Month: June 2010

“Big Case of Bluffing and BS”

by digby

Fox and Matthews are still on Sestak. And so is the White House press corps, asking Gibbs about it today.

Matthews said that “something went on between Bill Clinton, Rahm Emmanual and Joe Sestak,” but admitted that it doesn’t seem criminal. Then he asked Joan Walsh why the White House can’t seem to shake this scandal. Joan rightly replied that the press won’t let them.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are demanding more documents. And the beat goes on:

Administration officials dangled the possibility of a job for former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff last year in hopes he would forgo a challenge to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, administration officials said Wednesday, just days after the White House admitted orchestrating a similar job offer in the Pennsylvania Senate race.

These officials declined to specify the job that was floated or the name of the administration official who approached Romanoff, and said no formal offer was ever made. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not cleared to discuss private conversations.

The episode follows a similar controversy in Pennsylvania, where the White House last year turned to former President Bill Clinton to suggest Rep. Joe Sestak back out of another primary in favor of an unpaid position on a federal advisory board.

Yup.

Now I happen to think the Democratic establishment should let the people decide rather than try to muscle out challengers. But the Republicans and the press Claud Rainsing themselves into hysterics over something that has been happening since the dawn of democracy is absurd. I seriously doubt that even one of them give a damn about any of that. What they are trying to do is cover the Dems with dirt, adding on layer after layer until they are covered with irrelevant filth, thus misdirecting the people from the real problems (including real bipartisan corruption) they face.

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Cartoon Security

by digby

What is going on in this country? Do people think we are living in a damned movie?

How’s this for an ill-conceived emergency preparedness drill? An off-duty cop pretending to be a terrorist stormed into a hospital intensive care unit brandishing a handgun, which he pointed at nurses while herding them down a corridor and into a room. There, after harrowing moments, he explained that the whole caper was a training exercise. The staff at St. Rose Dominican Hospitals-Siena Campus, where the incident took place Monday morning, found the exercise more traumatizing than instructive. Hospital employees would have been justified in fearing for their lives. Just last year, Henderson police shot and killed an armed, hostile man in the emergency room. So it would make sense that security and emergency preparedness have been a focus at the hospital. But in Monday’s incident, which occurred in a unit that houses the hospital’s sickest patients, nurses, patients and their families did not know it was a drill, said Renee Ruiz, organizer of the California Nurses Association, which represents staff at the hospital.

I guess it’s a good thing Glenn Reynolds and the boyz haven’t had their way or all the armed nurses and critically ill patients would have opened fire on this off duty cop. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?

I just don’t get this mentality. Yes, there are dangers in this world. And we all need to be vigilant against crazy people armed with easy-to-obtain guns. But somehow or another with this puerile Jack Bauer obsession, common sense about violence has gone out the window and everybody’s acting like we’re living in the wild west — except that even the wild west wasn’t this kind of stupid free-for-all. (Wyatt Earp was first made famous as a lawman who confiscated cowboys’ guns on their way into town.)

Sadly, I’m beginning to think all this craziness is the natural result of emotionally stunted conservatives having a mid-life crisis. They pretended to be adults their whole lives, but never actually grew up. So now we have a whole bunch of frustrated, middle aged adolescents running things with no sense of morality or limits.

h/t to ms

The Energy Expert

by digby

She’s into nuance:

Extreme Greenies:see now why we push “drill,baby,drill” of known reserves & promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?

SarahPalinUSA
Sarah Palin

I guess I forgot to read the fine print under “drill, baby, drill.” My bad. I obviously wasn’t paying close enough attention.

TPM reminds us that the energy expert Palin hasn’t been so nuanced in the past about this:

[J]ust two months ago, in a widely circulated missive, Palin attacked President Obama’s plan to open up large swaths of the U.S. coastline to potential drilling for being too little, too late. “[L]et’s not forget,” she wrote, “that while Interior Department bureaucrats continue to hold up actual offshore drilling from taking place, Russia is moving full steam ahead on Arctic drilling, and China, Russia, and Venezuela are buying leases off the coast of Cuba.

And then there’s this from March, 2009:

Salazar went to Alaska this week as part of the process of developing this administration’s offshore energy plan. He has called a time out on new leasing, for more public input, and he got plenty Tuesday. Whaling captain and mayor of the North Slope Borough Edward Itta advised slowing down: “Mr. Secretary, like all Alaskans, the people of the North Slope depend on the economic engine of oil and gas development. We have supported onshore for well over 30 years now. But, Mr. Secretary, offshore is a different matter.” Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin advised speeding up: “Delays or major restrictions in accessing our needed resources for environmentally responsible development are not in the nation’s or our state’s best interest.”Shell’s Slaiby says the industry has learned from problems like the Exxon Valdez spill. Of the total volume of oil, less than 1 percent ends up in the oceans, he says. And, he says, more than 100 exploratory wells have been drilled in U.S. and Canadian Arctic waters without a single accident.

Ooops.

Somebody needs to ask Palin whether she still thinks Shell should be able to start its offshore exploration in Alaska (which the administration has delayed in the wake of the Gulf disaster):

Robert has been asking one simple question: If there were a Gulf-like disaster, could spilled oil in the Arctic Ocean actually be cleaned up? He’s asked it in numerous venues — at Shell’s Annual General Meeting in The Hague in 2008, for instance, and at the Arctic Frontiers Conference in Tromsø, Norway, that same year. At Tromsø, Larry Persily — then associate director of the Washington office of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and since December 2009, the federal natural gas pipeline coordinator in the Obama administration — gave a 20-minute talk on the role oil revenue plays in Alaska’s economy. During the question-and-answer period afterwards, Robert typically asked: “Can oil be cleaned up in the Arctic Ocean? And if you can’t answer yes, or if it can’t be cleaned up, why are you involved in leasing this land? And I’d also like to know if there are any studies on oil toxicity in the Arctic Ocean, and how long will it take for oil there to break down to where it’s not harmful to our marine environment?” Persily responded: “I think everyone agrees that there is no good way to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice. I have not read anyone disagreeing with that statement, so you’re correct on that. As far as why the federal government and the state government want to lease offshore, I’m not prepared to answer that. They’re not my leases, to be real honest with everyone.” A month after that conference, Shell paid an unprecedented $2.1 billion to the MMS for oil leases in the Chukchi Sea. In October and December 2009, MMS approved Shell’s plan to drill five exploratory wells. In the permit it issued, the MMS concluded that a large spill was “too remote and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis, even though the agency acknowledged that such a spill could have devastating consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to clean up.

I don ‘t think this so-called energy expert is someone we should be listening to any more than the energy experts in the oil industry who have been insisting for years that the Titanic is unsinkable. Why should anyone believe a word these people say at this point?

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Taking Advantage Of The Moment

by digby

Dean Baker:

[M]any members of Congress are doing far more damage to the country with their mindless pursuit of deficit reduction in the middle of the worst downturn in 70 years. This push for deficit reduction could do more damage to the economy and cost more jobs than 1,000 Bridges to Nowhere.

The basic story is straightforward and should be well known to anyone in a policy position. The collapse of the housing bubble reduced annual demand from the private sector by almost $1 trillion. Huge overbuilding of both residential and non-residential real estate led to a falloff in annual construction spending of close to $500 billion. The loss of more than $6 trillion of housing bubble wealth has forced consumers to cut back their annual consumption spending by close to $500 billion.

The only force that can replace this $1 trillion shortfall in demand is the federal government. The government can spend based on the confidence of the public in the long-term strength of the U.S. economy. This means that it can run large deficits with little fear of either the sort of investor panic that has recently afflicted the Greek economy or inflation.

With the unemployment rate near 10 percent and the vast amounts of idle capacity almost everywhere, we have more to fear from deflation than inflation. All measures show that inflation is very low and falling, as would be expected in an economy with so much slack.

There you have it, a nice easy to understand explanation of our current situation.

Now for the ongoing sabotage and idiocy of the deficit hawks:

In spite of a situation that demands more government stimulus to boost the economy, deficit hawks in Congress are now demanding cuts in spending to reduce the size of the deficit. This effort will slow growth and throw people out of work. Therefore these deficit hawks deserve serious ridicule for doing so much harm to workers and their families.

Today’s object of special ridicule is Pennsylvania Congressman Jason Altmire. Mr. Altmire insisted on paring back a package of unemployment benefits and aid to deficit strapped state governments. Altmire told the Washington Post: “We’ve hit the wall. We’ve come to the tipping point where we’re not going to do anymore… I think the case can be made that there are still more people who need jobs than there are jobs available. … But what’s the limit?”

That’s pretty good. The unemployment rate is at 9.9 percent. Prior to the recession, unemployment had not been this high in 27 years, and Mr. Altmire thinks: “the case can be made that there are still more people who need jobs than there are jobs available.”

This is not a marginal call. It’s kind of like saying that AIG may have become somewhat over-extended. Unfortunately, Mr. Altmire has apparently left planet earth and decided that his top priority is reducing the size of a supplemental appropriations bill… This will throw more than 300,000 people out of work.

[…]

In fairness, Representative Altmire probably doesn’t know squat about the economy. He probably just takes his cue from wealthy friends who enjoy muttering about “fiscal responsibility” when the issue is items like unemployment benefits and aid to state and local governments.

But, ignorance is not much of an excuse when you are crafting economic policy. Because of Mr. Altmire’s blind pursuit of deficit reduction, hundreds of thousands of people will suffer needlessly and the nation as a whole will see growth curtailed. If ridicule were proportional to the damage done by their policies, given the treatment of Senator Stevens, we would have to start a new television network dedicated to this purpose to ensure that Representative Altmire received the proper level of ridicule.

It will definitely have to be a new TV network because the existing ones are all in full blown deficit fever and are unlikely to recover.

I know it’s a cliche at the point, but this really is a shock doctrine move. The worst economic downturn in seventy years, natural disaster everywhere, two confusing and exhausting wars and more have created a very fertile environment in which to push through this policy. And they are doing it, along with the help of useful idiots who think that if they just do a little tweaking of the safety net today, the right will be completely disarmed and everything will be perfect. It’s a very scary, perfect storm.

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Tales From The New Depression

by tristero

Today in the Times, Robert Reich discusses the strange surge in entrepreneurship and start-ups during the Great Recession:

LAST year was a fabulous one for entrepreneurs, at least according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity released last month by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “Rather than making history for its deep recession and record unemployment,” the foundation reported, “2009 might instead be remembered as the year business startups reached their highest level in 14 years — even exceeding the number of startups during the peak 1999-2000 technology boom.”

Another surprise is the age of these new entrepreneurs. According to the report, most of the growth in startups was propelled by 35- to 44-year-olds, followed by people 55 to 64. Forget Internet whiz kids in their 20’s. It’s the gray-heads who are taking the reins of the new startup economy. And if you thought minorities had been hit particularly hard by this awful recession, think again. According to the report, entrepreneurship increased more among African-Americans than among whites.

Well, that sounds kind of cool, right, my fellow Americans? Strike out on your own! It’s the American way! Be your own boss! There are fortunes to be made!!! Except…

That’s just not what’s happening. There hasn’t been an increase in that Leave To Reagan (or was it Beaver? I get them confused) go-it-alone can-do spirit. Nope. It’s just plain unemployment:

Booted off company payrolls, millions of Americans had no choice but to try selling themselves. Another term for “entrepreneur” is “self-employed.”

According to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics by an outplacement firm, Challenger Gray & Christmas, the number of self-employed Americans rose to 8.9 million last December, up from 8.7 million a year earlier. Self-employment among those 55 to 64 rose to nearly two million, 5 percent higher than in 2008. Among people over 65, the ranks of the self-employed swelled 29 percent. Many older people who had expected to retire discovered their 401(k)’s had shrunk and their homes were worthless. So they became “entrepreneurs,” too.

But many folks who are actually working under the rubric “self-employed” aren’t, by any serious definition, self-employed. No, they are hired by companies but are classified as such so that companies can skip out on paying health insurance and other benefits. And of course, the temp agency that places them in their old job, or similar ones, grabs a piece of their income. Is this a great country or what?

Reich’s article illustrates all this by referring to the fate of a friend of his, some white-collar middle-management type, apparently. It’s a familiar, sad story. But, as it happens, there’s even a better example in today’s Times of exactly what the increase in “entrepreneurship” means. Julia Moskin’s article begins in the slightly breathless style that characterizes much “soft” journalism found in the dining section, with the spare – and therefore very effective – use of an effusive adjective or two to heighten the scene. But…well, you’ll see:

THEY carry home-grown radishes and red-cooked pork. They transport dozens of empanadas, juggling sheet pans on the G train. They pack boxes of butterscotch cupcakes, Sichuan-spiced beef jerky and grapefruit marmalade. They haul boiled peanuts, ice-grinding machines, sandwich presses and at least one toaster oven painted hot pink.

One Saturday morning each month, the vendors of the Greenpoint Food Market converge on the Church of the Messiah in Brooklyn.

“This is my investment in the future right now,” said Fabiana Lee, 26, an interior designer who lost her job in 2009. She has been selling at the Greenpoint market since its inception in October. After experimenting with cookies (too much competition), she has pared her offerings down to two: gorgeously browned empanadas and irresistibly twee “cake pops,” golf-ball-size rounds of cake perched on lollipop sticks. At the moment, they are her main source of income.

Young, college-educated, Internet-savvy, unemployed and hoping to find a place in the food world outside the traditional route, she is typical of the city’s dozens of new food entrepreneurs. As the next generation of cooks comes of age, it seems that many might bypass restaurant kitchens altogether. Instead, they see themselves driving trucks full of artisanal cheese around the country, founding organic breweries, bartering vegan pâtés for grass-fed local beef, or (most often) making it big in baking as the next Magnolia Bakery.

There are many things to be said about this passage. First of all, this is skilled, subtle reporting. After hitting our senses hard with visions of piles of “gorgeously browned empanadas” and irresistible cake pops, our drooling tongues are guiltily pulled back into our mouths when we learn that this 26-year-old’s sole source of income is producing small quantities of this very labor-intensive yuppie snack food.

Please don’t misunderstand me. By this time, I hope my respect for artisanal foods, and the people who make and eat them, can be taken for granted. If not, let me state categorically that I am sure that I would love Ms. Lee’s food and I have the utmost respect for the high quality of her wares. However, that doesn’t change the economic facts here. She has, apparently, exactly one day a month to sell her food, only pretty upscale people can afford to buy her products, and she takes home $500 on a good day. This is day-to-day living, New York-style, in the 21st Century, and it’s very frightening to contemplate.

And there’s more scary stuff in this passage than that. Did it register? These new food “entrepreneurs” don’t have any access to capital. Moskin reports they aren’t opening up bakeries or little shops. Translated, that means that not only is real estate too expensive but that these well-educated, deeply committed, hard-working people can’t – not won’t, but can’t – qualify for business loans. Not only do they not have jobs. They don’t have assets.

This is what Reich is talking about when he says the spurt in entrepreneurship is utterly misleading. At the end of the article Moskin, sticks the knife in and twists it:

At the end of the day, said Ms. Asselin, the vendors are very tired, very thirsty (much of the food is very sweet, very salty or both) and not much richer.

“It’s hard work,” said Hannah Goldberg, speaking about her time at the Hester Street Fair. “Our ancestors came through the Lower East Side to find a better life, and our parents think it’s crazy that we’re back here selling from a pushcart.”

Thus the effects of 8 years of conservative misrule, unrestrained and utterly corrupt financial markets, and a public discourse that provides non-stop, exclusive exposure for conservative/corporate propaganda with no disputation.* Even if Obama had a less compromised financial team, Bushism bequeathed him a well-nigh impossible hand.

Super Fail

by digby

Anyone who doesn’t think it’s a good idea to end the filibuster in this era of hyperpartisanship should read this essay about how well the “supermajority” concept has worked in California:

You don’t need to know anything about electricity to understand what’s wrong with Proposition 16, the initiative sponsored by the parent company of the Northern California utility PG&E, on the June 8 ballot. You only need to know California’s tortured history with supermajorities.

Proposition 16 would establish a new supermajority requirement in the state Constitution by mandating that local governments get approval from two-thirds of their voters before starting or expanding a public power agency. Proposition 16’s text, and the website of its sponsors, embraces the conventional wisdom that supermajorities are essential to preventing government from taking on debt, ensuring local control and promoting democracy and the rights of voters.

Of course, Californians, if they so choose next month, may approve Proposition 16’s supermajority with a simple majority. This is depressingly familiar. For more than 30 years, powerful interests have sought supermajority protections for themselves in majority vote elections. In the process, these interests, with the assent of a self-destructive electorate, have created a supermajority-saturated state Constitution that makes California virtually impossible to govern.

As California goes …

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Gun Control Pulls The Trigger

by digby

Instaputz notes the sick reaction of the Ole Perfesser to the news of shootings in Chicago over the week-end:

Sun-Times:

Six people were killed and at least three dozen wounded in acts of violence — mainly shootings — throughout the city of Chicago over the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

Putz’s reaction:

SO HOW’S THAT CHICAGO GUN CONTROL LAW WORKING?

Certainly Glenn Reynolds believes that gun control doesn’t solve the problem of gun crime, but from the snotty tone, it also appears that he holds gun control advocates responsible for the deaths themselves. I guess he really believes that if everybody were armed nobody would ever fire their weapons. Why these guys think that I will never understand. It’s as if they actually think that violence is always a rational act. Maybe in Libertarian Disneyland that’s true, but here on planet earth, people’s passions often get the best of them and when that happens, if guns are present, some people are likely to get shot.

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“It’s fascinating. It Just Is”

by digby

Oh dear god, how much I loathe and despise the Villagers at times like this. Here’s the back and forth on Hardball today about Al and Tipper breaking up:

Matthews: Lois [Romano, Washington Post] did this surprise you? Was this something out of nowhere?

Romano: It totally surprised me because they bought a nine million dollar house just last month for a winter vacation home. It shocked even their closest friends …

Matthews: Where did they buy the house?

Romano: California Montecito. It’s a five bedroom ocean front house. So …

Matthews: wow. Well they’re loaded right now, they’re doing very well.

Romano: And they celebrated their 40th anniversary two weeks ago so no one knows where this came from.

Yes. Who knows where it came from. It could be anything. Why I didn’t know a thing about it.

Matthews: Let me go now to John Harris, you’re an expert on the Clintons. [yep …]

There’s a certain irony here well, that’s obvious, but let’s go on. Your thoughts.

Harris: The Clintons, well everyone was fascinated by their marital problems, but they seemed like something out of a tabloid, remote from the circumstances or even the understanding of a lot of people.

But the Gores always seemed very human. I think that their lives and the difficulties they faced were very familiar and very accessible and I think that’s why people are going to be very struck by this news and upset by it.

Yes, nobody in the country could relate to a marriage in which the husband had affairs and yet they ended up staying together. Shocking stuff! Bizarre and freakish even. Why no one in the Village has ever heard of such a thing. (My god, what’s happened to the morals in this country?)

Meanwhile, let’s just make up some stuff up out of whole cloth about Al and Tipper since we really have nothing juicy on them (yet.)

Romano: You know one thing Chris to think about is that there have been two distinct phases in Al Gore’s life. The first 30 years with Tipper they had a common goal, it might not have been her goal, but it was a common goal nonetheless and it was fight for the presidency. Once that was over they had to kind of pivot and maybe they just didn’t pivot together. Maybe she had to find some interests too.

Matthews: When he did that thing with Inconvenient Truth, did she get into that whole thing about climate change with him?

Romano: No she didn’t. She does her own stuff. She does music and she does her photography. She sees friends. She has an active life, but she’s under the radar.

Mattthews: This could be just a question of different personalities. I mean I know them but I don’t really know them. I know them like a lot of people know them. Tipper’s very likable, she’s fun. Al’s deadly serious. He can be fun.

John this thing about this … I don’t even know why we’re talking about this except it’s fascinating, it just is. This was the stable old girlfriend, met her in school, the sweetheart, the obvious connection between the two of them, they seem very regular, in love and this thing ends and other more complicated relations survive.

Oh goody the Clenis!

There it is, a sort of ironic picture. [Bill and Hill, Al and Tipper, of course] Who would have predicted which marriage would survive all these years and there it is, the Clintons beating out the competition, if you will. I don’t want to be lighthearted about this, but who knows what’s going on?

Harris: Well, Chris all the relationships are complicated, the Clintons and the Gores. But just to echo one point that Lois made. Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton always did have a shared project, which was the Clinton brand and their ambition on the national stage. Even at the most difficult period they have that shared bond. I think in the Gores’s case, both of them had some degree of ambivalence about public life and I think that was especially true of Tipper who sometimes seemed to wilt under the public spotlight.

Matthews: You’re so smart Harris! That is so smart! Bill and Hillary are committed to public policy as their primary aim in life, they are good at it, they are good at the politics, they are good at the policy, they are wonks to the core and they’re committed to the core, not to making money but to public life itself. Whereas the Gores I think you do see, even with Al, the way he accepted defeat in 2000, there’s something wistful about that guy.

That really is brilliant. The fact that it’s been a cliche since sometime around March of 1992 doesn’t make it any less brilliant, either. It never gets old.

But there is something wrong with Al. We’ve always known that. And the equally brilliant Romano then gave us a recitation of conventional wisdom so stale that even Matthews forgot why he’s supposed to care:

Romano: Well he was on a track put there by his father, everything was one step closer to that. And privately he was a different man. He was a funny, engaging man private but kind of rigid and I think he just became the person he was going to become after he lost the presidency in 2000 and she developed her interests. You know he said once that he was very lucky that at every stage of their life they found each other and maybe this time they just couldn’t.

Matthews: I’m looking at myself in the camera and I’m saying, “I don’t understand what I’m talking about here.” I am so far beyond what I know anything about here. I’m a political watcher.

Luckily his producer runs the infamous kiss at that moment and Chris gets a little tingle up the leg:

It’s only fascinating because that kiss I guess. Let’s be honest that was the iconic event of the 2000 election in many ways.

Romano: Well it was his lesson to the world that “I have a good marriage” and almost a counter to what the Clintons had going on.

Matthews: (video of kiss playing) Look at that, it’s wolverine stuff, I mean what is this thing? What was that about? And it did go on much longer than what we’re showing here, by the way. [no it didn’t]

Can someone explain what “wolverine stuff” is? Is this a porno reference that I’m too old and out of it to know about? (The thought that Matthews does know about it makes me slightly nauseous.)

Harris: Well, they uh, obviously didn’t get any points for subtlety about that lengthy PDA at the Democratic convention in LA, and it was a very scripted moment I believe. But I do think it was genuine and unscripted that she humanized Al Gore who was, as he would joke, wooden and …

Matthews: I’ve got to break in here with the big news for people that can talk about this show tonight, Brook Bowers [sp?], one of our top producers just said in my ear that there has never been a recorded case of a divorce by a president or a vice president after they left office.

I’m sorry, Aaron Burr, well that’s the Gore Vidal situation.

Romano: Wow. That’s very interesting.

Matthews: I don’t know what that meant …

Neither does anyone else, believe me.

I did not make any of that up. He concluded the show with a final Deep Thought in which he related a quote from his old boss Tip O’Neill who told him “no one knows what’s in a man’s heart,” after which he babbled some more about the Gores.

Once again,in case you forgot, this man makes five million dollars a year.

Update: Here’s a little reminder of Chris “no one knows what’s in a man’s heart” Matthews from a couple years ago:

MATTHEWS: Let’s talk about the front page of The New York Times today, at the very top of the fold. I mean, it’s right up there at the banner, the Clinton marriage, “For the Clintons, delicate dance of married and public lives.” This is the most teasing story I’ve come across in The New York Times in a long time, the paper of record…

It was very carefully reported. Let me read you a quote from the Clintons — the two, the senator and the former president. It’s quite an interesting quote here: “She is an active senator who, like most members of Congress, has to be in Washington for part of most weeks. He is a former president running a multimillion-dollar global foundation. But their home is in New York, and they do everything they can to be together there or at their house in D.C. as often as possible — often going to great lengths to do so. When their work schedules require that they be apart, they talk all the time.” That’s a very defensive, formalized statement, isn’t it, Bob?

HERBERT: I mean, I really don’t know. It sounds to me — I read it, and I didn’t look for a hidden agenda, honestly. I read that as —

MATTHEWS: OK. You don’t think it’s setting them up for a different lifestyle? I thought it was saying —

HERBERT: I read that as —

MATTHEWS: OK.

HERBERT: — a reasonable, accurate depiction of what’s going on.

MATTHEWS: Could it be — to avoid all this kind of speculation that we’re already involved in, and I take responsibility — well, I share it with The New York Times here — Michael, that what they’re really saying, the official spokespeople for these two impressive people, is that they’re saying, “Don’t count on Bill Clinton living in the White House if Hillary gets elected. He’s got to run a big, multimillion dollars — they say, the spokesmen say — foundation. He’s got a lot of responsibilities up in New York City at his office up there, so don’t count on him being like a househusband or a first gentleman.”

SMERCONISH: No way.

MATTHEWS: Is that what they’re setting up here?

SMERCONISH: No, what they were saying is that most guys escape to the golf course to get away from their wives, and in his case, she’s in the United States Senate, and that’s his excuse.

HERBERT: Well, I don’t think they’re saying that he won’t be, you know, the first husband. I mean, I think that Bill Clinton is such a political junkie that he won’t be able to stay away if Hillary is president.

MATTHEWS: Well, I hate being away from my wife more than a day or two, but thank you, Michael. You obviously don’t mind that at all. Anyway, Bob Herbert, you go home and face her now.

There was much more of course. Years and years more of this nonsensical gossip about the Clinton marriage and the “meaning” of Al and Tipper’s smooch and all the rest. It’s just how they roll.

And it’s so mind numbingly stupid I have to go and wash my brain out with a strong mojito after transcribing that whole idiotic segment.

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They’ll Love Us If We Just Hurt Them Enough

by digby

In addition to Brad DeLong’s disturbing musings about the current deficit fever breaking out among the beltway elite, which I wrote about earlier this morning, here are a couple of other articles on the subject which are worth reading as we try to sort out just what is going on here.

Here’s Neil Irwin at the Washington Post making a very interesting observation about the common wisdom that says the bond market will collapse if the US doesn’t get its deficit under control immediately:

The U.S. government debt is rising inexorably, according to the conventional wisdom in Washington, and the political system is too paralyzed to take unpopular actions to rein it in. Privately, many policymakers take it as a given that the situation will change only when the nation faces a Greek-style fiscal crisis.

But apparently nobody told the people who lend the U.S. government money. On Friday, they were willing to hand over their cash to the Treasury for 10 years for 3.3 percent interest, a level so low it implies they consider the United States among the safest investments in the world. Collectively, those investors — think mutual funds, pension funds and foreign central banks — could lose hundreds of billions of dollars if they’re mistaken and the United States has a debt crisis.

It is the Beltway vs. the bond market, and they can’t both be right.

That’s right. But if I had to guess, the same bond traders who are investing in the safest investment in the world are also the ones telling the beltway bozos that the bond market is about to collapse if the US doesn’t destroy its public safety net as soon as possible. These are not mutually exclusive goals after all.

Krugman goes a bit deeper with his piece on the Pain Caucus from a couple of days ago:

Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you’re still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea — not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts. And the O.E.C.D. predicts that high unemployment will persist for years. Nonetheless, the organization demands both that governments cancel any further plans for economic stimulus and that they begin “fiscal consolidation” next year.

Why do this? Again, to give markets something they shouldn’t want and currently don’t. Right now, investors don’t seem at all worried about the solvency of the U.S. government; the interest rates on federal bonds are near historic lows. And even if markets were worried about U.S. fiscal prospects, spending cuts in the face of a depressed economy would do little to improve those prospects. But cut we must, says the O.E.C.D., because inadequate consolidation efforts “would risk adverse reactions in financial markets.”

The best summary I’ve seen of all this comes from Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, who describes the new conventional wisdom as being that “giving the markets what we think they may want in future — even though they show little sign of insisting on it now — should be the ruling idea in policy.”

Put that way, it sounds crazy. And it is. Yet it’s a view that’s spreading.

Doesn’t it sound just a tiny bit like people are looking for reasons to destroy the safety net? Yeah, I thought so too.

DeLong speculated that this is the result of out gilded age wealth inequality and I think that’s largely correct. These High priests of politics seem to live in an alternate universe from the middle class, in which “sacrifice” means other people having to give up their homes, their futures and their jobs in order to satisfy the deity we call “the market.” It’s fairly primitive stuff, actually.

But I think it’s also something more politically prosaic: Democrats are just dying to use this as another opportunity to inflict suffering, thus proving once and for all that they are the party of “responsibility.” Moreover, they seem to see the current financial crisis as a good time to evoke the Shock Doctrine to get that done. They’ve been thinking along these lines since the beginning of the administration and don’t seem to have shifted their thinking in light of all the evidence that this unemployment crisis isn’t easing more than a year later.

This is from February 2009:

Both Summers and Sperling said there would not be consensus in today’s session about how to fix the program. They also said the public was more receptive to the government making hard decisions necessary to keep SS from running out of money in the long run, because Americans are anxious about their private retirement savings and the value of their houses.

Sperling said: “I think there may be a lot more openness than we thought in the past for people to have an honest discussion about the shared sacrifice necessary to have Social Security solvency. That this would be a sure thing they could count on, and they could count on for the next 50 to 75 years.”

At the end, Sperling also tried to cut through disagreement over whether the program was in a state of crisis. “I really hate the whole argument about, is this a crisis or is this not a crisis? Why do we not want to preempt a crisis. Why do we not want to do something early? It is a shame on our political system that there has never been entitlement reform without a gun to our head. . .Wouldn’t it be a tremendous confidence-building thing to act early and smart?”

These people want credit for fixing social security, which they acknowledge means that people are going to have to “sacrifice.” Why these silly Democrats think the Republicans are going to hold hands with them on this is beyond me and the idea that the people will appreciate them doing it is delusional.

So, when Washington behaves like a gaggle of Marie Antoinettes, gibbering about “doing something early” on the backs of their suffering countrymen, it becomes clear that they truly are living in an alternate universe, as DeLong suspected.

And the Big Money Boyz just keep counting their filthy lucre.

Update: Dave Johnson at CAF discusses the GOP motivations here.

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Miranda Madness

by digby

Huh?

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, said Thompkins could have ended the questioning by telling the police he wanted to invoke his right to remain silent. In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision “turns Miranda upside down.” It’s counterintuitive, she said, to require a suspect to speak in order to exercise the right to remain silent.

So does this mean that when the police issue the warning “you have a right to remain silent” they will also say “but you have to tell us that you are invoking your right to remain silent?” because I don’t think people understand that. I’m guessing most people think that just remaining silent is adequate.

And is it true that once you invoke the right the police have to stop questioning you? The TV shows all depict cops stopping the questioning once someone has invoked their right to an attorney, but I didn’t know they would have to stop if you tell them that you intend to remain silent. Of course, everything I know about criminal law I got from watching Law and Order, so I’m certainly no expert. Is it true that police have to stop questioning suspects once they “invoke” their right to remain silent?

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