So do you still eat hot dogs?

When I was much younger, I had the misfortune of reading a document that specified how many rat hairs and other loathsome contaminents were allowed in a frankfurter. It was years before I was able to eat a hot dog again. the weird thing was that back then chicken wasn't allowed, but rat hair (and other leavings) below a certain amount were.

Watching Lieberman and Nelson during the course of these negotiations, brings back those memories and the disgust. Did they ban chicken while alowwing rat leavings?

Will reconciled with the House Bill will it turn our stomachs?

Will it save lives?

in reference to: Negotiating to 60 Votes, Compromise by Compromise - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Recovery?

In some places every other family suffers job loss. This seems to be the real tipping point on the path to every family in a neighborhood suffering. We started tolerating this inequality under Reagan. A generation now grown knows no other way to survive except to hope that spme of the value they produce will tridkle down from the advantaged people. Less and less does as time passes. Less and less will.

in reference to:

"A recent survey for the policy institute found that one in four families had been hit by a job loss during the past year and 44 percent had suffered either the loss of a job or a reduction in wages or hours worked. Economic insecurity has spread like a debilitating virus through scores of millions of American families. What kind of recovery are we talking about if blue-collar workers, and men and women without college degrees, and large percentages of ethnic minorities and the young and the poor are not part of it? And how can any recovery be sustained if economic insecurity is a permanent feature of even middle-class life?"
- Op-Ed Columnist - A Recovery for Some - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Villains Hate Being called Villains

There shouldn't beany surprises here. All the insurace companies ever really supported was an expansion of their market. Even this is less an effort to derail reform, than a rationale for steply raising rates after reform's passage. They may even succeed in further weakining already weak cost sontrols.

in reference to: Democrats Call Insurance Industry Report Flawed - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Five Senators Vote Against Public Need

Five Senators Vote Against Public Need:

"Besides Mr. Baucus, two Democrats, Senators Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, voted against both public option proposals. Two other Democrats, Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Bill Nelson of Florida, voted against the first amendment, but supported the second.
Mr. Carper said he liked Mr. Schumer’s proposal because it “would establish a level playing field” for competition between private insurers and the government plan.
The votes on Tuesday set the stage for a compromise under which the public plan could be offered in states where people could not find affordable private coverage, Mr. Carper said. He and Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, have proposed such a compromise."

Is fear what determines their votes? Right now the bill that came out of the Finance Committee could be titled the Insurance Industry Windfall Mandate because everyone is reqired to get insured, but insurance doesn't have to be affordable and the taxpayer will pay the difference in any case.
Where are the cost controls? Where is any pressure on the Insurance industry to lower their costs or even cut their overhead. Co-ops aren't going to do it because they are too small, by political intent. They're designed to look like an alternative without actually being one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/health/policy/30health.html?th&emc=th

Joe Lies! (Obama Heckled by GOP During Speech to Congress)

This isn't politics.

This isn't policy.

This is the spouse that lost custody accusing the winner of child molestaation, while planning to kidnap the child and go into hiding.

t r u t h o u t | Split on Health Care Goes Beyond Public Option

t r u t h o u t Split on Health Care Goes Beyond Public Option:

"The distance between the parties' leaders on health care was made clear on Tuesday when the No. 2 Republican in the Senate held a conference call with reporters. Asked by ABC News about a package of insurance market reforms that have been endorsed not only by President Obama but also by the insurance industry, Sen. Jon Kyl came out against all three proposals.

In particular, the Arizona Republican signaled that he opposes requiring insurance companies nationwide to provide coverage without regard to pre-existing conditions; requiring them to charge everyone the same rate regardless of health status; and requiring all Americans to carry health insurance.

'One of the concerns I have about the approach of the Democrats ... is an assumption that there has to be a national mandate on all insurers to do various things,' Kyl told ABC News when asked for his position the three issues.

'Those are techniques that states can, and some have, used in the past with fairly disastrous consequences,' he said.

Although the public option has dominated coverage of the health-care debate, Kyl's comments underscored that the rift between GOP leaders and Democrats runs much deeper."The more you look into [the views of congressional Republicans], the more you are going to find significant opposition up and down the board to most ideas on the table when it comes to comprehensive health-care reform," Jim Manley, the senior communications adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told ABC News.

"Republicans are betting that the president will fail."

Kyl said he opposed guaranteed issue - requiring insurers to provide coverage without regard to pre-existing conditions - and community rating - requiring them to charge the same rate regardless of health status - because of concerns about cost.

"There's no question that it does raise costs," Kyl said. "And the objective here is to reduce costs."

Obama Supports Mandating Individuals to Have Health Insurance

Two years ago, the insurance industry commissioned a study of states that have pursued guaranteed issue and community rating.

The study, which was conducted by Milliman, Inc., found that these policies "have the potential to cause individuals to wait until they have health problems to buy insurance. This could cause premiums to increase for all policyholders, increasing the likelihood that lower-risk individuals leave the market, which could lead to further rate increases. If this continues, the pool or market could essentially collapse or shrink to include only the high risk population."

The insurance industry has since concluded, however, that these problems can be overcome by requiring all Americans to purchase insurance.

"If we can get everyone in the health-care system, we can do guaranteed issue, which means no denials on the basis of preexisting condition, and no rating by health status or gender," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans (A.H.I.P.), the insurance industry's trade group.

Obama originally opposed requiring all adults to purchase health insurance. In fact, his opposition to an individual mandate was a flashpoint in his fight for the Democratic nomination against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

Since becoming president, however, Obama has changed his stance and he now supports an individual mandate, viewing it as essential to winning the insurance industry's support for guaranteed issue and community rating.

"So it's important when people ask me, why don't you do the insurance reform stuff and not expand coverage for more people, my answer is I can't do the insurance reform stuff by itself," Obama said Friday during a town-hall meeting in Montana.

"The only way that we can change some of the insurance practices that are hurting people now is to make sure that everybody's covered and everybody's got a stake in it," he said. "Then the insurance company are able and willing to make some of the changes." "

http://www.truthout.org/081909R?n

The Truth Ain't Funny If You're a Dittohead

But for tht rest of us…

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What Makes Justice Scalia A Really Bad Judge

What Makes Justice Scalia A Really Bad Judge “This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.

His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.

And, as Scalia himself made clear in a statement to Above the Law, he isn't happy about the invasion of his privacy:”

But, like other bad jurists, Scalia is unwilling to admit to a constitutional right of privacy because it doesn't mention the word. The philosophy of strict constructionism blinds him to the implication forcefully set out in the fourth and fifth amendments that make no rational sense without the concept of privacy. Also, the same philosophy requires him to ignore the fact that the constitution set forth rules regulating slavery, and how slaves were to be counted for purpose of congressional representation, without ever using the words slave or slavery.

Slaves and slavery existed. The constitution regulated them by implication. Yet Justice Scalia can't admitthat implication makes privacy a constitutional right. The philosophy that sees the law as something divorced from human practice and behavior probably explains some pof the bizarre opinions he's written as much as his briliant ones. Unfortunately, brilliant philosophy cab give you phlogiston instead of thermodynamics, epicycles instead of orbits, wonderful explication of things that never were, and a rage to with brilliant wit disprove and therefor silence simple self-evident truths.

The brilliantly wrong are the worst people possible to place in positionss of authority. The brilliant, bold but badly mistaken Justice Scalia is in position for life.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/googling_justic.html

DNC Web Ad: The Number Zero, Brought To You By The Party Of N-O

Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.

Restoring the Palimpsest until March 26, 2009

We share some bad habits of medieval monks. We decide a record isn't sll thst importsnt, scrub the parchment clean, then write our current, comforting interpretation on the page we insist is not just blank now, but has always been a tabula rasa.

Luckily, there are means of examination that reveal the original record and scholars like Dr. John Hope Franklin who patiently uncover the real past and set us on the path to our true destiny.

Dr. Franklin taught us to look and the looking expanded the scope of history to people who were written out and abandoned to the margins even when they were major players. He enabled us to see how far we've actually come and how far we yet must go.

He will be missed, because he cannot be replaced.

Alfred C. Ingram
Conceptual Design & Imaging
773 530-1554

Blueprint

Americans United for Change, a labor group, is beginning a “six-figure” buy for national cable TV stations to focus on several states whose lawmakers may be critical to providing votes that back the president’s plans. Jeremy Funk, a spokesman for the group, said the initial buy was about $350,000 and could double as the ad campaign runs through the time of the budget negotiations. The labor group’s ad highlights economic worries. Titled “Blueprint,” the ad closes by saying: “Call Congress. Tell them you support President Obama’s budget. Let’s all get to work rebuilding America.”

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites - The New York Review of Books

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites - The New York Review of Books:

There are no surprises here.

Their favorite show was "24". They thought it was real.

They thought our Constitution, and treaties like the Geneva Conventions, made us weak.

So, they did what Bin Laden could only dream of doing.

Damage no terrorist could ever do.

Damage we could only do to ourselves, from the inside.

Read these excerpts.

"…

The detainee would be photographed, both clothed and naked prior to and again after transfer. A body cavity check (rectal examination) would be carried out and some detainees alleged that a suppository (the type and the effect of such suppositories was unknown by the detainees), was also administered at that moment.

The detainee would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit. Earphones would be placed over his ears, through which music would sometimes be played. He would be blindfolded with at least a cloth tied around the head and black goggles. In addition, some detainees alleged that cotton wool was also taped over their eyes prior to the blindfold and goggles being applied....

The detainee would be shackled by [the] hands and feet and transported to the airport by road and loaded onto a plane. He would usually be transported in a reclined sitting position with his hands shackled in front. The journey times...ranged from one hour to over twenty-four to thirty hours. The detainee was not allowed to go to the toilet and if necessary was obliged to urinate and defecate into the diaper.

One works the imagination trying to picture what it was like in this otherworldly place: blackness in place of vision. Silence—or "sometimes" loud music—in place of sounds of life. Shackles, together sometimes with gloves, in place of the chance to reach, touch, feel. One senses metal on wrist and ankle, cotton against eyes, cloth across face, shit and piss against skin. On "some occasions detainees were transported lying flat on the floor of the plane...with their hands cuffed behind their backs," causing them "severe pain and discomfort," as they were moved from one unknown location to another.

…

A few weeks later, from October 6 to 11 and then from December 4 to 14, 2006, officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross—among whose official and legally recognized duties is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war—traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing "each of these persons in private" in order to produce a report that would "provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the fourteen during the period they were held in the CIA detention program," periods ranging "from 16 months to almost four and a half years."

As the ICRC interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, "to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities," to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them—in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on February 14, 2007. Indeed, though almost all of the information in the report has names attached, and though annexes contain extended narratives drawn from interviews with three of the detainees, whose names are used, we do find a number of times in the document variations of this formula: "One of the detainees who did not wish his name to be transmitted to the authorities alleged..."—suggesting that at least one and perhaps more than one of the fourteen, who are, after all, still "held in a high-security facility at Guantánamo," worried about repercussions that might come from what he had said.

In virtually all such cases, the allegations made are echoed by other, named detainees; indeed, since the detainees were kept "in continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention" throughout their time in "the black sites," and were kept strictly separated as well when they reached Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories, even down to small details, would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely, if not impossible. "The ICRC wishes to underscore," as the writers tell us in the introduction, "that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the fourteen adds particular weight to the information provided below."

The result is a document—labeled "confidential" and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials to whom the CIA's Mr. Rizzo would show it—that tells a certain kind of story, a narrative of what happened at "the black sites" and a detailed description, by those on whom they were practiced, of what the President of the United States described to Americans as an "alternative set of procedures." It is a document for its time, literally "impossible to put down," from its opening page—

Contents Introduction 1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program 1.1 Arrest and Transfer 1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention 1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment 1.3.1 Suffocation by water 1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing 1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar 1.3.4 Beating and kicking 1.3.5 Confinement in a box 1.3.6 Prolonged nudity 1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music 1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water 1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles 1.3.10 Threats 1.3.11 Forced shaving 1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food 1.4 Further elements of the detention regime....

—to its stark and unmistakable conclusion:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Such unflinching clarity, from the body legally charged with overseeing compliance with the Geneva Conventions—in which the terms "torture" and "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" are accorded a strictly defined legal meaning—couldn't be more significant, or indeed more welcome after years in which the President of the United States relied on the power of his office either to redefine or to obfuscate what are relatively simple words. "This debate is occurring," as President Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden the week after he delivered his East Room speech,

because of the Supreme Court's ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention. And that Common Article III says that, you know, there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It's like—it's very vague. What does that mean, "outrages upon human dignity"?^[5]

In allowing Abu Zubaydah and the other thirteen "high-value detainees" to tell their own stories, this report manages to answer, with great power and authority, the President's question."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530

Op-Ed Columnist - Reviving the Dream - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Reviving the Dream - NYTimes.com:

"As Jared Bernstein, now the chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden, wrote in the preface to his book, “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)”:

“Economics has been hijacked by the rich and powerful, and it has been forged into a tool that is being used against the rest of us.”

Working people were not just abandoned by big business and their ideological henchmen in government, they were exploited and humiliated. They were denied the productivity gains that should have rightfully accrued to them. They were treated ruthlessly whenever they tried to organize. They were never reasonably protected against the savage dislocations caused by revolutions in technology and global trade.

Working people were told that all of this was good for them, and whether out of ignorance or fear or prejudice or, as my grandfather might have said, damned foolishness, many bought into it. They signed onto tax policies that worked like a three-card monte game. And they were sold a snake oil concoction called “trickle down” that so addled their brains that they thought it was a wonderful idea to hand over their share of the nation’s wealth to those who were already fabulously rich.

America used to be better than this.

The seeds of today’s disaster were sown some 30 years ago. Looking at income patterns during that period, my former colleague at The Times, David Cay Johnston, noted that from 1980 (the year Ronald Reagan was elected) to 2005, the national economy, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. (Because of population growth, the actual increase per capita was about 66 percent.)

But the average income for the vast majority of Americans actually declined during those years. The standard of living for the average family improved not because incomes grew but because women entered the workplace in droves.

As hard as it may be to believe, the peak income year for the bottom 90 percent of Americans was way back in 1973, when the average income per taxpayer, adjusted for inflation, was $33,000. That was nearly $4,000 higher, Mr. Johnston pointed out, than in 2005.

Men have done particularly poorly. Men who are now in their 30s — the prime age for raising families — earn less money than members of their fathers’ generation did at the same age.

It may seem like ancient history, but in the first few decades following World War II, the United States, despite many serious flaws, established the model of a highly productive society that shared its prosperity widely and made investments that were geared toward a more prosperous, more fulfilling future.

The American dream was alive and well and seemingly unassailable. But somehow, following the oil shocks, the hyperinflation and other traumas of the 1970s, Americans allowed the right-wingers to get a toehold — and they began the serious work of smothering the dream.

Ronald Reagan saw Medicare as a giant step on the road to socialism. Newt Gingrich, apparently referring to the original fee-for-service version of Medicare, which was cherished by the elderly, cracked, “We don’t get rid of it in Round One because we don’t think it’s politically smart.”

The right-wingers were crafty: You smother the dream by crippling the programs that support it, by starving the government of money to pay for them, by funneling the government’s revenues to the rich through tax cuts and other benefits, by looting the government the way gangsters loot legitimate businesses and then pleading poverty when it comes time to fund the services required by the people.

The anti-tax fanatic Grover Norquist summed the matter up nicely when he famously said, “Our goal is to shrink the government to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub.” Only they didn’t shrink the government, they enlarged it and turned its bounty over to the rich."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/opinion/10herbert.html?ref=opinion

Bail? Bailout? Jail?

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Op-Ed Columnist - What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us - NYTimes.com:

"We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/opinion/22rich.html?ref=opinion

All Roland Burris had to do was tell the truth. Instead, he covered up a `crime' that wasn't there | Change of Subject

All Roland Burris had to do was tell the truth. Instead, he covered up a `crime' that wasn't there Change of Subject:

"I've heard it said that if leaders in the U.S. Senate had only known in early January the story that Burris is telling today, they never would have agreed to seat him. He wouldn't now be our temporary (I call him that not just to comfort myself, but because that's how the 17th Amendment refers to non-elected replacements) junior senator.

Nonsense.

Absent evidence of rank criminal behavior on Burris' part, any effort to keep him out of the Senate would have been blocked by the courts. His was a legal appointment, no matter how dismaying the circumstances. And the last thing the Democratic Senate majority needed in the run-up to Obama's inauguration and the fight over the stimulus package was a constitutional crisis with racial overtones.

He was safe. All he had to do was tell the truth—expansively, generously, perhaps even with a touch of humility and self-awareness, though no one was demanding miracles.

In our new, weekly podcast with WGN-AM morning host John Williams, my fellow columnist Mary Schmich said Wednesday that Burris 'misunderstood the moment' in Illinois when he used lawyerly evasions to offer fractional truths in his sworn testimony before the state House impeachment panel and in various affidavits. 'In this environment, [such deception] incites people in a way that it might not otherwise,' she said. 'It represents the larger problem.'

(Listen to and find out more about the podcast here)

Put another way, Burris testified as though he believed his most important mission after his appointment was to create distance between himself and our disgraced"

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2009/02/all-roland-burris-had-to-do-was-tell-the-truth-instead-he-covered-up-a-crime-that-wasnt-there.html

Op-Ed Columnist - Failure to Rise - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Failure to Rise - NYTimes.com:

The Congressional Budget Office, not usually given to hyperbole, predicts that over the next three years there will be a $2.9 trillion gap between what the economy could produce and what it will actually produce. And $800 billion, while it sounds like a lot of money, isn’t nearly enough to bridge that chasm.

"In both the House and the Senate, the vast majority of Republicans rallied behind the idea that the appropriate response to the abject failure of the Bush administration’s tax cuts is more Bush-style tax cuts.

And the rhetorical response of conservatives to the stimulus plan — which will, it’s worth bearing in mind, cost substantially less than either the Bush administration’s $2 trillion in tax cuts or the $1 trillion and counting spent in Iraq — has bordered on the deranged.

It’s “generational theft,” said Senator John McCain, just a few days after voting for tax cuts that would, over the next decade, have cost about four times as much.

It’s “destroying my daughters’ future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs,” said Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute.

And the ugliness of the political debate matters because it raises doubts about the Obama administration’s ability to come back for more if, as seems likely, the stimulus bill proves inadequate."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/opinion/13krugman.html?ref=opinion

GRIT TV

Starting this week TheNation.com is live streaming GRIT TV with Laura Flanders daily, Monday to Thursday. Hosted by longtime Nation contributor Laura Flanders, GRIT TV is a daily public affairs and news program featuring discussions of politics, media, news and culture, often with Nation contributors as guests. GRIT airs from 2:00 to 4:00pm EST Mondays through Thursdays.  In today's episode, Nation contributor Robert Pollin discusses the economic recovery bill, while healthcare expert Trudy Lieberman explores the prospects for heath care reform in the wake of the Daschle dustup

If they only had a brain...

Op-Ed Columnist - Playing With Fire - NYTimes.com:

It’s been clear for years that the G.O.P. is a party without a heart. But its pointless obstructionism, its overall lack of any serious response to what is a clear national economic emergency, seems to indicate it’s also a party without a brain.

"With the economy in deep, deep trouble, and Americans suffering by the tens of millions, the Republicans spent much of the week doing their same-old, bad-faith Neanderthal two-step: trying their best to derail the economic stimulus package working its difficult way through Congress.

“This bill is stinking up the place,” said Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina who not only opposed the legislation but wanted to make sure that no one would mistake him for a class act.

One of the goals of the package, of course, is to begin cleaning up the holy mess that resulted from the long, dark night of G.O.P. control in Washington. President Obama went out of his way to get a substantial number of Republicans to make a genuine effort to move the economic revitalization process along, but was rebuffed, and in some cases contemptuously.

On Thursday night, he struck back, attacking Republican intransigence and its failed policies of the past. On Friday morning, with the government reporting that nearly 600,000 more jobs had been lost in January, the president went public again, stressing how irresponsible it would be to do nothing in the face of the growing crisis.

Neither the job losses nor the president’s prodding was enough to prompt much of a response from the Republicans. But by Friday evening, it appeared that a small number of G.O.P. senators, enough to assure Senate passage of a revised (and watered-down) stimulus package by a very slim margin, had come aboard.

But only a small number. Even as the report of an agreement was being circulated, Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, was bad-mouthing the package on CNN. “This bill is a disaster,” he said.

It’s been clear for years that the G.O.P. is a party without a heart. But its pointless obstructionism, its overall lack of any serious response to what is a clear national economic emergency, seems to indicate it’s also a party without a brain.

Republicans in Washington have behaved like a milling crowd standing in the way of firefighters trying to respond to a devastating blaze. The best that can be said for the party is that a few senators seem to have been able part the crowd enough to let the rescuers begin to inch forward.

President Obama addressed Republican inflexibility on Thursday night when he said at a gathering in Williamsburg, Va., “Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis.” He added that without swift action on the stimulus bill, “an economy that is already in crisis will be faced with catastrophe.”

The report of January’s enormous job losses came roughly a dozen hours later. It was the latest in a long and hideous pattern of employment woes, much of it resulting from the G.O.P.’s obsession with destructive supply-side economic voodoo.… " http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/opinion/07herbert.html?ref=opinion

Inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama

People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day

Editorial Observer - Republicans’ Latest Talking Point - The New Deal Failed - NYTimes.com:

"Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/opinion/12mon4.html?ref=opinion