Telling It Like It Is

Saints & Sinners

By a wide margin (60-33), the Senate rejected legislation proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) that would cap credit card interest rates at 15%. I wrote last month about the negative impact unregulated lending rates have on the economy. A 15% cap hardly seems an onerous burden on the lending institutions who would have to reduce their profit margins from demonic to merely scandalous. My two senators, Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, both opposed the Sanders legislation; I've written to them about it. You can see how your senator voted here. Please write him or her to express either disappointment or support of their vote...

Would that it were so...

Robert Frost's Banjo has a short history of bonnets...

Montana Democrat Max Baucus had doctors and nurses supporting single payer health care arrested and ejected from "hearings" on health care reform...

Chris Mooney warns against the dangers posed by scientific illiteracy. He saves his final salvo for the mainstream media:

Something that drives the science community nuts is this supposedly news media refusing to state clearly what is an established conclusion in science and instead doing on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand over something like evolution or global warming — which is throwing two talking heads on the air to shout at each other, one of whom represents a really well-established and credible position and has every scientific community in the world behind it, and one of whom is just completely way out of the mainstream. And creating a false equivalence between them, it's kind of cowardice. It's also a journalistic norm (that has) outlived its usefulness. But that's a huge aspect of the problem.

He's absolutely right about this. While I'm happy that the Seattle Times ran this interview, I'm mindful that they've also given op-ed space to the benighted ravings of the Discovery Institute. There is a such thing as an equality and inequality of ideas, after all, and a newspaper ought to take that into consideration when allotting precious editorial page space...

NOLA Happenings: The Saints And Sinners Literary Festival starts tomorrow at the Bourbon Orleans hotel...Tuesday is the first day of the New Orleans Wine And Food Experience...

Geronimo

As the Democrats move toward a Big 3 bailout package that includes Federal oversight, I find myself leaning more and more toward a preference for partial nationalization. Taxpayer money is being used to bail out a vital industry -- arguably the vital industry -- that has been mismanaged beyond belief. Under the circumstances, we deserve and can legitimately demand seats on the boards of these companies.

Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) said the other day on Air America that somewhere in the world there has been one bailout after another since he came to Washington, and he angrily listed them: The S & L bailout, the Asian stock market bailout, the Mexican peso bailout, the Wall Street bailout, and now the Detroit bailout. As Sanders pointed out, each of the first four crises came after a round of deregulation that allowed businesses and individuals to milk an industry for windfall profits until it was on the verge of collapse, after which they turned to the taxpayers for help.

I would put it more strongly: They've blackmailed the taxpayers for even more money with the threat that matters would get even worse without it. Unfailingly, they've gotten the money and the government has then gone on to deregulate even more! Taxpayers across the political spectrum have become understandably resentful. That, and the damage inflicted on the economy by deregulation presents, it seems to me, a golden opportunity for the development of a political coalition based on economic populism and not cultural values and racial attitudes. 

With the collapse of neoconservatism as a politically viable ideology, the Republicans have knocked their intellectual rationale out from under themselves. The party may soon be dominated by no-nothing nativists and yahoos who will fight yesterday's battles on gay rights and abortion, and prate self-defeatingly about the free market. Since conservatives also surrendered any claims on competence, all the Democrats have to do is act responsibly. The danger, of course, is that they'll settle for that, which means that progressives must keep a watchful eye on their side of the aisle and not be reticent to apply pressure. 

Bush and his Republican enablers in Congress have left the country broke and in a mess. Now is the time for universal healthcare access. Now is the time to repair and upgrade infrastructure. Now is the time to invest in education. Now is the time to get out of Iraq and reform the Department of Defense. If not now, when?...

Quote of the Day: 

"The employees, dealers, suppliers and the GM board of directors feels strongly that Rick Wagoner is the right guy and best guy to lead us through these tough times."

General Motors spokesman Steve Harris, in response to Senator Christopher Dodd's call for General Motors CEO Wagoner to step down as a condition of any bailout.