No good deed goes unpunished: After a massive ad buy devoted to thanking America for saving it from certain death during the financial crisis (which it helped cause), AIG is considering suing the federal government “because they think the [$182 billion bailout] deal wasn’t generous enough,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a statement.
January 2013
Maybe we should cut defense spending before we go after programs that serve the poor and the elderly and the poor elderly? Just a thought. Matthew Yglesias:
Obviously, you don’t want to cut the military all the way to the bone lest you invite an invasion from Mexico or Canada. But we’re not even close to being overwhelmed by Canadian arms. And it’s striking that if you look at non-U.S. defense spending, a majority of it appears to be by U.S. treaty allies—NATO members, Japan, Australia, South Korea, etc.—so we really do seem very safe.
Then again … “maybe Mexico’s military is unusually cost effective and we have no choice but to spend 50 times what Mexico spends in order to defend ourselves adequately.”
The defense budget is really high: The U.S. could spend way less – Slate.com
Comparing Obama to Eisenhower and Reagan, both of whom won re-election with jobless rates above 6 percent, Andrew Sullivan makes a strange offhanded comment today:
Then there’s the golf and the fact that Obama really has restored the cultural Waspiness of the presidency.
Wait, what? That’s it—Sullivan doesn’t elucidate on the point, as if it’s totally self-evident.
I have to think about this… but I think he might be right. Bill Clinton: white man, first black president. Barack Obama: black man, restores white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture to the presidency.
WHAT A WEIRD WORLD.
from The Sartorialist
Josh Marshall pulls an apt quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech:
“Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.”