New team please... Please?!

Appropriately an old pic from The Onion, that I landed on and used back in the Palin era….

Catching Nouriel Roubini on some business / stock show on PBS, saying what too many, across the board, say, moves from pretzel are too small, too spread out, move too slow… and … etc.

In Cali, we languish with no budget… it almost is not news.  We have passed so many “deadlines”, been assured so many times that at 6PM, 10PM, tomorrow am, later in the afternoon, it will be achieved.  They, the Sacto gang, have been photographed with pillows, toothbrushes in hand, sleeping bags… all but a snuggle toy for the midnight snooze.

Latest word, another attempted vote at 10PM tonight, and the legislators are under lock down in the Capitol Bldg. unable to leave.  Worse, as of a few days ago… the damn thing is worded to require a voter ratification.  In May, now they say.

Mother of Gawdddddd.

Further, supposedly ‘no budget’ risks our varying amounts from the DC boondoggle handout.  Which might be 26 billion, 39.5 (I really want that big .5 added on!) OR 42 billion, depending on the hour of the day.

I doubt we can be trusted with the money.

Kansas yesterday got a state budget out… but we, sans Toto, languish.  I am voting Wicked Witch of the West to be governor.  Red Queen to be Speaker of the Assembly in Sacto.  This is not a feminist manifesto, anyone who can get it done.  Those mythic figures just popped into my head.

Anyone who can get it done.

The Bank of England is to start ‘printing’ new money for the first time in 30 years as it runs out of options to kick-start the economy. The Governor of the Bank of England will write to the Chancellor within days to get permission for the unprecedented action.

On the FP of the Independent… as we continue to live in “unprecedented” times.  So they tell us……….

Last from the Flasher Coast, they still might vote at 10PM tonight!  News at 11PM…

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From the tag end of the last thread, a comment from Madman:

Blue Dogs: The Democrats Who Love Big Business

The Blue Dogs were founded in 1995 in the wake of the GOP takeover of the House, but they didn’t get much attention until the Democrats took it back in 2006. If you read any of the post-election coverage, it was the freshmen Blue Dogs like Pennsylvania’s Chris Carney and North Carolina’s Heath Shuler who had upset high-profile Republicans who were the MVPs of the cycle and the party’s new voice. Leaders of the House Pack? the Philadelphia Inquirer asked in a headline, Blue Dogs Could Point Way for Democrats.

Their star turn extended through much of the 110th Congress, as caucus members flexed their muscles on their signature issue: fiscal discipline. They pushed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to adopt “pay-go” rules, which required all new expenditures (except, notably, those for the war) to be offset by tax increases or corresponding spending cuts. Their outsize influence frustrated progressive activists who viewed their support for the Iraq occupation and expanded government surveillance powers and their opposition to “net neutrality” as obstacles to fulfilling the progressive promise of the new Congress. The website Open Left labeled the group “Bush Dogs” and began documenting the ways they enabled right-wing legislation.

“Remember, you don’t get to choose your politics,” Cooper told me when I visited his office one morning in December. “The voters choose you. All Blue Dogs and our predecessors were trying to do is reach people who don’t read The Nation…. Why have people been begging to be Blue Dogs? Because it’s a brand of Democrats people in the heartland can trust. It partly means fiscal conservatism and it partly means we’re not going to rubber-stamp the rest of the [party] agenda.”

In the 110th Congress, the Blue Dogs’ clout made a kind of sense. The caucus was larger than the Democrats’ margin, which meant they were the proverbial swing voter — and fawned over as a result. But in the 111th Congress, the Democrats’ margin is big enough to pass legislation without a single Republican or Blue Dog vote. On top of that, the severity of the economic crisis has moved the center of debate decidedly away from the Blue Dogs’ cardinal issue of fiscal austerity. There’s a broad consensus among economists that we need to run large short-term deficits to avoid levels of unemployment and misery we haven’t seen in seventy years. So you’d think the Blue Dogs would have as central a role in today’s debate as pacifists did in the months after 9/11.

But not so. The Blue Dogs continue to wield influence. Before the stimulus could be brought to the floor, the House had to approve emergency orders to expedite the process. The Blue Dogs balked and threatened to rebel until the White House sent a letter to several House committee chairs reaffirming its commitment to return to pay-go budgeting after the stimulus is passed. In the end, half the caucus voted against the leadership anyway. The week after the stimulus passed the House, Blue Dog co-chair Stephanie Herseth Sandlin sent an open letter to Pelosi and House majority leader Steny Hoyer expressing the caucus’s support for efforts by Senate Republicans and conservative Democrats to cut approximately $100 billion from the package — including money for things like school construction, rural broadband and early childhood programs. “We believe that’s a highly worthwhile goal,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, the media remain obsessed. As Talking Points Memo’s Elana Schor recently noted, press mentions of the Blue Dogs outnumbered mentions of the Progressive Caucus by nearly ten to one between mid-October and mid-January. This despite the Progressive Caucus being larger and having far more members in the leadership.

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