This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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Another something I’ve been meaning to post for a long time but never got around to:
The Real Great Depression
(Scott Reynolds Nelson, Chronicle Review, 17 Oct 2008)
As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably unknown to everyone else. But as I turn the crank on the microfilm reader, I have been hearing weird echoes of recent events.
When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany’s inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.
In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls “the real Great Depression.” She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.
(via The Daily Dish)
(from Good Magazine via Matthew Yglesias)
I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile, but never got around to it. Click through on the image above to see it at a readable size. It is a rundown of the events that occurred in the first 100 days of each Presidency since FDR.
Some abbreviated highlights:
- FDR: Emergency banking and stimulus legislation
- Truman: VE Day ends the European part of WWII, Signs the UN Charter
- Eisenhower: Not much
- JFK: Starts the Peace Corp, Bay of Pigs Invasion
- Johnson: Not much
- Nixon: Starts secretly bombing Cambodia
- Ford: Pardons Nixon
- Carter: Not Much
- Reagan: Gets shot
- GHW Bush: Not much
- Clinton: Kills a bunch of Branch Davidians at Waco
- GW Bush: Not much
Looks like “not much” is a decent possibility. We’ll see how Obama does.
Damn it. Unlike the last two elections, there appear to not have been any faithless electors at all in the Presidential Election (the real one) that happened yesterday.
It’s official: Barack Obama elected 44th president
(AP on Yahoo, 15 Dec 2008)
Monday’s voting was largely ceremonial, the results preordained by Obama’s Nov. 4 victory over Republican Sen. John McCain. Obama won 365 electoral votes, to 173 for McCain. With every state reporting, all the electors had cast ballots in accordance with the popular votes in their states.
(via MyDD)
Of course the headline isn’t actually correct. It will not be official until the results are reported to congress and certified by congress in January.
I continue to hold out hope that one election, the right series of events will occur such that the electoral college will actually be able to act as a proper deliberative body, with each member of the college making an independent decision on who to vote for, rather than feeling bound by the results of the general election where THEY were elected, not a President. I also want to see electors running on their own merits and under their own name rather than by being pledged to some candidate or another.
Somehow, I don’t think I’ll ever see that, but I can still hope.
This is pretty funny…
ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to “suck it up” for two years and do nothing and give this “motherfucker
his senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH states that he will put “[Senate Candidate 4]” in the Senate “before I just give fucking [Senate Candidate 1] a fucking Senate seat and I don’t get anything.”
…
Later in the conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH said he knows that the President-elect wants Senate Candidate 1 for the Senate seat but “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.”
I just finished reading the whole thing. Reading between the lines, it sounds like Blogojevich viewed “Senate Candidate 1” as Obama’s desired replacement for himself, and kept trying to suggest “deals” in exchange for that, but the transition staff essentially offered “only their appreciation” and was not responsive to any of the overtures. So Blagojevich and company started getting more and more upset, and throwing out other candidates they would appoint instead to piss off Obama… and of course also evaluating each of those alternate candidates by how much personal benefit they could bring to the Blagojevich family… and meanwhile still trying to construct deals on Senate Candidate 1 that would be less obvious andless directly traceable back to Obama. And of course plans to appoint himself to the seat if none of that worked out.
At least that is what it looks like. The Complaint says that what is included is only a small subset of what was recorded, and what is included does not seem to include any conversations with the transition team, only with Blagojevich and his advisors discussion options and what they wanted in exchange for what. So there might still be more not public.
But at least initially, it seems like the Obama team was doing the right thing and basically ignoring this asshole.
Anyway, the press conference on this is about to start…
[Edited 17:21 UTC to add the second quote]
From the actual complaint (pdf):
Defendants ROD BLAGOJEVICH and JOHN HARRIS, together with
others, attempted to use ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s authority to appoint a United States Senator
for the purpose of obtaining personal benefits for ROD BLAGOJEVICH, including, among
other things, appointment as Secretary of Health & Human Services in the President-elect’s
administration…
(via The Corner)
Most of the coverage I’ve seen so far has concentrated on the “selling the seat” bit, suggesting he would give the spot to someone who “contributed” the most or some such. But there also seems to be a bit here with him looking for favors or appointments from Obama. We’ll see soon here who, if anybody, within the Obama transition is caught on tape here too and what they said.
This could get interesting…
The complaint is 76 pages long. I’d better get reading… well, perhaps skimming.
What wonderful fun news to wake up to. The Governor of Illinois arrested for essentially trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder. Ha! Wonderful.
The logistics thing I asked the other day that is.
I did have a bunch of references I found, but I won’t properly footnote this, just give the results. It just took 15 or 20 minutes of Googling that I didn’t have time for when I posted the original question.
The way it usually works in presidential transitions is this:
- The president-elect announces his intention to nominate various people to the cabinet once he is inaugurated.
- The new senate is sworn in early in January.
- The appropriate committees of the new senate hold hearings on the prospective nominees, even though there are no actual nominees yet, just intended nominees.
- The committees vote on the prospective nominees to give their recommendations to the full Senate.
- The President is inaugurated.
- Usually within the first hour or two of the presidency, the new president officially makes the nominations.
- The Senate convenes for a special session, usually once again just an hour or two later, for the final vote on the nominees… often a single voice vote to approve all nominees at once rather than full individual votes on each nominee.
- The new cabinet officers are sworn in, usually also within an hour or two.
And that be that. Pretty much what I expected. I find it an interesting cart before the horse thing to hold the confirmation hearings before the actual formal nomination, but given the practical consideration of needing to let the new cabinet be seated as quickly as possible after the new administration begins, it makes sense. But it is still odd.
There are even more odd things that can happen in edge conditions during the transitional period. For instance, the line of succession gets somewhat odd if “bad things” happen during the time period where parts of the new administration has taken office, but not all of it, because while it is traditional for the previous cabinet to resign and be replaced by the new cabinet, the actual timing of such resignations can vary. Do folks resign effective at noon on Inauguration day? Effective at the moment the new President is sworn in? Effective when their successor is sworn in? Depending on exactly how that is done, during Inauguration day itself, there can be times where the line of succession still includes members of the old administration as well as the new. (There is also oddness due to the fact that the Vice President is sworn in first in the case something happens to the outgoing president after the new VP is sworn in but before the new President is.)
Now, if anything happened that actually caused any of the above to matter, I’m guessing there would be much confusion, but the end result would very quickly be made to match what you would expect to have happened if the new administration had already fully taken their place… and the detailed timelines of when various things are supposed to happen would be ignored, but…
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