Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
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For the record, I’m usually not in my pajamas and I don’t blog from my parent’s basement (they don’t have one). And Sarah Palin is still an idiot. Just sayin’
My fundamental problem with the choice of Sarah Palin, and really what the McCain campaign has become over the last few weeks, is embodied in this clip. Their speeches are all derisiveness and snark, very little substance. No explanation of why this fruit fly research wasn’t worth it or why the earmarks process shouldn’t make sense. This was a prepared speech, by the way, so it was written into the speech that way. I doubt she even knew what the study was about.
By the way, if you’re not watching Maddow, you should. She’s funny and actually lets her guests, not all of whom agree with her, talk rather than shouting over or at them.
(last note: to be fair, the earmark Palin is criticizing is an agricultural study, not a genetic one, to ward off damage to olive crops, but I suspect that she didn’t know that as she was reading off the teleprompter… I realize I’m hypothesizing here, but based on her previous record, I’m feeling good about it)
Update: it occurs to me that perhaps the title is in the opposite order it should be… but whatever. 
This was pretty much what I expected. I’ve been saying on Twitter (you’re following me, right?) that this is all Biden’s to lose. If she didn’t sound like a moron, she would win. She didn’t sound like a moron, so I stand by what I said: she wins.
I think her strategy worked well for her, by only staying with her talking points no matter the question she was given. I think if you didn’t know about the index card strategy, she probably came off pretty well. Regardless, it was a smart approach to the rules of the debate. She would just ignore the question and ask her own. As they’re saying on MSNBC, she asked to respond to topics that hadn’t even come up yet. The format worked well for her in that way. She was able to control the format, which kept her from having to, well, “think” on the fly. Well executed, quite frankly.
I wonder what the Couric interviews would’ve been like if she would’ve been able to bring her index cards?
Of course, it was an entirely substance free debate from Palin, and she repeated the same lies that McCain got called out for during the last debate. One wonders if non-political junkies know about the lies enough to dismiss them. I can only hope.
One just has to watch the Couric interview segment where he and Palin are side by side to see just how little he respects her. He’s clearly moved all in with this decision.
The beginning of this clip make the actual clip of Tina Fey as Palin I posted earlier (still at left at the time I posted this) even funnier.
You should read his article, but this interview captures the salient points.
The funny thing is that they used a bunch of lines straight from Palin’s Couric interview.
Read the transcript. It’s almost as bad as the Couric interview…
Sarah Palin is a train wreck. I don’t know if she’s just unintelligent, a poor speaker, or trying so hard to not say anything stupid that she’s sounding like an idiot. Whatever the reason, she is a national embarrassment. No wonder they’re trying to postpone or reschedule the VP debates.
For those of you still not 100% sure who you’re voting for, just consider this decision. Choosing Sarah Palin was the height of political calculation and disregard for the nation. It was a bumper sticker move, just like so many of George W. Bush’s policies: toe the line on ideology, ignore the actual outcomes.
This simple reality, encapsulated in his choice of Sarah Palin and his grandstanding this week, is the simplest, most important reason to make sure John McCain isn’t the next President. Voting for him endorses this sort of ridiculous, reckless decision making.
Putting ideology over outcomes ends up costing you and your family actual dollars. If you thought inflation was bad already, wait until the government prints $750 billion. $5.50 for a gallon of milk, anyone?
Just another link to back up some of the things I mentioned in the long form post below.
Excerpt:
Sarah Palin likes to tell voters around the country about how she “put the government checkbook online” in Alaska. On Thursday, Palin suggested she would take that same proposal to Washington.
“We’re going to do a few new things also,” she said at a rally in Cedar Rapids. “For instance, as Alaska’s governor, I put the government’s checkbook online so that people can see where their money’s going. We’ll bring that kind of transparency, that responsibility, and accountability back. We’re going to bring that back to D.C.”
There’s just one problem with proposing to put the federal checkbook online – somebody’s already done it. His name is Barack Obama.
I saw this speech live today at the office and thought about usaspending.gov immediately. I know that there’s more coming, but it sounds like what she’s proposing but, you know, actually implemented and running. What was amazing to me was that she immediately followed this claim with the “Obama hasn’t done anything” segment of her speech.
They’re liars, too lazy to look stuff up, or idiots. You pick.
(via TPM)
Anybody understand how this is legal? I’m missing any justification offered by the AG aside from “they don’t like the investigation.” That’s wrong…
I’ve seen snippets of this letter floating around, but this AM at the dentist was the first time I read the whole thing. Found it on TWN. Worth reading.
By now, I’m sure most of you have seen this, but just in case you haven’t, here you go. There really is just so much that’s awesome and perfect about that skit that it’s hard to pick one moment. I happened to catch this live on Saturday and just got sucked in. The lesson here is that I need to watch more 30 Rock.
Another day, another lie from John McCain and Sarah Palin debunked. As the article says: “Palin says Alaska supplies 20 percent of U.S. energy. Not true. Not even close.”
Read the link for the details.
It looks like the must read article about Palin. As you read it, consider the way the current administration has run government. There are a number of parallels and none of them bode well for a potential McCain/Palin ticket. He’s willing to lie and she has a Cheney-esque obsession with loyalty and the same disregard for facts and science shown by Bush, Cheney, and McCain.
What makes the Palin choice even worse is that he can’t even defend the pick on the merits and has to
lie about her record.
The AP ran an article claiming that “liberals” were criticizing Palin for running for VP because she wouldn’t have time to take care of her kids. It even came up during the Romney/Giuliani speeches, as they claimed “they” were criticizing Palin for being a bad mom. The article had no quotes or attribution to anyone liberal, so Greenwald and Atrios asked people to politely write the author of the article and ask for the quotes or articles he based his article off of.
The reporter responded with a list of 19 quotes, only one of which contains any reference to Palin having time to take care of her baby. That quote was from John Roberts of CNN who is quite plainly not liberal.
For what it’s worth, I never even thought about it until it came up in the intro speeches, and was appalled when they said it. When Heidi and talk about kids, the assumption is that Heidi will work if she wants to and that we’d have to sort out some sort of child care. I assume that the VP could afford the best private child care in the world considering their salary. It seems illiberal to bring the topic up at all to begin with.
If you can’t read the Salon article, the list of quotes is over here, and you can read them for yourself. Definitely some sexism there from Democrats and/or “liberals” but none making the criticism that’s central to the AP article and those claims from the GOP.
Another lie, it seems.
Kevin Drum linked to several reactions. This article is by Dan Drezner, a conservative who is intellectually consistent, as much as any of us can be. His reaction to Palin’s interview is about what I’d expect if you take foreign policy with any seriousness whatsoever.
In case you want the rundown on what the “Bridge to Nowhere” really refers to, here’s the Wikipedia page, which I suspect will become the subject of edit wars soon, if it already isn’t.
Short version, airport is on an island the requires a ferry to get to it. The airport serves about 200,000 people annually. The bridge would connect Ketchikan, the 5th largest city in Alaska (measuring in at about 7300 people, yes, really) to the island. The bridge would’ve cost almost $400 million.
Palin supported the bridge until she aspired for national office.
I almost spit up water at that one. Oh my. So funny and so very good.
Atrios makes my point in far fewer words. Somehow, I find it more effective the way he said it:
Economic theory looks a bit like this. Having basic understanding of the ownership of Fannie and Freddie 18 months or so into this housing/credit crisis and after a weekend of front page coverage of them… requires reading the damn newspaper.
Bet the McCain camp circles the wagons on this gaffe instead of saying oops and moving on…
What gets missed in all the Palin-mania is she is completely uninterested in the work involved for the top job. This is what I’ve been saying from the beginning. It’s not about experience or whatever but about temperament. I don’t have time today to really gather all the links with interviews and stuff of her past staff and folks in the Alaskan government who say she isn’t interested in the nuts and bolts of getting stuff done.
Instead, let me link to the one article that reminded me to write about this and make two simple points: Steve Benen highlights a report that Palin doesn’t know that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are GSE’s, in other words they’re private corporations that happen to be government sponsored/backed. They’re not a burden on taxpayers in that they don’t represent a budget line item unless they screw up.
So, my two points are this: I know that Fannie and Freddie are GSEs. I read about this stuff every day I have time outside of my day job. I don’t think I’m qualified to be on the Vice Presidential slot or President, and yet I know this because I actually give a damn. I think the minimum standard for the national ticket is that the candidates similarly give a damn.
Here’s my simple requirement for me to consider voting for a ticket: They must know more than I do about the issues that face the nation. Obama and Biden both know this stuff. McCain probably knows this stuff, but it’s unclear if he would admit it if it contradicts Republican mantras. Sarah Palin doesn’t and has shown no interest in getting this stuff right. This is just the latest example.
The second point is that in general our expectations of what it takes to be in the top job have come down greatly. George W. Bush was an underachiever in life, and he continued that track into his time in government. Sarah Palin is more similar to him than McCain, and that’s a terrible prospect.
People keep giving me grief about being unwilling to consider voting for Republicans. While not entirely true, I can’t vote for people that are unable to meet the simple standard of knowing more than me. This is their chosen vocation. They are CHOOSING to run for this office. It would be good if they showed some interest in the job rather than the fancy job title.
Here’s the lede:
Key Alaska allies of John McCain are trying to derail a politically charged investigation into Gov. Sarah Palin’s firing of her public safety commissioner in order to prevent a so-called “October surprise” that would produce embarrassing information about the vice presidential candidate on the eve of the election.
This is crap. The investigation started before she was a VP candidate, and it should continue on the course it was on.
Pretty much says it all:
So here is what Giuliani and Palin didn’t know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed–job training, help with housing and so forth–from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord’s work–the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a “task from God.”)
This is what Palin and Giuliani were mocking. They were making fun of a young man’s decision “to serve a cause greater than himself,” in the words of John McCain. They were, therefore, mocking one of their candidate’s favorite messages. Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school. To describe this service–the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other–as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme.
Perhaps La Pasionaria of the Northern Slope didn’t know this when she read the words they gave her. But Giuliani–a profoundly lapsed Catholic, who must have met more than a few religious folk toiling in the inner cities–should have known. (”I don’t even know what that is,” he sneered.”) What a shameful performance.
Little snarky for my taste, but his point is absolutely right. Obama was helping people get back on their feet. For someone like Giuliani to mock this type of service is silly and insulting to everyone.
(via Cogitamus)
One of those mocking, derisive but ultimately silly attacks made by both Giuliani and Palin yesterday had to do with mocking Obama’s time as a community organizers. I’ve read many different posts today defending the work community organizers do but Obama, as you might expect, puts the right perspective on the issue. Steve Benen has more background.
(he slightly misspeaks at the start — it was 20 years ago, not 3).
As I mentioned on Twitter yesterday, I thought her speech was excellent for the base of the Republican party. It was sarcastic, snide, and dismissive about Obama in a very disrespectful way that tended to stay away from actual substance. It’s unclear to me how well this plays with those who are undecided or “sway-able” by personality politics likes this.
The other thing that struck me (also posted to Twitter last night, hint, hint) was the sheer volume of blatant lies and demagoguery in the speech. One thing about the Democratic convention was that Biden and Obama poked fun at McCain, disagreed with him, and said he didn’t get it without belittling McCain or the Republicans. Certainly, they’re capable of that and had some moments where they got a bit silly, so I’m not saying that the Democrats were paragons of virtue or anything.
The Dems just stayed away from the kind of rhetoric featured in the speeches given last night by Romney, Giuliani, and Palin. Romney set out to vilify entire groups of people, for example insinuating that Washington was liberal (that’ll be news to George W Bush and the filibusterin’ 49 R’s in the Senate) and that east coast elites mocked them (even though he is an east coast elite).
Palin, though, was the worst of the lot. Her speech, more than the others, was filled with the sort of lies that cannot be ignored. They’re not the typical campaign exaggerations but the kind of things you grew up learning as lying. I don’t have the time to really list them all out, but here are two links to folks that do. First, Hilzoy at the Washington Monthly goes through the big ones I noticed last night. Obama’s campaign released a far more detailed (and picky) set of fact checks last night as well. Hilzoy hits on the issue I think are most important, so I’d start there.
One final thing: this party has run Washington for over 8 years. They’ve had unilateral control over Congress and the White House and a friendly Supreme Court for most of that time, too. I can’t believe that they’re trying to run on the “Washington is not working” theme at the convention. Bill Clinton and Obama both hit on this last week. What we’ve seen over the last 7+ years is the result of Republican supply-side economics meeting reality. It’s the Republican policy platform for the last few decades and they finally got a chance to implement it. It’s why this country is where it is. Think about where fuel standards would be if Democrats were in Congress. Median incomes would be a real focus rather than top line corporate profits. The tax cut in 2001 would’ve at the very least given the same percentage reduction to everyone instead of knocking an extra few points off the top bracket, etc., etc., etc.
Too funny! At least they’re attempting to get the English language right…
Got nothing to add, here’s the excerpt:
There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is “a task from God.” The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.
Read the rest.
(via Atrios)
Forgive me one more Palin post. Hilzoy posted what I think is the best summary of my problems with the Palin pick. The rest of the coverage (daughter’s pregnancy, etc) is not important to me. What matters is that this pick was made purely for politics. For a man running on the “Country First” slogan, this was the most recent and most obvious evidence that John McCain doesn’t actually put country first.
It’s not just about her experience, but the recklessness with which McCain seems to have proceeded with this selection. Palin wasn’t his pick, but the pick of the religious right and rather than challenge them, he chose to put his political future first and just chose her. Then they decided to vet her.
Anyway, read Hilzoy. She lays this out much better than I have. Steve Benen has a post at the Washington Monthly saying similar things, so check his post out, too.
