Will-fully Ignorant

It's just a continuation of a conservative meme that has been out for a while, it's just been repackaged to sound credible.



Spoken like a person that has never been on unemployment.

Dependant on your needs, or that of your family, the reality of unemployment benefits is that they are not equivalent to the wages you would earn on the job - they are based on your current salary and hours worked each week. Often times, and far too often from my perspective, employers can deny unemployment benefits for a variety of reasons and cannot be challenged by the employee. This, however, can vary from state to state.

The larger point of this is that unemployment benefits more often than not do not cover all expenses that a required. Try paying your mortgage, getting groceries, putting gas in your car, and keeping up with the bills on an unemployment check. If anything, the unemployment check that you get each week would be a great incentive for finding a full-time job that pays a living wage.

Republicans Are Having A Good Month

Well, as good as they are framing it to be.

From the reports of resignations by 3 Democrats ( and there are many more Republicans retiring, but you won't hear them speak of that ) to the newly revealed statements of Harry Reid. His racist comments are all the rage in the conservative blogging realm, and calls for his resignation are growing louder and louder.

And while not everyone is claiming that what Reid said is racist, one thing is quite clear - the conservative double-standard is most certainly in play.

Trent Lott made racist statements and his party accepted an apology and moved on. But that was before we had a black President. Conservatives are hyper sensitive about race, and Barack Obama's election simply amplified that to a fault. Many within the conservative ranks of leadership ( Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity ) still used racially charged language when discussing issues, but amplified their labeling of people as racists. So now that Reid's words have been revealed, conservatives are acting like children with new Christmas toys.

The one overriding factor that the reactionary wingnuts aren't taking into account is Obama's acceptance of Reid apology. Does it change what happened? Absolutely not. Should this be used to show that liberals/progressives are somehow "accepting" of racial animus within their own party? Not at all, but that is precisely what Liz Cheney says this is.

If anything, Reid should step down as Senate leader. However, from my perspective, he should never have been leader in the first place. His "skills", or lack thereof, haven't benefited the Democratic platform once. This incident only amplifies his incompetence in more ways than I care to enumerate at this point. The bottom line is that what he did was wrong and no one within the Democratic party thinks everything is "just fine".

But Republicans are forgetting that RNC Chairman Micheal Steele had his own racial slur problem. But this is all part of the great month Republicans are having. They aren't reporting on it in favor of another racial slur. And that is the double standard.

Worst In The World v 5.4

George Will

Sean Hannity

Bill O'Reilly

"Dealing" With Revisionists

I'm not an economist.

Neither is George Will. And Ed Morrissey at HotAir is just plain stupid.

Considering that fact that so many within the conservative realm will take any and everything that Will says as gospel, it's no suprise that they jumped for joy when he pointed to FDRs "New Deal" as one of the ( if not THE ) root cause that The Depression lasted as long as it did. However, Paul Krugman ( you know, that guy that just won the Nobel Prize for Economics ) had a quick and truthful rebuttal to Will's right-wing nonsense:




Ed Morrissey comes into the equation not so much hanging on Will's coattails - though I would imagine that he felt a bit more comfortable knowing that Will initiated the talking-point - but in reference to a Washington Post article where writer Lori Montgomery speaks about the simularities between what Obama is postulating and what FDR did with the "New Deal".

Portion cited from Montgomery's article:

The campaign did not release an estimate of the number of jobs that his latest proposal would create. But congressional aides who have been involved in developing stimulus proposals said that any plan to create 2.5 million jobs is likely to be significantly larger — probably well over $200 billion, or between 1 and 2 percent of the gross domestic product.
Such a plan would be bold by historic standards. President Bill Clinton, facing a weak economy when he took office in 1993, proposed a $16 billion stimulus package, which was blocked in the Senate. Obama’s proposal would be an order of magnitude larger, even when adjusted for the larger size of today’s economy.
Some economists have compared Obama’s proposals to the spending spree President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched during his early months in office in 1933. Roosevelt offered jobs programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, and cash for public-works projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, in hopes of easing the pain of the Great Depression.

Ed Morrissey's predictable reaction:

Lori Mongtomery apparently took pains to use the phrase “in hopes of”. FDR certainly hoped to alleviate the pain of the Great Depression with his experiment in federal mobilization of the civilian workforce, but he failed to do so. FDR spent years pulling capital out of the private sector and creating civil-service jobs that underproduced and inefficiently utilized the capital. The end result was a prolonged depression that only ended when FDR was forced to partner with private enterprise on the war effort in the 1940s.

While Morrissey's schtick is more grounded in the "the media is in-the-tank-for-Obama" way of thinking, you can still feel the flow of what Will started.

So, what does all this mean?

How do we know that George Will and Ed Morrissey are drinking their own bathwater?

Just ask Brad Delong who offers up the chart below as proof.




He goes on to state the following:

I have never been able to make any sense at all of the right-wing claim that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by creating a "crisis of confidence" that crippled private investment as American businessmen feared and hated "that Communist Roosevelt." The crisis of confidence was created by the stock market crash, the deflation, and the bank failures of 1929-1933. Private investment recovered in a very healthy fashion as Roosevelt's New Deal policies took effect.

The interruption of the Roosevelt Recovery in 1937-1938 is, I think, wel understood: Roosevelt's decision to adopt more "orthodox" economic policies and try to move the budget toward balance and the Federal Reserve's decision to contract the money supply by raising bank reserve requirements provide ample explanation of that downturn. And once those two factors had run its course the continuation of Roosevelt's policies was no obstacle to an investment recovery driven by war-related exports monetary expansion produced by capital flight from Europe.

You can argue--and I occasionally do--that had the Supreme Court not ruled the NIRA unconstitutional it would have exerted a significant drag on medium-run economic recovery. But the Supreme Court did rule the NIRA unconstitutional, 9-0, Brandeis voting alongside MacReynolds.

Guess what Mr. Delong does - he's an economist.