http://donklephant.com Big Teeth. Huge Ass. Surprisingly Reasonable. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:35:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It feels a little hard to believe, but we're marking another milestone on the site today: 9,000 posts in a little over 4 years. Many, many, many thanks to my fellow contributors who have written thousands of thoughtful posts. And many, many, many thanks to all of you who read and ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/20/9000th-post-on-donklephant/ To paraphrase Julie Andrews, "The Blogs are Alive ...", but this time with stolen emails rather than "Music". Documents and archived emails were stolen from the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Center (CRU). The first accounts indicate that 1,072 emails and 72 documents were stolen and ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/20/climate-email-hacked/ A local newspaper in upstate New York's 23rd Congressional District, scene of the hard-fought and nationally prominent special election (won -- so far anyway -- by the Democrat after his Conservative opponent conceded), reports that a computer virus may have "tainted' the results:   GOUVERNEUR, NY - The computerized voting machines used ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/19/uh-oh-virus-infected-ny-23-computerized-voting-machines/ The deficit explosion under the Obama administration is a common complaint by fiscal conservatives, and is often represented with a graph such as this one, courtesy of the libertarian think-tank, Cato.org: [Editor's Note: the chart cannot be displayed; please check the link for the charts mentioned in this post] However, as Cato ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/19/big-spenders-all/ As many of you know, I've been a fan of Dobbs. Yes, he has been leading the far right on issues like immigration and border security, but he opposed the Bush tax cuts, wanted to raise the minimum wage, is pro choice and favors gay marriage. Meanwhile, he values fiscally ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/19/jon-stewart-interviews-lou-dobbs-reveals-more-paranoia/ And it'll achieve 94% coverage. And it costs $849B. CNN has more about some of the key points in the new bill...Among other things, they've agreed to subsidize insurance for a family of four making up to roughly $88,000 annually, or 400 percent of the federal poverty level. They've also agreed to expand ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/18/cbo-says-senate-health-care-bill-cuts-deficit-by-127b/ Why oh why oh why oh why? They gave her an incredibly easy way to ignore the more substantive arguments against her legitimacy as a candidate and focus on their dumb decision to run with the above nonsense. And this isn't just coming from her corner. It's coming from Media Matters and ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/18/newsweeks-dumb-and-sexist-sarah-palin-cover/ Michael Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, he proposes a temporary payroll tax reduction as a second try at a stimulus. He starts his argument with consideration of what would have ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/18/stimulate-this-baby/ http://donklephant.com/2009/11/17/free-the-yuan/ The administration's claim of nearly 640,000 jobs created or "saved" by the $787 billion stimulus bill continues to be savaged by traditional media outlets for inaccuracies. From the Washington Examiner: More than ten percent of the jobs the Obama administration has claimed were "created or saved" by the $787 billion stimulus package ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/17/jobs-what-jobs/ Journalist Ezra Klein has come out in favor of the proposition that a federal health insurance mandate is constitutional, but the question remains a thorny legal problem. If a reform bill is passed with an individual mandate, will it pass constitutional muster? The answer isn't quite as clear ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/17/is-a-federal-mandate-constitutional/ Our auto company GM is "repaying" some of the bailout money early! Or so say the headlines. But the reality is a little bit different. Some background, in case you don't remember all the payments you made to own 61% of GM. The government placed $6.7 billion in ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/16/gm-repayment-beyond-the-headlines/ So, I read Doug's take as well as John's angle and followed it all with Justin's comments and Jacob's snark. The bottom-line (as far as I'm concerned) is that this really is not a big deal. I understand the interest and argument posited by Doug and John, but I think ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/16/bow-wow/ Seniors: One super-voting bloc politicians mess with at their peril For months now, it's been clear that the road to "deficit neutral" health care reform is a bumpy, maybe even dangerous, one for seniors. Ironically, in their zeal to extend health insurance to the roughly 40 million people who don't have ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/16/will-seniors-sit-still-for-half-a-trillion-dollars-in-medicare-cuts/ Not surprisingly, The New York Times review of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life isn't exactly positive: “Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the campaign: among other things, for breaking ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/15/going-postal-on-going-rogue/ To Charles De Gaulle... To the wife of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Gronchi... To Pope John XXIII... Maybe he just liked to sneak a peek at their shoes? (h/t: Gaucho Politico & Lawyers, Guns & Money) http://donklephant.com/2009/11/15/dwight-eisenhower-another-bower-in-chief/ Maggie Mahar has an interesting observation in Sunday's Washington Post: If you're a progressive like me, and you're upset by the Stupak amendment, which bars federally subsidized insurance from covering abortions, consider this: What if we had a single-payer health-care system and someone like Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin were running ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/15/unintended-consequences-of-a-single-payer-system/ In what can only be called an Epic Win, President Obama has turned his back on Superman! USA rules! With this daring breach of protocol (at the risk of a super-wedgie) Obama has done what no American President has ever done - disrespected Superman. I think we can all agree that ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/15/breaking-news-obama-superman-win/ Hey all, I've heard quite a bit of back channel chatter about the last two posts on the blog and I wanted to explain how I was responsible for the topic even showing up here in the first place. Doug and I are friends on Facebook and he feeds his posts through ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/15/how-the-bowing-posts-came-to-donklephant/ I found the following numbers from Gallup about government's role in health care to be, well, eye opening. Check it out... Hmmm, what happened in 2008...I can't really think of anything. Republicans can not like Obama all the want, but this smacks of "Soreloserism." Why, just look at how this drop has effected the ... http://donklephant.com/2009/11/15/republicans-shifting-opinions-on-healthcare-purely-partisan/