For the last seven years the GOP hasn't been able to work up any spit about the deficit. Suddenly now that the global economy has frozen, and the macro and micro trends say consumers are spending less  (especially on credit card debt), and that the private sector banks are not lending in spite of a massive infusion by the Feds,  the GOP has found religion on the national debt in typical myopic fashion, just in time to be the party of opposition.

Clearly it matters less what your principles are than it does that one just oppose democratic policies for the sake of it.

http://spectator.org/archives/2004/03/30/deficits-dont-matter

I can't believe that I am writing about budget deficits again. The Bush Administration's $520 billion deficit forecast for this year doesn't bother me, but the deficit phobia and media outcry is getting tiresome. I thought this had been resolved and agree with Vice President Cheney, who reportedly told Paul O'Neill, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." He was right. ~ Brian Wesbury

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_52/b3914021_mz007.htm

Opposites are True?

Supply-siders believe deficits don't matter because tax cuts so boost investment and productivity that the economy grows its way out of debt. The opposite, "starve the beast" faction, epitomized by tax tactician Grover Norquist, hope tax cuts will indeed create deep deficits that will then force spending cuts. But both things can't be true. ~ Robert Kuttner

http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_berry&sid=ac...

 Myopic Republicans

Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economy is in the throes of a deepening recession  and needs a really big dose of fiscal stimulus to help stabilize it.

What it doesn’t need is efforts by congressional Republicans to limit the size of the package because of feigned concerns about how much additional spending might add to the national debt. ~ John M Berry

 

Please also note the sourcing on this , it is not simply an IDF claim:

Palestinians reported some two dozen airstrikes in Gaza on Thursday. One militant was killed and 10 wounded in Gaza City, while an airstrike in northern Gaza killed three members of a rocket-launching cell, Palestinian medical officials said. The attack took place about 150 yards from a hospital and wounded 12 bystanders. The Israeli army has repeatedly said militants use civilian areas for cover.

Such tactics are simply standard practice, and unfortunately so is the Israeli response. For example, from last year :

An Israeli missile hit the grounds of an agricultural school in Beit Hanoun, a town in northern Gaza, killing a teacher, Hani Naim, 43, and wounding three students, according to a local resident who monitors violent activity in the area.[...]

Images from The Associated Press Television News showed the school in Thursday’s airstrike to be a series of huts in a rural area. A rocket-launching device was spotted between olive trees, indicating that militants had used the school as cover to launch attacks, according to The A.P.

Israel finds itself in a no-win situation, either having to permit attacks from behind civilian cover or else to retaliate in a way that puts non-combatant lives in danger. That it faces such choices is of course despicable, but IMHO greater care needs to be taken to avoid collateral damage. Most of the responsibility for avoidable civilian deaths in these situations falls on the militants who use them for cover, but that's kind of an academic point.

 Hank Paulson, the economy is doing fine, just months before the credit markets tanked.

 Second place goes to the ratings agencies, like Moody's and Standard and Poors, that lost all of their integrity by stating that such and such was rated Triple AAA, thereby pulling the wool over investors eyes, that their investments were safe.

The Illinois House has voted to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

http://www.politico.com

 

The death toll in the shelling of a family compound in Gaza rose to 30, the United Nations said in a report issued on Friday, as relief workers continued to comb through wreckage they had been denied access to for days after the attack.

The episode has ignited intense international criticism of the Israeli military for its failure to allow relief workers to reach the scene in a timely manner. On Friday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, also pointed to the deaths in the family compound as cause for an independent investigation into possible war crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza.

 

Well hey the compound was probably used for launching rockets, right?  Or at the very least the IDF thought so right?

Members of the Samouni family said that they were rounded up late Sunday night by Israeli soldiers and ordered to gather for their own safety in a single dwelling in the impoverished Zeitoun district of Gaza city, a Hamas stronghold. The next morning, they said, the building was shelled.

Okay but the Palestinians are probably just lying, right?

In its report on Friday, the United Nations agency confirmed the family’s account, saying that 110 people had been forced into the house on Sunday. “The next day the house was shelled,” Allegra Pacheco, an agency spokeswoman, told BBC television, quoting unidentified witnesses.

Oh.  So the Israeli forces gathered up over a hundred civilians, including children under four years of age, then put them in a single place so they could more easily drop an artillery shell on them at once?

Oh it gets better.  After the attack the IDF refused to allow the Red cross to ener for days despite the fact that there were survivors.

Only on Wednesday [tlaloc note: the attack was sunday or early monday], the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement on Thursday, did Israel give Red Cross representatives permission to enter Zeitoun, and what the operatives found there chilled them. Four small children in the Samouni household, so weak they could not stand unassisted, cowered next to the corpses of slain mothers, the Red Cross said on Thursday. At least 12 corpses lay on mattresses and three more bodies were found in another house.

Hey it's okay despite the IDF specifically rounding up one family to shoot like fish in a barrel we get the usual BS dflection:

Israeli officials said that they were examining all the allegations, that they did not aim at civilians and that they were not certain that the source of fire that killed and wounded the United Nations drivers was Israeli.

“We do our utmost to avoid hitting civilians, and many times we don’t fire because we see civilians nearby,” said Maj. Avital Leibovich

I've seen Bond villains that were less over-the-top evil than this.  Quoted story here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/world/middleeast/10zeitoun.html

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2008/12/a_bailin_instead_of_...

The author suggests giving GM a bailout but as part of that make them change from auto manufcturing to making them oproduce mass transit vehicles.  The irony of course being that GM was one of the companies that colluded to destroy mass transit in america.  As the author points out:

In 1936, General Motors reorganized a subsidiary called National City Lines into a holding company funded by GM, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Firestone Tire and two suppliers of bus-related products. The business plan was to convert electric transit systems in U.S. cities to GM bus systems.

Aided by federal policy, GM sold existing streetcars to other cities outside the country and extracted contracts from local transit agencies that prohibited the future purchase of any equipment that was powered by any fuel other than gasoline.

By 1949, National City Lines had been so successful that more than 100 electric rail systems in 45 cities had been converted. That same year a federal jury convicted GM and its partners of criminally conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses to transportation companies throughout the United States.

Each company was fined $5,000 and senior executives were fined the princely sum of $1.

Despite the conviction, GM persisted with its business plan until 1955, by which time 88 percent of the nation's electric streetcar network had disappeared. In 1936 there were 40,000 streetcars operating in the United States; by 1955 there were about 5,000.

It is probably better karma than GM deserves to get to make emnds for the sin of killing off mass transit (which has greatly hurt this country in a number of ways).  Still the symmetry of the situation amuses me.

Personally I was thinking an Ideal "make work" program to be part of he stimulus package would be to completely revamp the nations rail lines.  Currently the train is slow prone to breakdowns and terribly inefficient.  A lot of these problems however come from our completely antiquated rail system which does not isolate rails from their surroundings (as in other countries) and which tend to be many decades old. 

With new more reliable tracks a system of high speed modernized trains can be put in place to facilitate cargo and passenger transit while reducing oil usage, traffic acidents, and road congestion.  The original WPA built a fair amount of our current highway system.  Only fitting that the second one update our transportation system.

This is pretty funny.  It is one of several lists of things purported to be caused by global warming followed by this:

More Executions of Witches Caused By Global Warming

By JDZ

New York Times editorialist Nicholas D. Kristof (Joe and Valerie Wilson’s breakfast partner ) quotes a Berkeley professor who claims to have identified yet another.

As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil wars — and even more witches hacked to death with machetes.

In rural Tanzania, murders of elderly women accused of witchcraft are a very common form of homicide. And when Tanzania suffers unusual rainfall — either drought or flooding — witch-killings double, according to research by Edward Miguel , an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

There is some spectacular irony implicit in this particular accusation. The enlightened portion of mankind knows that the persecution of alleged witches has always taken the form of the bringing of false accusations of responsibility for untoward events through mysterious and preternatural agency against the innocent by unethical and deluded people seeking to benefit personally by gaining prestige and/or power thereby.

Which is, of course, precisely what leftists do when they point to the modern industrial economy and the citizens of the developed countries and accuse them of altering the climate of the earth.

We don’t need to travel to Tanzania to observe witch-hunting in action. Plenty of that activity is conducted right here at universities like Berkeley and in the pages of the New York Times.

...reply from above

The concept of an entire civilization can help in a war effort, but only a small fraction are the designated killers and bullet sponges is only seems to increase the odds of war starting and one continuing. But there is no way of finding out those who are victims of circumstance, and those are effectively paramilitary forces.

Israel doesn't like Hamas firing at civilians, so Israel responds by dropping 500 lb bombs or popping in some Hellfire missiles in densely populated areas. The fact that Israel decides to not drop 2,000 lb bombs and 1,000 lb bombs or a hydrogen bomb isn't something Israel should pat themselves on the back for. Trying to avoid civilian casualties by dropping 500 lb bombs in urban areas is a non sequitur. Israel doesn't like Israeli civilians being harmed and wants the option that will lead to the least risk to Israel's military and reduced risk to non-Israeli civilians. Israel's actions show that non-Israeli civilians are less important than Israeli soldiers.

It is possible that the Hamas military members feel that Israel would kill them all given the chance. And they are doing everything they can to get others on their side. Or they could be trying to draw more of the current civilians or their Arab neighbors into the fighting. It should be clear to them that Israel will take the least risky to Israeli life tactical bombing approach to taking out their targets.