Gulag– oh lord, does that take me back to more carefree days! Can’t resist one more: I sure hope he “Socks It To ‘Em!”

Theres a strategy to making the opposition look like the biggger asshole. (I learned about that from Barbara.) Obama did sincerely try to be bipartisan. THEY drew the battle line. Obama can now make his case factually and let the facts speak for themselves. The elections of 2010 may go down as the Waterloo for the old GOP.

They believe any form of regulation is socialism except that which pays them money to make up for their greed. They don’t want any control coming with the the free ride they are being given, particularly salary caps. They will have emotion-laden terms for each and every form of regulation that they are confronted with.

I think this is a more fundamental problem. Corporations think they are America. Those getting big bonuses in the financial industry think they are America. Evangelicals think they are America and so on and so on. None in these and various other groups seem willing to discuss how they will fit into America. In their minds they are America and America cannot do without them.

By the time each in a long list claiming their interests are America’s interests there is shit left for anyone else. We might as well have the government give tax credits for knee pads so we can kneel and kiss their royal behinds.

Apparently no one is willing to stand up for them. It is going to take a lot more than salary caps on recipients of bailout money before this situation is corrected. We have barely scratched the surface with respect to what was done during the Great Depression.

There is a great deal of preemptory posturing and revisionist history being promulgated now precisely because these leeches know history and they are scared shitless that it might be repeated.

Seems pretty clear to me. It also seems clear that lines have been drawn so distinctly that the solution will not be bi-partisan in the least. It is naive to think it will be and though I supported Obama this cum-ba-ya, lying down with lions and contagious spirit of compromise is what worried me. These people will never compromise when their goal is winning totally. They do not compromise and the word is not in their vocabulary.

All this talk is arising out of some salary caps for execs of companies being bailed out. If you think that’s intense wait until we are in the thick of the health care fight.

They are worried particularly because the only thing that stands between them and their worst fears are jackasses like McCain who attempt to leverage voter ignorance with word games as if stimulus were not spending.

*To anyone outside the WSJ’s readership, that is.

As Arte Johnson used to say, “Verrry interesting.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123396915233059229.html

He reasons that “powerful benefits of the bonus system, which helped make the U.S. the global leader in financial services for decades.”

Evidently he believe no adjustments should be made when the global leader leads other countries down the road to ruin along with us. Maybe he believes it is their fault because they should have knon better.

It is an incredible read steeped in self-aggrandizement, unrivaled hubris and bizarre notions of leadership only proving that some in the financial sector consider themseves indispensible. Well, we once though that air traffic controllers were indispensible too. Ronald Reagan showed us otherwise.

Behind all of this is real fear of having their salaries come down to earth. Without them making what they made America loses.

What jokes they are. It would be funny if it were not so pervasive.

NOTE: Roy C. Smith is a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a former partner of Goldman Sachs.

My guess is that Republicans are afraid the stimulus package WILL work, and by Obama’s second term, plans to address the deficit will be underway.They know who will pay, and it terrifies them.

I hope that Obama will say this mess was created by Republican philosophy, and if Republicans block reform now they own the mess we are in – until the mid-term – and he trusts the voters to decide if restoring tax cuts for the rich will feed or house them.

As for the group that devised the cuts, I think they all believed they were doing a good thing. And trust me– as one of his constituents, I can say that Ben Nelson has been on that well-intentioned “road to Hell” his entire carrier. Perhaps his best punishment would be having to explain to Gov. Schwarzenegger, face-to-face, why the $40B “state fiscal stabilization” portion was cut from the bill completely.

This afternoon I was re-watching The West Wing as I’d promised myself I would do. In the second episode (originally aired Sept. 29, 1999), Leo McGarry (John Spencer) says to Toby Zigler (Richard Schiff):

Know what we need more than a media consultant? An economic stimulus package that doesn’t look like it was put together at an Amway rally.

In other words, as I think Shakespeare said: “There is nothing new under the sun.”