Setting the record straight
August 24, 2009 8:29 pm

The National Association of Letter Carriers issued a point-by-point rebuttal of a grossly inaccurate, partisan attack on the Postal Service and its 700,000 employees, perpetrated by by the House Republican Conference in an underhanded bid to derail health care reform. “This smear cannot go unanswered,” NALC President Fredric V. Rolando said. “This attack on America’s most trusted agency is deliberately misleading and unjustifiably undermines public support for the Postal Service.”
NALC statement—summary | full text

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*Awesome* Cartoon Explains
August 26, 2009 8:36 pm

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All the President's Zombies
August 30, 2009 8:39 pm

Paul Krugman

....Let's talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.

First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the "magic of the marketplace" were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn't happen.....

.....President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.

And then there's the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.

There's a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis - and the crisis came.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. "We know now that it is bad economics." And last year we learned that lesson all over again.

Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.

The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option - not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson - have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance - which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer......

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