It’s been a busy week.  President Obama’s been hard at work, and the Republicans have been continuing to be world champion drama queens.  So, let’s just go through a few of the stories this week.

“FIX IT!!!”

After President Obama learned that Citibank was going to take delivery of a brand new $50 million business jet, after taking billions of dollars of TARP bailout money, one of his aides called Citibank and said “Fix it!” in those words.

Yesterday, President Obama commented on the story that Wall Street executives took home 18.4 billion dollars in bonuses last year, while banks and Wall Street firms were hemorrhaging money.  “That is the height of irresponsibility.  It is shameful. And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint and show some discipline and show some sense of responsibility.”

Keep kicking ass, Obama!

» Continue reading “From the political peanut gallery”

President Obama was right to start work on the stimulus package with a bipartisan approach.  When possible, it’s good to get a broad bipartisan consensus when bringing legislation through Congress.  Obama has bent over backwards to give the Republicans a chance to contribute the stimulus package, and he’s accomodated them in that he’s removed some funding for family-planning from the bill and added $275 billion in tax cuts.

That’s a lot more generous than I would have been.

Because while I dislike paying taxes as much as anyone else who works for a living, the fact is that tax cuts are a horribly inefficient way of stimulating the economy.  You get far more bang for the buck doing things like building infrastructure – building roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, etc. than you get from tax cuts.  Don’t believe me?  Believe the economists – they’ve done the research and crunched the numbers.  Here you go.

» Continue reading “Infrastructure building and investing in people works far better for economic stimulus than tax cuts.”

Rush Limbaugh has been acting out lately.  Just this week, he said “I hope he fails.” about President Obama, and said

“We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.”

That’s just a taste.  Limbaugh’s only the guy making headlines today.  Tomorrow, it’ll be Sean Hannity, or Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter or a dozen others.  But they’re just the talking heads.  The truth is that we’re seeing a much larger right-wing noise machine than any fair and free market can support.  A few big corporations have taken over most of the TV, radio and newspaper outlets in the country, and their owners want us to hear nothing but right-wing propaganda.

So, do you want to shut Rush up?  Some suggest direct measures, like reinstating the Fairness Doctrine.  But I’m not into censorship.  The solution is to force the right wing blowhards to compete on a level playing field, and it can be done without encroachments on the First Amendment.  The way to do it is to break up the corporate stranglehold on the media.

» Continue reading “Break the media oligopoly!”

In an attempt to learn a little PHP and learn a little about what goes on under the hood of a WordPress blog, I wrote a little code.

I was inspired after I watched the interview of Russell Tice on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, where he discloses that the National Security Agency illegally intercepted communications of American journalists and news agencies.  I remembered that Emacs had an old program called spook, invoked with the command “M-x spook”, which printed a bunch of random subversive words in your Emacs buffer.  Such a program could not live solely within Emacs, so Meta-Press Spook was born.

» Continue reading “Introducing Meta-Press Spook!!!”

President Barack Obama.  Damn, it feels good to say those words together.  After eight years of Bush running this country into the ground with that insufferable smirk, it’s good to have a smart president, who actually has a conscience, for a change.  Hell, it’s good just to have a president who knows how to speak English.

What?  I gave him Democratic Milquetoast of the week a few weeks ago, now I’m giving him the Badass of the week award.  What’s up with that?  Well, let’s just say it has something to do with the things he’s done on the first day of his presidency.

» Continue reading “Democratic Badass of the Week: Barack Obama”

I just took a quick tour of the newest version of KDE 4.2.  Release Candidate 1.  Sometime around the end of the month, the KDE developers will unleash the official 4.2 release upon the world, and it will be picked up by your distro creator of choice sometime soon afterwards.  At any rate, KDE 4.2 will include a bunch of new features, and some sorely needed bug-fixes.  So, how does it hold up so far?

» Continue reading “What’s new in KDE 4.2? A Review:”

I know, I’m slow on the draw, but since in my review, I mentioned my wish for an x86-64 version of Linux Mint 6, I thought it would be a good idea to mention that Linux Mint has released its first release candidate ISO image of Felicia for x86-64.

Do bear in mind that the folks at Linux Mint don’t consider this release ready for prime time, yet, but if you feel like experiementing, knock yourself out!

Download Linux Mint 6 for x86-64 here…

Just four more days…  Bush made his farewell speech last night.  As expected, it was a waste of precious oxygen.  Now he and his staff are packing up and emptying the White House, and Bush will be spending his weekend at Camp David before he cedes power.  Obama is now staying in the Blair House – Bush could spite him by not letting him move there earlier, but he couldn’t override tradition.

Now it’s almost over.  Obama’s already President in just about every way except the formality.  Clinton’s in as Secretary of State, Holder’s about to be in as Attorney General.  There will be some hiccups as the rest of Obama’s Cabinet gets confirmed (Geithner’s especially likely to get a hard time in the Senate, thanks to his little tax whoopsie.)

But our long national nightmare is almost over!

You know what the best part of this press conference was?  The end of it, and the fact there won’t be another one!  As of this writing, Bush now has six days, twenty hours, thirty-nine minutes and twenty seconds left of his Presidency.  Granted, this Thursday, we’ll be subjected to that waste of precious oxygen he might call a speech.  After listening to Barack Obama’s speeches and having my expectations raised, hearing one more of Bush’s discombobulated concatenations of partisan talking points will be excruciating.

But where was I?  Oh, yeah, the press conference.  This one was interesting in that Bush let down his hair and showed us a little more of his underlying personality than he usually does.

» Continue reading “Bush’s last press conference.”

I originally posted this on Democratic Underground:

Everybody’s complaining about Obama’s proposals on the economic stimulus package. Nate Silver isn’t really complaining – again, he’s bringing out his knowledge of game-theory to show that Obama’s again playing chess instead of checkers, or alternatively, playing tight-aggressive poker at a table full of fish. » Continue reading “Nate Silver: Obama’s Price is Right Strategy”