Month: January 2009

Via Dennis Perrin, from the long-ago late-night comedy show “Fridays,” a bit of nostalgia from the bleak period between Ronald Reagan’s election and inauguration (surpassed only by the even bleaker period of his presidency).

Everyone who’s claimed that the current economic crisis couldn’t have been predicted (e.g. most recently, Dick Cheney) should be sat down with a copy of Michael Moore’s The Big One.

Filmed during a Moore book tour that spanned the 1996 presidential general election (Bill Clinton v. Bob Dole) and released in 1998, The Big One follows Moore from city to city, where he meets with a variety of front-door security officers and PR flaks at large corporations, Garrison Keillor and Studs Terkel, and workers from plants that have announced closures.

It was a period when the economy was ramping up to the Internet boom, but it was also an era of massive nationwide layoffs for workers in trade and labor industries (something that Moore had documented a decade earlier, on a smaller scale, in Roger & Me). Despite the cheery numbers on job creation from the Clinton administration, we were already living in an America where many people worked more than a single job in order to get by, and as many studies have pointed out, a lot of the jobs that were created in Clinton’s second term paid a fraction of the salaries of the jobs that were lost. Then, of course, there were the Bush(2) years.

The seeds of the current economic collapse do indeed go back that far (and farther). Maybe it was just easier to see the squeeze taking place from the bottom than it was from the top.

Please, Democrats, for a real change, just listen to George McGovern on foreign policy for once:

As you settle into the Oval Office, Mr. President, may I offer a suggestion? Please do not try to put Afghanistan aright with the U.S. military. To send our troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan would be a near-perfect example of going from the frying pan into the fire. There is reason to believe some of our top military commanders privately share this view. And so does a broad and growing swath of your party and your supporters.

True, the United States is the world’s greatest power — but so was the British Empire a century ago when it tried to pacify the warlords and tribes of Afghanistan, only to be forced out after excruciating losses. For that matter, the Soviet Union was also a superpower when it poured some 100,000 troops into Afghanistan in 1979. They limped home, broken and defeated, a decade later, having helped pave the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams was set to give a speech on ethics at PSU on Friday, but the mentor-sex kerfuffle led him to cancel. The quote from PSU according to Willamette Week:

“He just pulled out,” PSU spokesman Scott Gallagher says.

Ouch. My sides hurt.

Seriously, though, one of the commenters had an exceptionally good point, which, of course, Adams doesn’t appear to have through of on his own:

caveman writes on Jan 21st, 2009 5:24pm

you know, if the guy had integrity and really was sorry he would re-write his ethics speech to cover the current situation and give it anyway. He missed a real opportunity to cover “ethics and social responsibility” in a more meaningful way.

Portland City Councilman Randy Leonard plays Scott McClellan to Mayor Sam Adams’s “Dick” Cheney in the new mayor’s sex/cover-up scandalé:

Leonard also feels that Adams used him to strengthen Adams’ lie.

“I feel disturbed that Sam allowed me to say the things I did as part of his campaign to deceive people,” Leonard says. “I’m not understanding how he took advantage of my friendship and my loyalty.”

“I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”

Just a matter of time until The Daily Show gets hold of this one….

From a New Yorker article last week (the full text of which is not online unless you’re registered) by Samantha Power, about Christian lawer Gary Haugen who runs the somewhat-controversial International Justice Mission, providing legal services to clients in Third World countries.

According to a report published by Afrobarometer, a public-opinion research group, only fifty-three per cent of people surveyed in sub-Sarahan Africa expressed confidence that senior government officials would be brought to justice if they committed a serious crime.

Considering the current attitude of “don’t look back” being expressed by the soon-to-be-POTUS and his aides — and a rather shocking lack of accountability for crimes executed under previous administrations in the US — would the American public even break into the forties?

Everybody else is doing it.