Fiorina Fail

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday February 06, 2010 · 8:30 AM PST

2010/02/06 · 08:30

I don't know who will be the next governor of California, but I damn well know it won't be Carly Fiorina. I awoke this morning and checked out Slog, the blog for The Stranger, Seattle's alt-weekly paper, and was treated to an ad. I watched it and laughed over and over and over again. It was my assumption that this was satire, well done satire, but satire all the same. Watch:

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday June 08, 2009 · 3:48 PM PDT

2009/06/08 · 15:48

There have been massive decreases in consumer credit over the past year. Home equity lines of credit have been reduced and revoked, credit card companies are becoming more selective and lowering credit limits, and well, no one's buying cars or houses. Those standards have also gotten stricter.

The US is a consumer based economy, so this looks bad. In the short term, it certainly is, but it's hard to fault people for saving. It also looks like (God willing) this may become a new trend of responsibility and thrift. We may again be looking at wonderful days when buying a new car instead of a used one is an extravagance, rather than the inverse being evidence you're poor or a tightwad.

What will this mean for the American economy? More spending on better products and services, and more money for small business investments.

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday May 25, 2009 · 6:32 PM PDT

2009/05/25 · 18:32

I grew up in New Mexico, where there is no initiative system. There's also a fair bit of corruption. When I moved to Seattle for college, I was very impressed with the initiative system, and quite taken with the idea that citizens could do an end run around recalcitrant legislators.

I've lived here for thirteen years now, and I'm much less taken with the idea. In fact, the only initiative I would now sign to have placed on the ballot would be to change our state constitution to end the initiative process altogether.

The combination of populist rage, ignorant and shortsighted voters, as well as the greed of one man in particular has reassured me that the Founders distrust of the mob was justified. Additionally, the demagoguery paid for by corporations is turning our initiative process into a system just as corrupt as the legislature I left behind in New Mexico.

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday May 13, 2009 · 6:32 PM PDT

2009/05/13 · 18:32

I married my husband twice, once in Portland and once in Vancouver, and we have a domestic partnership in Washington, where we actually live. We all know that victory is now inevitable, but I just wanted to briefly give you an anecdote of how close victory is. And it all has to do with my right wing sister-in-law.

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday May 12, 2009 · 5:06 PM PDT

2009/05/12 · 17:06

I want us to face facts. As much as I am for universal, single payer health care, we will have to face hard choices. Some of these hard choices will be relatively easy to debate. Keep an 89 year old alive for an additional six weeks, or use those funds to perform a kidney transplant on a 40 year old? Some are hard. How premature will a birth have to be before we decide it's too expensive to try and keep that newborn alive?

But we've also got to ask ourselves a fundamental question: how healthy is healthy enough?

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday April 16, 2009 · 8:31 PM PDT

2009/04/16 · 20:31

Given the rather anemic turnout, I have to express disgust, if not surprise at the media attention given to the teabaggers. Others have already pointed out the hundreds of thousands who attended the 2006 immigration reform demonstrations, the millions who attended the 2003 Iraq war protests, and hey, quite recently, 1.2 million people showed up to welcome Barack Obama into office, at the largest inauguration in history.

So, why pay this much attention to crowds of a few hundred here and there?

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday March 02, 2009 · 7:25 PM PST

2009/03/02 · 19:25

Recently, the FDIC approved a one time emergency fee to all banks. It's a 0.2% levy, essentially $0.20 for every $100.00 in deposits a bank holds. This is because with so many banks failing, the FDIC is dangerously depleted. This is in addition to their normal 0.14-0.16% levy that's paid annually. There is now talk of increasing the levy permanently, and making it bigger the bigger the bank is.

That's a start, but we truly need to start doing more to disincentivize growing into a megabank, while making these giants pay for the risk they impose on you and me. Tier 1 capitalization is a good starting point.

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday February 01, 2009 · 11:54 AM PST

2009/02/01 · 11:54

With our system set up as it is, yes, the major national institutions are too big too fail. Letting them fail in September would have destroyed the credit market, and the credit market is what keeps the economy moving, both the commercial paper market, and long term corporate and small business debt. Letting the banks fail would have resulted in a Depression, capital D, and one that would have had a decade or longer recovery time.

But it doesn't have to be that way, and we certainly should not have facilitated the mess of mergers that occurred in the wake of presumptive failures. That exacerbates the problem, making these megabanks larger, and making the consequence of their failure more serious. Shielding them from failure makes matters worse.

So they must be allowed to fail. We must first examine why their failure would be so damaging, and how to let them fail in a way that lessens the impact on us.

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday January 19, 2009 · 12:19 PM PST

2009/01/19 · 12:19

As I predicted, the banks took their capital injections and sat on it. Their capitalization numbers look better. They are much less in danger of insolvency. Bully for them, but they're still not lending. At a time when interest rates are dropping, a good credit score gets you a rejection or an average rate, an average score gets you a rejection or a high rate, and a below average score gets you shown to the door. This cannot stand, or our economy will fail.

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday January 16, 2009 · 7:15 PM PST

2009/01/16 · 19:15

Though George W. Bush was governor of Texas and chose to retire in Dallas, due to the efforts of a determined cabal, intelligence highlighting the Texan nature of the outgoing president was deliberately downplayed. Instead, a rural conservative faction fabricated evidence that Bush was actually Comptroller of Oregon. Much of the evidence came from a defector from a Eugene, Oregon squat, code- and nicknamed "Cheeseburger." Though officials were dubious of an informant known to lie about the quality of his bud and who gave contradictory evidence, such as claiming that Bush's signature was on the state tax audit of the Burger King where he worked, and also that he was at Burning Man while the audit occurred, supporters drummed up the Oregon location.

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday January 02, 2009 · 8:43 PM PST

2009/01/02 · 20:43

One of the largest boogeymen raised by opponents of single payer health care is that your health care will be rationed. There will only be so much money, so someone will end up being denied the health care they need. To some degree this is true. I do expect that people will have to postpone elective procedures until a fiscal year passes. This can sound terrifically scary.

Except your health care is already rationed, and to a frightening degree.

gitaiba

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday January 01, 2009 · 8:32 PM PST

2009/01/01 · 20:32

As the housing crisis has unfolded, economists have mentioned a possible "silver lining" to millions of Americans losing their homes, and millions more being upside down on their mortgages. It's that they can walk away from those homes and seek employment where the jobs can be found. This is, of course, cold comfort and can only be viewed as a silver lining from 35,000 feet up. Once you see the cold hard details on the ground, it looks less pretty. After all, this is exactly what happened to farmers, both landholder and sharecropper in the Depression, and it didn't work out so well for the Joads.

But they do have a point in that home ownership decreases job mobility. It's difficult to sell a home, so if a better job can be found across the country, it has to be one hell of a job to go through the effort. You have to balance this against the benefits of having residents invested in their homes, of course, but for this entry, I'm mainly concerned with how this affects the job market.

Newer
Older

RSS

Fiorina Fail

The End of Consumer Credit-More and Better Spending

Direct Democracy Sucks

Personal Gay Marriage Victories

How Healthy Is Healthy Enough?

Why the Attention to the Teabaggers?

Too Big to Fail? You Better Pay.

Too Big to Fail, and How to Let Them Fail Well

A Better Bailout

The George W. Bush Presidential Library-A Preview

"They'll Ration Your Health Care"

Health Insurance and Job Mobility