Good thing ESPN isn't headquartered in Schenectady.

On a related note, GOP demands relating to Solis are so absurd, they're hard to believe

No more absurd than Holding up demanding AG Holder not prosecute republican criminals. It will take a while to squeeze the hubris out of these arrogant asses.

Actually, I think Shyamalan's The Village was underrated.

Grover Norquist is up to his old tricks blaming the Democrats for the recession.

I seem to remember that Norquist compared the Estate Tax to the Holocaust.

Serious Loser

Job losses were worse in both 1982 and 83, as percentage of workforce, than last year.

Yes, let's be concerned. This is a more serious recession by far than the last two.

But, for anybody under 35, stop the apocalypticism already.

It has nothing to do with a mediocre Shyamalan movie...

How dare you call that movie meidocre.

It was awful.

: "[S]houldn't Obama have made a much bigger plan, say $1.3 trillion, his opening gambit? If he had, he could have conceded to the centrists by cutting it to $1.2 trillion, and still have had a plan with a good chance of really controlling this slump. Instead he made preemptive concessions, only to find the centrists demanding another pound of flesh as proof of their centrist power."

Don't worry, I'm sure there's still some top level positions he can appoint Republicans to. Maybe even Ginzberg's Supreme Court post!!!

Obama really is a smart guy. So smart that he apparently can proceed in contravention of common sense and all principles of statecraft since the beginning of recorded time. That's change for you!!!

Give him time! Liberals need to make concessions now so they will be in an even better position to make even more concessions in the future. You will never live to see healthcare reform but maybe your great grandchildren will. In any event, you can preen yourself as morally superior and avoid being rude when you are invited to social functions.

Duncan -- I hear that Doug Kmiec is available.

Digby may have coined the term "the Village", but Richard Ben Cramer had them pegged way back in "What It Takes," when he referred to them as "the Karacter Kops."

The Bush administration's "burrowing" will be a serious problem for a quite a while.

Wherever the burrowers are, they need to be assigned to exhaustively research ways to promote the liberal position of whatever issue they hold most dear.

So that's what the Palins named the kid after? Why not just name her ESPN? Life in Palinland must be very strange.

Steve Benen: I've been wondering the same thing the last several days: "[S]houldn't Obama have made a much bigger plan, say $1.3 trillion, his opening gambit? If he had, he could have conceded to the centrists by cutting it to $1.2 trillion, and still have had a plan with a good chance of really controlling this slump. Instead he made preemptive concessions, only to find the centrists demanding another pound of flesh as proof of their centrist power."

Hopefully, we've ALL learned our lesson, right?

Ahhh, Sarah Palin again! Hey, she is supposed to be a gramma now, but "Tripp" seems nowhere to be found, no pictures are out there (?) - what gives? Shall I call her Office again and ask?

I have to disagree with all you bashers of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village." I enjoyed the movie thoroughly.

--and now, back to your regularly scheduled Great Depression in progress.

[S]houldn't Obama have made a much bigger plan, say $1.3 trillion

Is the suggestion here that he would have found more shovel ready projects? Or that Republicans would have found even fewer pieces of minutia to attack? The idea that Republicans and Blue Dogs will just take any "first number" and reduce it by 10% is pretty naive.

"[S]houldn't Obama have made a much bigger plan, say $1.3 trillion, his opening gambit? -- Krugman

Sure, he should have; I would have. But, for all he has called himself Baruch Obama on occasion, he's still missing that gene which tells you how to sell or buy a carpet in the Middle Eastern bazaar. I guess he misunderestimated the Republicans' penchant for haggling.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I didn't realize that Sarah Palin named one of her children after the ESPN headquarters. -- Benen

Neither did I. Always thought it was after "Bristol cities", in hopes that the child would follow her Ma's path in the swim suit contests, where a good pair of Bristols is the most obvious "talent" on display.

good to see that sarah "you can see russia from alaska" palin's grasp of geography is still as strong as ever. i mean, who knew that if you wanted to work for espn, you'd actually be expected to live near espn? and who knew connecticut was far away from alaska!?

Wasn't it Tina Fey who said that?

RE Palin. I don't believe it. Bristol Bay is where she has salmon fished for many years and its an amazing and beautiful place. Story sounds bogus.

Pat Buchanan repeats his rant on 1600 that was discredited this morning on Morning Joe by Krugman.

Shouldn't regulars be required to come up with something new for each show, and shouldn't host enforce this by calling them out on their failed rants?

A surprisingly good day on Wall Street. Apparently, investors have more confidence in the Senate than I do.

Nah -- they just love layoffs and high unemployment. They're convinced it's a sign that companies are "getting tough" with their employees and cutting back to improve profits. Because, as we all know, there's nothing healthier than a company that lays off several thousand people.

Looks like the deal is done: Sources: Tentative deal reached for $780 billion stimulus package

Palin missed her calling. She would have made a great ESPN bunny. She already has the TV hair.

"Until I learned that you'd have to move to Bristol, Connecticut. It was far away,"

Wasilla to Bristol CT: 3334 miles
Wasilla to Washington, DC: 3352 miles

Do we tell her now, or wait till 2012?

The Dems are wheeling in Ted Kennedy for the vote tonight.

Wow. Palin. The last time I saw someone sucking up that hard, it was interrupting the Super Bowl.

INRE: The stimulus.
Why are we freaking out over whatever gets cut out of this bill? Can't we just put it in another bill, later?

Thanks for doing such a great blog, Steve! You rock! :-)

Olbermann is forgiven for not voting. He does a lot more than only vote, I suppose.

Palin is the last thing we should be talking about.
The woman has no sense of anything relative to reality.
ESPN has hired some stupid folks, but they have their standards.
Too bad the repups dont. Rush and Sarah, sitting in the GOP...

The market is up on the news that "mark-to-market" rules are being suspended. A good idea, unlike the bill you are all so enthusiastic about.

The market is up on the news that "mark-to-market" rules are being suspended.

No, that's not the opinion of the majority of market analysts. You were corrected on this last night. Nice try at trolling, though.

I am not excited about any part of the Stimulus Package that doesn't create jobs / promote growth.

The market is up on the news that "mark-to-market" rules are being suspended. A good idea, unlike the bill you are all so enthusiastic about.

Try again, Mike:

U.S. Stocks Advance on Speculation Job Losses Will Prompt Stimulus Passage

I just heard the breakdown of 42% tax cuts, 58% spending in the final Senate version of what used to be the Jobs Bill. Anyone able to confirm that?

Don't forget the $350 billion "left-over" from TARP to be announced Monday.

I'm worried about Obama's political chops. By failing to push for a big enough stimulus to get this $14-trillion-a-year economy moving again, and to allow it to get larded up by Pelosi and Reid with easy targets for Republicans to attack, and by allowing centrists to fill it with non-stimulative tax cuts, Obama has handed his opponents a fantastic strategy. The worse this bill does, the more the economy tanks, the more the Republicans can blame Obama.

In other words, the more they wreck the effectiveness of the stimulus with Hooverite small-government arguments, the more fodder they have for blaming the bad economy on Obama and his liberal stimulus bill. Then, in 2010 or 2012, they can come back in and clean house--and finally achieve their goal of turning the US into Argentina.

"Don't cry for me, Argentina."

I read somewhere that Todd Palin said Bristol Palin is named after Bristol Bay in AK, which - as someone else has already mentioned - is where she and the First Dude have their commercial fishing enterprise. I think if the ESPN asperations was involved, she would have named Bristo Espinmerelda or something equivalent.

august 31, 2008: "Palin said the eldest girl was named after Bristol Bay, where the family fishes."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/republican_race/2008/08/30/2008-08-30_whats_in_the_palin_childrens_names_fish_.html

and, yeah, it would be nice if she would go back to alaska and stay there.

josh: "to allow it to get larded up by Pelosi and Reid with easy targets for Republicans to attack"

what specifically are you referring to?

pay attention, dear. the republicans are objecting simply to object. all the stuff i have heard them objecting to is only objectionable if you're a halfwit.

To extend the game of "Good thing ESPN headquarters aren't in ..."

A favorite town name in my state of Washingtons is Humptulips.

Humptulips Palin. Too precious.

Re S Palin: who friggin' cares???? She's an idiot and should be ignored.

Same with Samuel the non-joe-plumber.

Wow, the Rs are just chock full of talented people. ::snort::

Joe was his middle name.

"On a related note, GOP demands relating to Solis are so absurd, they're hard to believe."

There is no limit to the amount or degree of absurdity of which Republiscum are capable.

Diane Feinstein: "So I reserve the right at the end of the day to vote against the package that I don't think puts those jobs out there. That's my point."

Is this an abstract defense of senators who have doubts about the stimulus, or does Sen Feinstein doubt that the stimulus will produce jobs?

Me thinks a bottle of Harveys Bristol Creme had a part to play.

Thanks for helping to bring attention to the fact that Lilly Ledbetter won't get a dime from Goodyear unless we all work on her behalf to make that happen!

fienstein wants more stimulus money and less repub tax cuts.

“It’s supposed to be a stimulus bill. If this ends up being a tax cut (bill) I won’t vote for it,’’ Feinstein, D-Calif., said yesterday. “The money is much better spend on infrastructure.’’

Karen Marie, thanks for your comment to my comment, karen marie, I do appreciate it.

(I'm referring to your posting that said, among other things, "pay attention, dear. the republicans are objecting simply to object. all the stuff i have heard them objecting to is only objectionable if you're a halfwit.")

First of all, how sad that we are all spending our Friday nights doing this...

Anyway, I suspect both of us are on the same side here and neither of us are halfwits. And I agree with you that Republicans will object to the stimulus no matter what's in it, it's true.

But when Republicans object, they are staying true to their coherent small-government principles, and they come off well to uncommitted voters. They seem principled.

By contrast, when the Democrats simply throw everything they like into the bill, without regard to how stimulative their provisions are, it looks unprincipled.

For instance: although I do personally support federal funding for birth control, and funding for the NEA, and pretty much everything else in the bill, I can't justify all of it on the grounds that it's a "stimulus." To do so would be unprincipled. I would need different justifications--which don't have anything to do with a stimulus bill.

Instead, the Democrats should have only inserted provisions they can specifically justify to the public, and they should have posted every single one of them onto the Web. And Obama, Reid, and Pelosi should have collaborated on a clear set of talking points to explain the bill in a consistent way. Doing that would have shown the public that the Democrats are adhering to their principles and holding onto the high ground. Plus, it would be consistent with Obama's principle of open government.

They did not do this. And they are paying the price.

Dear.

Although Republicans

Goodyear needs to start paying their men less.

If they're going to be stingy, be consistently frugal.

It seems so odd that Goodyear wasn't more annoyed that it seems they're human resources were putting stockholder profits into some type of favoritism at least partially based on sexism

These guys need training to squeeze every employee as hard as they can. If women are still making less, they'll need some proof that guys are
a) tougher negotiators
b) could not be replaced by a cheaper employee who's more of a doormat.

What empirical measures could one use to prove a company is uniformly putting the screws to everybody.

Women are stockholders too, I would think this type of potential waste on excessive men's salaries would make them mad.

Josh -- thank you for holding true to your principles.

"Leon Panetta has made some very encouraging comments about torture and national security policies"

You were encouraged by him saying that renditions will continue and that he would press Obama for more leeway on interrogation practices ?

Well I guess what else could you say after your treatment of the LA Times, warning about precisely this a mere week ago. I guess this is what you call taking a "wait and don't see" attitude.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.