I think Keynesian economics is B.S.,we should have direct government control of the means of production. Given the state of information today we will not make the mistakes the Soviet Union made in prior generations.

Che always said we should be open to new discoveries that will enhance socialism.

Baucus and Conrad screwed us on Health Insurance Bonanza. Baucus and Conrad will rob us of Social Security and Medicare.

These two whores need to work another street.

Can a campaign to block these clowns be rolled out now?

we should have direct government control of the means of production

Who is “we”?

So according to Gallup 6 out of 10 liberals LIKE this debt deal?

58% of Dems like it.

The Tea Party hates it worse than anyone else?

Only 22 percent of them like it?

No wonder we’re in trouble–they go for the throat.

Our side just goes for cover and thanks the gauntlet for the whacks as it runs for it.

Jeesh.

Mornin’, BT, pups

From the link to Marcy:

short term response to a disaster (even if it is one Alabama’s legislators all refuse to pay for)?

Living in AL must be a bitch.

And for the troll at #1: ROFLMAO

•Though Obama and congressional Democrats failed in their efforts to include higher taxes on the wealthy in the plan, Democrats were among those who rate it most highly. Two-thirds of moderate Democrats and six in 10 liberal Democrats approve of the deal

Is there nothing that Obama and the Democratic Party can do that will merit the disapproval of a majority of liberal Democrats? Liberals just got their asses kicked so hard that they will shit shoe leather for a week and they’re laughing and smiling about it because Obama said it was good? Are liberals more blindly submissive to authority than conservatives? So much for that “strict father” and “nurturing parent” thing that Lakoff came up with.

There are $2.1 trillion in spending cuts and $0 in tax increases in this deal. Obama adopted all of the Republican talking points about needing to cut spending to increase business confidence and the family budget being like the government budget. He bragged about cutting domestic discretionary spending to 2.2% of GDP, back to where it was under Eisenhower. Obama isn’t triangulating between liberals and conservatives, he’s triangulating between Paul Ryan and Ronald Reagan. Ronald Frickin’ Reagan is too left to be the left pole of acceptable debate in this country anymore. And the liberals just clap louder and louder.

I think Alabama has 36% on Food Stamps. That needs to be cut back. The country can’t afford all these “dead beats.” Hunger is a wonderful motivator. For revolution.

I think a free-market model works best on a small scale. Trouble is, we don’t have a free market, having monopolies instead.

Socialism on the European model, which encompasses healthcare, worker protections, and regulation of businesses works well with free markets (not capitalism as we know it.) Lenin knew this and allowed kulaks, or small business owners, which proved a success. Under Stalin, kulaks were persecuted, many sent to the Gulag.

A truly free market establishes optimum pricing through the operation of supply and demand. Where these prices are out of reach or ordinary people, they could be subsidized. A command economy, such as the USSR, is too complicated to administer. For many decades the country was saved from collapse by the shadow economy, which, unfortunately nurtured crime and corruption.

Apparently, the only Dems I know come from the 42%. And I guess I know only 4 out of 10 liberals. And the only tea party folks I know LOATHE the deal.

Boxturtle (What an interesting statistical anomaly from a clearly unbaised poll)

A friend of the family who was in the French military and later worked for a French business met Che in Havana and was very impressed with his intellect.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land. – Herbert Hoover

Meteor Blades at DKos:

Ahead of Friday’s report, ADP today announced the findings of its monthly survey of the private job market. It was a bit better than expected, with a gain of 114,000 jobs. But ADP’s report is not usually a good match for the government numbers. For June, it reported 100,000 more private-sector jobs were created than the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics did. ADP also doesn’t cover government jobs, which have been taking major hits for the past two years, especially in the past 12 months.

I don’t care how you cut it, gaining 100,000 jobs a month when at least a million lose them is not a recovering job market, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Obama, I’d like you to explain to me and 300 million other Americans how your free trade agreements are going to create jobs in the US. Are those jobs gonna be in the arms industry so right wing paramilitary types can control their populations?

It would seem that “liberal” Democrats and Democrats in general are every bit as myopic and clueless as Republicans.

I don’t care how you cut it, gaining 100,000 jobs a month when at least a million lose them is not a recovering job market, not by any stretch of the imagination.

“When I said, ‘change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say ‘change we can believe in tomorrow’.”

And of those 36%, I’d bet a majority vote a straight GOP ticket. Without even realizing they may be taking food off their own tables.

Boxturtle (Pro-life trumps food. Dunno about Whisky)

http://www.moneynews.com/StreetTalk/obama-wallstreet-electioncampaign/2011/07/22/id/404563
Wall Streeters Top Obama Re-Election Supporters
A just-released study by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that President Obama is relying more on Wall Street to fund his re-election this year than he did in 2008, according to CNBC.

Shocked, I say…Most of them were at his $35Thou a plate birthday evening; that should get a big piece of cake or pie or whatever one desires.

There are a lot of openings for drone operators.

Hell, just fill the open Judicial posts, that’d drop the unemployment rate measurably in some states.

Boxturtle (*bitter sarchasm*)

Good. That means working folks can get more bang from their donation buck by giving to local candidates who will actually do something for them instead of to them.

Sorry to carry a post up from below, but it pertains to what SD just wrote about Alabama.

I just saw an article that stunned me. In the Chattanooga local paper I learned that the Food Bank of NW Alabama had closed a local distribution center because of understaffing

Here is why: “Companies such as Kelloggs’s, Hormel, Campbell and ConAgra donate food to the Huntsville central food bank. The companies request that all donated food be accounted for because of tax purposes, an arduous task that the local food bank was unable to complete”.

“They were so small in terms of staff and funding: they were overworked and couldn’t get numbers of delivered goods required by the companies.”

Can you believe this?? These big, fat, obscenely wealthy companies will only donate food to hungry families if they are given a lengthy accounting for TAX purposes??

ConAgra probably receives hefty agricultural subsidies, and they are miserly enough to eek out additional monies at the cost of children going hungry.

Why won’t our cowardly president get up and say this when he is talking about extending tax cuts and ‘shared sacrifice’.

You can look at this another way. Those moderate and liberal Democrats who disapprove of the deal are likely to REALLY disapprove of it (the poll does not measure intensity of feeling). Many of these will not vote for Obama or Democrats in 2012. The Democrats have already suffered a pulverizing defeat in 2010 comparable to their epic defeat in 1994 (though it was more regionally based last year–in Illinois, for example, the Republicans did not gain significant ground as they did in 1994). When you add the total of those so enraged by the deal that they will no longer vote for Democrats, the Democratic losses in 2012 will probably far exceed those in 1994. There will be an anti-Democratic landslide of unprecedented dimensions that will shake, and maybe destroy, the very foundations of the party. And after this deal, this defeat can no longer be seen as a bad thing.

That was rhetorical. Sigh.

The named companies can’t count the fuckin’ cans before they’re shipped? JHFC

You know they have tax accountants coming out the you-know-where, let THEM figure out how to carve out another pound of flesh.

The Regressive Party of FL wants to move its primary up so it will be among the first. If they manage to do this they’ll lose half their delegates to the national convention, which just happens to be in Tampa next August. Really smart, these Regressives.

Now you’re just trying to make sense.
‘Morning, SD
At the place we volunteer, they have a huge floor scale and they just weigh all the stuff that comes and goes. Seems to work pretty well.

I give some canned goods to the food pantries but mostly bags of rice and beans and other bulk goods. Goes a lot further than canned goods and are easier to store and last longer after they’re opened.

Mornin’, demi

In polls like this people self-designate. A lot of Lieberman supporters would consider themselves to be liberal. It would be better if the polls were to use a term like ‘progressive’, which hasn’t been devalued. A significant proportion of those who call themselves ‘liberal’ define the term relative to Michele Bachman. Such persons could be unsure whether re-instituting slavery might be a bad idea and still identify themselves as liberals prepared to see all sides of any question.

Yeah, once you’ve opened a can of spagetti-o’s, ya gotta eat the whole thing. heh.
Did I tell you about some of the items that we received during the Stamp Out Hunger campaign? That was thorugh the US postal dept, where the carriers picked up the donations from each house when they delivered the mail. Some people had donated cavier, champagne, cooking sherry, godiva chocolates…hoo boy.

Not as dumb as you might think. The media blows Iowa and New Hampshire so far out of proportion that if a Presidential candidate wins both of these states, there’s a pretty good chance that he or she is off to the races. Even if there’s a split decision like in 2008 when Huckabee won Iowa and McCain won New Hampshire, by the time many states voted, McCain had things wrapped up. Better to lose half your delegates than have no relevance at all.

I’m all for a national primary.

Let’s stop using the term ‘free market.’ There is no such thing, and using the term muddies rather than clarifies issues concerning the organization of economic life. We had a great book salon on this with Bernard Harcourt last week.

In retrospect, it might not have been such a good idea to teach so many undergraduates the debased versions of introductory economics that are the norm in universities everywhere. I used to tell my students two things: don’t do this stuff except under parental supervision. You really don’t know what you are doing at this level. The second was: a little bit of economics can take you a long way, almost always in the wrong direction.

A dead parrot could do economics better than someone coming out of a standard introductory course in the subject.

cavier, champagne, cooking sherry, godiva chocolates

That blows my mind.

So what do you suggest we call it in the face of the widespread use of the term? We know it means “free from regulation” but the average schmoe doesn’t know that.

Thinking about something that might actually help mitigate the suffering. Get the YMCA or some other local organization to give classes teaching people how to survive on beans, milk and potatoes. Hey, it worked for the Irish just up to the Famine. When I’m in the States I see a lot of people stocking up on junk food that costs too much and is bad for them to boot. The same is true up here in Canadaland in poor neighborhoods. Given that nothing is going to happen to help these people find jobs over the next three years, at least helping them learn how to stretch whatever funds they can scrape up by selling pencils and apples on the street (Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas suggested this as a reasonable solution to the unemployment problem). It would also make them healthy, which would also be a good thing, since none of them are going to get any support in that area from the government.

We actually need to send observers to Honduras to see how people get by there. Life expectancies are lower, but this also has a silver lining, since it helps solve the SS deficit.

So you see, Poverty really is The Answer.

It did mine too.
A funny story the Food Director told me. He said that one year one of the postal drivers had stopped at lunch or some time during the day at a liquor store to buy a bottle of tequilla for home. When he got back to the post office and volunteers emptied his truck of donations, they accidently took the tequilla too. Fortunately, the Food Director had kept it safe in his office and the carrier came and pick it up.
Who’s got my tequilla?

I would personally just call it ‘market’ with no qualifiers. That would encompass everything from monopolies to the rag trade and barber shops. It is a descriptor. To put a valuation on its outcomes — such as ‘efficiency’ or ‘welfare’ is a huge mistake and the one that everyone makes because they’ve been told that the ‘free market’ is efficient. If you have professional training (as I do) in economics, you know that isn’t true. Just to explain why it isn’t true requires a first-year graduate course in the subject, which explains why hardly anyone understands it. In my lifetime, the economics profession, which in the late 50s and early 60s was a hugely progressive element in American social and political discourse, has done huge and potentially irreversible damage to our understanding of how the world works. I could name names, but some of these people are friends of mine.

At MEND, they have a bulliten board where they post recipies and healthy tips, but I don’t think many people read the board. Unfortunately, most of the “clients” are so down and out, they are despondent, angry and so depressed, they’re not much in a learning mode. The kids cry alot and run amok and the parents often don’t even seem to notice. It can be unnerving, and sometimes I have to take a break from going there.
It’s about priorities. A person who is in desperate need of a shower (MEND provides for them twice a week) and a hot meal aren’t ready to sign up for parenting classes.

•Though Obama and congressional Democrats failed in their efforts to include higher taxes on the wealthy in the plan, Democrats were among those who rate it most highly. Two-thirds of moderate Democrats and six in 10 liberal Democrats approve of the deal

The Kool Aid truck must have been making the rounds the day thi poll was taken! Tribalism at its “best” as no economist thinks this deal will make the economy better and it will make things worse>

Wait, this thread can’t be over. We haven’t laughed about Santorum’s peach jelly yet.

Let’s stop using the term ‘free market.’ There is no such thing,

I am glad someone said it. He who controls the narrative wins the battle.

I am laughing now. :)

Ah jest hafta vote for a man who can make his own jelly. Oh, brudda.

Ewwwwwwwwwww. You just can’t make this shit up..

The comments to that item over @ TPM are pretty funny as well.

Peach jelly–now with Santorum!