Joe the Plumber Reports From Israel

Yeah, we passed through the looking glass long ago. Anything goes.

Joe trades wrench for reporter’s notepad in Israel

By AMY TEIBEL Associated Press

Jan. 11, 2009, 1:33PM

SDEROT, Israel — Joe the Plumber has set aside his wrenches to become a rookie war correspondent, covering Israel’s side of its two-week-old military offensive in Gaza.

The Ohio man, who rocketed to fame during the U.S. presidential campaign for asking Barack Obama about his tax plan, was in the southern Israeli town of Sderot on Sunday to tell readers of the conservative pjtv.com Web site about the rockets that rain down from the neighboring Gaza Strip.

The people of Sderot “can’t do normal things day to day” like get soap in their eyes in the shower, for fear of rockets, said America’s most famous plumber, who’s real name is Samuel J. Wurzelbacher.

“I’m sure they’re taking quick showers,” he said. “I know I would.”

Wurzelbacher’s status as a rookie was evident when he stood in front of a pile of spent rockets and said: “I have thousands of questions but I can’t think of the right one.”

What he could summon was contempt for Israel’s critics, who are outraged by the more than 870 Palestinians killed in Israel’s bruising air and ground onslaught against Gaza’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers. Thirteen Israelis have also died since the operation began, including four killed by the rocket fire that touched off the war in the first place.

“Why hasn’t Israel acted sooner?” Wurzelbacher asked. “I know if I were a citizen here, I’d be damned upset.”

He described himself as a “peaceloving man,” but added, “when someone hits me, I’m going to unload on the boy. And if the rest of the world doesn’t understand that, then I’m sorry.”

Wurzelbacher, who underwent intense media scrutiny during the campaign, said he was enlisted to cover Israel because he’s “an expert on media bias.”

“I was on the short end of the stick,” like Israel is now, he said.

When Wurzelbacher joined Republican Sen. John McCain on the campaign trail, he agreed with a supporter who asked if he thought “a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel.”

Wurzelbacher said the full story of Israel’s campaign against Hamas isn’t coming out on mainstream news outlets. He said they are demonizing Israel instead of recognizing it as the victim of Gaza militants who have fired thousands of rockets at Israel over the past eight years.

“It’s asinine when someone is firing upon you and the world is coming down on you,” he said. “Common sense has gone out the window.”

“Hamas hides among its own people,” causing civilian casualties, he added. “But I hear no cry out from the international community.”

That’s the Israeli government’s position, too. And though foreign reporters normally have to provide proof of experience to receive government authorization to report from Israel, Wurzelbacher was being escorted Sunday on his first reporting gig ever by the head of the Government Press Office, Danny Seaman, and a press office photographer.

Wurzelbacher said he’s been “embraced” by the people of Israel because “they know I have no agenda but the truth.” But his arrival in a busy cafe elicited no overt signs of recognition. He appeared to cause more of a stir among the press there.

This is his first trip to Israel, and he pronounced himself “happy to be here.”

But war correspondent or not, Wurzelbacher won’t get to Gaza: Israel has barred access to foreign journalists.

“If he wants to put on an Israeli military uniform and go in as a volunteer, maybe,” Seaman quipped. “Nobody goes in.”

Original is here.

I want to laugh, but....

Oh, please go in, Joe.

Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal

Just finished reading Paul Krugman's excellent book, The Conscience of a Liberal, published 2007. I highly recommend it to anyone who has a relatively open mind and can think, and that unfortunately will exclude many conservatives. The Guardian has a good review of the book, and here is a snip:

His latest book-length polemic, The Conscience of a Liberal, lacks something of the bite one gets in the columns; but it remains a valuable and thoughtful study that puts a good deal of political and economic history into perspective. It offers considerable hope to those who, like myself, would like to see changes occur in the US, including a reduction in drastic income disparities, the implementation of a national healthcare system, an end to racial divisions and a foreign policy that moves beyond "shoot now, pay later".

That review is here.

To quote from Salon's review, Paul gives "a history of the political economy of the United States from the beginning of the 20th century to the present."

Another quote from Salon, "If one sentence could sum up "Conscience" it might be: "Republicans increase economic inequality, Democrats decrease it, and so, politics matter."

The entire Salon review is here.

A few interesting snips from the book that I found:

"So the difference between the parties is not an illusion. Republicans cut taxes on the rich and try to shrink government benefits and undermine the welfare state. Democrats raise taxes on the rich while trying to expand government benefits and strengthen the welfare state."

snip

"...the right-wing takeover of the GOP is the underlying cause of today's bitter partisanship."

snip

"Bitter partisanship has become the rule because the Republicans have moved right, and the GOP has moved right because it was taken over my movement conservatives." "...public opinion, unlike the Republican Party, hasn't shifted sharply to the right."

snip

"But with the coming of the New Deal, the rich started to face taxes that were not only vastly higher than those of the twenties, but high by today's standards. The top income tax rate (currently only 35 %) rose to 63% during the first FDR term, and 79% by the second. By the mid-fifties, as the United States faced the expenses of the Cold War, it had risen to 91%."

Now, even for me, a 91% top tax rate is a bit too high. And 35% is too low. Seems we could easily have middle ground of 40%? Maybe 45%? Maybe even 50%. I hear people saying that we need a "new" New Deal these days, but I hope they don't mean tax rates upwards of 91% again. That's just far too high.

snip

"But as so often happens when we look closely at the real political history of this country, it's far from clear that what everyone knows is true."

Which is another way of saying that you cannot believe everything you learn in textbooks, and that history has undergone many revisions over time, in addition to a whole lot of it just simply being left out of our history books.

"What made the New Deal's influence so enduring was the fact that FDR provided answers to inequality and economic insecurity." "If everyone is entitled to health insurance, there's no need to screen people to eliminate high-risk clients. If a government agency provides insurance, there's no need to fight over who pays for a medical procedure: If it's a covered procedure the government pays. As a result government health insurance programs are much less bureaucratic and spend much less on administration than do private insurers. For example, Medicare spends only about 2 percent of its funds on administration; for private insurers the figure is about 15 percent.

Among Krugman's rather simple prescriptions to reduce income inequality and put a little fairness back in society are:

"higher taxes on the well off."

"undoing many of the tax cuts for the wealthy that movement conservatives have pushed through since 1980."

"closing some of the obvious loopholes in the U.S. system. These include eliminating the rule that allows hedge fund managers to classify their earnings as capital gains, taxed at a 15 percent rate rather than as income, at 35 percent. Also, closing loopholes that let corporations, drug companies in particular, shift recorded profits to low-tax jurisdictions overseas, costing billions."

"taxing capital gains as ordinary income."

"an end to the thirty-year tilt of government policy against unions."

As Salon said in their review, there might not be a whole lot of groundbreaking material in this book that liberals do not already know, but he writes in a very clear way that helps to reinforce what you do know. And we know that repetition is a key to learning.

Rockets in San Diego

If I've heard this question once, I've heard it 20 times: "Well, if they were shooting rockets into San Diego (or Seattle, or any border city), what would we do?" As if the two situations could be identical.

There is a long history over there between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They've been ... "unfriendly" ... for quite some time now. How many hundreds, thousands of years?

At this point in time, the Israelis have the Palestinians rather penned up in Gaza. Israel (and Egypt) have been blockading Gaza for over 18 months now, controlling every thing and every person coming and going. It's almost like a huge concentration camp. Gazans have been running out of food, water, electricity, all strictly controlled by Israel and Egypt.

Under the circumstances, I would not be surprised if they dug tunnels under the borders. We frequently discover tunnels from Mexico and Canada into the U.S.

But wee have not been fighting the Mexicans across San Diego for centuries. Likewise, we haven't been fighting with, or blockading Canada to our north. So it is very unlikely that Mexico would launch rockets into San Diego or El Paso. We don't have the same history. To transfer actions over there - that have quite a lot of history - over here, to justify what Israel is doing, is quite the rhetorical stretch. But I hear it, almost every day.

As if the Israelis have done absolutely nothing to provoke, in any way, any Palestinians. As if Israel is an innocent bystander in the conflict. It is certainly not right for anyone to fire rockets at any other people. It is also not right to strangle a whole people, or to bomb them when they are trapped in a cage, like the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.

Someday, maybe, both sides will learn to live together. Not this day. And not tomorrow. I'm not holding my breath.

Bill Moyers covered the situation pretty well in this past Friday's Journal on PBS.

Another 524,000 jobs lost

For the entire 2008 year, the U.S. shed 2.8 MILLION jobs.

But hey, don't you worry about ol' Bushie. He still has "joy" in his heart. No, nothing as trivial as unemployment skyrocketing to 7.2% or the worldwide economy tanking is going to dampen his joy. I'm sure glad that he isn't troubled in the least about the economy or anything else. Why would he be? He'll have a cushy pension for the rest of his life, along with a contingent of secret service at his beck and call. Where he actually belongs is in jail.

US unemployment surges as 524,000 jobs lost

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US employers shed a massive 524,000 jobs in December, capping a yearly loss of 2.8 million, as a deepening recession pushed unemployment to a 16-year high of 7.2 percent, official data showed Friday.

The staggering job losses in the Labor Department report heightened a sense of urgency for president-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress to agree on swift economic stimulus plan, analysts said.

The job losses over the course of 2008 were the most in a year since 1945, the Labor Department said in its monthly update. Some 1.9 million were lost in the past four months.

The agency also revised up the number of job losses for the prior two months. The October figure was changed to show a loss of 423,000 jobs from 320,000 and November's data to a loss of 584,000 from 533,000.

The jobless rate, calculated on a separate household survey, climbed to 7.2 percent, the highest since January 1993, from 6.8 percent a month earlier.

The brutal acceleration of job losses suggested a vicious downward cycle for the world's biggest economy, analysts said.

The report "suggests that both the US economy and job market fell off a cliff" at the end of 2008, said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight.

Behravesh said he expects "the jobs hemorrhage to continue through much of 2009" at a heavy pace and to ease if a large economic stimulus package can be enacted quickly.

"Nevertheless, the current pace of job losses means that the unemployment rate will rise into the 9.0 to 9.5 percent range at a minimum before leveling off," he said.

Yet some economists said the report showed the pace of job losses may have peaked as companies retrench and cut as much as possible.

Some analysts had expected a far worse figure after a survey by payrolls firm ADP showing the private sector lost 693,000 jobs in December.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid said lawmakers need to move quickly on a plan to revive the economy.

The number of unemployed rose to 11.1 million in December, the data showed.

The figures come as the US economy is gripped by the worst recession in decades, which began in December 2007 after a collapse of a house bubble and massive financial sector losses that led to a credit crunch.

In December, a large portion of the losses came in manufacturing, which shed 149,000 in the month and 791,000 in the year, with the auto sector hard hit.

But the service sector, which accounts for some 80 percent of employment, fared even worse, with 273,000 jobs lost in the month.

The original story is here.

A month or two ago, my company issued a statement saying that our goal was to cut all costs by 10% by the end of 2010, and that all of the savings could be accomplished by attrition and people retiring.

That was then.

Just yesterday, they revised that, saying that we needed to cut that 10% by the end of 2009, AND another 10% by the end of 2010. And the real kicker was that "a reduction in headcount can no longer be considered to be 'off the table." Great. We had three spectacular quarters in 2008, but one (modestly worse) 4th quarter and it's alarm-bell city.

Bush, may you and the anti-regulation conservative zealots rot in hell. But I'd be quite satisfied with Bush rotting in a cell in the Hague.