Comments on: Bailout Nation

By: Susie

Susie — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:21:07 +0000

Then email the guy and add it to his list. Certainly, the railroads pretty much owned the government in those days.

By: Bob

Bob — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:59:00 +0000

The whole argument is wrong. The 19th century cowboy hardly rode alone. WIthout government support the RR’s and telegraph would never have been built, the Native-Americans wouldn’t have been under armed guard on reservations, and law wouldn’t have been established and enforced. We need to get past this bullshit view of the 19th century of a time when men were men and the guvmint stayed away. Was the federal government smaller than today? Of course. Did it play no role in the development of the west? It played a major role.

By: Susie

Susie — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:47:26 +0000

I think the Great Depression bailout refers to the banks.

By: Spryboy

Spryboy — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:18:33 +0000

This sorta reminds me of the best quote from last weekend’s Bill Maher show… paraphrasing:

“Republicans believe in privatizing profit, and socializing loss.”

So True. This was, of course, in reference to the big banking, real estate, etc., bail-outs underway now.

By: ShortWoman

ShortWoman — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:24:31 +0000

Well I take exception to putting the Great Depression on this list. The high school I graduated from would not have been built except for the “bailout” of the Great Depresson; 70 years later they are still churning out graduates that benefit society. I sit in a home and work in an office powered by the Hoover Dam; arguably that “bailout” still has positive economic effects. Many TVA, WPA, and other Great Depression era “bailouts” are still of great benefit to society. I haven’t even gotten to the positive impact of banking regulation, the HOLC, or Social Security.

If I had time and the inclination, I could probably skewer more items on the list (I worked for a dotcom and didn’t get a government bailout, I’m lucky I got a lousy t-shirt), but government bailout for the Great Depression? Oh come on.

By: white_n_az

white_n_az — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:21:48 +0000

GWB has this same picture too…

As Texas governor, President Bush admired a 1916 painting by W.H.D. Koehner hanging in his office. In 1995, Bush wrote a memo to his Texas staff describing the artwork:

[T]he painting is based upon the Charles Wesley hymn “A Charge to Keep I Have”. I am particularly impressed by the second verse of this hymn. The second verse goes like this: “To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill; O may it all my powers engage to do my Master’s will.” […]

When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us.

But in his new book, The Bush Tragedy, Jacob Weisberg explains that the painting has nothing to do with the hymn and “circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century.” It actually depicts a horse bandit:

The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors.