Her positions on gun control are likely to earn Gillibrand a primary challenge from Long Island Representative Carolyn McCarthy.

Gillibrand’s positions on some social issues is, shall we say, a work in progress. Once maligned for her less than clear statements on abortion rights, Gillibrand and her supporters now make it clear that she is solidly pro-choice. Gillibrand has also moved to support full marriage rights for same-sex couples; a position she was much less clear about just weeks ago. (Her new position is stronger than either that of current Senator Chuck Schumer or former Senator Clinton.)

Gillibrand is known as an impressive fundraiser—if you are one to be impressed by those sorts of things.

The last is the most important, of course. Rahm & Friends are very impressed by that sort of thing. Very.

Perceived Dumb People, Too

Non Sequitor by Wiley

It's Always Darkest Before the Storm

The bad news just keeps piling up as the Bush Economy, built on illusion, smoke dreams, and fakery, gets washed away in a rising tide of debt and fear. Georgia's unemployment just exceeded 8% and it's hitting the folks who thought they couldn't be hit. 

Georgia’s unemployment rate in December climbed to 8.1 percent, up 80 percent in the past year to reach its highest level since 1983, the state Labor Department announced Thursday.

During the past year, the state has lost nearly 122,000 jobs.

The pain has not been spread evenly: For instance, three of the job cuts came under the same roof in Loganville. Sharon Khilling lost her job as a legal secretary in November, the month after her husband was laid off from an auto-repair shop and several months after her son-in-law lost his job at Wal-Mart.

What Does Labor have To Do to Get Some Respect From Democrats?

An OS blogger named Organian went looking at the new White House website and has a question: "Where's Labor?"

Just out of curiosity, I took a look at the new, improved presidential website installed by the BHO administration yesterday. The page listing BHO's "agenda" covers a lot of issues that we can all agree need to be addressed - health care, energy, environment, poverty, civil rights, and so on. But there's one thing notably missing.

There is no mention of LABOR! After all the contributions and doorbell ringing by organized labor that went into getting BHO elected, wouldn't you expect that the agenda would at least mention vital issues like getting the card-check bill passed, revamping the NLRB, and so on? (Not to mention repealing Taft-Hartley, which I wouldn't expect a centrist Demo like BHO to endorse.) Nada. Bupkess. Zilch.

It's a good question. After 8 years of either ignoring workers' issues or being actively hostile to them, the state of  Labor in this country is tenuous at best. Obama's new Sec Labor, Hilda Solis, is going to have one helluva job cleaning up after Elaine Chao, the worst LaborSec in history, and so far there isn't much sign of interest from Obama's corporate-heavy Wall Street advisors.

The Man Responsible for Obama's Election

It may well be, though no one has yet said this, that the man who is truly responsible for the election of a black man to the US presidency isn't anyone who has been mentioned by anybody in any context.

"Bush Is Gone!" Day 2: Was the Bush Era Tragedy or Farce?

It has been a long 8 years, an age of a Dark Age, and I freely admit I wasn't at all sure it would actually end, not until Bush screwed himself so badly that even his own party ran away from him. For a while it looked as if they might be able to cover up their mistakes, theft, and moral bankruptcy long enough to eliminate the presidential term limit and steal yet a third election. In the end, it was the very excess on which they prided themselves that took them down.

Can You Imagine?

What if instead of Rick Warren's "wooden, uninspiring" invocation, a prayer so lacking in content (let alone poetry or emotion or, gawd forbid, communitarian, post-partison bring-us-togetherness, that no one - NO ONE - has yet bothered to quote from it. What if Instead of that deadbeat, moronic cliche-repeating the nation had heard this before Obama was sworn in?

“O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears -- tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless this nation with anger -- anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort at the easy, simplistic answers we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Go read the whole thing and then think again about Obama's decision-making process. He turned a great moment away and replaced it with mindless dreck. I'm not liking what that suggests about him.

Happy "Bush Is Gone" Day!

Tom Tomorrow has the last word.

Obama Promises SocSec "Reform", Ignores Corporate Tax Reform

Avedon Carol says as well and as succinctly as it can probably be said.

I really, really wish Obama would stop using language that suggests that he thinks the Republicons are right about Social Security. Social Security is paid for. Social Security is not the thing that is sucking the life out of our economy. It's the people who keep attacking "entitlements" who are doing that. There are a lot of big, systemic things that need to be addressed if we are really going to restore our economy to something most of us can live with. (And in the meantime, it sure wouldn't hurt to quit wasting money on crap like this.) We need people to be talking about why those big social programs are good for the economy, not reinforcing the Village-Republicon consensus. For dog's sake, people, Britain had just been through the Great Depression and had the hell bombed out of it by the Nazis and was not just broke but in debt and they still managed to create the NHS.

(emphasis added)

Yet nobody but nobody is talking about the kind of reform Davis Cay Johnston is suggesting. NOBODY. Not Obama, not his advisors, not the Village punditocracy, not even most left-wing blogs. This discussion hasn't even started yet and it's already over, according to them.

Everyday Miracle

This is a gorgeous post.  If I clip any, I'll steal it all.  I will add though that public money also made yesterday's rescue in the Hudson possible. Your Tax Dollars and Union Employees at Work.