Credit Where Credit Is Ignored And Stuff

How do I know President Obama’s nomination of Dr. Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank is an inspired and awesome choice?  Two reasons.  One, all the smart Puritopian money was depressingly convinced that President Obama was going to fail progressives again because he had to choose Larry Summers for the job.

Second, the right is having a small series of heart attacks.

What will be interesting is how a left-wing physician will run the only aid organization with a decent smattering of free market economists, who have tried, sometimes successfully, to help nations build private insurance-based healthcare systems. My suspicion is that more and more of the competent staff will leave, and the Bank will endorse more centralized medical systems development. I guess it has symmetry that as Obamacare is about to be challenged in the Supreme Court, the president doubles down on his intent to move the rest of the world away from private healthcare.

Now go figure, Fred Hiatt is in love, and Noam Scheiber is convinced that Kim’s views will be neutered, and therefore President Obama basically deserves no credit for his selection.

In Kim’s case, it’s not hard to see how that might put him at odds with the Obama administration, at least when it comes to global health, his area of expertise. Kim’s formative professional experience was co-founding and running the group Partners in Health (PIH), which was dedicated to battling expensive, hard-to-treat diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis in the most forsaken places on the planet. To realize that goal, as Ezra Klein points out, Kim and his more famous PIH co-founder, Paul Farmer, had to wage a years-long battle against the global health establishment, which was generally skeptical of the approach. Suffice it to say, he believes in it pretty deeply.

Problem is, the Obama administration has taken a very different (and, in the post-PIH world, equally controversial) position on global health aid: It has slowed the rate of growth in the money the U.S. government spends fighting AIDS and TB abroad, and instead spent a good deal of money on equally deadly but far easier-to-treat illnesses like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria (especially for children).

I doubt a Wolfensohn or Zoellick type would have challenged this approach—such a person probably wouldn’t have spent much time thinking it through before ascending to the World Bank presidency. But in Kim’s case, opposition to the Obama approach is, you know, the foundational principle of his career. Will he dissent from the Obama administration line or pull his punches?

Just…really?   So, President Obama gets pretty much no credit for doing what the left begged him to do, which is “Please pick anyone but Larry Summers!”.  They can’t even give him credit for that, it was served to him on a short list by others of course, and now Scheiber is wondering if Kim is going to actually be any better than Summers or if Obama will make him “pull his punches.”  Christ.  Of Course, Scheiber’s new book on the administration’s stimulus battles and economic policy is pretty much all about how Larry Summers was the worst choice ever, and I’m totally not surprised that Scheiber is immediately convinced that Kim’s choice is bullshit.

And you wonder why I’m mad at the “professional” Left all the damn time.  They got an inspired choice, Obama surprised them pleasantly, Dr. Kim has amazing credentials and he’s exactly what the President’s critics on the Left said the next head of the World Bank needed to be, a development expert and not a banker,  and the first thing they ask is “Will Obama just ignore him anyway and keep being the worst administration ever?”

Really?  What the hell does he have to do, folks?  What is it going to take?

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Symptoms Of A Syndrome

On a day where President Obama spoke about Trayvon Martin’s murder and said the following:

“All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” President Obama said Friday morning following a White House Rose Garden ceremony when asked about the 17-year-old’s death.

The president called the shooting a “tragedy” and says “every aspect” of the case should be investigated. Obama gave his condolences to the slain teenager’s parents and said if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

We have this going on at a Rick Santorum event...

At a shooting range in Louisiana on Friday, an onlooker encouraged Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum to pretend the target he was firing at was President Barack Obama.

“Santorum is shooting a 1911 Colt,” Politico’s Juana Summers tweeted from the sheriff’s office shooting range in West Monroe. “Range master says ‘Well, it’s not your first rodeo.’ Someone here says ‘pretend its Obama.’”

...and this out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich....

In a radio interview on Thursday, Newt Gingrich returned to one of his favorite recent themes, what he calls the “elite media” and their conspiracy to aid and abet the Obama administration.

In an article at Huffington Post, the former Speaker of the House is quoted as saying to Sandy Rios of the American Family Association that the “elite media” are “in the tank for Obama” and will do everything they can to see him re-elected.

“It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are,” he said, “Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church?”

...and I just shake my head.  I’m a black male who has survived to the ripe old age of 36 and is not incarcerated.  I’m an exception in this country, it seems.  I live in one of the 24 states that has a law that solely exists to justify the use of deadly force as the ultimate sanction against someone who is merely perceived to be a threat, without evidence, due process, or the right to face your accuser (because hey, you’re effing dead.)  The legislative need to create laws like this is a symptom of a much more awful syndrome, and in every case these laws were passed by “pro-life” Republicans led by the gun lobbyists.

These laws are designed to allow vigilantism, period.  It’s the worst impulse of the whole Glibertarian/Paulite/Somali Pirate anarcho-justice codified into “I get to decide who lives and who dies, and I reserve the right to exercise that impulse at any point.”  We’re all castles stomping around killing each other, and may the best, most heavily armed castle win.  And as far as Republicans are concerned, well that impulse extends to “We’ve decided that having a black President violates our right not to have one, so we’re going to do something about it from the ground up.”

Trayvon Martin’s awful, pointless murder is just a symptom of a much uglier sickness.

[UPDATE]  Newt doubles down.

“What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful,” Gingrich said on the Hannity Radio show. “It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.

“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him. That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.”

Effing. Perfect.

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Observing The Anniversary

As the Affordable Care Act turns two today, the Serious Village Types are contractually obligated to inform us that it was the worst piece of legislation ever conceived and that President Obama is the worst politician of all time for wasting time trying to get GOP votes for the bill, and then going it alone without them, assuring they would vow to destroy the law.

We are assured that everyone hates the bill, left, right, and center, despite the fact that elements of the bill are popular (particularly the parts involving coverage for pre-existing conditions and keeping kids on insurance plans to age 26.)  But at this point I think Republicans have vastly overplayed their hand on it for three reasons.

One is MetamorphoMitt.  The one thing from his past that he can’t shake away is MassCare.  Two, the GOP really can’t stop themselves from twirling their collective evil mustaches when doing things like voting to kill the Medicare cost review board while complaining that Medicare costs too much.  The other is the GOP assault on women’s rights, which is seriously driving away voters of both sexes.

All of these are going to seriously put a dent in the amount of damage the Republicans can do in November.  And call me crazy, but I think the Supreme Court may punt on the law until 2014 because the mandate isn’t in effect yet, and precisely because the GOP has done zero to replace the law should it be struck down, there’s a fair argument that nuking the law would be a massive burden for the states and for individuals.  Indeed, the government’s argument is that without a replacement set of laws, the entire health care system itself could be at risk if the mandate is severed.

Meanwhile, the parts of the law that are going into effect are working slowly and surely behind the scenes, and the law is rolling inexorably forward.  I think we’re going to be okay here.

[UPDATE]  Sarah Kliff over at Ezra’s House O’ Wonk has a detailed rundown of the changes already made by the law.

 

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They’ve Always Been Banking On Failure

A lot of rightful facepalming has been made over GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s odiously awful budget proposal adding some 50 million Americans to the ranks of the uninsured and basically handing over trillions to the one percent, but in addition to all that the GOP would end up obliterating Dodd-Frank and leaving us with the same “oversight” we had in 2007 when the financial meltdown came barreling through our lives.  Suzy Khimm over at Ezra Klein’s Kaplan Nerd Farm details the carnage:

The Ryan budget, however, would actually repeal the FDIC’s new resolution authority, arguing that it would have the opposite effect of what’s intended by allowing bank regulators “to access taxpayer dollars in order to bail out the creditors of large, ‘systemically significant’ financial institutions.” By doing so, Ryan says he would “end the regime now enshrined into law that paves the way for future bailouts.”

His blueprint doesn’t go into much further detail to explain why this is the case. But other critics of Dodd-Frank have argued that it could enable the FDIC to take control of failing firms and rely on taxpayer funds to keep the systemically important parts running through a government-run “bridge” financial company. That’s likely why Ryan believes the cost of the new resolution authority could far exceed the Congressional Budget Office’s $26 billion estimate.

While outside analysts across the political spectrum have shared Ryan’s concerns that Dodd-Frank doesn’t do enough to stop Too Big to Fail, their specific worry is often quite different than Ryan’s: they’re worried that bank regulators have too little authority, not too much, to quickly take down failing firms. It’s unclear, for example, how swiftly and forcefully the FDIC would use the new rules to liquidate a highly troubled, systemically important firm.

Repealing that authority as Ryan proposes eliminates a new government channel for intervention, but it wouldn’t explicitly prohibit future bailouts, which could become more likely if systemically risky banks aren’t wound down in an orderly fashion.

Of course they would be, that’s the point.  Banks are profitable now only because they got trillions in mulligans from the Bushies (and FOX News has done a terrific job of lying to the American people, convincing them that President Obama bailed out the banks, not Bush and Hank Paulson, and conflating the Obama stimulus with the Bush bank bailout on purpose.)  Here’s the thing: I know everyone says that Ryan’s budget proposal is just empty posturing that has no effect on the actual budget, but if there’s a GOP Senate to go along with the House in 2013, these proposals will end up on the President’s desk.

Let’s not pretend that the GOP getting into actual power will moderate the Ryan Plan.  This is their plan for America’s future, where the rising tide lifts all yachts and drowns the rest of us who can’t tread water.  And speaking of the Kaplan Nerd Farm, when Ezra Klein says things like this:

Today, the Republican Party is in a different place, and my theory is that it’s because they’ve committed themselves to a set of fiscal priorities — lower taxes, higher defense spending, no entitlement changes for 210 years, and lower deficits — that can only be reconciled through draconian cuts to programs for the poor.

The result is that when Republican politicians stop speaking for themselves and begin speaking for their party, their fiscal proposals have to reflect those priorities, and so they end up cutting deep into programs for the poor, even though that may not be their personal preference. But that is, of course, just speculation.

I have to have a good, long laugh, because the dude has it so backwards it’s actually funny.  Draconian cuts to the poor at the expense to give more to the rich was exactly what the Republican party has been engineering since 1980.  We’re just in the endgame now.  They didn’t “accidentally leave themselves no other choice” any more than any other fanatical group of nutjobs have throughout history.  The cuts have been the point all along, knucklehead.  Like I said, let’s stop pretending that a series of unfortunate and non-preventable accidents led the GOP to this sad fate.  This is deliberate, it has been deliberate, they believe this stuff period, and we have to recognize that first thing.

[UPDATE:]  Oh, and for the folks still convinced that none of this is deliberate and that the Ryan Budget will quietly die in the House because it’s an election year, well that’s not happening either.

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Afternoon Open Thread

Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard can’t help himself, suggesting that the Serious Paul Ryan should be Romney’s running mate.  The poor should just be ground up into tortillas anyway.  The Ryan Plan will make so much more of them.

These people are insane.

Open thread.

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Mittamorphosis? Metamorphomitt? Metamittomorph?

Nothing can compare to the  superpowers of one Willard “Metamorphomitt” Romney, The Man Who Will Be Anything.

Appearing on CNN this morning, Romney Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom was asked if he’s concerned that Romney may alienate general election voters with some of the hard-right positions he’s taken during the primary to appeal to conservatives. Fehrnstrom brushed this concern off:

HOST: Is there a concern that Santorum and Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election.

FEHRNSTROM: Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

Plastic Man’s got nothing on Metamorphomitt.  Granted, they both have their own jets and a couple of minions, but Mitt has better hair.

And yes, Ferhrnstrom really does think GOP voters are this incredibly stupid, because GOP voters are pretty much incredibly stupid.  Guess what?  Those votes still count (especially since the GOP is doing everything they can to disenfranchise everyone else.)  Why waste time assuming they’re not going fall into line when the only thing that matters is BEAT OBAMA?  Not Romney may be winning the GOP primaries (Not Romney beat Romney last night in Illinois 53-47) but when Romney morphs into Not Obama later this year, yeah, it’s a new ball game.  Fehrnstrom knows this.  Village knows this.  GOP voters know this.

Nothing shocking here.

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Sad Songs, Sold Souls, Same Silliness

There’s very little room for misinterpretation of Jon Chait’s latest NY Mag piece, if you go by the title:

How Obama Tried to Sell Out Liberalism in 2011

So, yeah.  For those of you keeping all hands and arms inside the boat on this, the short version is Chait completely buys this weekend’s Kaplan Special on the President being at total fault in the debt ceiling debate last year for not rejecting the GOP out of hand and just using his Green Lantern ring to create a deal and tell the GOP take it or else.  When it became clear the GOP wouldn’t accept any deal short of 100% of what they wanted, it was the height of liberal idiocy to continue down the path of good faith.  This constitutes, let’s see here, that “Obama’s disastrous weakness in the summer of 2011 went further toward undermining liberalism than anybody previously knew”.

Chait argues that President Obama wanting a deal—any deal, mind you—led him to treat the GOP as good faith partners when they were clearly not.  Republicans, he goes on to say, were going to screw POTUS and the country no matter what Obama did.  This is where Chait’s argument turns into purist whining:  There was nothing President Obama could have done that would have changed the outcome of the GOP screwing us over (indeed, the GOP is now signaling that it will simply ignore the debt deal), and at the same time he didn’t do enough to change the outcome.  It’s just meaningless stupidity, brought about by the “liberal” Washington Post unloading this hit piece on the President, and Chait absolutely takes the bait, re-fighting the same arguments we had in 2010 and 2011 about “but if Obama had done THIS and LISTENED TO HOW SMART I AM…” five minutes after saying there was nothing he could have done.

There’s nothing productive about this civil war re-enactment other than Chait scratching his own “Tell Obama what to do” itch that so many of our professional pundit class seem to suffer from.  But generating that itch was the entire point of the Kaplan piece.  Chait performed admirably, attacking the President from the left.  After all, attacks from the right aren’t working too well, since the wingers keep putting most of their ammo into their own feet.  Whenever the left is winning, we have to be demoralized into our own worst enemies, and we’re damn good at it.

It keeps pissing me off that we’re really going to go through the same self-flagellation over this when we should be concentrating on taking back the House, keeping the Senate, and not losing the White House to any of the GOP dipsticks.  Instead, we’re just going to bash ourselves in the gonads until the GOP crawls across the finish line.  Awesome.  Thanks, Jon.

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Two-Faced Gas Face

GOP, Saturday:

Freshmen Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) – tasked with delivering the weekly party message – ticked off the administration’s initiatives that he contended will exacerbate the problem, instead of alleviate it.

Obama has “called for raising energy taxes, which the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says would actually lead to higher prices. He’s asked the Attorney General to ‘reconstitute’ an oil speculation task force that has never reported its work to the public. He quietly pushed members of Congress to prevent construction of the Keystone pipeline – despite overwhelming support for the project and the jobs that it would create – and his lobbying may have made the difference in the vote,” Gardner charged.

Under mounting criticism and facing falling poll numbers, Obama addressed the issue in a speech Thursday on his “all-of-the-above” energy policies – a term borrowed from Republicans, who made it popular in the summer of 2008.

Gardner accused the president of failing to follow-through on policies that would bring down the price of gasoline.

GOP, Thursday:

Republicans launched a preemptive strike last week against rumored plans by the White House to tap the country’s emergency oil reserves.

Releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a 696-million-barrel stockpile stored on the Gulf Coast, is a ploy to score political points amid gas prices that are nearing a national average of $4 per gallon, Republicans argued.

“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is for emergencies – not political disasters,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said in a statement Thursday.

Both articles being at The Hill seems to indicate that the President being attacked for not doing anything about gas prices and warned not to do anything about gas prices at the same time is completely logical in every way.  If he doesn’t do anything, he hates America.  If he does anything, it’s a deeply cynical ploy to get re-elected.  Either way, It’s Good News For Conservatives™ if you accept the framing, which of course our wonderful liberal media will.  Horse race and all that.

Job creation?  Boring and soooooo 2011.  The election was always about gas prices, you know.

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Romney Gets The Gas Face

Marquis de Mittens has it all figured out.

On Fox News Sunday, Mitt Romney said that President Obama campaigned saying that “he wanted to see gasoline prices go up” and that he implemented that plan once in office.

“He said that energy prices would skyrocket under his views and he selected three people to help him implement that program: the secretary of energy, the secretary of the interior, and the EPA administrator,” Romney said. “And this gas-hike trio has been doing the job over the last three and a half years and gas prices are up.”

Only possible explanation.  Also, when Mitt launches his war with Iran and gas goes up to $7 a gallon or so, it will be because Freedom Isn’t Free™, and SHUT UP THAT’S WHY.

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Evening Open Thread

Yeah, like you had Lehigh and Norfolk State and Ohio U. winning.  Riiiiiiiight.

Open thread while I figure out if my crazy alternate bracket is now ahead of my “competitive” one in the office pool.

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