The Nation’s Katrina vandenHeuvel tweeted, “AFL’s Richard Trumka a strong & welcome voice on CNN this am. Candy Crowley sure seemed skittish w/some of what he said.”
I paid most attention to the last question in the segment. Crowley may have been rushed, but I think she rushed to misjudge the very issue she was trying to straighten out.
Is she taking a side on this, or doesn’t she understand? Either way it didn’t work out so well (unless this was an audition for Fox News). Sure sounded to me as though she was advancing the conservative (and erroneous) side of the argument, even to the point of helping out the association spokesperson when he was conceding too much ground.
I would like to see Trumka on TV even more. He’s sharp, knows policy—and he looks like your plumber. Can’t hang an elitist label on that guy.
I will embed the video when or if it becomes available. This part of the interview was not included in the clips featured on the CNN site, but once the video podcast has been pushed out maybe you can see it in the whole-show video. Maybe not. They might just excerpt it; it’s a long show. Somebody must capture all of every show. Media Matters? Are you interested in this?
Here is the transcript.
CROWLEY: Let me ask you about one—one final policy, and that is about the Bush tax cuts. As you know, they are scheduled to be—to expire in January. This president wants to keep them for anyone who makes $250,000 per household or under. I want you to listen to Joe Biden a little bit ago on this subject.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: The only argument that our colleagues, our Republican colleagues make is, well, this is really going to hurt small business if you don’t extent the entire Bush tax cuts. Here are the facts: 3, not 3 percent of the small businesses in America would benefit one single, solitary penny of extending that top 2 percent tax cut. So this is just a bunch of malarkey. (END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: Mr. McCracken, clear this up for us, because every time we start on this—start down this tax cut thing and the $250,000 mark, what we hear is this is going to hurt small businesses. Is this overall a drain on small businesses? Should the tax rates expire on those making $250,000 and up?
MCCRACKEN: We think this is the wrong time to have taxes go up for—for small companies, because they do pay taxes at this rate, so we think Congress should at least temporarily extend…
(CROSSTALK)
CROWLEY: For everyone?
MCCRACKEN: Yes, these taxes, because this is the wrong time to increase taxes on anybody, because the companies that do pay this tax—and it is a minority of small companies, for sure—but the ones that do are the more successful ones who are most likely to be growing jobs and the ones that we want to continue to be successful and we don’t want to put disincentives in place for them to do it.
But the vice president is correct that it is only a fraction of small companies that pay taxes at…
(CROSSTALK)
CROWLEY: But those companies that tend to create most of the jobs?
MCCRACKEN: Exactly. The jobs aren’t spread across evenly across all small companies.
CROWLEY: OK. All right. And you’ve got the last…
TRUMKA: It’s not fair to—it’s not fair to say most of the jobs. They create some of the jobs, not most of the jobs.
CROWLEY: Well, most of the jobs within the small-business industry.
TRUMKA: Not most of the jobs within the small businesses. They’re not created by the 3 percent. They’re created—the vast majority are created by the other 97 percent. So it’s not fair to say most jobs are created by that top 3 percent, because they are—are not.
CROWLEY: I’ll give you the last word.
(CROSSTALK)
MCCRACKEN: Well, there’s the question of job creation versus jobs—jobs that exist. Most small businesses—most jobs exist in—in the other businesses, but I think the more successful, growing companies that pay the higher rates are creating most of the new jobs, so it depends on how you look at it.
CROWLEY: Todd McCracken, it always comes out (inaudible) Todd McCracken, Richard Trumka, thank you so much for joining us. Happy Labor Day to you both. TRUMKA: Happy Labor Day to you.
CROWLEY: Up next, what the numbers say about President Obama’s handling of the economy and why that could erase his Democratic majority in Congress.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
Determined critics simply will not be pleased. Not if Obama swore off leisure time for the balance of his term. Heck, I don’t think some people would be mollified if we passed a law that required him to stay in the Oval Office 24 hours a day in a 4’ x 4’ cage sitting at a school desk.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>NPR aired a story about Obama and business today:
A Chamber of Commerce spokesman in the piece talks about a “tsunami of regulation emanating from the administration.” With the financial crisis and the oil spill so fresh in everybody’s memory it is hard to imagine there is much of a demand for easing up on regulation, but who knows what they will be able to get people riled up about. You wouldn’t have thought there would be a market for fretting about the deficit either.
Then there’s taxes. Regulation and taxes is always the conservative mantra. I don’t buy the argument that raising the tax rate by a couple of percentage points discourages investment and the entrepreneurial spirit. Say your business is looking at a terrific opportunity that will require a $100,000 investment and you anticipate a gross return of 20 percent, $13,000 after taxes. Would a looming tax increase of 2 percent, meaning you would only see $12,600, make you do a total 180 on the great idea and say “Nope, forget it then. My spirit is broken.”
The Chamber is holding a jobs summit tomorrow.
I still think talking more about small business would be a smart move. There’s even a small business jobs bill in play right now but you don’t hear a thing about it.
At the end of the NPR story the reporter opines that reaching out to the business world would alienate liberal voters. I don’t think you would find a lot of libs having a problem with the president reaching out to small business.
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It was hard not to notice that my iPad is just the size of a composition book when I was carrying the two in a stack.
So I couldn’t help but think an iPad cover/case that looks like a comp book would be cute. You could scan a book, maybe cartoonize it a little, and have the fabric printed up by Spoonflower. Then probably pad it and wrap it around an actual comp book.
The fastening part, I don’t know. Maybe elastic at the corners, but it would have to be really tight. You wouldn’t want the device to slip out. I’m constantly afraid of dropping mine and cracking it. (I dropped an iPhone on a concrete patio once and it nearly broke my heart.) Thing is I don’t take mine out much. It seems to like staying at home with me.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>Afterthought: Or maybe, as Paul Krugman says, it’s not public polling that sways the strategy, it’s news reports.
Big business has run amok—big oil, big health, big banks, but he could make a distinction that might prove interesting. It would make sense to double down on efforts you don’t hear enough about to help smaller businesses and entrepreneurs, where the real innovation and job growth comes from. Pump that up and make a big deal of it because it’s fair and smart. As a bonus it takes an arrow out of the Republicans’ quiver because the GOP and the Chamber of Commerce like to trot out the plight of small business when they really are shilling for huge business. See where they stand if a tax incentive were rolled out that dramatically favored tiny businesses and phased it down to zero at the 25th percentile of annual revenues.
By the way, the beneficiaries of help for small businesses aren’t always the smiling mom and pop retail store owners you see pictured in GOP pollster PowerPoints. I think one definition of a small business is 500 employees or less, which could be represented by a slightly different photo: a sprawling three-story complex in your average office park.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>She must be the greatest little kid’s mom ever. She read to me constantly, probably starting when I was less than two years old, and I’m always grateful for that. We had a family custom that called for me (and my brother, too, I guess) to close a book hard enough to make a big whopping sound when we finished it. It meant “Hey, Mama, I made it through that whole book.” Then she would call out, from wherever she was in the house, “Very good!”
One summer when we missed the deadline to register for city rec swimming classes she drove my brother and me way out of town two or three times a week to a lake where classes were still available. She taught me to play to piano and encouraged us kids to take dancing lessons and tennis lessons and sing in the church choir.
She and my dad are great grandparents, too. They flew my kids to Florida every spring break for years and sported them about to every amusement park you’ve ever heard of, always letting them choose the parks, the rides, and the food.
Mom’s a wonderful decorator, with a load of taste. She like colors like I do, and sees ideas for combinations of colors everywhere. I’ve always thought that was proof that she’s really creative and wicked smart in the sense that she can bridge concepts from disparate realms. For example, she might get an idea for a color for throw pillows against the color of a sofa by spotting a woman on the street wearing a scarf that looks nice with the color of her coat. I can’t do that.
I love her. Many more, Mom.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>My folks from Germany arrived at Governors Island 300 years ago in June. By October 1710 they were encamped at Germantown to manufacture ship stores for the British crown. The tar making didn’t work out at all and the clan moved twice, ultimately settling in what is now Herkimer County, NY. (The approximate period and location depicted in ”Drums Along the Mohawk.”)
I like the tradition, but don’t feel anything like pride of aristocracy—I’m just proud to have blood that’s been American for a long long time—since Isaac Newton’s time, think of that. It’s not hoity-toity in the least; they were farmers and carpenters, and militia members as early as the French and Indian war. They were scrappy and sort of assholes. One story about the Mohawk years from Philip Otterness’ Becoming German tells of a gang of Palatine women riding a tax collector out of town on a rail and peeing on him. Very early tea partiers. A namesake of my line’s patriarch had no use for Tories.
My Bellinger line, as far as my dad has been able to figure out: me > Richard > Vernon > Ellis > Adam > Phillip > Adam > Philip > Philip (Known as Lips!) > Johannes. My oldest son is called Adam and my last name is his middle name.
The Pillars of the Earth, a mini-series based on Ken Follett’s novel, starts in three weeks on Starz. I subscribed in anticipation, its benefits for me outweighing the embarrassment.
What’s to like?
Lavish $40 million production
Ridley Scott involvement
Matthew Macfadyen
Rufus Sewell
Middle Ages
A cathedral
Not to like? Well… it’s based on trash historical fiction. Ken Follett’s rep has slid from Eye of the Needle days. Pillars and its sequel no doubt took long labor and research, and they show a glimpse of the period that I like to hear about, even if I’m not sure it represents the period accurately. The books also pander to Gothic tastes, kind of a guy’s take on bodice ripping. Follett’s villains have all the subtlety of Snidley Whiplash. (Come to think of it, Ian McShane, who plays Waleran in the series, would make a great Snidley Whiplash.)
I’ll admit I’m not completely immune to the thrill of the Gothic in tiny infrequent doses, though I’m really embarrassed to recognize I like it. As for the mini-series, I figure if a story puts me in even a broken time machine to the 11th century, I’m in, ready to enjoy the good bits and slide the trashy bits over to (alright, over near) the periphery of my judgement.
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Scrapbook materials take up many aisles. It’s the rage. Scrapbooking appears to be a sort of assembly art, not that creative, it doesn’t seem to me. There are a lot of pre-made objects you can buy and then you assemble them, bringing your own taste or whimsy. I’m sure there must be a certain satisfaction in it. I’m also sure the craze couldn’t exist without products to buy.
Then as I wandered around, I noticed it’s not just scrapbooks. It seems like many—not saying most—crafts consist of buying things that somebody else made and putting them together. Can I buy a chain and a plastic teardrop crystal, put one on the other, and claim that I make jewelry?
I remember painting a preformed plaster cat at summer Bible school when I was about 8 and thinking “I didn’t make this.” But I think it’s getting worse. Is it part of the same trend as toys that entertain kids but don’t allow for much imagination or doing on the kid’s part?
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The rubbery iPad case/folder is a little tippy for sitting the device upright, and you do want to take your iPad to bed to watch Netflix. I tried a beanbag pillow on my first day with my little prize a month ago, and darned if I’m not still using it.
One nice thing: you can rotate it to something other than a 90-degree angle. If you’re not a bed watcher or reader you won’t understand the sovereign importance of this feature.
Another discovery in the what-will-I-use-this-thing-for department: the iPad is perfect for reading long magazine articles online. I’ve found that I tend to abandon nice meaty stories if they go on for pages and pages; I’ve even been known to *gasp!* buy a print magazine if there’s a particular long article I want to luxuriate in. Not anymore.
Later: Brome made a stand with Legos.
Nice how MSNBC now lets you clip a clip to show just the part you’re talking about. And nice how they expose their text promo in the embed code so you can strip it off if you can read plain HTML.
Later: Bob Herbert on Saturday:
There is nothing new to us about this. Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?
And: Frank Rich on June 5:
BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.Comment on Friendfeed ]]>
People want to hear big indignant statements from him about the Gulf oil gusher because we’re indignant about it and we want him to represent us. But it’s posturing; we know that and he knows it. If he’s like me, he rolls his eyes when he encounters posturing by other people and he would rather not do the thing he scorns.
What he will do, because he’s expected to, is rail against the delay and fret about the damage. A better approach would be what Dan Froomkin suggests: seize the moment to talk about regulation, but not just about oil. He could chance it and be brave, generalize it—tying in mining and the banks, maybe even the Citizens United case, not minding what opponents might say about bashing business. It’s been building to this point since the Reagan years and now big business has run fully amuck.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>So I put an ad unit on my blog this morning, kept refreshing the page, looking at different posts and watched how it slowly learned what’s on my site. Probably cut-rate cr*** c*** and b**kr**y plans are shown regardless of the content because there are a lot of advertisers wanting to push that stuff out, but I had the added magnet of a long post about my experience with a particular company and another about f******** reform. Over the course of an hour they seemed to be acting as a beacon for more and more ads about youknowwhat even on unrelated single-post pages. Do you think that’s possible?
Now I’ve closed the posts. See if helps. I liked seeing the Washington Post banner on my blog. Why can’t more of the ads be like that? If they didn’t make you feel like such a slime merchant the ads would be even more used, don’t you think? Or don’t most small publishers care? I don’t know, but I care. See how long I can stand it. I’ll let you know.
Update: Credit-related ads are largely gone, a day later. Pleasant surprise. I’ll try reopening my February post about Capital One and see what happens.
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Currently playing on the blog: one Flash post after another. I’m an iPad owner with just a two-week tenure (waited for the 3G), so I’ve been following this whole Flash-Apple thing—dubious two months ago, warming up, surprised to be so persuaded by Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash, yet still worried about non-video Flash. The “Well, you have H.264” argument doesn’t answer a concern for a few important applications of Flash.
Worried about what non-video Flash? Most of it I couldn’t care less about: HBO’s new all-Flash site, car dealer sites, Flash banner ads, maybe even widget platforms and embedded audio plugins. I do wonder how quickly other methods can replace e-learning courses and demonstrations like the nice stuff The New York Times makes to illuminate its stories. But especially e-learning, a market expected to reach $50 billion by 2014, as big as the market for home improvement for energy savings, though you don’t hear much about it from web/tech luminaries, let alone in presidential speeches.
I’m not deep in the online training game, but have some connection to it. As far as I’ve been able to determine in my world, nobody’s planning to make courses any other way. There might be an opportunity here for a company to really clean up with some type of vector something or other. In HTML5 canvas? I haven’t looked into which technologies are out there poised to replace what Flash can do. I figure e-learning types could be watching casual gaming programmers and follow their lead, but I don’t think most of them are. Even if they did pick up on methods used in gaming, it seems like it would have to take another few years before content authoring tools for non-programmers could become available.
Salesforce itself must expect status quo at least for a while. As I was reading the second post on the current blog index I wondered if the company did any online training, so I nosed around the site and spotted a recruitment ad for curriculum developer for Force.com. Rapid deployment software experience desired: Articulate Studio, Captivate, Camtasia—all Flash-based.
We may be entering a rather painful interregnum and I have to say it’s all very interesting. God, I love change.
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Walternate strolled in, in the final minutes of the last episode. Two more eps to go in the season. About time. I’ve been channeling Sringer Bell‘s impatience.
P.S. Levi Johnston is a poor man’s Josh Jackson.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>I signed up for the 3G plan: limited bandwidth, $14.95 for a rolling 30 days, no contract. It seems quite fast in suburban Chicago, even loading a movie on Netflix.
Netflix looks beautiful. I hadn’t really tried to predict what I might want to do with the device, except that I thought I would like curling up in bed to read books and watch movies. I’m not sure how I’ll prop it up. The case is nice for creating a school desk slant angle but you need something more like an easel to watch it. Right now I’m using a sort of beanbag pillow.
Public domain books in the iBook store are much nicer than the PD books made for Kindle.
I synced all of the audio in iTunes. Will I listen to audiobooks using it? I have no idea. It might be safer for driving, with the larger controls.
After specifying Gmail in the device settings, it accepted my user/pass, but the inbox never did fill up after several attempts.
I got the keyboard, not Bluetooth, the accessory that the iPad mounts on vertically. The keyboard has a nice touch. The ensemble looks extra sweet. I predict it will be used in many a home magazine or furniture ad.
After using it constantly for the first three hours following unboxing, I wanted to do something else. I can’t afford it, so I’m going to be biased toward loving it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t actually love it. I may already love it a little. We’ll just have to see what it’s good for—maybe something I can’t foresee. I want to make a web app for it to really learn how what its middle ground position in the universe of devices is all about.
Comment on Friendfeed ]]>—A member of the French parliament following Leon Blum’s election as prime minister in 1936.
(Of course Blum really was a socialist.)
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