It's like saying well, the situation didn't improve because when you subtract the parts that improved, then it didn't improve!

The real question that anyone who's tempted to believe this should ask is this: The revisionists are saying basically that things would have gotten better if we had just allowed conservative laissez-faire extreme free market economics to act. But we've just done that, for a decade or more, and look at the result.

The Depression ended, but these people are saying that they could have ended it sooner, and better. There's no evidence of this whatsoever however, and there's plenty of recent evidence that extreme-right theories lead only to utter economic ruin.

So now the word "deny" or "deniers" is owned by the Holocaust?

When people are called "Climate change deniers" is that a travesty against the memory of the Holocaust also??

It's a perfectly normal word, in use long before WWII. The phrase "Holocaust deniers" did become standard usage and is perhaps being played off of in the case of both global warming deniers and this reference to New Deal deniers, but that hardly makes it an attempt to equate either of those with the Holocaust.

"It might sound like one of those media-created, racially overwrought questions meant to boost ratings and Internet chatter."

Perish the thought! Do you think Salon would ever publish such a thing??

The irony-free lack of self awareness is even funnier than the article.

No, I think we can rest assured that the last thing Salon would ever do is focus on boosting ratings and creating Internet chatter.

Oh and "racially overwrought", yes, Salon steers clear of those! Why, when the rest of the media was obsessed with Jeremiah Wright, Salon hardly touched the subject, sometimes printing only two front page articles per day about him! (There were actually three, one day).

I mean good grief, just be honest, boosting ratings and "creating chatter" are not the most evil things on the planet, but let's face it, they're definitely pretty much Salon's reason for being.

That's the spirit.

I accept this bipartisan post in the spirit of bipartisanship, as long as I can horse trade with my Senate seat in a highly partisan way to influence the Governor's choice so he selects a Republican.

Put another way: This seat is bleeping golden, I'm not giving it away for bleeping nothing!

And one guy gets impeached and goes to jail for saying such things, and this guy gets a cabinet post instead.

Washington cracks me up.

or electronic print, anyway.

I lived in Europe for most of the last ten years and every time I returned to visit the US I was struck by how badly our airports compare with others. Also the public transportation systems and the general quality of public life. Now that I'm back in the US, I'll add health care to that list, what I've experienced in the US makes what I had in Europe seem almost too good to be true. The waiting months for appointments alone here is appalling, I never experienced any waits in Europe. So much for yet another myth.

I love living in the US, don't get me wrong, there are tradeoffs, plusses and minuses, to each system. However what most Americans don't realize is that in terms of our public life, public transportation, public spaces, general public safety, the ability to stroll through a city park at anytime of the day or night and feel utterly safe--- places like Europe have it all over the USA, there's no contest.

It's a part of the fast-grab, it's-money-that-matters mentality, something invisible to most of us until you experience another approach to life. Somehow it's got us convinced that getting into a place of business and working, for as many hours as possible, is more important than any other part of life, including how we get to the place of business. We tend to want to make our homes into palaces also. It's what comes in between work and home that we give short shrift.

There are deeper reasons for this than we realize, is my point, and it's not going to change any time soon.

This is how the Republicans do bipartisanship: Get on our partisan ship or bye, it's over the side with you.

So much for fantasy land.

Another point not to be overlooked here: Democrats are admitting that the Republicans are "winning the spin war" over the stimulus bill, and everyone more or less agrees. However what does this mean? Everyone assumes that it's a failing of Democrats, some intrinsic lack of message control or masculinity or etc (usually put in more juvenile and crude terms than that). What it really means however is that the Republicans are being given more air time, which a recent study showed conclusively, which means that the media outlets have the whole thing stacked in their favor.

People like to ridicule such ideas, "Oh, right, blame the MEDIA" one friend likes to say. However it's a real and powerful fact of life at the moment: If the public hears mostly Republicans blathering on about the bill and its horrors, then why suppose that this has no effect?

Media Matters has it right, we need to unstack the media deck before anything will change.

Or maybe it's just Koppelman.

Yeah, take it easy on those extreme right wing ideologues who stomped on our rights, our laws, and our reputation. Not to mention a million or more human beings, pretty much literally.

That's what we need, more bipartisan middle of the road softball pandering. That's the ticket.