Hullabaloo

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

 
Whining Job Creator 'O The Day: David Siegel still a huge jackass

by digby



Via Think Progress

Subject: Message from David Siegel
Date:Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:58:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: [David Siegel]
To: [All employees]
To All My Valued Employees,

As most of you know our company, Westgate Resorts, has continued to succeed in spite of a very dismal economy. There is no question that the economy has changed for the worse and we have not seen any improvement over the past four years. In spite of all of the challenges we have faced, the good news is this: The economy doesn’t currently pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is another 4 years of the same Presidential administration. Of course, as your employer, I can’t tell you whom to vote for, and I certainly wouldn’t interfere with your right to vote for whomever you choose. In fact, I encourage you to vote for whomever you think will serve your interests the best.

However, let me share a few facts that might help you decide what is in your best interest.
[...]
So where am I going with all this? It’s quite simple. If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current President plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company. Rather than grow this company I will be forced to cut back. This means fewer jobs, less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.

So, when you make your decision to vote, ask yourself, which candidate understands the economics of business ownership and who doesn’t? Whose policies will endanger your job? Answer those questions and you should know who might be the one capable of protecting and saving your job. While the media wants to tell you to believe the “1 percenters” are bad, I’m telling you they are not. They create most of the jobs. If you lose your job, it won’t be at the hands of the “1%”; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country.

If you haven't seen the documentary "Queen of Versailles" you probably don't understand the depth of depravity in that statement by the man whose wife is the title character. This is a man who's made his fortune bilking people out of money they cannot afford for time-shares that aren't worth spit. He's the guy whose conspicuous consumption is so over the top that they made a movie out of it, a movie in which he is revealed to be one of the stupidest businessmen on the face of the earth.

In fact, when I saw the movie that was the main takeaway. Here was a guy who'd made his fortune mostly through luck and timing --- and a flood of cheap money --- who refused to let go of a Las Vegas white elephant even though it would have saved billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. There was no reason for it other than his oversized ego, which also had him building the most hideous oversized structure this side of the Mall of America, which he dubbed "Versailles."

At the end of the movie he was sitting in a piles of papers and dogshit, yelling at his childlike wife and confused kids about turning off the lights when they leave the room. That made me happy. He was going down, down, down and nobody deserved it more. And his kids would be better off for not having the world handed to them by this creep.

Unfortunately he, like the rest of the 1%, no matter how inept and undeserving, has recovered his fortune and is back in business. The fact that he's still whining like a spoiled toddler is testament to just how sick all that money has made these plutocratic jerks.

Now he's doing God's Work (job creatin') by copying wingnut chain emails and sending them to his employees. If these are the titans of capitalism who are supposed to save us all, I'd say it's time we start gathering our survivalist gear and hoarding canned goods. The future is not bright.

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digby 10/10/2012 05:30:00 PM

 
Watch your wallet: David Walker's got a new plan

by digby

So, David Walker's throwing out some new deficit hawkery in the hopes that nobody gets too hung up on Simpson Bowles and fails to keep their eyes on the prize --- insuring that that DC consensus that the deficit is the biggest problem this country faces, intact:

On Wednesday, David Walker, CEO of Comeback American Initiative, proposed another alternative that would challenge the political orthodoxy of both parties.
To most Democrats’ chagrin, Walker’s group wants to block-grant Medicaid, repeal and scale back parts of the Affordable Care Act, and raise taxes on Americans who are above the poverty live but pay no federal income taxes, as it outlined in a 2011 fiscal reform plan.

“There are a lot of people well above the poverty rate who aren’t paying income tax,” says Walker, the former Comptroller General who previously ran Pete Peterson’s foundation. He acknowledges that the tax change won’t be a big money saver. “That’s not going to generate a lot of money, but we’ve got to have more people have a stake in government finance,” he explains, adding that the framework would hold middle-class taxpayers harmless.

Likewise, Walker says, Republicans wouldn’t be happy with the group’s proposal to scale back defense spending to President Obama’s recommended levels, or with the higher effective tax rates on the wealthy. And many in both parties might be taken aback by Walker’s proposal to impose a consumption tax akin to a VAT and phase out the employer deduction for health care, which would radically shift the country away from a employer-based health care model. (Walker says it would be replaced by a system that would offer “basic coverage for all citizens,” though he didn’t go into the details.)

Walker’s group, which is supported by Peterson, shopped these ideas to colleges and business groups in 16 states. He says that these reforms—taken as a whole—were exceedingly popular among those who attended the tour’s public events. But concerns surfaced at Wednesday’s press conference: One woman questioned whether block-granting Medicaid would harm poor and disadvantaged Americans.

Alice Rivlin, who was also part of the Bowles-Simpson commission, agreed it was “a very legitimate concern” about the Medicaid block-grant. But Rivlin, who appeared at the event in support of Walker’s group, dissuaded the audience from getting too hung up on the specifics.

“I’ve noticed some of you taking notes on specific proposals he was offering I think that’s not the point,” Rivlin said. “He put out in the public domain a set of proposals we ought to be talking about. I wouldn’t agree with absolutely all of them. But that’s the essence of getting to a solution.”

Stop being so picky about these details, people! Focus! We've just proposed to repeal parts of Obamacare, block grant Medicaid and get rid of the Employer Deduction for health insurance, thus likely throwing millions of Americans into the hellhole known as the individual market, but you needn't worry your pretty little heads one bit. David Walker says he's got an idea for some kind of "basic health care" to be named later and the wealthy will have to "pay a little bit more" so all you plebes should be mollified.

These people are relentless. They never stop proposing and propagandizing and keeping the pressure on to fundamentally change the compact between the government and the people.

Do. Not. Trust. Anything. They. Say.

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digby 10/10/2012 04:00:00 PM

 
Romney Dogwhistles online, too

by David Atkins

Mitt Romney has been flooding newspaper websites with webads. Here's one of them:



Speaking to an adoring sea of white? Check. Railing against "dependency" as the root cause of our economic problems? Check.

It's not even subtle. The guy needs to win 61% of white vote, and he's doing his damnedest to get there.


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thereisnospoon 10/10/2012 02:30:00 PM

 
Will the real Mitt Shady please stand up, please stand up?

by digby


Watch the first five minutes or so of this NOW with Alex Wagner from this morning to see all the various Mittster positions on abortion in living color. It's quite something:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

For those wondering what is Mitt's "real" position on abortion, I'd probably default to this. I have no reason to believe he isn't sincere about his religious beliefs.

In 1973, the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released the following statement regarding abortion, which is still applicable today: “The Church opposes abortion and counsels its members not to submit to or perform an abortion except in the rare cases where, in the opinion of competent medical counsel, the life or good health of the mother is seriously endangered or where the pregnancy was caused by rape and produces serious emotional trauma in the mother. Even then it should be done only after counseling with the local presiding priesthood authority and after receiving divine confirmation through prayer.”

I haven't heard any of the mainstream wags talk about this, but I wonder if Mitt's performance couldn't begin to shred the myth that people care about "authenticity." If the GOP base sticks with this guy we'll know they're just partisans, which is par for the course. But what about these alleged "undecideds" in the so-called middle who Romney is supposedly wooing? Aren't they one ones who demand authenticity the most? If they're breaking for Mitt you just cannot say they are sticklers for authenticity. I honestly don't think we've ever had a presidential candidate who's taken both sides of fundamental definitional issues like this one has. Yes, Tricky Dick was a liar and Reagan made things up and Clinton was slick. But this man has openly run for high office as both a moderate liberal and a hardcore conservative --- within a ten year span. And in this current race, he's running as both. He proves that in this polarized age you can be completely inconsistent in your views and get away with it. Obama did this too, to a certain extent, but it was far more subtle using a sort of theatrical, content free liberal "style" and symbolism to create the illusion to those who wanted to see it that way that he was further to the left than his plain words clearly placed him. (Clinton did it too, with the whole baby boomer, sax playing, draft dodging and pot smoking.) I think that's a fairly commonplace political sleight of hand. Mitt's the same guy to everyone --- a vaguely patrician heir to a famous name who made a fortune through inscrutable financial transactions. The only people his persona dogwhistles are his donors. There's no way for him to subtly signal to either his base or enough moderates that he's one of them. He isn't. He's the quintessential One Percenter, without even the slightest claim to the common touch. So he has to literally say that he's all things to all people.


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digby 10/10/2012 01:00:00 PM

 
Dispatch from Conservative Bizarroworld

by digby

Elections expert Richard Hasen poses an important question:

What if President Obama wins re-election and Republicans don’t believe it?

The question isn’t far-fetched. For several weeks, we have seen Republicans challenge the veracity of a number of election-related facts, and the outcome of the presidential election may be no different.

First, some Republicans claimed that public opinion polls were all skewed to show an Obama lead. As Slate reported, 71 percent of self-identified Republicans and 84 percent of Tea Partiers believe in the skew. Republicans confidently claim that the polls are oversampling Democrats, not realizing that these are self-reported party identifications, which rise and fall with candidates’ support.

Distrust of the polls is not a new phenomenon, and it is not confined to Republicans. As Nate Silver pointed out, when Democrats were behind in 2004 they believed the polls were skewed toward Republicans. Fortunately, the Romney debate performance last week apparently was enough to “unskew” the latest numbers.

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a relatively rosy jobs report, which not only reported better-than-expected hiring for September but also upward revisions for earlier months. Soon thereafter, a number of Republicans, including former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, questioned whether or not the numbers were accurate. Welch tweeted: “Unbelievable jobs numbers ... these Chicago guys will do anything … can't debate so change number.” What evidence did Welch have? Nada.
[...]
All of these conspiracy theories—like the earlier birther controversies—indicate that if we are unlucky enough to have a very close election in November in which President Obama ekes out a victory, we can expect Republicans to question the election results, too. We’ll have the Fraudulent Fraud Squad telling us that Democrats used voter fraud to steal the election. Hucksters like John Fund will point to “bizarre” anomalies in vote totals from Democratic areas and tout new conspiracy theories. Social media will likely fan the flames.

I have never been a believer in "poll-skewing" theories, but I cut the 2004 Dems a little slack because of the results of the 2000 election. When you see a dubious result like that you can be forgiven for being skeptical for a while. As the article points out, the "skepticism" on the right, on the other hand, has morphed into full-fledged delusion.

But then, this was the one of the goals of the Vote Suppression movement. It's true that they want to keep Democratic partisans from voting. But they also need to feed the bedrock conviction that no Democrat can be legitimately elected. They did this going back to Clinton, when Dick Armey famously declared, "Clinton is not my president" and continued when they became rabid dogs in defense of Bush's dubious victory in 2000. Obama won too big for them to create doubt about the legitimacy of the vote, so they came up with this birther nonsense to allow these wingnuts to believe that the president himself wasn't a legitimate candidate.

I don't know what to do about this. We're dealing with a large number of people, including some of our society's wealthiest magnates, who are living in an alternate universe.

For instance:

TUCHMAN: Paul Ryan has said it himself that he believes there is media bias against the GOP ticket. And at these rallies, a widespread belief that presidential preference polls are part of that conspiracy.

TUCHMAN (on camera): Do you think the pollsters want the Obama ticket to be in front?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I do.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #1: I think they're shaping them for Obama. I mean, the media, the liberal media, and whatever they can to help him.

TUCHMAN: Do you think that the polls that have shown that Obama is in the lead are inaccurate?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, I don't believe those. I don't believe them. I know they had a poll that said that the polls were wrong. They had a poll that said the polls were wrong. So I don't -- I don't believe that.

TUCHMAN: Do you believe the poll that said the polls were wrong?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No. I don't believe any of it.

TUCHMAN: It's easy to bash polls and pollsters. And not at all unusual. But it becomes more complicated when new polling comes out that indicate your candidate is in front.

(Voice-over): That's what happened the middle of our day with Ryan, when a Pew Research poll showed the Romney-Ryan ticket in the lead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE#1: Everybody says that the polls are skewed in one way, you know? So.

TUCHMAN (on camera): A recent poll has come out that shows Romney in front. How do you feel about that poll?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE#1: Well, he got a good bump, you know, out of the debate.

TUCHMAN: So you're saying you believe that poll?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #1: Yes.

A lot of people aren't even aware that they're being self-serving. They think it's self-evident that Democrats cannot legitimately be elected because everyone says that the US is a conservative country. And that's just the one's who watch the mainstream news. Those who are tuned into the right wing media hear that Democrats are all radical leftists if not full-fledged communists. And they don't know a single person who is a radical leftist of full-fledged Communist so how could any of them possibly win without cheating?

This is a huge problem for our democracy, but unless some people on the right decide that it's a problem for them I doubt there's anything we can do to change it. Conservative bizarroworld has always been a feature of American life, but now they're making a huge profit at it. It's hard to see what mechanism will change that.

Update: When I say that conservative bizarroworld has always been a part of American life, this has always been ground zero:

Eight of eleven states in the former Confederacy have passed restrictive voting laws since the 2010 election, as part of a broader war on voting undertaken by the GOP. Some of these changes have been mitigated by recent federal and state court rulings against the GOP, yet it’s still breathtaking to consider the different ways Republicans have sought to suppress the minority vote in the region...

The consequences of these changes will be to make it harder for growing minority populations to be able to cast a ballot in much of the South and to make the region more segregated politically at a time when it is becoming more diverse demographically. “The net effect is that the potential for any coalition to exist in the Democratic Party of moderate-to-progressive whites and African-American voters is pretty much decimated,” says Crayton. Obama is betting he can once again turn out such a coalition in states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, but that task has become tougher in 2012. The outlook for state and local Democrats in the region is far bleaker.

The regression in the South today when it comes to voting rights is eerily reminiscent of tragic earlier periods in the region’s beleaguered racial history. “After Reconstruction, we saw efforts by conservative whites in Southern state legislatures to cut back on opportunities for black Americans to cast a ballot,” says Crayton. “It’s hard to dismiss the theory that what we’re seeing today is a replay of that scenario.”

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digby 10/10/2012 11:19:00 AM

 
Making fools of the donors

by digby

It looks like Mr Super Executive and fiscal conservative is being taken to the cleaners by his campaign staff:

Voters in Columbus, Ohio, saw 30-second television ads for both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney while watching “Wheel of Fortune” on their CBS affiliate over three days in September. For Obama’s team, the order per spot cost $500. For Romney’s, the price tag on the order was more than five times steeper at $2,800 per ad.

That gap – found in data filed with the Federal Communications Commission — is an outgrowth of an unusual TV-buying strategy by the Romney campaign. Media strategists on both sides of the political aisle, along with station managers who handle ad placement, expressed puzzlement to POLITICO about the way Romney’s TV operation does business.

Unlike other presidential campaigns, which typically outsource their ad reservations and placement to specialized firms with large teams that know how to make the most of the complicated FCC payment procedures, Romney does all his TV buying in-house through a lean operation headed by a single chief buyer.

The campaign rarely buys cable ad time, focusing overwhelmingly on broadcast television. Romney places his commercials on a week-to-week basis, rather than booking time well in advance, and typically pays more so that his ads don’t get preempted and to spare his campaign the hassle of haggling over time as prices rise.
For those “Wheel of Fortune” ads in Columbus, for example, Obama bought the airtime on Aug. 29, according to the FCC data. Romney bought the time on Sept. 11, the day before his ads aired.

The Romney media operation is organized under the umbrella of a firm called American Rambler, which includes top Romney advisers Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer, the campaign’s chief media consultants, as well as Stephanie Kincaid, the campaign’s top buyer and a longtime employee of the Stevens and Schriefer Group. Press accounts have also named senior Romney campaign aide Eric Fehrnstrom as a Rambler partner, and Romney aides said other top officials’ work is handled through the firm.
The most recent Federal Election Commission data showed that the Romney campaign paid $85,258,006 to Rambler this cycle through August 2012, much of which represents ad buys with primary-election dollars.

Of course, to Mitt, that's chump change. But you have to wonder if their donors feel the same way.

A whole lot of Republican "strategists" are getting very, very wealthy from this campaign cycle, what with rich fools throwing millions at them. They're getting rolled, big time.

The funniest thing about it is seeing these "conservatives" rail against crony capitalism. Shameless doesn't even begin to describe it.


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digby 10/10/2012 09:30:00 AM

 
Death by taser, caught on tape

by digby

Even if you believe in Taser International's pet medical diagnosis that only afflicts people in custody ("Excited Delirium")you would think this would be considered to be wrong.

Unfortunately, police commonly taser people in the US who are already in handcuffs and in custody and it doesn't raise a hue and cry. They usually say, as the officer in that video does, that they had to do it for their own safety but it's quite clear it's because they are trying to force "compliance." They lie because it's impossible to explain how someone who is mentally ill, high on drugs or in the midst of having an epileptic fit can be expected to understand the commands to "comply." And frankly, when you listen to the agitated police screaming at the person to stop struggling, it's quite clear that if "excited delirium" exists it is a disease that afflicts the authorities as well.

I've come to believe that tasers are deadly torture devices and I think they should be banned. (I didn't always think so, but I no longer believe the authorities can be trusted with such a device.) But if they are used, there should definitely be zero tolerance for using them on anyone who is handcuffed in custody. It's as outrageously immoral as using a cattle prod. The police can back off and let the person flail if that's what it takes. Hitting them repeatedly with electro-shock on the scene is no different than hitting them repeatedly over the head with a baton.

Some people die, like this fellow, although not all do. But the minute an electrical shock in administered to suspects already custody, they become victims of torture. There is no excuse for it.


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digby 10/10/2012 08:10:00 AM

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

 
Leadership according to Rahm Emmanuel

by digby

Read and learn:

A lot of people look for leadership today, OK? What is leadership?

On the Race to the Top, the president of the United States took on a very powerful constituency of his own party to see through an education goal for the country. I say that because Bill Gates said to me, he says, when I was speaking at something, he applauded when I talked about Race to the Top only because he says that's where he thought the president most put nation above party. Name me one thing a Republican nominee has ever spoken against the base of their party. One. Gay marriage. Gun control. Taxes. I mean, 100 percent correct on everything.

OK, two. The president's own party was against what he said on Afghanistan. Showed leadership.

Third, auto industry. A lot of people advocated bankruptcy. A lot of people advocated Chrysler. He picked a different course and then stuck to it.

Health care, even though I advocated different, he doubled down, even when the chips were down, to get something that had been elusive to other presidents for 80 years.

In the financial area, people were advocating nationalizing banks. People were advocating breaking up banks. Picked a different course.

Leadership is about willing to put the chips down and lead a country even though [there are] adverse political consequences. And time and again he has shown that. That's what leadership is.

And I say it's in direct contrast many times with people in the Republican Party who have yet to in one area, find fault or difference with parts of their own party. And there can't be one party absolutely right 100 percent of the time. Not possible.

I would laugh if I wasn't crying.

Rahm expresses perfectly the Village Democrats' attitude: Democrats show leadership when they abandon their principles, while Republicans are stubborn for clinging to theirs.

I don't suppose it ever occurs to any of them that as long as the Democrats are doing the Republicans' work for them, they don't have to do anything but up the ante and throw red meat at their base.

That excerpt is from interviews for tonight's Frontline. There are a whole bunch of good ones which will be providing fodder for much bloggering to come, I'm sure.

Update: Also too, this, from the same interview:

Look, there's a bigger change. It's not about Washington. Washington is a mirror reflection sometimes of what goes on in the country. There has been a dramatic shift in the Republican Party in the center of gravity, OK? The most dramatic way of saying it is I don't think Ronald Reagan would be nominated by the Republican Party today. It's moved that far. If you look at his record as governor, there's no way today that he'd ever become the nominee of their party. That's one.

Not that I disagree that there's been a dramatic shift in the GOP's center of gravity. It's obvious that the country is polarized and has some fundamental disagreements about how their government should operate. (It isn't the first time.)

But why would a party that has just nominated a wishy-washy Governor of Taxachusetts who passed the antecedent to Obamacare not nominate Ronald Reagan? Clearly, as wingnutty as they are, they are capable of nominating someone who has a "checkered" political past as a moderate. And Reagan's past was far more palatable that Mitt's should be. After all, he cracked some heads, and that's always a good thing.

Maybe Rahm was just being sloppy and/or trite, but the truth is that this far right freakshow is more sophisticated than Rahm's giving them credit for. Which is also typical of Democratic politicians.

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digby 10/09/2012 06:00:00 PM

 
Quote of the Day: a pollster

by digby

E.J. Dionne asked a pollster friend of his if conservatives and liberals treated him differently when the polls didn't go their way:

“When you give conservatives bad news in your polls, they want to kill you,” he said. “When you give liberals bad news in your polls, they want to kill themselves.”

Doesn't that just say it all?


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digby 10/09/2012 04:30:00 PM

 
The landslide debater

by digby

Someone sent this in an email and I thought it was worth sharing:

I remember watching it and everyone in the group I was with was slightly appalled. (Sadly, it turned out that he had Alzheimer's disease --- but it was obvious in 1984.)

Let's just say that debate performances aren't everything. That guy won his reelection in a landslide.


On the other hand, perhaps President Obama might keep this in mind in his second debate:

It is a pretty straightforward story. President Obama was pushing toward his 2008 margin among the Rising American Electorate– particularly unmarried women – according to this pivotal research completed right before the first debate. But the debate touched on none of the issues that have moved these voters.

According to this survey and focus groups, Obama can get to 2008 levels when he makes
Romney own ‘the 47 percent’ and offers a robust message to make this country work for the middle class again – with more punch and choice, more values, more on the consequences of unequal power, and above all, big policy choices that go well beyond the thin rhetoric of the first debate.

And just for fun, he might use the word "women" a time or two. They represent about 60% of the people who vote for him.

Update: The research linked above said that the way to get these women back in the fold was to link women's issues with economic issues.  Irin Carmen's story at Salon suggests that the President is listening:

By Friday, two days after the debate, Obama implicitly conceded he’d goofed up. There he was, talking up his women’s health positions and his appointment of two women to the Supreme Court in Fairfax, Virginia. He even adopted the feminist line that reproductive health issues are also economic issues, saying there was something that didn’t  “get enough attention in the debate other night, and that’s economic issues that have a direct impact on women.” (Wonder how that happened!) 

Obama touted the Affordable Care Act’s women’s health provisions, including no co-pay contraception, saying, “I am proud of it. It was the right thing to do, and we’re going to keep it.” He also jokingly tied in Romney’s support for defunding Planned Parenthood with the similarly politicized yanking of PBS funding, the sole meme-generating moment of the debate: “Governor Romney said he would get rid of Planned Parenthood funding. Apparently, this, along with Big Bird, is a driving the deficits.”

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digby 10/09/2012 03:47:00 PM

 
Pete Peterson's magical thinking club

by digby

Matt Yglesias wrote an important post today about why Pete Peterson's ongoing crusade to cut the deficit is killing us. He notes that many serious liberals dismiss the (dirty hippie) idea that the focus on long term deficit reduction is wrong in itself in favor of the idea that it's simply wrong for the current situation. Being one of those who have been saying for years that focusing on long term projections (which are notoriously unreliable and always unenforceable) is a fools game, I appreciate the fact that Yglesias has taken another look at this:

That is all, I think, correct. But I'd like to push the idea that the deeper critique is also correct—the focus on long-term fiscal policy is misguided and it's the misguided nature of this focus that helps drive the odd interventions into partisan politics.

To see why, think about the deficit reduction deals of 1990 and especially 1993. Those were deals that conservative viciously opposed, and the backlash against moderate Republican support for the 1990 deal is the essential context for the budget gridock of the subsequent 20 years. But another thing to note about those deals is that they weren't deals about long-term fiscal policy. Chait complains that deficit reduction groups were insufficiently enthusiastic about this deals:

Because Republicans opposed both laws so hysterically, they successfully turned them into symbols of phony government thumb-twiddling while the deficit raged out of control. Accordingly, Karl raged (in his Gen-X way) against Clinton’s plan, “that deficit reduction is a myth.” And the speaker before him denounced the 1990 deficit reduction bill. But both plans worked incredibly well! By the end of Clinton’s term, we were running surpluses, which allowed conservatives to take power in 2001, argue that the surplus represented a nefarious overtaxation, and bring us back into structural deficits.

But this simply reflects the fact that "the deficit" means two different things. The deficit that George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton targeted was a short-to-medium-term affair. The problem that they were trying to solve was that loose fiscal policy was inducing the Federal Reserve to maintain relatively high interest rates in order to contain inflation, creating a situation in which potentially valuable private sector investors were being crowded out by government borrowing. You might think that maintaining low taxes or high levels of military spending or high levels of social services are more important than that goal of promoting lower central bank interest rates, but it's perfectly comprehensible disupute among competing priorities. And the deficit reduction packages achieved their goals in that sense. Interest rates declined without inflation surging.

That is correct. You'll all recall the famous Bill Clinton line:

`You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?''

Yglesias explains how Peterson is doing something completely different and that he's dragged the political establishment along with him:

Pete Peterson, by contrast, is wrestling with a question that's either much deeper or much shallower than something as petty as managing aggregate demand. One way of looking at it is that he's concerned that in the future too much economic activity will go toward bolstering the living standards of unproductive retirees rather than toward growth-boosting investments. This, however, is too deep a problem to solve. No matter how much we scrunch our eyes together and promise really really hard, we can't force the political system of 2040 to avoid overspending on health care services for my eightysomething dad rather than on private sector capital investments that will increase the productivity and wages of hypothetical thirtysomething kid. It simply can't be done.

What we can tackle is the shallow problem of CBO scores. Right now, the way the CBO scores things shows gigantic future deficits. If you pass a law saying "if the cyclically-adjusted budget deficit goes above 3.5 percent of GDP, Medicare reimbursement rates will automatically fall to eliminate the deficit" then you solve the CBO score problem.

It goes away like magic. But that's a dumb plan. Or, rather, it's not a plan at all. It's just a scoring rule. But if you peer into the details of different deficit reduction plans this is how they all work. Because the only way to change a long-term CBO score is to change a scoring rule. It's a bit of a postmodern game in which there's nothing outside the text. The way CBO scoring is supposed to be useful is that a member of congress might have an idea he's genuinely enthusiastic about and want a credible analysis of what that proposal would cost. He might then also want credible analysis of which tax measures would or wouldn't raise an appropriate amount of revenue. But the CBO doesn't employ fortune-tellers who can assess conjectures about the future application of information technology to health care, about the military situation in the Pacific Rim, or about the political economy of tweaks in program design. So all the long-term plans end up relying on scoring rules. You direct the CBO to assess a situation in which congress "isn't allowed" to spend more than X on domestic programs or Y on the military or automatically applies cuts to hospitals. But giving the CBO those instructions doesn't change anything in the world, it's just an accounting exercise.

Excessive focus on these issues distracts crucial attention from meaningful budget questions which play out on a much shorter time frame. Right now, fiscal policy is set to be much too tight in 2013 with terrible growth effects that are being ignored by the political system. In 1993, fiscal policy was too loose and the president who cut the deficit didn't get any credit from the deficit scolds because they were too busy worrying about long-term problems that the Clinton administration didn't solve because they can't be solved. To assess fiscal policy correctly, you have to get off the focus on the long-term and instead pay attention to what politicians actually control.

I would just suggest that Peterson and his Masters of the Universe pals may not be quite as ingenuous about their "worries" as Yglesias imagines. It's true that's what they say. But Peterson and his friends were all for privatization, which would have the same economic effect on protecting living standards of the elderly at the expense of greater economic activity. So I'm just not convinced that old Pete is being entirely above board. But none of that changes the fact that this all based upon magical thinking. Peterson may be worried about his grand kids (insufferable privileged jerks that they are) but I suspect he's mostly worried about the fortune he's bequeathing them.

And keep in mind that these people who are so convinced that these projections have been sent down from Mt Sinai are many of the same people who deny that climate change exists and are perfectly content to wait to see if the catastrophic droughts, famines and massive refugee crises actually develop.

As for economic projections, it's difficult to even get the current ones right:

The estimated deficit is $38 billion below what CBO projected in its August Budget and Economic Outlook because revenues were higher and outlays were lower than expected near the end of the fiscal year.

Building up projected long term deficit as the greatest threat to America's future, especially in the middle of an economic slump, is truly malicious. At a time when smart people should be putting everything they have into figuring out how to create growth and restore a sense of security among the American people, our leaders are tilting at phantom windmills of the distant future. They are basically doing exactly the wrong thing. Well played Mr Peterson.


*Sorry for the long copy and paste of Yglesias' post. Please click over to Slate to read the rest.

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digby 10/09/2012 01:32:00 PM

 
Teaching selfishness

by digby


John Stewart and company turn Sesame Street into a Galtian paradise:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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The bit is funny and pointed, of course. But it also made me just a little bit sad to think that the lesson Grover and the adorable little tyke are talking about is not considered by millions of Americans to be ---- wrong. Teaching kids to be unselfish, to share with those in need is so basic to raising decent human beings that it makes me almost unbearably sad to realize that we live in a society in which millions of people are growing up to scream "suck it up whiners" instead and yell "yeah" when someone asks if a sick man without insurance should die.

Our culture is sick. Deep inside.


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digby 10/09/2012 12:00:00 PM

 
Healthcare, Not Warfare: A Cosmic Thing

by digby

Here's a good ad from Rob Zerban, Paul Ryan's congressional opponent:



Apparently, some of Ryan's supporters are having a fit because it says he wants to "end Medicare." Of course he does. He thinks people who get benefits from the government are parasites.

And speaking of Zerban, Blue America is having another drawing:

This week, PDA and Blue America have teamed up to mark the 12th anniversary of America's violent involvement in Afghanistan by going after two senior Republican militaristic policy-makers who are dead set on extending the occupation of that country, House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon and House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan. Both espouse a radical Austerity agenda that cuts back on human needs for healthcare, education, infrastructure expansion, nutrition, basic research, etc while expanding military spending and continuing to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires. And, shockingly, both have "free passes" to reelection from the DCCC.

Although Obama won both CA-25 and WI-01 in 2008 and is expected to win both districts in November by even greater margins, the DCCC would rather spend money to try to replace powerless backbenchers on the Republican side with conservative New Dems and Blue Dogs than go after key GOP policy makers and replace them with stalwart progressives, in these cases, Dr. Lee Rogers in California and Rob Zerban in Wisconsin. That doesn't sit well with us.

So... who remembers Cosmic Thing by the B-52's? It was the band's best-selling album and had two smash hits, "Love Shack" and "Roam." When the 1989 blockbuster had sold 4 million copies in the U.S., their record company, Reprise, where I was working, celebrated by designing a spectacular, customized, RIAA-certified, quadruple platinum award. Only a few dozen were ever manufactured and it is extremely rare and collectible... especially for a B-52 fan. Do you know any? Christmas is coming up fast.

We're going to pick one random person who contributes-- any amount; no minimum-- to Rob Zerban's and Lee Rogers' campaigns on this page: Healthcare, Not Warfare: A Cosmic Thing. And if you want to have a chance to win and can't afford a contribution, just send us a note at P.O. Box 27201, Los Angeles, CA 90027 and tell us you want in and... you get a chance too.

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digby 10/09/2012 10:30:00 AM

 
Loophole kabuki: Shumer's clever strawman

by digby

As Atrios says, you've got to love the framing of this article:

WASHINGTON — Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the Senate’s third-ranking Democrat, threw cold water Tuesday on what had been an emerging consensus for a bipartisan deficit- reduction plan — an overhaul of the tax code that lowers top income tax rates but raises more revenue. Mr. Schumer’s position greatly complicates efforts to win bipartisan support for a deal before January, when the “fiscal cliff” of tax increases and automatic spending cuts goes into effect.

That bastard, coming along and ruining everything.

But the meat of the article is interesting, because it shows that Shumer is doing no such thing:

In a speech to the National Press Club, Mr. Schumer was set to say he rejected the idea of a tax code overhaul as “little more than happy talk.” Taxes could not be changed to bring in more revenue, lower the top tax rates and still protect the middle class from tax increases, according to excerpts from his speech.

Instead, he will say, the top two income tax rates should be frozen, and any additional revenues generated by closing loopholes and curtailing or eliminating tax deductions and credits should be devoted to deficit reduction.

“It is an alluring prospect to cut taxes on the wealthiest people and somehow still reduce the deficit, but you can’t have your cake and eat it, too,” Mr. Schumer’s prepared remarks said. “The reality is, any path forward on tax reform that promised to cut rates will end up either failing to reduce the deficit or failing to protect the middle class from a net tax increase.”

I think the concern with the deficit at the moment is counter-productive to say the lease, but if they're going to do it, I'm all for keeping tax rates as they are and putting all that money they project from "closing loopholes" toward deficit reduction. Since I think the probability that much money will ever be produced (or produced for very long) that may be the best we can hope for.

As I've written many times, "tax reform" as currently conceived is a scam which will end up starving the government of needed funds and giving the rich even more of a tax break than they already have. The simple fact that so many little Paul Ryans are in favor of it should be a tip off that they are really trying to turn the US into a tax haven for the rich.

Ryan said so explicitly:

As Mother Jones explained:

James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Co., describes offshore tax havens like the "bar scene in Star Wars." He explains, "Dictators and kleptocrats used them to conceal stolen loot. Arms dealers and drug dealers use them to launder their deals. Google and Apple and Pfizer use them to park their intellectual property and pay themselves tax-free royalties. Banks use them to park lousy loans and stash the offshore accounts and assets under management of their wealthy individual clients, many of which are paying zero taxes back home…And so on."

When I say he wants to turn America into a dystopian hellscape I'm not exaggerating. So, when you have someone like Ryan endorsing "tax reform" I'd say watch your wallet. And start looking for a gated community --- with armed guards.

Unfortunately, Shumer is batting at a straw man as far as the so-called fiscal cliff is concerned. There's not been a whole lot of serious talk about tax reform in this round, so I don't know why he's bringing it up unless it's to set up a deal whereby the Republicans agree to some loophole closing in exchange for some benefits and program cutting. That's the vaunted "balanced approach" everyone (except the people) are looking for.

Everyone who's speaking publicly is sending up trial balloons and publicly negotiating right now, so it's almost impossible to know what their real position is going to be. However, if we take them at their word, it's not hard to see what they are doing. They want to "tweak" Social Security, find "savings" in Medicare, "streamline" Medicaid, and "cut out the fat" in various other vital programs to the tune of four trillion dollars or so, all of which will come out of the hides of average citizens in the form of less money, less security, fewer services. Oh, and they're going to ask the rich to "pay a little bit more" too, which Chuck Shumer is saying will come from closing some loopholes in the tax code. This is what they mean by shared sacrifice. Just so you know.


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digby 10/09/2012 08:59:00 AM

 
The P.I.T.Y. Party for the ultra-rich

by David Atkins

Stephen Colbert says what needs to be said:

The Colbert Report
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As Digby and I have been saying for a long time now, it's not enough for these people to own everything while stamping out opportunity for the rest of us. They want to be loved for it. That's why there's an Ayn Rand renaissance, and that's why they've put the little robber baron from Monopoly at the top of the GOP ticket.

Perhaps they're right. Perhaps they've finally reached the point of total insulation from us plebs. But I wouldn't count on it. That sort of hubris has never really worked out well for them over the long run.

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digby 10/09/2012 07:29:00 AM

Monday, October 08, 2012

 
The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming!

by digby

The stupidest "fraud" post you will see all year, courtesy of the valued member of the best political team on television, Erick Erickson:

The President has come under fire for the shoddy verification processing his campaign does for donations.

In light of this Newsweek story about the Illegal-Donor loophole with Team ObamaA while back, among conservatives, it was even a story that he was doing this shoddy credit card verification for overseas donors.

So, after talking with some lawyers about the process, etc. I donated to Barack Obama. Sort of.

It is rare that I do something where I feel the need to talk to lawyers first. But giving money to Barack Obama was one of those times.

I didn't actually do it. I made up a name, made up a passport number, made up an address in Russia -- hell I made everything up except my credit card number and expiration date.

Got that?

Everything was bull**** except the actual credit card number and expiration date. Everything.

Go try that with Target or Amazon or Apple or Mitt Romney's campaign and see what happens. Here's a hint: it'd get rejected.

When the zip code does not match, it would get rejected.

When the name on the card does not match, it will probably get rejected.

When nothing matches, it will get rejected.

Barack Obama's campaign processed my very generous $5.00 donation.

It sounds bad, doesn't it? The Obama campaign took a five dollar donation from some treacherous Russkie! Who knows how much he's into these folks? Why, they might have collected 50 bucks or more.

But the story doesn't end there:

For several days my bank listed it as processing. Then this is where the anti-climactic end to my story comes. The donation ultimately did not go through.

But don't let that get in the way of your amazing tale of intrigue and suspense. Clearly, the Obama campaign is in league with the commies. I mean, we know that. It's just a matter of smokin' 'em out o their caves.

Sure, this may not prove anything. But I don't think it passes the smell test anyway. The minute some foreigner tries to infiltrate America by trying to donate an illegal fiver through an online site, a drone plane ought to zap them with a laser beam where they sit. Why are we fooling around here?

Here's hoping Erickson gets CNN to blow the lid off thing thing before the election.

Oh, and by the way, don't worry your pretty little heads about all the shady Chinese mafia money billionaire Sheldon Adelson has funneled into Romney's campaign, which he openly admits is to shield himself from prosecution.


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digby 10/08/2012 06:30:00 PM

 
Moonstruck

by digby

Oh boy. Andrew Sullivan is really having a hard time dealing with his idol Obama being in a close election. His latest called, "Did Obama Just Throw The Entire Election Away?" is overwrought to say the least.

Here's the advice I sent him on twitter and I'm sending it out to any of you who are similarly frantic.

Oh, and by the way, Sullivan thinks that the only thing that can save Obama is Simpson-Bowles. For real.


digby 10/08/2012 05:30:00 PM

 
The Nanny State wins one

by digby

Keep in mind that we were trying to do this today, the right would be adamantly opposed and insist that the founders are turning over in their graves because the nanny state was trying to strangle human liberty:

Over the past 50 years, after scientists realized that even minute doses of lead can have harmful effects, policymakers have been steadily trying to eradicate the stuff from the environment. In the United States, no one uses lead-based paint or fills up their cars with leaded gasoline anymore—those were banned back in the 1970s and 1980s. Lead levels in the air have dropped 92 percent since that time.

By most accounts, this was a spectacularly savvy investment. There’s ample evidence that lead exposure is extremely damaging to young children. Kids with higher lead levels in their blood tend to behave more aggressively and perform worse at school. Economists have pegged the value of the phase-out in the billions or even trillions of dollars. Some criminologists have even argued that the phase-out of leaded paint and gasoline was a major factor in the steep plunge in U.S. crime during the 1990s.

I remember watching a documentary about lead back in the 70s or 80s and thinking to myself that it must have something to do with the low test scores and other pathologies that everyone was up in arms about during that time. I'll never forget the sight of little toddlers eating chipped lead paint in a housing project. It was heartbreaking. The article above points out that recent studies have born that out.

Despite the improvements, there's still a lot to be done and there's quite a bit of resistance to it. I would guess that's not just because of ideology, but because of money as well, but the anti-science forces have made great strides in the last several decades. In a sane world we'd do a WPA thing and put people to work getting the lead out once and for all, since it's indisputable that it causes so much damage to our children. But we don't live in a sane world, do we?

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digby 10/08/2012 04:30:00 PM

 
Pew poll shows post-debate enthusiasm gap, but perhaps not much else

by David Atkins

The political world is buzzing over the latest Pew poll showing Romney up by four points after the debate. There will also apparently be a PPP poll coming out showing Romney with a national lead as well to confirm the trend (despite some interesting counter-evidence from Gallup showing Obama up by five, a shift back toward Obama from Rasmussen and a static nearly 4-point Obama lead from RAND.)

So the movement is real. But what does the movement tell us? Let's look at the Pew internals for a moment.



First, the bad news: the sample is weighted slightly toward women with 56% of respondents being women. Which means that from that perspective, the numbers for the President should be even worse.

But looking down at the other categories we start to see some eye-popping numbers.

• For starters, a full two-thirds of the respondents were over 50 years old. Is that likely to be the shape of the electorate? Very likely not.
• A full 77% of the respondents were white. That is almost certainly not going to reflect the final electorate.
• A large preponderance of the respondents were from the South (449), with the next highest total from the Midwest (294), and only 219 from the Northeast and 239 from the West. There will not be twice as many voters from the South in the election as from the Northeast or the West.
• Finally, more respondents claimed to be Republicans than Democrats, which would destroy the President's chances in November automatically. It's possible for the final electorate to resemble that Party ID, but unlikely.

Does any of this mean the poll is inaccurate or "skewed"? Not necessarily--and certainly not when it comes to the fluid, enthusiasm-based Party ID number.

What it does seem to mean, however, is that enthusiasm can make a big difference in the polling picture. And that goes in both directions.

Most pollsters don't get more than a 10-12% response rate on their polls, if that. Only the most interested people tend to answer the phone when a pollster calls. So the polling prior to the debate almost certainly overestimated Obama's national lead as dejected conservatives refused to answer the phone, but would likely have trudged to the polling place or sent in their mail ballot regardless.

Similarly, conservative-leaning groups (mostly older, whiter Southerners) seem very excited to answer the phone now.

What all this means is that the election is likely quite close in reality--and always has been. What seems to change more than anything is enthusiasm.

And that in turn means that what matters most is simply turnout. If you'd like to prevent Mitt Romney from taking over the White House, if you want to keep McConnell out of Senate leadership, if you want to put the gavel back in Nancy Pelosi's hands, and if you want to turn back the tide of Republican control of state legislatures across the country, there's only one thing to do: get involved, get on the phones, knock on the doors, and help turn out the vote.

Yelling at the President in online comments isn't going to do anything. Barack Obama is either going to perform well in the following debates or he isn't. But regardless, enthusiasm is still what seems to matter most.

Update from digby:

I just wanted to add this analysis from the Guardian:

Conclusion: we can't take too much from any one poll

There are reasons to believe the Pew poll is probably too pro-Romney. Still, with this normally Democratic-leaning poll, and the Daily Kos- and SEIU-sponsored Public Policy Polling national poll (coming out tomorrow) also having Romney in the lead, it's fairly safe to assume that this is not down to some conservative push to call this race tied.

This is what makes living in a polarized country so invigorating.

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thereisnospoon 10/08/2012 03:00:00 PM

 
Reagan spawn coming of age

by digby

How droll:

“I’d rather be a lady of the evening than a feminist"

Well, it is traditional women's work.

Long is Kristen Gillibrand's opponent, a hardcore Phyllis Schlaffley wannabe:

Ms. Long eventually went to work for The Dartmouth Review, an association that Democrats now point out to portray her as an extreme ideologue. She served as an editor, and during that time, the paper published incendiary articles on issues like race, sexual orientation, affirmative action and what conservatives viewed as the liberal excesses of the day. Ms. Long did not write any of the articles, but she clearly found a home among the self-styled, conservative provocateurs there: “I’d rather be a lady of the evening than a feminist,” she was quoted as saying in an issue of the paper, displaying the satirical edge she has shown on the campaign trail these days...

In 1990, eight years after she graduated, Ms. Long made a trip to Hanover to deal with widespread student and faculty protests that had broken out after The Dartmouth Review printed lines from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” on the eve of Yom Kippur.

Ms. Long, then a trustee of the paper, arrived on campus with Dinesh D’Souza, one of the newspaper’s founders, to hold a news conference, in which they publicly apologized on the paper’s behalf and said that the lines had been slipped into the newspaper without the editors’ knowledge.

In the coming weeks, two of Ms. Long’s more famous classmates, Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio host, and Mr. D’Souza, who just completed a controversial film about President Obama, will hold a fund-raiser for her.

The hardcore right goes way back and this period --- the Reagan years --- was particularly fertile and spawned a great many wingnuts. Many of them are politically coming into their own.

Luckily, Long is not expected to win. It is New York, after all, and Gillibrand is popular. But this is the type of candidate they have on their bench, even in the northeast and far west. It's a problem. For them.

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digby 10/08/2012 01:30:00 PM

 
Tea Party compromise

by digby

My, my my, here's a shocker for you:

Tea party activists are again supporting Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown this election, even though many aren’t thrilled with some of his votes over the past two years.

They say any disappointment with Brown is overshadowed by two bigger factors — the threat posed by Brown’s Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren and the desire to help Republicans seize control of the Senate.

"The bottom line is that he’s a Republican in the Senate," said Ted Tripp of the Merrimack Valley Tea Party. "Republicans have to take control of the Senate so we can stop the liberal agenda and roll back the liberal policies that have been put in place over the past few years."


When Brown staged his surprise win in the 2010 special election for the seat left vacant by the death of longtime U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, some of his earliest and most ardent backers were tea party activists.

Two years later not all tea party supporters are still enamored of Brown, but say they’re backing him as he seeks his first full six-year term.

And to think everyone told us that the Tea Partiers were libertarian iconoclasts who didn't care about the Party and always acted on principle no matter what the consequences.

I get it. They look at Elizabeth Warren and think she's the second coming of Josef Stalin so they'll vote for the turncoat Scott Brown instead, if that's the choice. But still, they were supposed to be the kind of voters who would rather have Stalin than some bipartisan squish. And yet, here they are.

It's probably a good idea to examine the assumptions underlying the legislative positions of these hardcore wingnuts as well. Perhaps it's not what everyone thinks it is.

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digby 10/08/2012 12:30:00 PM

 
The afterlife in tabloids

by digby

When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible --a journey to the afterlife.

From what I hear, these sorts of cover stories sell big. And that's fine. But I never find them persuasive. (I suppose that if years of Sunday School and the Bible didn't do it, Tina Brown surely won't.)

Whenever I see one of them, I can't help but recall this quote from one of these "news stories" back in 2005:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus' resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

That just makes no sense to me whatsoever.

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digby 10/08/2012 11:34:00 AM

 
Pragmatism and White Whales

by digby


Who is Ezra talking about here?

" ______ isn’t an ideological moderate. He’s a pragmatic executive. When he needs to govern from the center, he does. When he needs to lurch to the right, off he goes. So if you want to know how he’ll govern, don’t listen to what he says. Look at who he has reason to fear.

He's talking about Romney but it struck me that he could have just as easily been talking about Obama. But Obama is very different in one important way. He did not run a flip flop campaign in 2008 as Mitt Romney is doing today. He said this explicitly before the inauguration:

"I don't want to get bottled up in a lot of ideology and 'Is this conservative or liberal?' My interest is finding something that works."

He's always been honest about what he was. Romney, not so much. But when you have a rabid right wing and a tepid left wing, I'm afraid the dynamic remains the same, whether the "pragmatic executive" is a Republican or a Democrat, no?

When I read Ezra's piece this morning I couldn't help but be reminded of this wonderful piece by Chris Hayes back in December of 2008 (which I wrote about here) discussing Obama's "pragmatism":

The chief failure of Bushism, according to [Obama adviser Cass]Sunstein, is not its content but its form. Not the substance of ideology but the fact that he was too wedded to it, too rigid and dogmatic. It's a view widely held in Washington. Many, like Sunstein, have drawn a lesson from the past eight years that is not about the failure of conservatism--neo or otherwise--or the dangers of the particularly toxic ideological disposition of the Bush administration, of larding public dollars on your cronies and friends, of exacerbating inequality while gutting regulatory oversight, of eviscerating centuries-old common law protections or of starting pre-emptive wars.

No, through a kind of collective category error, they have alighted on a far more general moral to the story: ideology, in any form, is dangerous. "Obama's victory does not signal a shift in ideology in this country," wrote Roger Simon in Politico. "It signals that the American public has grown weary of ideologies." No less an ideologue than Pat Buchanan has come to this same understanding: "If there is a one root cause to the Bush failures," he wrote, "it has been his fatal embrace of ideology."

If "pragmatic" is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days, "ideological" is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.

He talked about the great liberal assumption that Obama was simply hiding his ideology for political purposes and asked an important question:

[T]here will be moments in the next four years when a principled fight will be required, and if there is an uneasiness rippling through the minds of some progressives, it arises from their doubts about just how willing Obama will be to fight those fights. When a friend of mine decided to run for office this year, someone suggested that he write down a list of positions he wouldn't take, votes he wouldn't cast, then put it in a safe and give someone the key. The idea was that by committing himself in writing to some basic skeletal list of principles, he'd be at least partially anchored against the slippery slope of compromise that so often leads elected officials to lose their way.

Does Obama have such a list? And if so, what's on it?

After four years, do you know the answer to that question?

Hayes, made the point in his piece that ideology is really inevitable and it forms the basis for the decisions of even the most "pragmatic executive". So, if I had to guess at this moment, I'd have to say that he does have a list and at the top of his list is what Matt Yglesias calls his "white whale" -- the Grand Bargain. He's certainly been pursuing it relentlessly since January of 2009. I don't believe that it's a matter of pragmatism --- it's ideology.

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digby 10/08/2012 10:04:00 AM

 
What if Obama had done what Romney is doing?

by David Atkins

A brief thought experiment for a Monday morning:

What if President Obama had spent an entire year campaigning on a $5 trillion stimulus program comprised entirely of government spending? What if that spending were on programs as unpopular, say, as tax cuts for the rich?

And what if, when confronted about the notion that this plan might add to the federal deficit, the President answered that it was revenue neutral, because he promised to cut $5 trillion in other spending to make up for it, even though said spending doesn't exist? What if the President refused to state any of the specifics of the spending that would be cut, even when asked about it directly on a friendly network like MSNBC?

And what would the reaction be if, during the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney called out the President on this spending plan, only to hear back that the President had never suggested any sort of plan like that in the first place? What if the moderator had then refused to interrupt and correct the record, allowing a "he-said-she-said" vacuous argument to take place for 20 minutes?

What would the reaction of the press establishment be? What sort of bias would the media be said to have? Would the President have been awarded a debate victory on the basis of that response?

We have a very, very broken media and political system in this country.


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thereisnospoon 10/08/2012 07:30:00 AM

Sunday, October 07, 2012

 
Virtually Speaking at 6pdt with Joan McCarter and Me

by digby

Digby and Joan McCarter Virtually Speaking Sundays
by Jay Ackroyd Featured Host
in Politics Progressive
Sun, October 7, 2012 06:00PM/pdt

Call in to speak with the host
(646) 200-3440

Joan and digby will talk about the debates and about the future of our social insurance programs, in the wake of the debates.

Culture of Truth satirizes the Sunday Morning 'news' shows at the Bobblespeak Translations. Each week, he provides us with a pre-recorded segment: the most ridiculous moment from that Sunday.


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digby 10/07/2012 05:30:00 PM

 
Goldwater to Ryan to what?

by digby

Elias Isquith has written a piece on Barry Goldwater and Paul Ryan that's filled with interesting insights. And he brings up something important which I don't think most people realize:

The treatise on what Ryan calls the "moral consequences" of the welfare state recalls nothing so much Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. In the surprise bestseller, he warned, "The effect of Welfarism on freedom will be felt later on -- after its beneficiaries have become its victims, after dependence on government has turned into bondage and it is too late to unlock the jail." Ryan's rhetoric is never quite so apocalyptic, but his frequent warnings that his country approaches a threshold "beyond which the Nation will be unable to change course ... [with] disastrous fiscal consequences, and an erosion of economic prosperity and the American character itself" come close.

The Republican Party's antipathy toward the welfare state is well known. Less appreciated is the fact that what really defined Goldwater in the public's eye was his comfort with, or even celebration of, the violence of the state.

Isquith goes on to discuss this in the context of Goldwater's anti-communism and points out that Ryan mouths all the same BS about "exceptionalism" and "not apologizing" on foreign policy and I think he's more than likely to be as bloodthristy as all right wingers when it comes to national security. But I also think Ryan believes in state violence domestically. He has never deviated from the standard authoritarian POV of the conservative mainstream, whether in terms of civil liberties of crime and punishment issues. Goldwater was anxious to kill off communism, but I never got the sense that he thought police violence and incarcerating large numbers of America citizens should be standard operating procedure. (There's not a lot of moral difference there, I grant you, but it does show a difference in scale.)

Isquith goes on to note the most glaring difference between the two avatars of economic freedom: the religious right. Goldwater didn't have any use for them while Ryan goes out of his way to ensure that his Randroid extremism can fit in with their worldview. And increasingly, it does. We've got plenty of Christian right leaders extolling the virtues of low taxes and agitating to end the welfare state these days.

I'm sure Old Barry would still have disliked their incessant desire to meddle in people's personal lives, but Ryan doesn't seem to mind at all. After all, to Goldwater, even the commies were still human beings. Does Ryan think that individual liberty applies to parasites?

In any case, read the whole piece. Let's just say these wingnuts aren't getting any saner with time.

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digby 10/07/2012 04:30:00 PM

 
"Fox News will help you"

by digby

The Republican party of Florida says this call was "off script" but it sure sounds like it was on message to me:

Well think really heard, you all sound like senior citizens, no? …. Yea, you don’t want Obama, you don’t want Obama because he’ll get rid of your Medicare. You might as well say goodbye to it. … Yea, and I don’t know if you have done any research on Obama or not, but he is a Muslim. He has got a socialistic view on the government, economy, the whole nine yards. If he had his way, we would be a socialistic country. …. Pay attention to Fox News. If you can get out and watch that movie 2016, do so, it has a lot of really good information. Just really read the newspapers and Fox News will help you.

This is what Fox news and talk radio say all day long. Even the Muslim stuff is easily tolerated on the network and the rest is by the book Fox commentary. Rush, Hannity and the rest as well.

I would guess that there are many Romney volunteers who are saying this all over the country. They believe it.


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digby 10/07/2012 03:00:00 PM

 
So much for the Year of the Woman

by digby

Chris Hayes and his panel today talked about the most mystifying omissions in the debate:

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Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I think Hayes is right and that the President didn't prepare. Confidence is a necessary trait in a president, but I think his achilles heel is believing his own hype. And I think the hype was that he was good at debating and Romney isn't. Unfortunately for us, losing a presidential debate to Mitt Romney is probably the least significant negative consequence of this particular character trait.

I personally don't think this debate means as much as some people do. I get why the right is having a field day. If the Democrats were the underdogs, they'd be doing the same happy dance if their guy trounced the Republican in the first presidential debate. It's natural. If the polls show a substantial shift over the next couple of weeks in Romney's favor, then I suppose this will have been an important event. But, unless Obama screws the pooch in the rest of the debates I'd be surprised if it ends up being a big deal.


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digby 10/07/2012 01:30:00 PM

 
A proposal to change the structure of debates

by digby

Considering the fact that the Republicans have openly admitted that they lie in presidential debates and don't care if they are fact-checked, perhaps something needs to be done to change them. Michael Froomkin has an interesting proposal:

Can something be done to prevent lying in Presidential debates? I have a simple suggestion that will greatly reduce the opportunity for lies, admitting that nothing can eradicate them completely: The moderator’s key questions on the issues should be released to the candidates and the public 48 hours in advance of the debates.

It is silly to think that the element of surprise adds value to these events. Allow the candidates to do scripted talks and then have the surprises be the back and forth as they interact and ask each other followups. Allow followups from the moderator if you trust him or her to be less milquetoast than the hapless Jim Lehrer. But if you must have surprise as to the basic questions, reduce it to a fraction of the event.

Releasing at least a substantial fraction of the questions in advance will unleash the fact-checkers on all sides. It will promote debate. It will allow campaigns to set up web sites in which they give backup for their claims. In a more perfect world than we actually have, we could aim for a week in advance, and hope that a consensus dataset would evolve in real rather than nominal dollars, but I know that is just an academic pipe dream. It won’t happen, and a week is a long time in politics anyway.

Of course, the two campaigns control the debate formats and they'll never agree. But it's just possible that if for some reason the media had a collective epiphany and decided to do their jobs, they could insist which would mean the candidates would have to choose between cancelling the debates (no great loss to the public considering what mendacious kabuki pageants they currently are) or adhering to these new rules. Scroll down to the post below to see why I am very pessimistic about that possibility.


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digby 10/07/2012 11:00:00 AM

 
The Villagers circle the wagons

by digby

It's one thing for each side in the political divide to accuse the other of lying. But when someone suggests that the press is partly responsible for the fact that Americans are being misinformed, just watch the fur fly. Here's the entire This Week panel attacking Paul Krugman for suggesting the press fell down on the job in reporting Romney's epic lie fest in the debate:

This was on and on and on, with Matalin sneeringly referring to Krugman as "doctor professsssser" as if that was synonymous with child molester. I especially love walking cliche Jonathan Karl jumping in with the "he said/she said." If you wrote him as a character in The Newsroom, we'd consider him a cartoon --- even by that show's standards.

Here's an example of Matalin the arbiter of truth:

MATALIN: You have mischaracterized and you have lied about every position and every particular of the Ryan plan on Medicare, from the efficiency of Medicare administration, to calling it a voucher plan, so you’re hardly credible on calling somebody else a liar.

Think Progress:

But this is exactly what the Ryan proposal is — turning Medicare from a “defined benefit” into a “defined contribution” plan. Seniors would get a voucher from the federal government that they could use to help pay for a selection of private plans.

Although the Romney/Ryan campaign has shied away from this phrase in favor of the euphemistic “premium support,” Ryan himself has specifically referred to his proposal as a “voucher” program in the past.

The woman has chutzpah.

I also enjoyed Carville saying the good news is that the Republican base is fully embracing Romney and so will not be able to disavow him if he loses. Shortly thereafter, Peggy Noonan lugubriously declared that the Romney who showed up at the debate was the grown-up, reasonable moderate Governor of Massachusetts. Does anyone believe that those two comments compute?

All in all, this show made me miss Ann Coulter. I don't think I need to explain just how bad that makes this particular show.

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digby 10/07/2012 09:18:00 AM

 
Drowning in a dwindling sea of white

by David Atkins

L.A. Times photographer Maeve Reston was at the Romney rally in Florida yesterday, and took this photo, which copyright restrictions don't allow me to paste.

So go look at it..

What do you see? Or, more precisely, what do you not see?

Mitt Romney may or may not squeak out this election against a vulnerable president. Probably not. But one thing is certain: this will be the last time anyone tries to do this. Many of those in that photograph won't be around to vote four years from now. And many more progressive voters will be in the ranks.

They'll try to paper it over with different looking candidates, but it will still be a losing proposition for them.


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thereisnospoon 10/07/2012 07:30:00 AM

Saturday, October 06, 2012

 

Saturday Night At The Movies Will it go round in circles? By Dennis Hartley

My dinner with me: Willis and Gordon-Levitt in Looper

 

If there’s one cardinal rule of time-travel that I’ve gleaned from watching sci-fi movies over the years, it’s this: make sure that you never, ever “meet” yourself. Why? Dunno, really, just that you’re not supposed to. I imagine it could be quite unnerving, in either direction. I mean, it’s traumatic enough looking at that dorky version of my younger self in that yearbook photo, and who in their right mind is chomping at the bit to get a sneak preview of themselves in drooling dotage? In his stylish and ultra-violent sci-fi thriller Looper, writer-director Rian Johnson not only gleefully breaks the cardinal rule, but manages to violate a few that haven’t been invented yet (see what I did there?). Johnson has himself a jolly time exploring the potential fluidity of the time-space continuum, toying with causality and paradox like a kitten batting a ball of yarn all around the room.

The year is 2044, and America is a dystopia (it took that long?). The economy has gone 2008 for good, crime is rampant and 1 out of every 10 people has a mutation that gives them the power to levitate objects at will (although for a majority of the afflicted, their abilities are limited to the occasional Uri Geller level parlor trick). Jobs are scarce; the biggest “job creator” is organized crime (again…it took that long?). And yes, they still have plenty of gigs for hit men in the future; especially for a unique subset known as “loopers”. Loopers have a relatively easy time of it; unlike your standard assassin, who has to meticulously plan the right time and the right place to do a hit, the looper simply shows up for “work” at a designated spot, where the target (bound, hooded and festooned with a set of silver bars) is delivered to him like an overnight FedEx package…from 30 years in the future (don’t ask…just enjoy your delicious buttered popcorn and accept it).

Pretty easy job, wouldn’t you say? The hours are good, the wages are decent, and loopers party like rock stars when they go out on the town. However, there is a calculated risk every looper takes by choosing this career path. “Retirement” (at least in the traditional sense) isn’t necessarily part of the equation. Should your bosses (who can be a fickle lot) determine that for whatever reason your services will no longer be required, they send the older version of yourself back to the present so that your younger self can take you out. This is referred to by the higher-ups as “closing the loop”. Naturally, they don’t give you a heads up; it’s just another anonymous hooded victim who appears out of thin air in the middle of a cornfield somewhere in Kansas. Either way you look at it, you never see it coming. Ergo, as looper Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) confides with self-effacing irony in the opening voiceover, this is not a profession that tends to attract “forward-thinkers”. Joe does have plans; he’s stashing all his silver bars and learning to speak French. Everything is going swimmingly for young Joe until that one fateful day in the cornfield, when his Victim du jour turns out to be… “old” Joe (Bruce Willis), who manages to flee.  Uh-oh.

As it is nearly impossible to divulge further plot detail without dropping a trail of spoilers in my wake, I’ll leave it there, and let you discover and enjoy the surprising twists and turns in your own time (in a manner of speaking). While there are some obvious touchstones here (primarily 12 Monkeys, The Terminator  and Logan's Run , with a few echoes of Groundhog Day.) Johnson has fashioned a clever and original thriller that’s smarter than your average modern sci-fi actioner, yet not so self-consciously “meaningful” as to drown in its own self-importance (the director has not forgotten to entertain the audience along the way). Most notably, there’s an emphasis on character development (remember that?) and a palpable focus on the quality of the writing that is sorely lacking in most genre entries these days. The production design, special effects and atmospheric flourishes are “futuristic” without going over the top. It’s the little touches I especially enjoyed, like the fact that the time travel device is clearly modeled after George Pal’s design for his 1960 version of Time Machine . Gordon-Levitt and Willis are terrific, and there are strong supporting performances from Jeff Daniels and Emily Blunt. See it now. See it later; it doesn’t really matter (time being relative and all).

Saturday Night at the Movies review archives

Dennis Hartley 10/06/2012 05:30:00 PM