Let the Sunshine In

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Tuesday November 09, 2010 · 2:28 PM PST

2010/11/09 · 14:28

Was it just bad messaging? Was it a mis-reading of what the voter wanted government to do? Was it Republican obstructionism, brilliantly disguised as an attempt to save the nation from socialism and other nefarious Obama designs?

Whatever it was, many voters took their frustrations out on the Democrats this midterm election. And if Obama is to succeed strongly enough to expect reelection in 2012, he had better work on shining some extra light on just what is really happening in Washington DC.

It will not suffice to rely upon the mainstream news media nor the pundits in the media to carry his message intact to the general public. The former seem to be too lazy or too shallow. The latter are almost all biased toward one side or the other, and in that shouting match they create all kinds of irrelevancies in a successful attempt to drown out the truth.

This diary, below the fold, suggests a new version of FDR's "Fireside Chats," but modernized for the age of information and the Internet. It will be something akin to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of one and a half centuries ago.

sjbob

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Saturday June 26, 2010 · 6:10 PM PDT

2010/06/26 · 18:10

This "Green GasCap" proposal works against two problems at once: our lavish purchases of foreign oil and the penance we'll have to pay for swimming in the greenhouse gases we produce. It will not be an evolutionary approach, like cap and trade, which works primarily upon suppliers. Their prime directive will always be to support the market demand they actually see. Instead, it attempts to create an economic disruption; it modifies the demand that suppliers see. It realigns market forces coherently and presses a balanced, directed force against the status quo.

It will not be a tax; but it will affect consumer psychology even more strongly than a tax. It acts at those critical times when we make purchase decisions that affect our nation's use of oil: at the pump; the automobile dealership; when we pay our monthly bills. It requires that we also purchase deposits when purchasing certain products of oil. There will be a constellation of different options through which those deposits can be redeemed. Usually they will be redeemed for even more value than the extra cash we originally had to pay. But all those options are designed to affect the economy in ways that reduce our need for carbon based energy -- and especially for foreign oil.

sjbob

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Tuesday June 15, 2010 · 12:11 PM PDT

2010/06/15 · 12:11

teacherken and Nashville fan have feuding diaries. Judging from the activity, you, the reader, have probably already read both diaries. If not, you should do so.

I agree more closely with teacherken. Nashville fan makes too many unsubstantiated assertions for my taste, so I will start below the fold with an attempt at exposing those. Then I will add something new, that neither diary seems to have considered.

sjbob

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Saturday June 12, 2010 · 5:58 PM PDT

2010/06/12 · 17:58

My worst case but imaginable scenario:

Both relief wells might fail in the same manner as the original one did. This would leave us with 3 gushers to contend with instead of one. Merry Christmas from BP.

Why? Because everything is the same: same oil field, same pressure, same depth, same rock formations, same company in charge of drilling the new wells, same drilling plan, same people at MMS overseeing the work.

No time or effort was invested for making revisions or learning from original mistakes. If one repeats a process over and over again, without bothering to change anything, why should one expect anything different to happen?

sjbob

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Thursday June 10, 2010 · 5:22 PM PDT

2010/06/10 · 17:22

Senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina's words, "So Yesterday!", were captured just one day after she won the Republican primary in California. She was waiting for the cameras to roll before an interview. She was mocking her opponent-to-be Barbara Boxer's hair styling when Barbara was on TV the evening before, also having won her own primary for California senatorial nomination, but on the Democratic side. Evidently Carly did not realize her mike was alive.

I think that Barbara Boxer should make frequent use of those words in sound bites. She should use them in many different ways throughout the fall campaign. Whenever Carly aligns herself with the "party of no" or pumps out a conservative theme calling for a return to American life as it was before and during the roaring twenties, yearns for the days of the "robber barons", or just tries to solve every problem with tax cuts which but benefit the rich and/or are not paid for, Barbara should hit her hard with those words: "... So Yesterday!"

sjbob

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Monday November 23, 2009 · 9:09 AM PST

2009/11/23 · 09:09

From Payback Time, New York Times, Sunday night, 11/22/09:

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed. ... the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We can't protect our children from the full brunt of this catastrophe. But we can protect our grand children. Continue over the fold for a plan to do that without increasing taxes on any living soul.

Poll

14 votes Show Results

How would you prefer to pay back your share of deferred taxes.

14 votes Vote Now!

How would you prefer to pay back your share of deferred taxes.

Throughout your lifetime in the form of increased taxes

4 votes

After death, as your estate is being settled

5 votes

By letting your grand-kids pay for it, instead

5 votes

Using Reinsurance To Channel Private Insurers Toward A Network That Behaves Single-Payer-Indirect

sjbob

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Thursday September 03, 2009 · 4:00 PM PDT

2009/09/03 · 16:00

This is an attempt to “think out of the box”. There still exists an open path by which we can solve many of the problems that have eluded us because a broad coalition of Americans will not cooperate. Furthermore, none of the present bills can solve our most important problem: pool pollution. Pool pollution is omnipresent in American Healthcare, having resulted from allowing private insurers to partition everyone into disjoint sub-pools with wildly assorted ratios of healthy to less-than-healthy individuals.

Single payer insurance has already been compromised away. But there may exist another means to get most of its advantages. This would be accomplished by indirection, using a mechanism called "reinsurance". We can still reorganize the current system of competing private insurers into a symbiotic network of insurers, all acting in coherence with one another. The emergent structure can be fashioned such that the whole network becomes better at improving America's health care than the sum of its elements can do so acting on their own initiatives.

This proposal calls for fundamental health care reform. It creates an American Pool Equalization and Reinsurance Agency, (APERA), which can also provide a new funding mechanism that pays much of the cost for mandating universal coverage.

sjbob

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Tuesday November 18, 2008 · 11:28 AM PST

2008/11/18 · 11:28

A lot of things have been said in diaries concerning how we should think about the plight of the auto industry, and hardly anything about how the auto industry should think about their own failures toward us.

Over the fold I want to offer an idea that provides the minimum that I think our government should expect in return for a bailout.

sjbob

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Monday November 10, 2008 · 9:09 AM PST

2008/11/10 · 09:09

This proposal is intended to mitigate at least three problems facing this country in the immediate future:

The plight of GM, Ford and Chrysler, the auto-parts industry and the millions of jobs that depend upon their health.

The portion of our national wealth which is being transfered each year to the oil rich countries of the world

The lack of ridership and the poor state of our mass transit alternatives for fuel efficient transportation.

sjbob

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Saturday November 08, 2008 · 4:30 PM PST

2008/11/08 · 16:30

Over and over again, I keep hearing Republican pundits talking about how unlucky McCain was:

"His bar was lifted too high because of the timing of the economic meltdown. No Republican stood a chance after the economic events of mid September. Poor Johnny did remarkably well given the circumstances."

(I paraphrase.)

How convenient, though, that they limit their analysis to the near past. By framing their thoughts in that manner they have eliminating any need to reckon with the idea that the economic collapse was already baked into the pie -- by a flawed philosophy of economic governance.

sjbob

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Sunday September 14, 2008 · 7:12 PM PDT

2008/09/14 · 19:12

Why were the Bush Tax Cuts fake?

Because they were all put onto the government's credit card. We still have to pay those taxes.

Why were they steenking?

Because there is a slow, decade long shell game being played upon the middle class. How many of you have watched for the shell with the peanut close enough to see where it is going?

Let's go below the fold to see where it has gone.

sjbob

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Saturday September 13, 2008 · 1:16 PM PDT

2008/09/13 · 13:16

In today's Washington Post Charles Krauthammer discusses the Palin-Gibson exchange concerning the Bush Doctrine. He starts by referring the reader to Wikipedia's definition of the term, touting his own expertise by pointing out that he was first to provide the definition of the term. He Says:

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. ... I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

As it turns out, I had performed a cut and paste of Wikipedia's article in a comment to a DKos diary just two days ago. There was no mention of Mr Krautheimer in the Wikipedia article on that day.

Poll

84 votes Show Results

How do you think the reference to Krautheimer got into Wikipedia just in time for him to cite it in his column?

84 votes Vote Now!

How do you think the reference to Krautheimer got into Wikipedia just in time for him to cite it in his column?

Charles edited it himself

24 votes

Charles had his assistant do it

51 votes

Some stranger edited Wikipedia while eating his pie

9 votes

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Let the Sunshine In

Wherein A Green GasCap Disruption Is Proposed

What if Eugene Robinson is Neither Completely Right nor Wrong?

The Gulf of Mexico Meets the Peter Principle

"So Yesterday!"

Controlling the National Debt

Using Reinsurance To Channel Private Insurers Toward A Network That Behaves Single-Payer-Indirect

Exploring The Conditions That Make An Auto Bailout Acceptable

Guzzlermoney: Curing Three Economic Problems With One (Psuedo)Tax

Deflecting The Blame

We Don't Need No More Fake, Steenking Tax Cuts!

That "Oh So Modest" Charles Krauthammer!