Well, that's one vote.

Anybody got Obama remorse yet?
Double digit unemployment, one year after the TARP bailout that "we had to do now or else the sky will fall" the economy is still tanking hard. Where are the saved and/or created jobs...in the govt sector? Follow the money, 2 billion to help Brazil drill for offshore oil. Who is the largest investor in Brazil oil - you guessed it - George Soros. George Soros, who needs a free 2 billion bullshit. 25(?) White House appointed Czars who are unelected and not checked by Congress or the American people. A major attempt to marginalize Congress and center power at the executive level vis a vis budget machinations, census, and bizarro healthcare reform. How can you add 40 million people to the healthcare rolls immediately (these people need coverage now! is the cry) while not adding any more nurses, doctors or hospitals in to the equation and assume the system will not have to ration care, at the very least until the system absorbs them and is brought up to speed with more personnel, is ludicrous.

Are you kidding?

I agree with much of Obamas direction.
There are a few things I am on the fence about.

In any case I see little government wise that I do not consider an improvement. In itself that is still saying pathetically little since I disagreed with the last administration so much before 911 almost completley after.

In short though, I never thought of Obama as a saviour who would or could perform miracles. Did I miss a candindte who could and would?

That's why, Alice, the guy voted for Kodos. All would have gone well under his administration.

Well, Kodos couldn't do any worse.

Quick quiz: who was president a year ago?

Who elected Karl Rove, who singlehandedly tried to dismantle an entire branch of government? Who checked Cheney?

Stop right there. Stop. Think about this statement.

You're absolutely right: the public demand for healthcare will be overwhelming no matter how it's implemented. It will be an worldwide embarrassment to the American public and way of life, that will absolutely trivialize Katrina.

I am dumbfounded, wordless, for how horrifying it is that we've deprived so many people of care, ruined lives and families, and yes, killed people: all in the name of "free market" corporate profit.

That very fact ALONE is why we need to enact healthcare reform YESTERDAY. It's proof beyond any kind of denial.

No matter what - we'll be underprepared and overwhelmed. Yep, absolutely. And if you think for one second that that's any kind of a reason to hold off or to vote it down, your tail is wagging your a@@ so hard you can't see straight. Quit your whining and go volunteer to help.

Blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda.

alice you are forgetting that Republicans are the biggest wreckonomic stimulators in the known universe (except for Kodos, to keep this on topic.) I'm pretty sure McCain would have made many of the same unpopular moves.

Basically we as Americans do not know what we want. We get stimulus, we say we don't want all this stimulus because it's just going to bail out wall street. If we weren't getting free money for clunkers, though, we'd be complaining about the vanishing value of our retirement portfolios and saying the government should be "doing something, anything." The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and people just like to b!tch.

WTF exactly does this mean? "Volunteer" to "help solve the health crisis?" Are you advocating taking a rotation as a volunteer EMS? Or maybe volunteer to play fake unqualified doctor for a day? I just can't parse it.

Not me.



That conflates two issues: TARP, and the stimulus. But most people, including most conservatives, believe that the infusion of money into the banks kept the national if not the world economy from complete collapse. And most people, including many conservatives, think that the stimulus has done some good and that things would be even worse without it, even if not all the money has been used as efficiently as it could (there's a tradeoff between efficiency and immediacy).

Yes, some of those saved jobs are in the government sector. With state governments reeling, ask governors where they'd be without the money they got from the feds. Consumer spending would be worse than it is now; people don't realize it because the money comes from reduced withholding in their paychecks rather than in an easily visible lump sum. And the infrastructure money is only starting to flow. Many if not most economists say the recession is ending, though it will take more time for jobs to recover.



As for the "car czar," he said the government may start selling its GM stock sometime next year--hardly support for long term government management of industry. It's not as if this administration wanted to get involved in autos; it wanted to try to save a major manufacturing base while not losing all of the taxpayer investment.

Budget machinations? Obama's put forward the most honest budget in eight years. He's not hiding the costs of the wars in "supplementals." He's not pretending that we won't have an AMT patch year after year. These are light years ahead of the prior administration.

And I don't see how health care can be "marginalizing" Congress when the administration has given Congress the lead in developing the bill. That assertion to me seems factually challenged.

As for rationing care, we already do. We just do it really, really badly: we do it by income, which is tremendously inefficient. See this David Leonhardt article for more.

Yeah, the economy isn't great. But I find it hard to believe that it would be any better with anyone else in charge. I see no scenario where McCain would have been an improvement. Hence no buyer's remorse.

Give it time. I'm willing to bet the man won't be re-elected.

I'll take that bet.

2012 is ages away. I think if the economy is satisfactory, people will vote their wallets. And I think the probability of the economy continuing in its present slump until then is low.

Also, there isn't an obvious challenger among the present crop of politicians (other than perhaps Romney), though there's still some time for more contenders to emerge.

By then, they'll have some explaining to do about how those "death panels" failed to materialize

Not in the slightest. Compared to the last 8 years of secrecy, ineptitude, and illegality, he and his administration continues to be a welcome breath of fresh air and intelligence. It will take a lot of effort to undo the massive damage done by Bush and a sycophantic Republican Congress.


Oh think for yourself a bit. Somehow when they were republicans, they were called Presidential Advisers. They have no real power other than to make recommendations to the President. 8 of them happen to already be in positions that do require Senate confirmation. Another two haven't even started their job yet, since their confirmations have been held up by Senate republicans. Even your beloved Fox right-wing propaganda machine News has debunked the notion of czars with unchecked power. You know, if you keep regurgitating misinformation from ignorant people like Drudge, Hannity, Limbo, and Beck, you start to appear just as ignorant.

Unpossible. If you do that, they stop sending you your copy of the Talking Points Memo.

Come to think of it, perhaps kodos is our best chance for truly "universal" health care.

Kodos would have more than balanced the budget, began national debt reduction, eliminated crime, corruption, poverty, illegal immigration and waste, preserved our environment, restored respect for our nation, withdrew US armed forces from foreign locations, negotiated an end to all international conflicts, spread democracy throughout the globe, insured a superb education for all and made this nation robustly healthy.

In that case....

All hail our alien overloards!

(Though I suspect if Obama had "negotiated an end to all international conflicts," some would criticize him for the subsequent devastating job losses in the weapons manufacturing industry.)

First, it's not as if 40 million people are going completely without care. They are going to the ER, which may be the most inefficient way to receive care.

Second, I don't know what the process of adding people to insurance rolls will be, but I'm skeptical that it will happen overnight. Plus there is no single bill at the moment, so it's hard to talk about implementation before there is some kind of agreed-upon text. To the extent that there is text, Congressman Tim Bishop's [NY-01] website says that the provisions of House Bill 3200 would not go into effect until 2013.

Most members of Congress (though not all) are not ignorant regarding the need to provide time for changes to a large, bulky, administrative-laden system. Instead of assuming that huge numbers of people will suddenly be thrust into an unprepared system, we should look at what the legislation (when/if it happens) actually says and have a discussion on that basis.

The comics you post are now too small and blurry to be readable on a 1280 x 1024 monitor.

I had to use zoom - but it was worth it.

I must be getting used to it cause I have to do it more and more often. Pretty sure I could led a couple of grades harder if I could see the holds too!

As reported by Think Progress.org:


Meanwhile, we've been making a profit from the bailout:

Well, if presidential advisor Austan Goolsbee says it is so, I guess it's not propaganda.

So Alice, whom do you favor for 2012?

This from someone who swallowed all the bullshit that Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Bolton spewed.

The numbers here will always be fuzzy regarding the effects of the stimulus, but the consensus view is that it has helped some and will continue to help some as infrastructure spending picks up over the next two quarters. The benefits do, of course, have to be weighed against the long-term consequences of increased debt. But some would argue that it's hard to pay back debt if the economy sucks, so that has to be addressed first.

As for the financial bailout, it looks like TARP may break even. It certainly won't be anywhere near the $700 billion hole its critics feared. And that's not even considering what the economy would be like today if the banks failed and the economy completely collapsed. Avoiding that scenario would have been worth losing money on because we would have been even worse off both personally and as taxpayers.

And that's not even considering what the economy would be like today if the banks failed and the economy completely collapsed. Avoiding that scenario would have been worth losing money on because we would have been even worse off both personally and as taxpayers.

Some have said that such an event would have a cleansing effect, sweeping clean all that has been foul in the financial sector. Of course that foulness might reoccur afterwards, but likely not in our lifetimes. Who knows?

I think it's a legitimate argument. And some people argue that rescuing entities that are "too big to fail" creates the environment for more bad risk-taking (the so-called "moral hazard"). But there's also the argument that we were faced with another major depression which outweighs these concerns.

The Great Depression resulted in regulation to reduce the chances of it recurring. If there had been no regulation, I doubt there would have been a "cleansing effect," or at least one that would have lasted very long. People are greedy, and that won't change. So I'm skeptical that letting everything fail would have been to the long-term good.

But if we don't follow up this crisis with a retooling of our financial system, there's little reason to think that this event won't recur either.

More meat, less fat. All the better for Kodos's plans for a "consumption" society!

How can you add 40 million people to the healthcare rolls immediately (these people need coverage now! is the cry) while not adding any more nurses, doctors or hospitals in to the equation and assume the system will not have to ration care, at the very least until the system absorbs them and is brought up to speed with more personnel, is ludicrous.

Oops Alice, you forgot to use a question mark. Nevertheless, your question is a good one. An answer is given by Representative Kucinich.

It is said one should not ask how sausage or laws are made. Are you concerned about a public option? Let me share with you some insight about health care legislation which may not be good for your health.

A lesson in politics. The Kucinich Prediction: Here's what's going to happen ...

House will make a big deal about keeping/putting a public option in HR3200 because it competes with insurance companies and will keep insurance rates low.
The White House will refer to the President's speech last week where he spoke favorably of the public option.
The Senate will kill the competitive public option in favor of non-competitive "co-ops". Senate leaders like Kent Conrad have said the votes to pass a public option were never there in the Senate.
The bill will come to a House-Senate Conference Committee without the public option.
House Democrats will be told to support the conference report on the legislation to support the President.
The bill will pass, not with a "public option" but with a private mandate requiring 30 million uninsured to buy private health insurance (if one doesn't already have it). If you are broke, you may get a subsidy. If you are not broke, you will get a fine if you do not purchase insurance.
This legislative sausage will be celebrated as a new breakthrough and will be packaged as health insurance reform. However, the bill may require a Surgeon General's warning label: Your Money or Your Life!

The bill that Congress passes may pale in comparison to the bill that millions of Americans will get every month/year for having or not having private health insurance.

Those 40 million people already have access to medical care. It's claled the emergency room, and when they finally go for treatment it costs 10X what it would have if they had gotten preventative care. They don't pay the bill....we the taxpayers pay the bill at substantially higher costs. It's such a screwed up system we have right now. It benefits no one except the companies that own hospitals and the companies that make drugs.

....and doctors, lawyers, and insurance companies.

To quote a retired insurance company executive "there are way too many smart people making way too much money" for there to be any substantive change in our system.

I think most of us would agree with Kent here.

I'm almost smart enough to know what substantive means!

How could anyone have Obama remorse? What was the other option? Please, someone tell me what the Repugs would have done? Made Bush Tax cuts permanent? What the F*&% else. The Repugs have no answer but more military spending and tax cut for the wealthiest people. Please get over yourselves, you Repugs, because you have no answer just complaints.

Oh, and what happened to GM. Did they go down the toilet like Repugs wanted. No, it was saved along with 100,000s of jobs and made profitable. If GM failed this country would have been really screwed.

And, yeah, its been two years and the economy isn't that much better. But, what did you think would happen, just click the remote and it would be fixed. It took Bush 8 years to destroy our way of life. It may take 10, 20 years or more to get back to where our economy was a few years ago.

I had to give up a lot of things I didn't want to because of what has happened and If you think I don't sound happy about it your right. I'm so tired of all these complaints when no one has any answers. If the Repugs take over the House and Senate then we get what we deserve. You all really better think about your votes in the near future because unchecked capitalism ultimately destroys itself.

One last thing, what happened to our economy after Bush I? Anyone want to answer that? I will, because I graduated from college in 92. We had a recession? :-O Holy crap, you mean we had a recession after Bush I and after Bush II. That was just a coincidence. OH, I forgot, I don't believe in coincidences.

Please, someone tell me what the Repugs would have done?

Don't you know that McCain would have won swift victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, assuring lasting peace and prosperity in both nations; brought full employment to the USA; stopped inflation; brought crime down to unprecedented levels; drastically reduced federal tax levels, yet increased revenue due to general prosperity; restored respect for our nation worldwide; assured good affordable medical care for all and would have greatly improved the nation's morality.

Waiter! I'll have whatever he's drinking and smoking.

And McCain would have rendered the latter legal.

Now, I could have lived with that! lol

Tongue in cheek I know, oeno, but legalization would never fly with McCain's core fan-club. He comes from Arizona, which is by far the most rabidly anti-Mexican of the southwestern states, so much so that at times it seems they're living in some sort of fun house mirror version of reality...

Case in point, their governor is a paranoid schizophrenic who was off her meds briefly: http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-09-04/ne...udy-immigration

Adjusted that for ya!

At election time, I think of a saying I heard decades ago, "Vote for losers; they'll never disappoint you." No one has presidential McCain remorse. Some who voted for him might even agree with a few of his might-have-been accomplishments I listed above.

An update:

http://www.economist.com/node/18805615

At current realizations, taxpayers seem to have made money bailing out the banks, lost money bailing out the carmakers, and lost their shirts subsidizing mortgages to individuals.