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Thom's Blog Is On the Move
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Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
:-)
Nels,
You're right --- they don't work!
Nels,
Is this what you mean by emoticon?
@Maxrot: Emoticons don't seem to work.
Anyone else having this problem?
Yep.
@mstaggerlee:
'Atlas Shrugged'?
You have my sympathy. You might more easily get the essence of her approach from one of the collections -- 'The Virtue of Selfishness' or 'For The New Intellectual'.
Perhaps an even better choice is Leonard Peikoff's book 'Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand' wherein he summarizes and comments on her key concerns. It's weighty but well written.
In fact, I may take that last recommendation and speed read it again just so I can better understand the mindset of the Cons . . . though I bet most of 'em even never read Rand.
Emoticons don't seem to work.
Anyone else having this problem?
One annoying issue- right after I post I am getting a blank comment on my own post. I do not need to see my post and a blank comment box. I want to see everyone else's posts, I find I am operating in a loop. - I have to get out of the board and then back in. I do stay on the site but get kicked out of this page.
mstaggerlee, anyname that gets my attention is fine with me (keeping my fingers crossed I don't start getting refered to as "Dolt" or "Dumb Ass" though"
Breaking news.....from yesterday.....
After Patent on Genes Is Invalidated, taking stock. New York Times.
Many biotechnology stocks fell on Tuesday as investors struggled to understand the impact of a ruling that threw out parts of two gene patents and called into question thousands more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/business/31gene.html?emc=eta1
@ Maxrot (Nels?)
Government employees benifit from strong labor unions that protect their right to just cause. I have worked in both union and non-union facilities where bad employees were shown the door. The rub Repubs don't want people to know is, in my experience, the union shops were ran better and were more profitable. The non-union shops were in a constant state of training that led to poor quality and costly rework.
cmoore68,
Minnesota --- once thriving and progressive
I look around and see only the destruction wrought by the Rand/Reagan policies carried out by opportunist Governor Tim Pawlenty. I moved here 30 years ago because it was (to me) a progressive paradise. Under Pawlenty (taking instruction from Rove and others), we have really fallen to mediocre, at best. So I say, show me where these policies have actually made life for the majority BETTER! (No one seems to be held to account. Thom's right-wing guests never are.)
@ Louis thank you! For both the open letter post and the reply- yes, part of this I imagine will just be getting used to something new. What I love is that little edit feature for when I re read my posts! Hopefully there is a spell checker here, too.
One more wish. I pride myself on promoting the Thom Hartmann Show in creative ways. Is there a link to a page on this site that lists all the different ways to listen and or watch The Thom Hartmann Show?
@LeMoyne THX for that link there- I have it is a safe place in my personal files.
Impossible to fire Government Employees.
No its not impossible for Government employees to be fired. However, their supervisors must build the case against the employee. There is paperwork that must be filled out, one of the most important parts of this is the employee review. This gives the employee a chance to improve their work habits, as well as gives the supervisor the proof of deficiencies as they add up over the course of time.
Its a fair way of relieving someone of their job. Unlike the private sector though, an unsuspecting employee doesn't arrive in the morning at the job, to be surprised that their let go at the end of the day. If you were a government employee and been fired, either you didn't see the writing on the wall, or you broke a major rule.
Quark,
"Has anyone ever challenged this myth and asked for examples of where this has worked the way it is predicted?"
We are seeing the results of this myth with reduced regulation of men of intellect and ability. Forgive us all if we were to adopt the Libertarian model.
Wow- new site! Much friendlier to use and no doubt geared to simplicity to hopefully get some more of the tea baggers here so we can straighten them out. Randi Rhodes had to replay and replay the speech of Bush Jr talking about the Ownership Society to the teabagger argument that 'The Government' mandated the banks to loan to dumb poor people.
Does someone have a link to the open letter that Thom just read? I am on my way to our Congress persons event today to release exactly what is in the health bill - that's Doris Matsui- she's pretty good.
And why the hell should I have to pay the bank to go to college.
RE: Corporate spying on Gov't Employees
Here's an issue that really frightens me about corporations being able to spy on gov't employees: Who says their going to use the information they find and make it public? What if they use it to find out which employees are the most vulnerable to being approached to do their bidding? Such as, John Doe here is close to defaulting on his home loan, and he can also get our project approved, perhaps we should approach him with a tantalizing offer?
That's the kind of thing the worries me most about corporate spying, not how are they going to expose corruption, more like how can they cause corruption for their benefit.
mstaggerlee,
Re: Ayn Rand: "men of intellect and ability" if allowed to persue their own agendas, without interference, will do wonderful things that will (a) create goods and services that benefit everybody, and (b) make a fortune for themselves."
Has anyone ever challenged this myth and asked for examples of where this has worked the way it is predicted?
I am following your observations of Rand's book with interest. I tried to read Rand's books when I was in my 20s but just wasn't interested enough to delve that deeply into them, I guess.
My Problem With Rand
mstaggerlee,
The problem I have with Atlas Shrugged is the work is fiction. The wonder of fiction is you can take a premise not to its natural conclusion, but to the conclusion the author seeks. Sure her prose is partially based on factual concepts, but so are Tom Clancy novels. I have rejected reading Rand for that very reason.
I do beleive in understanding the enemy. So, I admire you in your anguish.
@Nels (yeah, I'm gonna stick with the OLD names, when I can) -
I live in NY, which has relatively high taxes on gasoline, and work in NJ, where gas taxes are considerably lower. Needless to say, I try to buy as much feul as possible in Jersey. Since the beginning of the year, prices at the pumps are up by about 10-15% hereabouts.
I like the new site -- primarily because, unlike the old one, I can access it w/o it locking up my system and causing it to crash.
That said, I found the layout of the home page confusing -- too much going on. Also, it took multiple clicks to get to the live blog.
While I appreciate having space to type my comments, each blog entry takes up so much space that it's difficult to scroll through and follow them. It almost looks like one of those Windoze themes with monster fonts.
Ahem. On a more positive note, I was glad to hear from Charles Bowden again. The man is steeped in knowledge of the U.S. Southwest and was the major force behind the creation of the Sonoran Desert National Monument. His first book on Juarez was published in 1998 with a preface by Noam Chomsky and afterword by Eduardo Galeano -- pretty good company. He also told the truth about Charles Keating's crimes in his book Trust Me. (It'll be interesting to see if that title is underlined when I upload this comment. It is in the edit section but not in the preview.)
Actually (at least in my area) I was just commenting to my wife that gas prices have been abnormally stable. I was wondering if the oil companies were trying to keep a low profile with energy regulations coming up on the agenda. I'd say for almost the last month the cost of gas has been $2.899 in my LA suburb. (BP's Arco lowest Octane price that is)
@DRichards -
Have you noticed that gas prices are on the rise again? Once again, the banksters are messing with the "laws" of supply and demand, and are speculating on oil futures, just as they were doing in the summer of '08, when we started appraoching $5/gallon prices at the pump!
Taken in that light, the drilling maneuver by Obama is a countermeasure against the specs - it increases future supply, making oil futures a poor investment.
MAKE BANKING BORING AGAIN!
Kewl - new website for Thom! I see that the first few words of a post are used as the topic, so I've placed the conclusion of my arguement at the top!
I often free-associate on my drive into work - put both the car and my brain on auto-pilot, and let them go where they will under minimal control. This morning, I was thinking about how pretty much ALL of the talking points that I seem to hear from the Cons these days seem to come directly out of the book I've been forcing myself to read over these past few weeks, Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". The entire point of this book is to demonize the point of view that society has any right to re-allocate so much as a single penny earned by the labor of an individual. Several examples are provided of why this is so, all of which seem to me to carry the consequences of "liberal" policies far past the point of absurdity.
The essential arguement, however, is that the rich do the poor more good when they serve their own interests than when they are forced to serve the government's concept of the interests of the poor - that "men of intellect and ability" if allowed to persue their own agendas, without interference, will do wonderful things that will (a) create goods and services that benefit everybody, and (b) make a fortune for themselves.
Maybe, just maybe, that was true back in 1947 - I'm not sure I buy that hook, line & sinker, but let's accept it for the moment. I'm 56 years old, and I believe that I was on the trailing edge of the era in which those "men of intellect and ability" actually went into a fied where he produces things.
Back when I was young, banking and finance were very heavily regulated. There was little room, if any, for creativity - it was a painfully boring line of work, AND THAT WAS A GOOD THING!!! People who had the creative instinct, therefore, avoided the banking and finance sectors, and went into a line of work where they could create. Shortrly after, or perhaps right around the time I started my "career" (such as it is), the regulatory environment began to change, bank(st)ers and investors were granted more and more latitude, and the financial industries became more interesting and appealing to the creative person. Guys like me, who'd earned their undergrad degrees in Physics or Engineering, started to take Masters courses in Business Administration instead of the "hard" or applied sciences. These people took their creativity into the financial sector, where the relaxed regulatory structures allowed them to create these "exotic" ans "sophisticated" financial products (hell, folks, when I was a kid, anything financial was called a service, NOT a product), like derivatives and credit default swaps. As we have observed, these creations did absolutely no good for society in general - in fact, they damn near bankrupted the world.
So, obviously, there's only one solution to this situation ...
MAKE BANKING BORING AGAIN!
I am a little worried about Obama and the Democrats' political skill in undermining the 'rational' positions of the Republicans. Sure the Republicans look like nuts opposing their own health care plan but the plan itself doesnt really make anyone happy except the people already covered and the insurance companies. Maybe the right-wing-nuts will go to the Capitol and shout "Kill!" at it another few million times...
Opening the east coast to offshore drilling is a brilliant political move going into an energy policy debate - Obama gets behind the Republicans and there goes the wind out of their sails. Thirty years after its peak, domestic oil production is really marginal to creating sustainable energy independence for US. I am curious to see where the Republicans go now, but I am really concerned that there will be another give-away campaign by the Democrats.
Has President Obama become one of the two Santa Clauses?
Wow! Finally got on. Getting familiar with the usernames will be interesting. Also notice the Mysterious Floating Head now has a shirt.
Nice job on the site.
Formerly Charles in OH