Krugman: Fed mortgage rate help is a good idea

Krugman:

Mortgage rates have dropped a lot in recent weeks, which is a good thing. But there’s still a huge spread between mortgage rates and rates on federal debt....

The persistence of the spread offers one opportunity for quick economic stimulus: declare that Fannie and Freddie are backed by full faith and credit, and if that doesn’t work, have the Treasury borrow on their behalf. This can bring mortgage rates down by more than 100 basis points. By itself, that’s not nearly enough to turn the economy around, but it could really help the economic recovery package.

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Bill Kristol's Year Up at 'NYT': Will He Get Axed?

It's been a year. After all the mistakes, maybe it's time to retire Kristol.

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Clean Coal

Reader John writes:

I'm shocked that you just put up a little free market advertisement from an astroturfing organization from a set of really nasty environmental corporate criminals in the country. Why are you doing that? Clean coal is corporate BS. Nice concept but magical thinking.

I personally think some of Obama's kumbaya stuff is magical thinking. And having Rick Warren at the inauguration is one example. He is the spiritual equivalent to the coal companies. I suspect Warren's enviro schtict is more astroturfing. I find both offensive.

Well, here's the problem. First, we're getting ready to weather what will possibly become the next Great Depression. I don't think anyone is turning down any ads at this point (short of something truly offensive - David Duke and Big Tobacco comes to mind). Second, as we've written before, and Markos has written about this a lot, we tend not to censor our ads, but instead have the same policy as other big liberal magazines like The Nation. Here is what Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel had to say:

In all seriousness, it makes sense to me that Kos would embrace the Nation's ad policy. After all Daily Kos is in some ways a forum of opinion like the Nation; its editor(s) have strong opinions that they express every day, and they make all kinds of selections for the site's readers as to what should be featured on the home page; but there's no reason to apply that same level of selectivity to what ads you'll run, and since the money earned from advertising goes to further the editorial goals of the site, it makes simple business sense to err on the side of openness.

Furthermore, I believe you're showing respect for your readers' intelligence by adopting this policy. R-E-S-P-E-C-T for readers' intelligence--and for the broad and free exchange of ideas-- has stood The Nation in good stead these last 141 years! May that same stance keep Daily Kos going for that long!

If clean coal, or whomever, wants to advertise, God bless 'em. You guys are smart enough to figure out the truth. But if we were to start hand-picking our advertisers, then we'd be sanctioning the ones that remain. And you wouldn't believe the number of emails I get each week about this or that ad - I'd be spending every day sifting through ad complaints.

But the most important point here is that one thing you usually won't notice is progressive groups paying for counter-advertising. You'll see "Clean Coal" ads, but where are the ads from the environmental community? During the Net Neutrality debate the "bad guys" (telcoms) spent thousands in advertising on various blogs (ours included) to push an anti- Net Neutrality message. Folks complained, and said we shouldn't access the nearly $4k in advertising (as I recall). But the pro Net Neutrality side, which included some HUGE companies, didn't spend a dime. We were expected to take a $4k hit to our annual income - and mind you, this is our job, not a hobby, it's akin to YOU taking a $4000 pay cut - because the big organizations on our side were refusing to do the counter-education.

It's a story I tell a lot, about liberals/Democrats in Washington not doing nearly enough to support the Netroots. And it's the reason Clean Coal is getting its side of the story out, unquestioned. Read the rest of this post...

Sales are down, but not hideous

I know this was intended to be another doom-and-gloom story, but a drop of 2% to 4% from last year (excluding car and gas sales) doesn't sounds that bad. Am I missing something? What I'm also wondering is, with so many things selling horribly, per the article, like women's clothing and electronics, what sold well enough to bring the average back to 2% to 4%?

The holiday season — which typically accounts for 30 percent to 50 percent of a retailer's annual total sales — has been less than jolly for most retailers. Job cuts, portfolio losses and other economic woes have convinced consumers to cut back on their spending. Meanwhile, strong winter storms during the holiday season kept some would-be shoppers at home.

According to preliminary data from SpendingPulse — a division of MasterCard Advisors that tracks total sales paid for by credit card, checks and cash — retail sales fell between 5.5 percent and 8 percent during the holiday season compared with last year. Excluding auto and gas sales, they fell 2 percent to 4 percent, according to SpendingPulse.

Sales of women's clothing dropped nearly 23 percent while men's clothing sales slipped more than 14 percent. Footwear sales fell 13.5 percent. Sales of electronics and appliances fell even more drastically, dropping almost 27 percent.

More consumers appeared to do their shopping online, particularly in the last two weeks of the season when storms snowed shoppers in. Online sales dipped just 2.3 percent from the 2007 holiday season, according to SpendingPulse.

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The blog that saved Christmas

This is great:

But in June, Daniel got sick. After several tests, his doctors concluded that he was suffering from salmonella after eating a tainted tomato. As a new employee of Bank of America, he had not accrued enough paid time off to keep his job as a credit-card account manager. Watch how the Sampsons' home was saved »

Suddenly, the sole breadwinner in the Sampson household was out of work. Though the Sampsons received unemployment checks from the government, the money wasn't enough to make ends meet.

First came the shut-off notices from the electric company. Then one of their cars broke down. One morning, Daniel woke up and looked out his bedroom window and saw his truck was missing. It had been repossessed.

With no job, no car and no income, the Sampsons got another surprise: Ebony Sampson learned she was eight weeks pregnant.

The Sampsons returned home from church, where they are practicing ministers, on a Sunday in November to find a stranger knocking on their front door. He wanted to put a bid in on their house. Ebony told him their home was not for sale. The next day, the Sampsons were notified that they were facing foreclosure unless they could come up with $10,000 in the next two weeks to bring their mortgage up to date.

"Once we received that letter, it was like, 'Oh my God, what are we going to do?' " Daniel Sampson said. "I don't think anyone in their right mind would receive a foreclosure notice and not be rattled by it."

....A self-described geek, Grier started blogging years ago. Since then, she's contributed to a magazine's Web site and regularly posts thoughts and life happenings on her LiveJournal page. So, she published Ebony and Daniel's story, along with a link where people could make a donation.

At the most, Jaki thought she could raise enough money to help the Sampsons pay a security deposit on an apartment after their home was auctioned.

But donations started pouring in. Within 24 hours, Grier's blog had raised $1,000, far exceeding her expectations. People started linking to Grier's blog from sites across the Internet and around the country.

Attorneys posted legal advice. Others in similar situations offered sympathy. One woman sent a donation with a note that said she had just lost her own home but wanted to help anyway. Another woman wrote that she didn't have a car but would walk to her grocery store with a jar of change and donate it to the cause.

Yet another e-mail came from a woman who was unemployed, with no job prospects. She donated a dollar.

With every donation, the total raised ticked higher and higher on Grier's blog.

"Everybody wants to give to a charity, but so many times when you give to a charity you don't really see where your money goes," Grier said. "At least with this, you saw the little [donations] ticker go. I think that made people excited."

Four days after Grier's blog post, she had raised $3,400 -- enough to repair the Sampsons' car. That night, Grier went to bed ecstatic. The next morning she checked her PayPal account and was stunned to find the balance had ballooned to $10,900.

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When it comes to railroads, we're # 2!

I hope this humongous stimulus bill that we're going to pass does something about our abysmal backwardness in train transportation. The train from DC to Chicago takes 24 hours. An equivalent high speed train in Europe does the same distance in 5.5 hours or so. Europe has it problems, but I always get the sense that they're on the path to somewhere, striving to become something bigger, better (e.g., a unified Europe). What are our goals as a nation, other than killing the bad guys?

High-speed rail is moving ahead at high speed in Europe. Railroads there keep adding new high-speed lines and increasing service, while here in the United States, we keep fretting about the need for better transportation but do little about it. If you're heading for Europe next year, you can try out several new lines, and additional lines will open by summer.

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Who cares about Rick Warren?

Carla over at BlueOregon thinks, perhaps, we're all wasting our time focusing on Rick Warren:

There are a lot of excellent bloggers who know how to take the fight to the halls of DC and beyond. The ability to stir things up is a hallmark of what some of us love to do. But the ability to do this stirring has its limits. Our political capital is finite. Do we really want to spend it in an attempt to influence Obama to dump Rick Warren's Inaugural invocation? Really?

...I understand the chafing at the symbolism. And if our country weren't in such deep shit then maybe these symbolic things might be worthy of a cut of political chits. But frankly, we don't have the luxury of bemoaning these gestures when there are issues of greater heft and necessity than this, including the ACTUAL ACQUISITION OF CIVIL RIGHTS for the GLBTQ community. To burn through political influence on Warren seems frivolous in the face of the monumental problems on our collective plate....

[W]e've got bigger fish to fry. There are some very big, very serious fights in the coming weeks (both locally and nationally). This doesn't seem like the smart battle to pick.

There won't be any fish frying at all if, as a community, we aren't respected in Washington, DC. People in Washington, DC don't like us as a civil rights community. Sure, they like us as people, one on one. But they don't like our legislative agenda - it gives them the cooties, on the left and right.

There is a reason no openly gay person made it into Obama's cabinet, and I doubt it had anything to do with gays being less educated, less over-achieving, and therefore less qualified for a cabinet post. Rick Warren got chosen to make the invocation at Obama's inaugural, not because Obama was trying to take a slap at us in order to curry favor with everyone else. Rather, Obama picked Warren, I fear, because no one even thought about us at all. It's the same reason Obama picked homophobe "ex"-gay Donnie McClurkin to headline his gospel rallies during the campaign. It didn't cross anyone's mind that sucking up to homophobes was perhaps a bad thing. Or at the very least, they weighed the options, and pissing off the gays wasn't seen as costly enough to merit worrying about.

We need to make it costly enough. Or we won't be seeing any fish fries at all. Obama's perception of the gay community - our bite and our bark - will directly affect whether, and to what degree, he helps our community during his time in office. There's a reason that certain lobbies on the right and the left get their way in Washington, DC. It's because they scare the hell out of politicians. I still consider Barack Obama a friend of the gay community, in spite of his various transgressions, but I don't think he or his staff fear us enough. (I think the same is true of Obama's, and the Democrats' overall, perception of the blogosphere and the Netroots. A lack of sufficient fear breeds a lack of respect.) And until they do, all the good speeches in the world won't get us any closer to securing our freedoms. Read the rest of this post...

Eartha Kitt has died

LOVED her.

I knew her as Cat Woman.

Went to see her, perhaps ten years ago, when she appeared at Blues Alley in Georgetown. What a hoot. She was probably 71 or so at the time, and she was hot. A gay man's dream. Funny. Sultry. She reminded you of what it must have been like, once upon a time, to visit a smokey Parisian cabaret. So full of life. Ridiculously alive, really.



Here's another famous one:

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Friday Morning Open Thread

Christmas is over. The freezing spell in Chicago has broken, and I'm heading out to lunch later today with a friend from high school. So far so good on the new-dog front. I came home to find mom and dad in the family room with "Angel" (I'm still lobbying for a name change) roaming around on the floor. So the dog seems to be digging her way nicely into their hearts. I head back to DC tomorrow, where it will be a balmy 63 degrees on Sunday. A little nicer than the -2 we had here the other night. But at least I got a full week of snow. And no gun shots. Who could ask for a better Christmas gift.

Here's the view out the window at ma's place at 7am, Christmas morning. It's the view I had since moving to this house when I was 8. I miss that view.

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Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime

I posted this for the first time last year. I just love it. So damn catchy.

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