More good reading

A good read from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones about the lack of accountability for the recent financial debacle of the Bush years.

And Matthew Yglesias makes an important point about the ungovernableness of the United States today due to the radicalization of the Republican Party and their abuse of Senate rules such as filibusters and holds which desperately need to be reformed.

Steve Benen has a comparison of Obama's reaction to the Christmas bomber and President Bush's reaction to the identical shoe bomber case several years ago. In the past two weeks, Obama has addressed the issue half a dozen times, launched a fullscall investigation and has already begun to implement changes. During the equivalent two-week period under Bush, they did diddly squat. AND they got NO grief from the media or the rightwing hypocrites making a fuss today.

AEI confirms stimulus success

Even the conservative "think tank" AEI admits in a recent report that the stimulus helped grow the economy.

The real economy ... responded to the massive stimulus but remained heavily dependent on it. In the United States, growth during the second half of 2009 probably averaged about 3 percent. Absent temporary fiscal stimulus and inventory rebuilding, which taken together added about 4 percentage points to U.S. growth, the economy would have contracted at about a 1 percent annual rate during the second half of 2009.

Imagine how much worse things would have been had the Tea Partiers been in charge!

Happy New Year!

It's my first post of the new year and here is what's on my mind:


Good article in the Washington Monthly on the Texas Board of Education's continuing crusade to indoctrinate our schoolchildren with their far-rightwing ideology.

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principals. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Sigh. I so with that my fellow Texans would quit electing these insane people to serve on our state school board.

Meanwhile, Andy Sullivan shows how Rasmussen Polling veers far off from every other polling outfit in the nation making it the favorite of Faux News and the NRC.

I hope everyone saw this article in the WaPo last week.

The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.

And finally a great in-depth article in Chemical & Engineering News about the whole climate change controversy.