Columnist – John Sammon You know the old saying, those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it? What can you say about Republican hopefuls Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and their incredible knowledge of U.S. history? Remember, this is the best they can do, the Republican Party, out of the millions of people they might select. These two are the crème of the crop.
The following unauthorized, imaginary interview with the pair is based nevertheless on real statements the dynamic duo has made.
Myself — Ms. Palin, wouldn’t you say that we’re in the worst economic crisis since before World War II?
Palin — World War II?
Myself — Yes.
Palin — Wasn’t that that war where they drove old cars around a lot?
Myself — You could say that yes.
Palin — No. The worst crises are the liberals trying to take our guns and God away from us.
Myself — Ms. Bachmann. Do you agree?
Bachmann — The bitch doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You knew that I’m the spirit of John Wayne don’t you?
Myself — No. I didn’t know that.
Bachmann — He comes in the night with God standing behind him and tells me that God is an American, and the Republican Party is the party of God.
Myself — Really?
Bachmann — That’s right. That’s why we’ve never lost a war.
Myself — Because of John Wayne?
Bachmann — Because we’re in the right.
Myself — But we have lost one.
Bachmann — We did?
Myself — Yes. Vietnam.
Bachmann — Oh that. Yeah, I heard about that. The Vietnams attacked San Diego and then we dropped an atomic bomb on ‘em.
Myself — I think you’re getting confused with World War II.
Bachmann — World War what?
Myself — Never mind.
Palin — Can I say something?
Myself — Go ahead.
Palin — The history of this country has always been about God fearin’ people and God and the people fightin’ Godless savages. All through history, when Paul Revere warned the British they wouldn’t take our guns, to the battleships at the Alamo, we’ve been the ones. On May 5, 1968, at Pearl City, Hawaii, we were hit in a surprise attack at dawn and hit hard. But we struck back, and killed that Arab that hid the secret weapons in Iraq.
Myself — You mean Bin Laden?
Palin — Whoever.
Bachmann — I don’t have to take this. The bitch needs a bitch–slap. It wasn’t Pearl City, Hawaii. Everybody knows it was Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The A–Rab air force made a sneak attack and all our ships were lined up in a row in the harbor. I’ve traveled across this country…and
Palin — I had a bus.
Bachmann — Shut up bitch! I’ve traveled the length and width up and down of this country, and I’ve talked to heroes, veterans and people who know God like I do, and they all say the same things. America is our country, not theirs. You’re not one of them are you?
Myself — Them?
Bachmann — Those people. The evil ones. Those who don’t believe in God and the flag, the socialists and traitors.
Myself — I was a boy scout.
Palin — I know God better than you do Bachmann. You bitch! You say you know John Wayne? I was going to be on a reality show in a bikini with Brad Pitt. Try and top that. Not some dead cowboy. I got to talk on the phone to Margaret Thatcher one time and almost got a meeting with her.
Myself — Can we close this by simply saying that you both are concerned about the country? Have you two considered becoming running mates?
Palin — It’s possible.
Myself — Then the two of you might be able to stem the worst economic situation since the Great Depression?
Palin — The Great Depression?
Bachmann — You mean the Grand Canyon?
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The ‘Defeated‘: Two Nut-Jobs, Michele Bachmann and Sarah ‘DEATH‘ Palin Crowd Iowa
Columnist – John Sammon I would like to ask this question. Aside from being on the wrong side of every social advancement made over the past 100 years including Civil Rights, Medicare, Social Security, Child Labor, Women’s Rights, Equal Jobs and Housing, the right to collectively bargain, to Unionize, what has the Republican Party ever passed?
What have they ever done except oppose?
Anything that helps lower-income Americans, Republicans view as wasteful spending.
What has the Republican Party ever done just once in its entire history to advance social justice? Launching wars on tiny impoverished Middle Eastern countries based on false weapons of mass destruction to grab their oil doesn’t count.
The answer is zip. Zero. Nada. Nothing. In fact, the Republican Party has opposed all of the things mentioned above and if it had its way, none of the above would exist. It would still be an 1890′s America.
The Republicans have a long history of nothing, except bad. Three successive Republican presidents, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were in office leading up to the Great Depression of 1932. Bush and Cheney presided over the near collapse of this country two years ago, the worst since 1932. The trickle-down economics championed by Reagan and the fantasy that money hoarded by the ultra-rich and the tax loop-hole privileges they enjoy would make life better for the dying middle class and the poor is a proven failure.
John Boehner, the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, when he isn’t crying from the rostrum, basically reiterated the same thing a few weeks ago, saying “so be it,” in other words, “let them eat cake,” when told an action could result in people losing their jobs. It’s clear. He like other Republicans hope the American people suffer and the economy goes down the drain so Republicans can gain seats in the next election. Your misery is his gain.
Not a lot has changed.
The Republicans rail about socialism and give-aways and entitlements. How many former Republican Congressmen and women have refused their Social Security benefits, those who qualify? None. How many Americans if a poll was taken, would like to see Social Security and Medicaid abolished because they are entitlement schemes enacted by socialist liberal traitors?
None, except a few nuts.
All the Republicans have done since the Civil War, the last time they were proactive, backing Lincoln and emancipating slaves, all they have done ever since is to obstruct, except for wars. They love war. They say they stand for limiting big government and opposing higher taxes —-a lie borne out by the mushrooming debts incurred under both Reagan and Bush.
What original ideas have they conceived? None. What legislation have Republicans engineered that like Social Security most Americans benefit from and endorse? None.
Reagan supporters also claim that he alone won the Cold War, though it was the ineptitude, wastefulness and corruption of the Russians themselves that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A system that worked wouldn’t be brought down by one man. That’s nonsense only a Republican could believe.
Bush and Cheney destroyed the American economy and started two un-winnable wars.
What have Republicans ever done for the common good?
The tea-baggers screaming for blood at one of their frenzy rallies hinting that they’re going to take up arms or shoot the president, they’re all products of a government-run public schools system. They’re not going to give up their Social Security or Medicare. They like government intervention when it benefits them.
So, why do they scream? If they were honest, they’d tell you, I don’t want my money being given to niggers. Niggers can include more than just African Americans, whom conservatives secretly consider to be freeloaders and brainless animals only fit for basketball and who leech off government, when historically, black Americans have had to look to the federal government to give them redress to blatant racism and double standards. Individual states, particularly those in the South, wouldn’t do it.
Niggers now include women, gays, immigrants, Mexicans, liberals and anyone who looks different, and of course, Muslims, a religion that existed for countless centuries before some Americans decided to add them to the list of those already hated for no other reason than 9-11. Condemn an entire religion? They used to do that to Catholics and Jews. Some still do.
To mask their racism and to try and collect so-called minority votes, Republicans search for women and blacks to serve as token figureheads of their party. That chicanery at least makes some sense.
But I ask again. What have they ever done except say “No?”
Punishing the Jobless: We’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused. Nothing can be done about the first group, and probably not much about the second. By the heartless, I mean Republicans who have made the cynical calculation that blocking anything President Obama tries to do — including, or perhaps especially, anything that might alleviate the nation’s economic pain — improves their chances in the midterm elections. By the clueless I mean people like Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for senator from Nevada, who has repeatedly insisted that the unemployed are deliberately choosing to stay jobless, so that they can keep collecting benefits. — Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize Winner in Economic Sciences
[ By: Paul Krugman ] There was a time when everyone took it for granted that unemployment insurance, which normally terminates after 26 weeks, would be extended in times of persistent joblessness. It was, most people agreed, the decent thing to do.
But that was then. Today, American workers face the worst job market since the Great Depression, with five job seekers for every job opening, with the average spell of unemployment now at 35 weeks. Yet the Senate went home for the holiday weekend without extending benefits. How was that possible?
The answer is that we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused. Nothing can be done about the first group, and probably not much about the second. But maybe it’s possible to clear up some of the confusion.
By the heartless, I mean Republicans who have made the cynical calculation that blocking anything President Obama tries to do — including, or perhaps especially, anything that might alleviate the nation’s economic pain — improves their chances in the midterm elections. Don’t pretend to be shocked: you know they’re out there, and make up a large share of the G.O.P. caucus.
By the clueless I mean people like Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for senator from Nevada, who has repeatedly insisted that the unemployed are deliberately choosing to stay jobless, so that they can keep collecting benefits. A sample remark: “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job but it doesn’t pay as much. We’ve put in so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry.”
Now, I don’t have the impression that unemployed Americans are spoiled; desperate seems more like it. One doubts, however, that any amount of evidence could change Ms. Angle’s view of the world — and there are, unfortunately, a lot of people in our political class just like her.
But there are also, one hopes, at least a few political players who are honestly misinformed about what unemployment benefits do — who believe, for example, that Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, was making sense when he declared that extending benefits would make unemployment worse, because “continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.” So let’s talk about why that belief is dead wrong.
Do unemployment benefits reduce the incentive to seek work? Yes: workers receiving unemployment benefits aren’t quite as desperate as workers without benefits, and are likely to be slightly more choosy about accepting new jobs. The operative word here is “slightly”: recent economic research suggests that the effect of unemployment benefits on worker behavior is much weaker than was previously believed. Still, it’s a real effect when the economy is doing well.
But it’s an effect that is completely irrelevant to our current situation. When the economy is booming, and lack of sufficient willing workers is limiting growth, generous unemployment benefits may keep employment lower than it would have been otherwise. But as you may have noticed, right now the economy isn’t booming — again, there are five unemployed workers for every job opening. Cutting off benefits to the unemployed will make them even more desperate for work — but they can’t take jobs that aren’t there.
Wait: there’s more. One main reason there aren’t enough jobs right now is weak consumer demand. Helping the unemployed, by putting money in the pockets of people who badly need it, helps support consumer spending. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office rates aid to the unemployed as a highly cost-effective form of economic stimulus. And unlike, say, large infrastructure projects, aid to the unemployed creates jobs quickly — while allowing that aid to lapse, which is what is happening right now, is a recipe for even weaker job growth, not in the distant future but over the next few months.
But won’t extending unemployment benefits worsen the budget deficit? Yes, slightly — but as I and others have been arguing at length, penny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems. And penny-pinching at the expense of the unemployed is cruel as well as misguided.
So, is there any chance that these arguments will get through? Not, I fear, to Republicans: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, in this case, his hope of retaking Congress — “depends upon his not understanding it.” But there are also centrist Democrats who have bought into the arguments against helping the unemployed. It’s up to them to step back, realize that they have been misled — and do the right thing by passing extended benefits.
About The Author: Paul Krugman — is a columnist on the Op-Ed Page of The New York Times, and is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Mr. Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.
Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His professional reputation rests largely on work in international trade and finance; he is one of the founders of the “new trade theory,” a major rethinking of the theory of international trade. In recognition of that work, in 1991 the American Economic Association awarded him its John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to “that economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge.” Mr. Krugman’s current academic research is focused on economic and currency crises.
In 2008, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. He was voted sixth in a 2005 global poll of the world’s top 100 intellectuals by Prospect. [ READ MORE ]
Nobody can compete with Obama for cool. Even Republicans cannot say No to an invitation to party in the White House
It is happy hour on Wednesday night at the White House and the guests are downing cocktails before dining on wild-mushroom crisps, steelhead salmon and toasted saffron couscous pearls.
Barack and Michelle Obama are doing the rounds. “This is a pretty big house, so we get lonely,” Obama jokes. “It’s hard for me to move around out there sometimes, so I got to bring the world to me.”
All eyes are on the 44th president of the United States. “There is a part of Barack Obama that is ‘I’m the man, I’m the guy,’” says one of his friends. “The way he walks – even the vice-president walks behind him. He has risen so fast, he has got to have a bit of bravado about him.”
Nobody can compete with Obama for cool. Not the saxophone-playing Bill Clinton, and certainly not the early-to-bed, teetotal George W Bush.
PICTURE: U.S. President Barack Obama and members of the first family listen as entertainer Fergie (R) sings the national anthem on the Truman Balcony of the White House, on the South Lawn, in Washington. From L-R are:Obama, first lady Michelle Obama (top), daughter Sasha, daughter Malia, Obama’s mother-in-law Marian Robinson and Fergie.
One former White House adviser calls it Obama’s “Aloha Zen,” borne on the winds of his native Hawaii to the South Side of Chicago, the capital of black America, where the 47-year-old president forged his political career.
There has already been a White House party to honor Stevie Wonder – he wrote the “soundtrack to my youth,” Obama recalled – while the 1970s group Earth, Wind and Fire entertained state governors at a reception a few weeks later.
The Jonas Brothers, a boy band, have played hide-and-seek with Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, Washington’s queens of tween. The most coveted invitation is to the first daughters’ sleepovers, because the president just might turn up to tuck you in.
“People think I’m cool. Nobody is cooler than my girls,” boasts their father.
Resist invitation
Even Republican congressmen who have laid into Obama’s $9 trillion spending plans are unable to resist an invitation to the big house. Some were there for St Patrick’s Day, knocking back the Guinness as the White House fountains flowed green. Others turned up for hot dogs, pizza and potato chips on Super Bowl night.
Friends, cabinet members and congressmen crowded into the president’s private movie theatre for the game as their children watched Disney’s Ratatouille and ate ice cream in an anteroom.
Patrick Murphy, a Pennsylvania congressman who was one of Obama’s earliest Democratic backers, was there with Charlie Dent, a Republican from the same state. It was only a few weeks into Obama’s presidency, yet it was Dent’s second visit to the White House.
“I said, ‘Charlie, how many times did you come here with President Bush?’” Murphy recalled. “He said, ‘I was never invited here with President Bush.’”
It is no easy task to summon up the spirit of Camelot in the midst of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Some scrooges are already grousing that so much partying is unseemly as America’s national debt mounts.
Wednesday cocktails are fast becoming a White House “tradition,” according to Desiree Rogers, the immaculately groomed White House social secretary. But it is work as well as play.
At the Super Bowl party, “The president was in his khakis and shirt sleeves, but we talked shop at half-time,” said Murphy. “He was working the room. He made sure he had a private conversation with everybody. It was an effort.”
The lightness of being that John F Kennedy and his wife brought to the White House in the early 1960s wasn’t effortless either; it only looked that way. Leticia Baldridge, former social secretary to Jackie Kennedy, has a caustic take on the elegant cocktail parties of that era.
“We had them, we didn’t like them, but they’re a necessary evil,” she says, “a way of taking care of social obligations.”
For Obama, the bipartisan schmoozing is a weapon aimed at the heart of the Republican party. It’s disarming. He can’t win everyone’s vote, but he can court their admiration.
Under Obama, the alchemist who turned an e-mail list of 13m supporters into pure electoral gold, the White House has become a permanent campaign headquarters. Every member of staff is on full alert.
On Wednesday nights, while the Obamas entertain at the White House, another soiree takes place across town – one for workaholics, led by David Axelrod, the sharp but sleepy-eyed senior adviser, who has followed his boss from Chicago to the West Wing.
Obama’s victory
The rumpled “Ax,” 54, is the communications genius who masterminded Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries last year – a far harder task than the one that followed: beating John McCain, the 72-year-old Republican presidential candidate. It is Axelrod’s job to keep Obama’s feet on the ground as his head, inevitably, swells in size.
The regular invitation-only Wednesday Night Meeting draws together policy-makers, advisers and the speech-writers who craft Obama’s nonstop message.
“It helps clarify my thinking to talk to people I have faith in,” Axelrod says. Jon Favreau, Obama’s 27-year-old “mind-reader” and speech-writer, says Axelrod often asks aloud: “Can I speak on behalf of the American people here?”
Keeping it real is an obsession at the White House. “The inability to just go and sit at a corner coffee shop and have a chat with people… that, I think, is something that as president you’ve got to constantly fight against,” Obama says. He sees himself as the “people’s president,” says Betsy Myers, a senior Obama campaign official.
The president’s day begins with a briefing by economic advisers; a change from Bush, who always addressed national security and intelligence matters first. With the economy in freefall, it is a question of priorities. When he began his run for president, nobody, least of all Obama, foresaw how two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be elbowed out by more pressing matters, such as the failure of the US banking system, the collapse of the car industry, and the loss of more than 4m jobs.
After midnight
At night Obama reads 10 letters selected by his staff from the 40,000 that arrive by the sackful each day, helping him to break free of the White House “bubble”. It is normal for the lights of the Oval Office to be burning after midnight.
Aides feel the strain.
The rising stars, such as Favreau (“Favs”) and Reggie Love, 27, the president’s “body man,” who carries his jacket, hands him his phone and is on call 24/7 in a tiny alcove outside the Oval Office – sometimes for a quick game of basketball – are living off their wits and adrenaline.
“They’re exhausted, but they’re also pinching themselves. It’s like, ‘I’ve got so much to do, but it’s so neat, I’m sitting on Air Force One with the president,’” an adviser says.
Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s hard-boiled chief of staff, a ballet dancer turned congressman, gets up at 5.30am to work out at his old haunt, the gym in Congress. It is there that he has been arm-twisting some of the more conservative “blue dog” Democrats into supporting Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill. He rarely gets home before 10.30pm.
“As I always like to joke around the White House,” he says, “on Friday I say, ‘Good. It’s just two more workdays till Monday.’”
Obama has the advantage of living above the shop. “It must be nice to get home in two minutes,” another congressman told him. “Thirty seconds,” Obama grinned.
One of Obama’s first demands was for an encrypted “BarackBerry,” so that he could be the first president to stay in touch by e-mail with his close circle of friends, including those he left behind in Chicago.
“People appreciate that there’s a real family atmosphere back in the country,” says the congressman Patrick Murphy.
During the inauguration, he was with the Obamas on their whistle-stop train ride to Washington along with his wife and two-year-old daughter, Maggie. “I asked Malia, ‘How much would you charge to baby-sit?’ ‘Aw,’ she replied. ‘I love Maggie. I wouldn’t charge you to watch her.’”
Obama’s family values have boosted his popularity, but the goodwill won’t last if his economic recovery plans falter. Republicans are warning of a slide to “European socialism” that could leave America as the sick man of the western world and drag other nations down.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Emanuel, a phrase that sums up Obama’s activist style of government. Universal health care, a green energy revolution, the redistribution of wealth: no problem seems too big to solve, even though the country is broke.
Hillary Clinton, Obama’s surprise choice as secretary of state, said the same thing. “Never waste a good crisis,” she stated, while offering to reboot relations with Russia, woo Iran, flatter China, reopen the Middle East peace process, surge in Afghanistan and leave Iraq.
With such a big beast of the jungle in his cabinet, perhaps waiting to pounce, the possibility of a bust-up cannot be ruled out.
“I’ve heard she is very happy,” said one former Clinton staffer. “But sometimes she must want to smack Obama.”
No Drama
The attacks on him are beginning to mount. The Economist, in an article widely quoted in America, recently described his performance as erratic.
“The man who earned the sobriquet ‘No Drama Obama‘ for running such a disciplined campaign has, since coming to office, slipped on one banana skin after another.”
After an initial smooth start during the transition from Bush, he ran into snafus on a series of appointments, particularly at the Treasury, leaving the overworked Tim Geithner in charge of saving the world’s economy almost single-handedly.
Betsy Myers says Obama presents a fascinating study in leadership. “It will be really interesting to watch him over the next few years. When is the bloom going to come off the rose? Or maybe it won’t? He’s had an amazing start.”
Obama is already campaigning for the next election. He has attended town-hall meetings in the big swing states, submitted to questioning from internet users, addressed the nation several times on prime-time television, and deployed his army of volunteers to lobby Congress for his budget (counterproductively, one hears).
If it doesn’t work, he won’t lose his cool, Myers predicts. “It’s typical Obama, which is, ‘We’re going to do everything we possibly can, and if the country doesn’t like it, in four years’ time then we’ll have a new president.’”
On Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008, the astonished leadership of the U.S. Congress was told in a private session by the chairman of the Federal Reserve that the American economy was in grave danger of a complete meltdown within a matter of days. “There was literally a pause in that room where the oxygen left,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.).
As the housing bubble burst and trillions of dollars’ worth of toxic mortgages began to go bad in 2007, fear spread through the massive firms that form the heart of Wall Street. By the spring of 2008, burdened by billions of dollars of bad mortgages, the investment bank Bear Stearns was the subject of rumors that it would soon fail. [ MORE ]
You know the old saying, those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it? What can you say about Republican hopefuls Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and their incredible knowledge of U.S. history? Remember, this is the best they can do, the Republican Party, out of the millions of people they might select. These two are the crème of the crop.
There was a time when everyone took it for granted that unemployment insurance, which normally terminates after 26 weeks, would be extended in times of persistent joblessness. It was, most people agreed, the decent thing to do. 
