Where Are My Keys?

And this guy was almost in charge of revamping health care..

Nice choice you made there, Mr. President.

At the Huffington Post, we've coined a new phrase for this tactic: influence laundering.

In December, Daschle starts his new job as a "senior policy advisor" at DLA Piper, a massive law and lobbying firm that represents a range of corporate and foreign government clients. He has said he plans to focus less on health care, his main issue since losing his 2004 re-election bid, and more on international issues.

Even if Daschle refrains from directly contacting former colleagues on his clients' behalf, however, that doesn't mean DLA's lobbying clients won't receive the full benefit of his contacts and expertise, and that those assets can't be used to influence legislation.

For instance: clients of Alston & Bird, the firm Daschle joined in 2005, said this summer that Daschle sometimes advised them "indirectly" through the firm's registered lobbyists. So whatever news Daschle picked up on his many visits to the Hill or to the White House he could pass on to a client by telling one of his colleagues at Alston.

I

Hide the decline..

"This is really quite grim"

No shit, Paul Krugman.

Why is it when Republicans were telling you that this would be the outcome from Day One, they were laughed by Krugman and his ilk.  Today, the story is different from the Nobel Prize winner:

"This is really quite grim. At this growth rate it's far from clear that we're doing anything to reduce the output gap -- the gap between what the economy could produce and what it's actually producing. Correspondingly, there's no reason now for even a bit of optimism on unemployment."

When the 3.5% advance number came out, I took to warning people that even if the economy continued to grow at that rate, we wouldn’t see anything like full employment until late in Sarah Palin’s second term. Given the latest number, the date at which we can expect to see a return to full employment is … never.

And that’s if growth continues at this rate. The odds are good that growth will slow down next year: the stimulus has already had its peak effect on growth and will turn into a net drag in the second half, the inventory bounce — which was a major factor in 3rd quarter growth, such as it was — will fade out.

Basically, we may be in a technical recovery, but we’re not recovering.

With all due respect, Mr. Krugman?  Fuck you.

You were one of the guys cheering hardest for Obama and his Administration to enact these policies.  You were one of the guys telling the American public it would work.  Just like you ridiculed the Bush Administration for telling us it would be a "slam dunk" in Iraq, you are now held in the same light.  You bear some responsibility for this debacle.

I'm sure 6 Percenter will tell us Krugman is wrong about this.

When will Jesse and Al be landing in my City?

Since they are all for stomping out hate crimes, I'm sure they will be arriving any minute now.

One for Joe F in Salem..

He thinks I should be Tweeting on Twitter.  I'm more inclined to agree with Harsanyi than Joe:

Twitter's popularity and usefulness are a mystery to me. Pressed by personal, professional and cultural forces, I sporadically deploy short missives for fear of becoming one of those cantankerous technophobes who is too dense to recognize the miracle of letting "followers" know I hate raisins or that I loved the finale of "Mad Men."

Now, not only am I expected to transmit this minutiae mere seconds after I think it, some 20-year-old in California has decreed that I must do it within the brevity of 140 characters. This need for conciseness, in fact, induces normally articulate friends of mine to write in Prince lyrics — recklessly using "2" and "4" and "U" as words.

To this point, I've found Twitter so aggressively worthless that I was forced to research exactly what I was missing. In the process, I stumbled across a useful New York Times tech column penned by David Pogue that clarified all. The headline read, "Twitter? It's What You Make It."

In summation, like your beloved pet rock, Twitter is useful only in your imagination.

Despite this, I can't begin to add up how many times, as a member of the media, I've been instructed that I need to Twitter by people who have absolutely no clue what Twittering means. How Twitter helps journalism is yet to be determined.

But the deepest mystery of Twitter is why celebrities and elected officials take part. After all, we all know they can't write their own lines.

Now, admittedly, Twitter can be entertaining on occasion, as it turns out that 140 characters offers a great chance to be misunderstood — and an even greater chance one will expose his inner troglodyte.

I'm still on the fence.

Ouch..

Not fun to be a Democrat in politics right now:

Current poll data are brutal for the Democrats. In the Rasmussen survey, President Obama's approval index, the difference between those who strongly approve and strongly disapprove of his performance, has hit a record low of -15. Overall, voters disapprove of Obama by 54-45%. That's no doubt in part because voters have also turned decisively against the Democrats' health care proposals, opposing them, currently, by 56-38%.

Meanwhile, voters now favor Republicans over Democrats by seven points on the generic ballot, 44-37%.

Byron York examines the numbers behind Obama's slumping Gallup rating and finds that Obama is now at 39% with whites and below 50% among all those who go to church. Pluralities of all of those who are over 29 years old or earn more than $2,000 a month disapprove of Obama's performance. Looking at it positively, you could say that the President is still hanging tough with the pivotal young, poor, atheist voting bloc. Michael Barone, meanwhile, asks whether Democrats are beginning to desert their sinking ship.

Is that premature? Sure. But there is no doubt that if the 2010 election were held tomorrow, the Democrats would be slaughtered. What do they plan to do between now and November 2010 to turn that around? Jam an unpopular health care bill down the voters' throats, enact a job-destroying tax on carbon that most people now believe is founded on a myth, and raise taxes. Beyond that, they are crossing their fingers and hoping that the extraordinary vigor of the American economy will survive all of the damage they have inflicted on it, and will rally by November.

That could happen, of course. But it seems like a rather poor bet.

T-shirt of the year

Haven't I been saying this for months?

Looks like the founder of HuffPo realizes Obama's Economic Team is a joke.  Finally.

The problem for the White House and for the Democratic Party -- and, most importantly, for the country -- is that the administration's response on jobs is being led by Summers, who actually opposed the extension of unemployment benefits Obama just signed. At this point you have to wonder what Obama's attachment to Summers and Geithner is. We know if you become a target of Glenn Beck and cause five seconds of embarrassment to the administration you need to start updating your resume (ask Van Jones), but if you slowly bring down the administration, and the party, and the country, that's apparently fine.

Back in February, when the $787 billion economic stimulus bill was signed, Summers and company promised that it would keep the unemployment rate from going any higher than 8.5 percent. With another 3.4 million jobs lost since then -- and the official unemployment rate at 10.2 and rising -- what does Summers say now?

"I think we got the Recovery Act right."

Really, Larry? What would getting it wrong look like?

The tone-deafness of that statement rivals the clueless response of a certain clothes-conscious former International Arabian Horse Association commissioner turned FEMA head.

I can hear it now: Heck of a job, Larry! Heck of a job, Timmy!

When all those college kids were working for "Hope and Change!", I'm betting an address change wasn't wha they meant..

You fools were the ones that got him elected.  Enjoy living back home with Mom and Dad.

Did you see this fool on O'Reilly last night?

Watch and retch.