Read All About It in the Sunday Papers
El Somnambulo digs up the good stuff so that you don’t have to:
President Obama proposes outreach to the Taliban in a wide-ranging NYTimes interview:
Mr. Obama pointed to the success in peeling Iraqi insurgents away from more hard-core elements of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a strategy that many credit as much as the increase of American forces with turning the war around in the last two years. “There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and in the Pakistani region,” he said, while cautioning that solutions in Afghanistan will be complicated.
The Chicago Tribune profiles Barack Obama’s 27-year-old chief speechwriter Jon Favreau. Bulo hates him!
The 30-something generation, formerly Generation X, suffering the most from the economic downturn, according to the Boston Globe.
The Christian Science Monitor poses the question and possible answer as to whether greenhouse gases can actually be removed from the atmosphere. Fascinating. Paging Tommywonk…
Dog Bites Man. From the LATimes, Donald Trump rips off wealthy investors on Baja California project. As Trump and Jim Cramer prove, it’s OK to be a crook as long as you’re on TV and you’re charismatic. Come to think of it, that defines TV evangelists as well.
Finally, more on those Luzerne County judges who victimized hundreds of juveniles adjudicated for bogus offenses by sending them to privately-run detention centers run by a company that provided millions in kickbacks to the judges. If this piece from today’s Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t make you both sad and angry, you might want to look elsewhere for your news and opinion.
nice job man
“Dog Bites Man. From the LATimes, Donald Trump rips off wealthy investors on Baja California project. As Trump and Jim Cramer prove, it’s OK to be a crook as long as you’re on TV and you’re charismatic. Come to think of it, that defines TV evangelists as well.”
and B.O.
I read the Boston Globe article with interest since I’m a Gen-Xer myself. It looks like all age groups are suffering quite a lot. GenX may find it the hardest to understand since we’re the generation that grew up under Reagan, participated in the Republican Revolution of the 90s and listened to Rush Limbaugh. It must be difficult for a lot of us to realize that all we’ve known is wrong. (To be clear, a sizable portion of us never bought into this hooey)
It is strange to think about the future. For a long time I’ve thought that about now, and the next 5 years or so would be sort of a “golden age” for GenX, that with the huge retirement wave of baby boomers our experience would be appreciated and acknowledged. Now I fear that the baby boomers won’t be able to retire at all.
“The Chicago Tribune profiles Barack Obama’s 27-year-old chief speechwriter Jon Favreau. Bulo hates him!”
Why, because he’s dating the Obama aide-slash-Maxim model?
Yes, and ‘Bulo can’t even get a date w/a Barbizon model…
This is a good collection, ‘Bulo — when I read the NYT article, they had a transcript of the interview also listed as interesting. And so it was, for alot of reasons, but this is the one I am interested in (in which America’s Newspaper of record embarrasses itself again):
Q. The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?
A. You know, let’s take a look at the budget — the answer would be no.
Q. Is there anything wrong with saying yes?
A. Let’s just take a look at what we’ve done. We’ve essentially said that, number one, we’re going to reduce non-defense discretionary spending to the lowest levels in decades. So that part of the budget that doesn’t include entitlements and doesn’t include defense – that we have the most control over – we’re actually setting on a downward trajectory in terms of percentage of G.D.P. So we’re making more tough choices in terms of eliminating programs and cutting back on spending than any administration has done in a very long time. We’re making some very tough choices….
Then these highly paid and presumably professional vetters of information ask again:
Q. Is there one word name for your philosophy? If you’re not a socialist, are you a liberal? Are you progressive? One word?
A. No, I’m not going to engage in that.
WTF? This is supposed to be the liberal media, yes? But, President Obama thought about that interview for abit and called the NYT for a followup:
Obama: Just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter. It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question. I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement — the prescription drug plan without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks through these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can’t say the same.
Q. So who’s watch are we talking about here?
A. Well, I just think it’s clear by the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system. And the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis.
Very nice push back on the incredibly stupid (but very old school) red scare crapola on the right. More like this please — and somehow this kind of pushback has to happen among all Democrats. And, let’s hope a lesson to these reporters that credulously taking on every new bit of stupidity from the wingnuts is likely to make them look a lot stupider than they probably are.
The whole transcript is worth reading…
That’s sad. They were going for the cheap thrill, the easy headline. Just imagine if he’d played along…
Obama calls his policies ‘socialist’
or, from the follow-up call…
Obama calls Bush policies ‘socialist’