March 2, 2010
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picture time!
Snow? It’s really kinda HOT out there!
This is from the Global Satellite Temperature Record. The Green line that ends in the box is THIS year. All the other lines are previous years. Make your own chart here. As it turns out, in spite of snowmageddon, January was the HOTTEST January on record globally. February looks like it has been the HOTTEST February on record. And overall this looks like it will be the hottest winter on record. More precipitation and more snow does not mean Global Warming isn’t happening.
The recession actually IS big!
As Paul Krugman so aptly explained, this recession was no small matter. There’s a Trillion dollar gap between where our GDP would have been had this recession not happened and where it actually is. That translates into many many lost jobs and lost revenue and lots of companies going out of business. The spending gap needs to be made up somehow.
Majorities under FDR, LBJ and Obama!
This was reported under FiveThirtyEight.com. If you think Obama is wasting his “huge” majorities in congress, particularly compared to LBJ and FDR who were such amazingly effective Presidents, look at the above chart. Turns out President Obama has nowhere NEAR the support in Congress that FDR or LBJ enjoyed after first being elected.
People tend to think Obama is the anomaly in getting so little done with such high majorities. That’s a false short sighted view. The reality is, President George W. Bush was the anomaly in that he changed so much with such remarkably tiny majorities in both houses of congress. That has something to do with Republicans employing new hardball tactics, Democrat disorganization, and of course the outpouring of national support post-9/11 Bush received.
Okay so the Obama administration is probably overselling this graph. (They’re asking people to make it their twitter icon? Please.) But it does tell a really important story. Those who are arguing that the Stimulus and the Obama administration’s crazy liberal policies have screwed up and “sunk” our economy are just full of crap. You could argue that the policies haven’t done enough, but you can’t argue that they’ve caused harm. The chart shows pretty clearly that the rate of job loss has definitely been stemmed during the Obama administration. Whether that was because of the Stimulus, as many economists believe and the Obama administration is advertising, or would have happened anyway because it’s the “natural” behavior of recessions is something we can argue about. But I submit it’s impossible to argue honestly that the Obama administration made things worse in terms of job growth at this point in time.
These two charts show the gargantuan spike of filibuster threats in the current Obama administration Congress. Specifically the charts show Cloture Motions which are generally only needed to overcome the threat real or perceived of a filibuster. A filibuster is when one or more members of Congress threatens to speak forever in order to prevent a bill from coming to the floor for a vote.
More specifically during 2007-2008 when Democrats controlled the Senate, Republicans filibustered Democratic legislation 112 times. As of February 2010, Republicans had filibustered 40 times in the 2009-2010 Congress. Democrats this year have not even been trying to pass much legislation UNLESS they are sure they can pass by cloture. Prior to that the most filibusters Democrats had done was in 1999-2000 with 58 total filibusters.
So virtually everything the Democrats in Congress attempt to do now has to reach the 60 vote threshold because it is always held up by the well understood threat of a filibuster. This is historically unprecedented.
However, it also shows that the filibuster has been a sort of a nuclear arms race kind of a deal. More filibusters congress after congress whenever the numbers are close as the minority party always figures out that impeding progress is one of their best weapons for making the other party look bad. The Republican parties recent extreme use of the filibuster breaks all records but is not unexpected to anyone who has been paying attention. Their rhetoric that speaks of disastrous take over of Congress by the crazy extreme liberal left compels this behavior if they are going to be consistent and it’s obviously politically effective.
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Hope these pictures are helpful.
Comments (2)
the first picture I saw this morning in Paul Krugman’s blog or column. It’s a bigger picture, but still shows (if global warming skeptics use this winter as a cause celebre to say there is no global warming) that there is a warming trend based on the short term. The long term trend shows an even more sustained warming trend as opposed to the ten year mark skeptics love to use that starts in 1998 and ends in 2008. 1998 was a hot ass year though and ALL climate scientists say this is not a good sample since it starts out high. 1998 was a spike. Not a mean.
i like pictures…