Month: April 2011

Forgetting Himself

by digby

It looks like Limbaugh’s little white slip is showing. This is just from the past two days:

Limbaugh: Left Upset With Obama Because “White People Are Not Shining The Shoes Of Black People”

Limbaugh: Obama “Has Yet To Send” His Half-Brother “Anything, Including A Little Sign That Says ‘Hut Sweet Hut’ “
Limbaugh: Obama Is “A Street Thug. As A Community Organizer, That’s What You Are”
Limbaugh: “There’s A Racial Component” To The “Chip On [Obama’s] Shoulder”

Of course, he can’t be racist, since some of his best friends are black. (Okay, so his pal is also a nutcase and awar criminal,but nobody’s perfect.) Still, it’s starting to get a little bit obvious, isn’t it?

The good news is that only ten to twenty million people, including troops overseas, hear this stuff (and every GOP politician in the country is required to pay obeisance) so that’s good.

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Devil’s Bargain

by digby

Having Good Friday and Earth Day coincide brings up the interesting question about why the Religious Right are climate change deniers? To me, this makes no sense. At worst, they should be neutral, leaving the Rapture in God’s hands. But they are actively hostile to the very concept with an intensity that’s hard to understand.

I have wondered about this before in terms of the right in general and linked to Amanda Marcotte’s excellent answer, which I still think gets to the nub of it. But Right Wing Watch has put together a great analysis of the religious right’s anti-environment crusade that shines a whole new light on the subject. Turns out, like everything else, there’s money involved:

As Republican officials accelerate their efforts to weaken environmental regulations and attack climate scientists, energy corporations are reaping the benefits of a decades-long effort to put a more benevolent, humanitarian, and even religious spin to their anti-environmental activism. Among their most valuable allies are the Religious Right organizations and leaders who have emerged as ready apologists for polluters and critics of efforts to protect the environment. The Religious Right’s attacks are intended to lend credence to the efforts of corporations and the GOP to quash the Environmental Protection Agency and chip away at state and federal environmental safeguards. And increasingly, Republican leaders themselves are echoing the same misleading arguments and themes of the Religious Right’s corporate apologists.

Buoyed by corporate finances and a radical ‘dominion theology,’ the Religious Right has become more aggressive and fanatical in its defense of corporations and denial of climate science. Trying to combat the increasing number of evangelical Christians who are part of the “creation care” movement that is calling for a greater commitment to combat climate change, the Religious Right is working to misrepresent the environmental movement as dangerously deceitful, harmful to the poor and destructive to Christianity.

Read on. This coalition has been together for years, basically pushing radical capitalism for the haves and social conservatism for the have-nots.(And there have always been scam artists working the faithful.)But this funneling of vast amounts of wealth to the top is empowering them more than ever.

This is when I usually reach for my dog-eared copy of Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece and take a few hours off.

Update: And then there’s this … Good Lord.

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Newsweak

by digby

Gee, I haven’t heard anything about the most pressing problem in the whole world for at least six months. Can’t wait to hear the latest:

More analysis of this image at BagNewsNotes My favorite: “whales should sue.”

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Writing on the wall

by digby

I think this says it all — and it’s a real shame:

Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden‘s economic adviser and one of the longest serving economists in the Obama White House, will leave the administration at the end of the month, a White House official said.

Mr. Bernstein, a liberal voice in an increasingly centrist White House, will join the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He is also in advanced talks to be an on-air commentator for Bloomberg News Service’s television network.

Mr. Bernstein’s departure comes after the exit of two liberal economic allies, Christina Romer and Larry Summers, and the arrival of deal-making pragmatists like Mr. Summers’ replacement as National Economic Council director, Gene Sperling, and Bruce Reed, Mr. Biden’s new chief of staff who headed the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

But the official said his reasons for leaving are practical. In the face of a conservative Republican House and budget-cutting fever, Mr. Bernstein’s advocacy for more stimulus spending was going nowhere.

Keep in mind also that Biden has been tasked with heading up the deficit “negotiations.”

Also, you’ll notice that he’s not rushing off to Wall Street to cash in and become a gazillionaire. And yet, I think he’ll probably still make quite a decent living. Imagine that.

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The Talk Doctrine

by digby

Greg Sargent found an interesting little factoid in the NYT poll that someone should pass on to the White House:

The poll finds that economic pessimism is at its highest level yet, with the level of those who think the economy is getting worse jumping 13 points in the last month — and 57 percent disapprove of Obama’s economic performance.

At the same time, buried in the internals is a number that shows that the public doesn’t buy the argument that reining in the deficit will do anything to create jobs:

What effect do you think a major reduction in the annual federal budget deficit would have on the number of jobs in the U.S. — would it create jobs, would it cost jobs, or would it have no effect on job creation in the U.S.?

Create more jobs 29

Cost jobs 29

No effect 27

In other words, barely more than a quarter of Americans think reducing the deficit will do anything at all to fix the number one concern of voters, i.e. jobs and the economy — yet for months and months, deficit reduction has been far and way the dominant topic in the Beltway conversation. There you have it.

Frankly, I’m surprised it isn’t higher after all the fear mongering. But at this point, I suppose people are just feeling an overwhelming generalized anxiety about everything. It’s more than a little worrisome, however, that the governing and financial elites seem to be intent upon conflating these issues and making people belive that austerity is what’s called for in the moment. We actually have a name for that. It’s called Disaster Capitalism. Works like a charm. For the winners.

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Defend Social Security

by digby

Here’s my latest on the subject in this month’s In These Times. Lot’s of other good stuff in this issue, so poke around while you’re over there.

Deficits R Us

by digby

I have been fairly blasé up to now about the prospects of anyone defeating Obama in 2012. And considering the motley offerings of the Republicans, it is still a long shot. But these new numbers showing increasing pessimism spell trouble. If Morning in America doesn’t kick in soon, it’s not going to break in time.

John Judis has written an interesting piece in TNR that correctly diagnoses the problem: deficit fever. By adopting their “deficits are a crisis” frame, he’s reinforced the idea that the economic downturn isn’t going away any time soon — indeed, it goes on as far as the eye can see. Let’s just say all this talk of SS going broke and Medicare falling apart and deficits causing job loss isn’t exactly a stirring message.

And, as Judis points out, this deficit fever has been explicitly flogged by the right in the wake of the election and its worked like a charm:

[F]or the last five months, Republicans have been harping on deficits as the cause of the economic downturn and continuing unemployment. The economy and jobs are still voters’ top concern, but in the latest Gallup poll, deficits and spending come in second. That’s not because the Congressional Budget Office suddenly found a river of red ink, or because interest rates shot up, or because the unemployment rate has gone up. It’s because Republicans have advanced the deficit as the reason for the problems in economy and jobs. They filled in the gap between fact and perception with the idea that things are getting worse and that the reason they are getting worse is because of the deficits.

I am not sure exactly why Republicans have focused on deficits. I suspect it is a combination of reasons. Some of them don’t understand modern economics; many of them want to use the peril of the deficit to justify cuts in government spending on social programs; and some of them, perhaps, want to arrest the recovery to improve their election chances in 2012. But the effect is to nullify Democrats’ ability to offer popular programs that will fuel growth, save jobs, and reduce people’s insecurity.

Obama has, sadly, bought the Republican argument for why the economy is in trouble. This week, he went to a community college in Northern Virginia to rally students there to the cause of the deficit. Here’s my expurgated version:

For a long time, Washington acted like deficits didn’t matter. … And as the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. … Now, if we don’t close this deficit, now that the economy has begun to grow again, if we keep on spending more than we take in, it’s going to cause serious damage to our economy.

Obama has tried to carve a liberal niche within this retrograde political framework by charging that the Republican plan to cut the deficit would get rid of Medicare and would keep the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s all well and good, but Obama is still playing on Republican turf. And it might not work. The last Democratic presidential candidate who based his campaign on deficits was Walter Mondale in 1984.

Many of us have been talking about this for months, worried greatly that the Democrats are not only failing on the politics, but failing on the substance, which is truly catastrophic. People are hurting and they need good policy right now and they just aren’t getting it, largely because there’s no room to maneuver in this hysterical deficit obsessed environment. I don’t know why Democrats always think capitulating to the right’s agenda (if not the details) will “take it off the table.” It never does — it only reinforces it.

Judis’s whole article is worth reading. He’s not terribly worried, but he’s concerned enough to go on record. I hope the administration is listening.

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The Long View

by digby

Chomsky on American Empire

I don’t agree with everything in it, but there are some things so obvious — and so completely omitted in our political dialog — that it’s startling to see them in print. As it turns out we’re not all that exceptional after all.

*And, by the way, I don’t know where the idiotic trope that I had never heard of Chomsky until a commenter pointed him out to me got started, but it’s patently ridiculous. I’m a liberal baby boomer ferchristsake.

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Center Cut

by digby

I’m getting tired of talking about this and I’m sure you’re getting tired of reading it, but it’s got to be done. The “center” in this budget fight is not going to be someplace any of us on the left are going to be able to live with. Robert Reich spells it out in this piece:

I’d wager if Americans also knew two-thirds of Ryan’s budget cuts come from programs serving lower and moderate-income Americans and over 70 percent of the savings fund tax cuts for the rich – meaning it’s really just a giant transfer from the less advantaged to the super advantaged without much deficit reduction at all – far more would be against it.

And if people knew that the Ryan plan would channel hundreds of billions of their Medicare dollars into the pockets of private for-profit heath insurers, almost everyone would be against it.

The Republican plan shouldn’t be considered one side of a great debate. It shouldn’t be considered at all. Americans don’t want it.

Which is why I get worried when I hear about so-called “bipartisan” groups on Capitol Hill seeking a grand compromise, such as the Senate’s so-called “Gang of Six.”

Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, a member of that Gang, says they’re near agreement on a plan that will chart a “middle ground” between the House Republican budget and the plan outlined last week by the President.

Watch your wallets.

In my view, even the President doesn’t go nearly far enough in the direction most Americans would approve. All he wants to do, essentially, is end the Bush tax windfalls for the wealthy – which were designed to be ended in 2010 in any event – and close a few loopholes.

He goes on to point out all the useless programs that could be cut and taxes that could be raised that would maintain services that human beings depend upon and still turn back this allegedly existential deficit threat — none of which are on the table. This despite the fact that a credible budget that does all that and more is out there and being totally ignored — a plan, by the way, that tracks with the vast majority of the American people’s wishes.

Everybody says we have to “sacrifice” and have “skin in the game” but the fact is that the only skin that is likely to be stripped is the skin of ordinary working Americans.

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Literal Geniuses

by digby

This is infuriating, but its a fairly typical example of how the epistemological relativists on the right are able to convince people to destroy themselves and thank the Republicans for giving them the privilege. Our so-called “fact checkers” seem to be Rain Men.

If Democrats proposed to turn Medicare into a system that only provided free veterinary services to seniors, would Republicans be lying to say Dems wanted to “end Medicare,” without including the caveat “as we know it”?

Of course not. But that’s more or less the charge PolitiFact is leveling at Democrats over a new DCCC ad (below) which flatly charges Republicans with proposing to “end Medicare.” The House GOP budget, which passed with all but two GOP votes over unanimous Democratic opposition, would over time replace the single-payer, government-run Medicare program with a different system that subsidizes private insurance plans for beneficiaries. Those subsidies would work like vouchers — they would increase in value year-on-year at a much slower pace than the rate of the rise of health care costs, thus leaving seniors exposed to increasing costs as time goes on.

Republicans call this new health insurance system “Medicare.” But it’s a completely different program from today’s Medicare. PolitiFact doesn’t see it that way.

“But to say the Republicans voted to end Medicare, as the ad does, is a major exaggeration,” PolitiFact writes. “All seniors would continue to be offered coverage under the proposal, and the program’s budget would increase every year.”

But that elides the fact that Medicare currently guarantees specific services, which the private insurers won’t be bound to provide under the GOP plan. Indeed, the law President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965 created a national health insurance system that entitled the elderly to have a defined array of health care services paid on their behalf by the government.

One of the problems is in the word “coverage.” Politifact conflates insurance with health care and it isn’t the same thing. Today, seniors have guaranteed health care, period. Ryan’s plan says they will have a guaranteed voucher to purchase insurance. The difference between those two things is a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon and everyone knows it.

Politifact also goes far beyond its mandate by telling the Democrats the terms they are allowed to use. (They say it would be ok if they say “end Medicare as we know it.”) Message approval isn’t their job. Their job is to apply a thick-headed literalism to everything they see. And it makes them useless.

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