Potheads 4 Obama

Obama's website, change.gov, had an open forum for people to post question, which were then ranked by other users in a Digg-like system.

The #1 question in the first round of entries:

"Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"

7,947 people liking this question, and 634 people not liking this question so far.

(H/T: Daily Kos)

Republicans Reject Auto Bailout

Daily Kos fingers the 18 Republican Senator who voted against a $15 billion rescue for the Big Three but approved a $700 billion bailout for the banks. 

One of the commentors over there points out: "Never miss the opportunity to bust a union."

There's a thread I've been active on at Ta-Nehisi's blog that discusses the relationship between pragmatism and ideology and this seems like a scenario wherein the ideological basis of a decision outweighed practical consideration, inevitably leading to disastrous consequences. Many, many jobs will be lost when two of the three go bankrupt (apparently Ford isn't as bad shape as GM and Chrysler). Can a conservative ideology that abhors unions explain the Republican's willingness to let the cornerstones of American manufacturing falter? Or is there something more sinister at work?

Republican Senator's support for the bank bailout, which was like 45x larger, stands out as an even bigger rejection of neo-classical economics and small government. Either the GOP has completely lost their way or the personal portfolios on Capitol hill have become a larger conflict of interest than anyone ever expected.

Re: Ruth Marcus, Shut Up

I didn't have time to post a response to Ruth Marcus's op-ed in the WP yesterday that romanticized the notion of Caroline Kennedy taking over Hillary Clinton's seat, but I found the underlying nepotism and celebrity-worship to be emetic. 

Ross (@ Atlantic) knocked this one out of the park. On a side-note, I wish I could write as well as this:

"...after twenty years with the same two families in the White House - which nearly became twenty-four (or twenty-eight) - for a political columnist to endorse a pointless escalation of dynastic politics because it fulfills the fairy-tale mythos her generation spun around a mediocre, tragically-murdered President and his good-looking family isn't "girly"; it's an embarrassment."

Now that is one helluva sentence. 

More notes on Canadian Politics via US

A summary and analysis lite of Harper's missteps and the current crisis in Slate -- 2 whole pages!

The end of Print

Andrew has a terrific column at the Times Online about the future of newsprint and the role of blogging in accelerating its demise. 

"Take the newspaper industry. It has been faltering badly under the pressure of new media for a few years. For much of the past decade, circulation for all papers has been declining at about 2% a year. The last year has been a test case of sorts. Newspapers had the story of a lifetime: an election campaign of historic interest, suspense, drama and personality. From Hil-lary to Barack, from John Edwards’s love child to Sarah Palin’s Down’s syndrome child, from John McCain’s wild lunges for relevance to the first black president, it was the kind of year in which circulation should have boomed. If you live for a story, this year was an embarrassment of riches."

His arguments are flawless, but I wish he would have devoted a little more space to recognizing the true differences between 'opinion-mongers' like him, and the journalists who go out there and discover the facts themselves.

Opinion dominates the blogosphere, no question, but what would people like me, sitting in front of their laptops at 1 in the morning, opine about if there was no primary source from which we could glean the facts and then monger on about? Blogging would lose all substantive meaning and relevance without the direct relationship to traditional news media, not to mention the serious loss of credibility once NYTimes, Washington Post, and other majors go belly up and I'm forced to links to say, oh I dunno, the Chechen Times for the primary story.

I also wonder how the shrinking print industry has been affecting wire services like AP and Reuters. Their target market is somewhat more diversified catering to online outlets as well, but these sources have a veritable monopoly on foreign news coverage. Dead-tree publishing closed all their foreign bureaus long ago in the original round of cost-cutting, in the late 70's and 80's. Andrew didn't mention this and I haven't got the figures, but if the wire-services are also in financial trouble, that would portent an even worse fate for the blogosphere. Without the reporting of the raw facts on the ground that inject new life into the online debates, the blogosphere will morph into simulacrum. 

That was fast.

Ken Silverstein at Harper's seems barely surprised by a story in the Houston Chronicle that passed with nary a twitter-- Obama has quietly announced that the windfall profits tax he proposed during the campaign will be shelved indefinitely. 

1) The economy is tanking, requests for bailouts are coming from all sectors, the budget deficit at about a trillion, and the national debt exceeds ten trillion. The market sheds hundreds of thousands of jobs a month, families are losing their homes, businesses are declaring bankruptcy every day. The Treasury needs cash now more than ever and a generous contribution from oil and gas companies wouldn't hurt. 

2) Silverstein notes that ExxonMobil, the largest corporation in the world, reaped the largest profit in history for US corporation last quarter-- $14.83 billion. It is perverse that American auto manufacturers expect a taxpayer funded billion-dollar bailout, when oil companies, the complicit enablers supplying the cheap gasoline for the public to fill up their SUV's, are posting record gains. The Big Three employ so many people that they are 'too big to fail' and need to restructure and it will be expensive. Why not take a chunk off the price tag with oil profits? I don't have the numbers to see how much revenue such a tax would generate, but as a populist political move, it would be shrewd-- and funny, in an ironic way. Kinda like appointing Gen. Shinseki as Veteran Affairs chief , the general who famously was fired after testifying to Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be necessary for an occupation of Iraq post-invasion. Wolfowitz (incorrectly) challenged Shinseki's figures as wildly off the mark, and Shinseki was fired. Obama's choice sends a clear signal about his own position on the wars, and the last 8 years in general

Bush by the numbers

Statistics like these can easily be cherry-picked to create a certain impression, and correlation never proves causation, but the Bush administrations careless deregulating can be directly linked to decreases in animal species being listed as endangered, and ironically, the percentage of federal contracts tendered without public competition.