Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

Krugman, amping up the shrill. And I feel like I'm right there with him ... A "freeze" feels like nothing but a gimmick. It doesn't do much to change the deficit, and it sends all sorts of terrible political messages. You know what does cut the deficit? The health care plan! If voters don't know about key provisions of reform, like the ban on denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions, they sure as hell won't know about the benefits for the deficit (especially given the false information that some have spread). But the White House has done an absolutely abysmal job in educating the public, and now Obama has to resort to Republican gimmicks to make it seem like he cares about a deficit when, just a month ago, his signature health care reform was poised to cut the deficit by over $100 billion over the next 20 years.

Heuristic-Driven Public Opinion

My view of the public is that it doesn’t have strong views on policy matters. But most voters do have strong views about famous politicians. A large minority of voters really like Barack Obama, for example, and if he tells them something is good they’ll assume he’s right. Another large minority of voters has strongly negative feelings toward Obama, and toward the Democratic Party writ large, but has positive views about the Republican Party and its leadership.

Then there’s another, smaller faction that takes a dim view of both parties and of politicians generally. But even though this group is small, it’s centrally located on the opinion spectrum. And it tends to assume that if elite leaders from both parties get together and say something’s a good idea—like George Bush and Dick Cheney but also Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle and John Kerry and Dick Gephardt say we should invade Iraq—that it’s probably a good idea. On the contrary, if only one party will support something then it’s probably partisan and bad and probably the party pushing the idea didn’t try hard enough to reach a sensible compromise.

Therefore, almost anything that an opposition party succeeds in mounting unanimous opposition to—Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget, George W Bush’s 2005 Social Security privatization push, Barack Obama’s 2009 health reform push—will wind up polling poorly.

This is exactly right. And it's why the problems that face policy-making are much deeper than the super-majority requirement in the Senate.

The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.

Wait, but it snowed in October, and was really, really chilly. Like seriously cold. A lot of the time. Therefore, my experience of local conditions trumps worldwide temperature observations, and global warming's a hoax!

"We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group. “Now it is becoming increasingly important to their economic well-being as well.

Aggressive, loutish, self-satisfied parasites. It was a good run, guys.

Plastic Logic Creates the ‘Paperless Briefcase’

By BRAD STONE

Plastic Logic

After a year of slowly dribbling out news about its plans, Plastic Logic has finally unveiled the Que proReader, another rival to the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook in the growing market for electronic reading devices.

The Que proReader, a slender, lightweight touch-screen device the size of an 8 1/2-by-11 piece of paper, is designed primarily for mobile business professionals as a replacement for bulky printouts. The device was created with the celebrated Silicon Valley design firm IDEO.

“We are not creating a paperless office, or like the e-book world, trying to create a paperless bookshelf. What we are driving on is the paperless briefcase,” said Richard Archuleta, chief executive of Plastic Logic.

A decade-old spin-out from Cambridge University, Plastic Logic has raised more than $200 million in venture capital to build a factory in Dresden, Germany. The company wants to enable a new generation of electronics with flexible, robust plastic displays instead of glass and other heavier materials. The Que is its first product, but the company wants to license its technology to other companies and types of devices.

“We are going beyond an e-reader, creating a whole new category,” Mr. Archuleta said.

The Que will connect to user’s e-mail accounts and calendars and, with Wi-Fi and AT&T 3G connectivity, wirelessly reach books from the Barnes & Noble online store and a variety of newspapers and periodicals. That development gives the publications the same look and feel as the print version. Barnes & Noble will also sell the device in its stores.

But it’s awfully expensive. There will be two models of the Que. The first, with 4 gigabytes of memory, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, will sell for $649. A premium model, with 8GB of memory and AT&T’s 3G connectivity, will cost $799. The devices will go on sale in April. The similarly sized Kindle DX today costs $479.

The Que will also suffer some of the same drawbacks as other e-reading devices (no video, no color), particularly with a new generation of versatile color tablets hitting the market soon.

But Plastic Logic believes black-and-white e-ink on a plastic device is better suited to professionals weighed down by documents. “At Plastic Logic, we really celebrate black and white,” Mr. Archuleta said. “Ink on paper – e-ink on plastic. It’s the key to readability.”

Not really sure I get the utility of this product ... You can view Office docs so you can annotate them? If you really need to produce on the go, wouldn't you just want a a laptop? I guess it's best for a manager who can annotate a bunch of documents and send them to her minions to make changes ... Guess that justifies the price point -- definitely not minion-sized.