The Hollywood Liberal

The Tattlesnake – The Senate’s Teddy Bear Picnic and Other Maddening Madness Edition
“I don’t have a rearview mirror. I look only forward. And I still see the day when I can remove the cloud that currently surrounds me.” – Disgraced and defeated Sen. Ted Stevens (R-VECO), on the Senate floor, Nov. 20, 2008. (Perhaps he can bribe it to go away.) Even in politics, a business known for honking […]

Obama Will Allow Clinton to Pick Staff
The New York Times reports President-elect Obama reassured Sen. Hillary Clinton that “as secretary of state she would have direct access to him and could select her own staff” and with that “the wooing was complete.”

Late Late Nite FDL: Tom Turk And Daffy
Tom Turk And Daffy, starring Tom Turk, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig.  This 1944 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon was produced by Leon Schlesinger.  Supervision by Charles M. Jones.  Animation by Ken Harris.  Story by The Staff.  Musical direction by Carl W. Stalling.

What’s on your mind tonight?

Tom Turk And Daffy, starring Tom Turk, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig.  This 1944 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon was produced by Leon Schlesinger.  Supervision by Charles M. Jones.  Animation by Ken Harris.  Story by The Staff.  Musical direction by Carl W. Stalling.

What’s on your mind tonight?

Robert Gates Wants to Keep His Pentagon Gig, so He’s Pandering to Obama’s Bad Ideas for Afghanistan
Obama needs a defense secretary with the courage to speak out and halt the lunacy of more war, not a yes-man Bush holdover.

Franken Camp’s Claim: We’ve Cut Coleman’s Lead To Under 100 Votes
Has Al Franken cut Norm Coleman’s lead down to double digits? That’s what the Franken campaign just claimed in a briefing with reporters. The current estimates from the Star Tribune have Coleman up by about 130 votes, but the Franken…

Heartening
According to this post by Matt Stoller at OpenLeft, every major Democratic senate challenger this year (judged by very expansive criteria) supports Net Neutrality….

George Will: ?The First New Deal Didn?t Work?
Economists on both the left and right broadly agree that the need for stimulative government spending is necessary to prevent a further collapse of the global economic system — just as the New Deal and the deficit spending of World War II restored the health of the global economy in the last century. This […]

Economists on both the left and right broadly agree that the need for stimulative government spending is necessary to prevent a further collapse of the global economic system — just as the New Deal and the deficit spending of World War II restored the health of the global economy in the last century.

This morning on ABC’s This Week, conservative columnist George Will echoed the false right-wing meme that FDR’s New Deal policies made the Depression worse:

Before we go into a new New Deal, can we just acknowledge that the first New Deal didn’t work?

Watch it:

As Nobel-laureate Paul Krugman wrote recently in the New York Times, “There’s a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it’s important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most Americans.”

Krugman observed that the true short-comings of the New Deal policies resulted from the fact that they were not bold enough over the short-term:

[T]he truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious. […]

In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

Brad DeLong offers this chart to emphasize the value of the New Deal:

Fed Has Giant, and Opaque, Role in Financial Crisis Aid
Wall Street analysts, congressional overseers and the media have parsed every detail of the Treasury Department’s financial rescue program — $250 billion and counting.