In Delaware, keep your hands where they belong in the voting booth

I guess Delaware doesn't have any real problems to deal with. Wanking...now there is a critical socio-economic issue for the US Senate to deal with.

Thanks for the um...heads-up to the Media Consortium.

Letting a crisis go to waste...

Crisis Past, Obama May Have Missed an Opportunity

"...What all of this means for the country is that, even if Mr. Obama ultimately succeeds in stabilizing the economy, he faces a political climate that seems to be growing more hostile to the scale of public investment that many economists say the nation needs to keep pace with foreign competitors.

And that, you would think, is the very definition of a crisis having gone to waste."

Well, at least its books they are burning...again

A Gainesville Christian church is going to commemorate 9-11-2001 with a Koran burning. The bad news is that even though this is a small church, it is getting international attention all out of proportion to its size and worrying Gen. Petraeus, who is concerned that U.S. troops in the Middle East might become convenient targets of retaliation.

I guess the good news is that while our extremist Islamic brothers and sisters elsewhere are stoning people to death, our extremist Christian brothers and sisters here are just burning sacred texts. So far, anyway. But it seems misguided to me and to Professor John Esposito as well, to blame the Koran for the nutjobs who carried out 9-11 just as it would be nutty to blame Christianity for Timmy McVeigh's truck-bomb ride to infamy in Oklahoma City.

The First Amendment gives us the right to be nutty as fruitcakes, as long as we don't hit anyone over the head with the fruits of our kitchen labor. Gen. Petraeus, however, is worried about some of his men taking extra potshots over this. He is certainly wondering if the good Pastor Jones is going too far.

Sigh. Hasn't humanity traveled down this road before? The picture above was taken in Berlin in 1933. Acknowledgments to Wikipedia and the NY Times.

Robert Reich: Why the economic smoke and mirrors won't work

In today's New York Times

"...The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working: near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package and tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.

That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them...

(snip)...THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. In the 1930s, the American economy was completely restructured. New Deal measures — Social Security, a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half overtime, unemployment insurance, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage — leveled the playing field.."

Go read the whole thing.

And another oil platform goes up in flames......

Oil Sheen Seen Near Damaged Platform in Gulf of Mexico

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JACK HEALY 7 minutes ago

The mile-long sheen was spotted hours after an explosion on the offshore oil platform on Thursday, the Coast Guard said.