Month: June 2011

Blue America Chat, Wisconsin Recall Edition

A Justified Scold

by digby

Sarah Posner throws me a little (justified) scold this morning in her piece about the Jim Wallis/Ayn Rand/Paul Ryan and the bible kerfuffles the last few days. I was taking some cheap shots at Ryan and enjoying it a great deal. I would like nothing more than to show him for the religious hypocrite he is and inflame his evangelical and Catholic followers, but the truth is that I was mostly doing it for my own pleasure. Because, like Posner, I know that this is also true:

When these “faith leaders” stand up against Republican corporatism, progressives love it. But while it might be satisfying to hear a counter-biblical argument to the gospel of the Koch Brothers, if you’re judging policy based on scripture, it could well be argued that some of these “faith leaders” have got it completely wrong on other issues. And on those issues—particularly LGBT rights and access to abortion and family planning services—these same progressives cheering the Christian anti-Ryanism would be hard-pressed to cheer bringing the Bible into policy debates.

At the press conference on Friday, Butler focused on Ryan’s affection for Ayn Rand, an atheist and anti-religionist, and the heroine of the hyper-individualistic, anti-government wing of the Tea Party movement. But Rand is not a hero to the religious right, if she is even on their radar screen. Indeed, for many on the religious right, support for Ryan’s government-slashing budget is found . . . in their Bibles.

The anti-Ryan religious leaders seem to think that focusing on Ryan’s affection for Rand will turn religious people against him. Perhaps his love of an evil atheist would be persuasive enough, although if you’re not a fan of free-market worship, you weren’t likely to be a fan of Ryan, Rand or no Rand. And if they think conservative Christians will be put off by Ryan’s admiration for an atheist, well, evangelical Christians and secular libertarians have co-existed in the conservative movement for decades. The evangelicals tolerate it, because, minus the atheism, they buy it, too.

In fact, the poor beleaguered Ryan is probably getting sympathy from his social conservative base. Hypocrisy has never been something that worried them overmuch and they love the idea that they are a victimized minority group.

I do think it’s worthwhile to rattle Ryan even if it has little effect on his political supporters. He has suffered very little political opposition in his career and his reputation in the Village is so outsized for his accomplishments that he’d assumed a sort of untouchable status. he’s very thin-skinned and I think some ridicule is helpful in cases like those.

But Sarah’s right, both about the innate hypocrisy of the religious right and the useful idiocy of the Religion Industrial Complex. Most importantly, I shouldn’t have gotten so lost in my own gleeful snark that I failed to note that using the Bible as the basis of any political argument is antithetical to enlightened democracy. I hereby correct that mistake.

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To Protect and To Serve

by digby

The government’s war on videographers is getting worse. In Miami a bystander filmed police firing a hail of bullets into a car and the cops went after him, smashed his phone, threw him to the ground and took him to a command center and photographed him.

This is why I love Bag News so much:

No Pivot

by digby

In light of ongoing tepid job growth, Jared Bernstein had some good advice for the White House the other day:

Someone just asked me, “how does the White House pivot from targeting deficits to targeting jobs?”

How’s this? “Based on new information, we are now pivoting from targeting deficits to targeting jobs!”

So much for the “pivot”:

AMANPOUR:…So, economists are asking and people are asking, is this kind of a wake-up call, do you think, to sort of shift the political debate from what’s been all about debt reduction and shift it back to job creation? I mean, is this an opportunity, for instance, to try to talk about creating jobs and adding maybe another stimulus? Let’s say there was no politics involved, in a perfect environment. What would you do to get this off the slow burner?

GOOLSBEE: Well, I would say two or three thing. The first is, the president has never stopped talking about jobs. For him, the growth strategy is the number-one issue.

Now, we must live within our means. We have a moment that we can talk about long-run deficit reduction. And the vice president’s leading an effort to do that, that the president has asked him to. But the president is getting up every day — on Friday, he’s going out to Ohio to talk about jobs in manufacturing, which manufacturing is having its best employment year in almost 15 years.

From what Goolsbee said, it appears their strategy is going to be on dual tracks, not a pivot from deficit reduction. The growth strategy appears to be this:

GOOLSBEE: OK. So the — we have shifted in the economy from a rescue phase, which is government-directed, to a phase in which government policies have got — we’ve got to rely on government policies that are trying to leverage the private sector and give incentives to the private sector to be doing the growth.

And that — so the president has started these tax cuts that will continue over the rest of this year, has put in place this regulatory review in which all of the major agencies are going to go through, find any outmoded regulations, ones that are excessively costly for their benefits, find ways to streamline.

AMANPOUR: Would there be more payroll cuts…

GOOLSBEE: The free-trade agreements…

AMANPOUR: … tax cut holiday?

GOOLSBEE: Well, we still — there will be more payroll tax cut over the entire course of this year. It’s more than $1,000 a worker for 150 million workers.

The free-trade agreements, trying to increase exports, which are rising at 15 percent annual rates. The infrastructure bank that the president has called for, which, again, is trying to leverage, using government incentives to get private capital to enter and help grow the economy. That — that — those are the things that we’ve got to be doing.

So what we are going to see is deficit reduction plus tax cuts, deregulation, “government incentives to get private capital to help grow the economy” and free trade agreements. No wonder the Republicans have gone completely over the cliff. The Democrats stole their agenda.

Now I wouldn’t mind this nearly as much if the administration would at least use the excuse that these are the only options because Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are lunatics. It’s not much but they wouldn’t be teaching the country are the optimal choices and they’re just pleased as punch to enact these awesome policies because they are the best policies — and at least liberalism might then live to fight another day.

Matt Yglesias had an interesting post discussing a comment by President Obama at his facebook Townhall in which he said that because the recession came at a time of immense debt they have to deal with it or the markets will become spooked. (Where have I heard that before?)

Anyway, he believes that Obama was influenced by a study which shows that financial crises lead to unusually long and painful recessions, which back in 2010 Tim Geithner attributed to political cowardice. He said at the time, “but sometimes a policymaker has to say, I’ll take pain now against pain later.”

Yglesias concludes:

Some time in the ensuing year, the administration abandoned this Geithner/activist interpretation of the Reinhardt/Rogoff result and instead shifted to a fatalist interpretation. Yes, the economy is in bad shape. And yes, growth is likely to continue to be disappointing. But not because of policy failures. It’s just one of these things, like how it gets cold in the winter. You deal with it. But you don’t let it dominate your life. You focus on the long term. It’s a convenient story to believe, because it aligns with short-term political imperatives. It’s also flattering, it says to the people in charge, “It’s not your fault, there’s nothing more you can do.” But it’s wrong.

I don’t know that they were ever willing to “take the pain now” but I do agree that they decided that their only hope was to believe that the confidence fairy would fix everything in time if only we all clapped louder.

Update: I see Krugman already hit this fatalism bug, here.

Redoubling the Stupid

by digby

Oh bullshit:

“The feeling good comes easy now”

by digby

I often get rolled eyes and a “here she goes” look from some fellow liberals when I say that the anti-abortion agenda is really an anti-sex agenda. An awful lot of people have bought into the idea that these anti-abortion people just really, really care about cute little babies (before they’re born, anyway.)

That song was banned from radio when it was first released, naturally. I’m guessing that what was most offensive was the part about how she could enjoy sex now that she had the pill. Very unseemly. Very real.

Via Think Progress, we have Bill Kristol admitting that the corporate tax rate isn’t killing America after all:

Republicans are not only looking to cut the corporate tax rate, but they have been pushing to open a permanent tax loophole by switching to what’s known as a “territorial” corporate tax system, which would mean that corporations could permanently park money offshore and never pay taxes on it. The Republicans have also endorsed a misguided push to give corporations a tax windfall worth tens of billions of dollars through a tax repatriation holiday.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same is about as benign as a midnight movie gets. Sort of a mash-up of (a less funny) Clerks with Coneheads, it’s a wildly uneven and self-consciously campy affair that’s just endearing enough to make it tough to dislike. Writer-director Madeleine Olnek’s setup is clever-scientists on a distant planet theorize that the holes in their ozone are exacerbated by the disruptive vibes of lonely singles with too many “big feelings” (i.e. unrequited love). Their solution? Send the culprits to Earth, each with a directive to hook up with a human, who will of course break their heart and put them off of this silly love thing. The story follows the travails of three of these exiles, one of whom ends up with a socially awkward NYC store clerk (Lisa Haas). There are some genuine laughs, particularly whenever Olnek hits on some universal truths about relationships, but I wish there had been more of that and much less of a subplot involving two “men in black” who engage in scene after scene of painfully unfunny banter (quite amateurishly acted, as well) that drags the film down. The good news is that Olnek does display enough of an assured hand to hint that better things could be on the way in future.

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place is the latest from prolific filmmaker Alex Gibney, and a good companion piece to his 2008 doc Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson (which I reviewed here). If you’ve never read Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, this is the next best thing to actually “being there”. Where is “there”? Waaay out “there”, man. We’re talking the original Magical Mystery Tour that kicked off that disunited state of mind glibly referred to by those who were not “there” as “the 60s”. In 1964, author Ken Kesey, who had been involved with the infamous CIA-sponsored 1959 psychoactive drug research program at Stanford, assembled a group of friends (including hipster saint speed freak Neal Cassady) for a cross-country bus trip/consciousness-raising experiment that would come to be known as the maiden voyage for the “Merry Pranksters”. Kesey was prescient enough to document the trip with hours of film and audio recordings, but never got around to organizing it all as a coherent narrative. Gibney proves himself up to the task; as well as connecting all the (micro) dots between the Beats, the Pranksters, Leary, the Dead and beyond (the beyond).

Late Breaking Strategy

by digby

Politico is reporting that the Obama campaign is changing its strategy in light of the fact that the unemployment numbers are still so bad. It claims that he will make a hybrid pitch:

Democratic strategists say that means adopting an ungainly three-pronged political approach: Talking up economic gains since the darkest days of 2008 and 2009, highlighting a modest job-creation agenda blocked by Republicans and making the case that things would be far worse if the GOP were in charge.

Above all, he must avoid even the slightest hint of triumphalism on the economy — no missions have been accomplished — to avoid angering Americans still struggling to find jobs.

Gosh that sounds a lot more complicated than Hope and Change.

But this is not exactly surprising is it? The “Morning in America” strategy has been obvious for some time and there was always a huge risk it wasn’t going to work. In fact, the unwavering belief in it is as faith based as that group who thought the world was ending on May 21st.

This is from eighteen months ago:

Atrios wonders the same thing I did this morning when I read that the unemployment numbers still suck hard:

I generally hate that kind of thinking, and certainly don’t wish for things to get worse, but I do wonder just what level of job losses and unemployment might cause the powers that be to decide that maybe they should do something.

Probably it would take a stock market crash. That’s the important thing

It’s pretty clear to me that they think this will eventually iron itself out and that they don’t need to do much of anything. At some point unemployment will start to come down, however slowly, and then just as it was with St Ronnie, it will be Morning in America. It’s faith-based. And it ignores the very real suffering and lost opportunities that a long period of unemployment or underemployment causes as well as vastly underestimating the political and social upheaval such long periods of economic stress can cause. They’re playing with fire.

I’m guessing they believed, as about half the policy wonks in DC apparently do, that the US presidency is a very weak office and that there was never much of anything he could do about the economy anyway. And maybe that’s right, however absurd it seems to me. But they certainly could have left themselves some room for argument. Politico spells out the problem:

By ceding the argument to Republicans that the deficit is the problem, Obama helped steer the focus in Washington to cutting government spending, robbing the White House of its ability to argue for more stimulus measures. At the same time, the rise in fuel prices over the past six months has offset efforts late last year to boost consumer spending and job creation.

Maybe he couldn’t have gotten any stimulus anyway, but by succumbing to deficit fever they sure as hell lost their argument that the Republicans are the ones obstructing job growth with their insistence on austerity. After all, nowadays the only people who aren’t arguing for austerity are dirty hippies and liberal economists.

This was a very risky strategy that only seemed like the easy way out. When you are presiding over an epic economic meltdown policy substance matters. And if you can’t get the right policy it’s equally important that you don’t get blamed for the wrong one. Depending on “the cycle” or “the markets” to magically fix things just in time for the re-election campaign while you give lip service to your opposition isn’t a serious way to govern. I know it’s hard and that this lunatic opposition makes almost everything you try to do futile. But by failing to make the case, to prepare people for the worst because of it, they’re now left holding the bag.

I don’t doubt that President Obama will be re-elected. The Republicans are offering no reasonable alternative and the Tea Party faction led by Paul Ryan is certifiably nuts. I’ll be shocked if they even come close. But that doesn’t absolve the administration of responsibility for coasting on the economy because Larry Summers assured them that everything would be fine by 2012. This economy has been going sideways for some time now and the no-drama Obama team should have awakened from their slumber and recognized it.

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