Month: June 2011

Wise Guy Among the Hippies

by digby

So notorious murderer and longtime FBI informant Whitey Bulger was located living just a mile or so away from me. I assume I’ll be hearing from the wingnuts that we dirty hippies in the People’s Republic were harboring him, being all soft on organized crime as we are.

In all seriousness, it is terribly ironic that Bulger was referenced by the Pakistanis as evidence that it’s entirely possible for a notorious criminal to hide in plain sight and, lo and behold, it turns out he was doing just that.(Coincidence?)

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Mad-Liberals

by digby

The creator of Mad-Libs (one of my favorite childhood games) passed away recently. But the Mad-lib ouvre will never die. In fact, it’s being put to use right now to expose the crooked, moronic Florida governor Rick Scott for who he is:

It seems Pink Slip Rick can’t get real Floridians to write letters to local newspapers in support of his radical agenda, so he’s written a letter himself, and he’s begging his tea party followers to simply copy and paste it in an email. It backfired — of course — and now Rick Scott has another scandal on his hands.

So we’re going on offense and making sure that everyone knows the truth about Scott’s agenda.

Today, we’re launching the “Pink Slip Mad Lib Challenge,” a contest where you take his astroturf letter and fill in the blanks to expose the truth. Admissions will be voted on, and the best will win a PSR t-shirt.

I find that if you liberally use the word “bunghole” in mad-libs, you can usually get big laughs. Or you could when I was 12. Perhaps things have changed.

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The Bachman Chronicles

by digby

This is a good day for good reads and this piece by Matt Taibbi on Michele Bachman is one for the ages. Not only does it give a picture of a very dangerous, dumb, extreme politician, but it shows just how easily this woman could capture the imagination of the people and wind up on a national ticket. Here’s just one little example of her lunacy that should, in a sane world, completely disqualify her from running for office at all, much less be taken seriously as a presidential contender:

In 2003, after the Massachusetts Supreme Court issued its famous ruling permitting gay marriage, Bachmann proposed an amendment to the Minnesota constitution banning gay marriage — despite the fact that the state legislature had already passed a law making same-sex unions illegal. Even the politicians who were sufficiently gay-phobic to have passed the original anti-­marriage law were floored by the brazen pointlessness of Bachmann’s bill. “It’s unnecessary, it’s redundant, it’s duplicative,” said Assistant Senate Majority Leader Ann Rest.

The episode was classic Bachmann, whose political strategy throughout her career has mostly revolved around having her Little House on the Never-Existed Fundamentalist Prairie sensibilities rocked by something she has read (or misread) in the news, then immediately proposing a horseshit, total-waste-of-­everybody’s-time legislative action in response. In 2009, after she saw a news story about the Chinese calling on the world to abandon the dollar as its reserve currency, Bachmann somehow took this to mean that the Obama administration might force ordinary Americans to abandon their familiar green dollar bills for some international and no doubt atheist currency. To combat this possibility, Bachmann introduced a resolution to “bar the dollar from being replaced by any foreign currency.” Even after the gaffe was made public, Bachmann pressed on, challenging Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to “categorically renounce the United States moving away from the dollar.” Imagine Joe McCarthy dragging Cabinet members into hearings and demanding that they publicly disavow the works of Groucho Marx, and you get a rough idea of the general style of Bachmannian politics.

I had forgotten about that. There are so many ridiculous Bachman statements likethat that it’s hard to keep up. But it is also indicative of her strange talent. She has no idea what she’s talking about but she has an instinct for saying things that sound as if they make sense to people who are clueless. It’s not the Palinesque “deer-in-the-headlights-dog-ate-my-homework” rambling nonsense. her language is quite precise. She speaks in a sort of idea soup rather than word salad, that has a sort of ideological symmetry to it, even though it bears no relationship to reality.

Her recent pirouette on Medicare in which she accused the Democrats of trying to destroy the program in order to force old people into Obamacare so they can pull the plug was just such a ploy. It’s a bizarroworld version of current politics but there’s a certain logic to the argument that she just gets.

She doesn’t have the sex appeal that Sarah Palin has, which is probably in her favor. (Social conservatives get over-stimulated and confused around female sexuality.) But she’s attractive and poised and is a professional politician who knows how the game is played. And she’s both ignorant and savvy, accessible and extreme. She’s very creepy.

I wonder if everyone remembers how Bachman first burst in to the national consciousness:

C&L also noted at the time:

Bachmann has quite a thing for Bush, apparently. This press release from her campaigning days reads more like a diary entry for a 12 year old who got to meet her Tiger Beat teen idol:

I have never been in the Presidential limousine before so I was a little unsure what to do when the limousine stopped at the custard stand. I wasn’t sure if I should exit with the President or get out of my side of the car. Karl Rove told me I would exit out the door on my side after The President steps out and someone would open the door for me. I could not believe I was discussing what flavor of custard to order with the President of the United States!

That was four years ago. Now she’s running for president.

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I would imagine that many of you have already read this essay by Jose Antonio Vargas about his odyssey from being an undocumented child to undocumented success story, but if you haven’t take a few minutes and do it. It’s an extraordinary piece.

GOP Jobs Program

Following up on the post below, this result from the new Bloomberg poll doesn’t bode well at all:

As the public grasps for solutions, the Republican Party is breaking through in the message war on the budget and economy. A majority of Americans say job growth would best be revived with prescriptions favored by the party: cuts in government spending and taxes, the Bloomberg Poll shows. Even 40 percent of Democrats share that view…

Though Americans rate unemployment and the economy as a greater concern than the deficit and government spending, the issues are now closely connected. Sixty-five percent of respondents say they believe the size of the federal deficit is “a major reason” the jobless rate hasn’t dropped significantly.

“In this day and age we all have to spend less, and that includes the government itself,” says poll respondent Carolyn Beller, 66, a retired financial-services worker and independent voter in Hull, Massachusetts. “We all have to put a stop to this nonsense of spending.”…

Republican criticism of the federal budget growth has gained traction with the public. Fifty-five percent of poll respondents say cuts in spending and taxes would be more likely to bring down unemployment than would maintaining or increasing government spending, as Obama did in his 2009 stimulus package.

That may just be the best case of Orwellian up-is-downism since the run up to the Iraq war.

It’s fairly clear that the administration long ago bought into the deficit trope and threw in its lot with the confidence fairy to create growth. They have made an extremely weak effort to explain the Keynesian approach and have put very little power behind it. And truthfully, it wouldn’t be that hard to just say that this level of unemplpyment is way too high and that the government is going to put people to work if nobody else will so that they can feed their families. You don’t have to give a seminar in macroeconomics.

But it looks as though the deficit yammering has finally begun to pay off so that the Republicans can now run in 2012 as the deficit slaying job creators and Obama can have a great excuse to join that race to austerity. After all, it’s what the people want, right?

And perversely, having a big shot investor like Bill Gross come out in favor of infrastructure stimulus at this late date probably convinces people that it’s the wrong thing to do.

What a mess.

Pray for gridlock!

by digby

Ezra reports something that I would hope every Village gasbag would be forced to read each morning before they open their mouths:

The Congressional Budget Office just released the latest edition of its long-term budget outlook (pdf), and it shows the same thing as always: If Congress lets the Bush tax cuts expire or offsets their extension, implements the Affordable Care Act as scheduled and makes or offset the Medicare cuts prescribed by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act — which CBO calls the “extended baseline scenario” — the national debt will be totally manageable. If Congress passes laws extending the Bush tax cuts without offsetting the cost, repealing the Affordable Care Act and its cost controls and protecting doctors from Medicare cuts without making up the savings elsewhere — the “alternative fiscal scenario” — the national debt will be totally out of control.

In other words there is no long term debt crisis unless the politicians decide to create one. Everything’s already in place to keep it perfectly under control. So why are we talking about it?

I don’t think there’s any better evidence that this deficit fever is nothing more than a disaster capitalist boondoggle. The wealthy elites and their nihilist ideologue allies in both parties are flogging this debt crisis in order to enact favorable legislation and fill out their long term wish list. That they are doing it under a Democratic administration just makes it sweeter.

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For anyone who’s under the mistaken impression that the right has had a sudden change of heart about America and war, please read this piece by Matt Taibbi.

An excerpt:

Look, people are entitled to have changes of heart. They are also entitled to learn from experience. And most importantly, people are entitled to be wrong. We all are, from time to time. And if people like Ross Douthat emerge from the experience of observing the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes finally understanding “the bluntness of war as an instrument of state” and the “difficulty of predicting” any war’s “long-term consequences,” that’s great. I applaud it.

But I don’t buy it. What happened back in ’02 and ’03 isn’t can’t be summarized as simply as a simple policy disagreement that Douthat, through the folly of inexperience, happened to be on the wrong side of. The mere fact that the Douthats of the world supported the war wasn’t what made them so obnoxious.

Much more important was the shameless witch-hunting of antiwar voices, and the impugning of the patriotism of people who advocated the very sort of caution Douthat now claims to endorse. Douthat, remember, contributed to the National Review’s obnoxiously-titled “Kumbaya Watch,” pitched as “the latest in anti-American commentary from the left.” In that column he hounded critics of the president and/or those who didn’t advocate immediate war against the Muslims, and wondered aloud about the political bias of organizations like ABC News (they wouldn’t let their reporters wear American flag lapel pins!).

The recent conversions to the cause of foreign-policy prudence by people like Douthat would be obnoxious even if they were believable. It’s easy to respect the position of someone like Ron Paul – he’s been against the war from the start, and for the same reasons throughout.

But people like Douthat didn’t start becoming pacifists until a) the occupation of Iraq went south, helping derail the Bush presidency, and b) Barack Obama became president and started taking ownership of new adventures in places like Libya. Before then, he was just another jingoistic twit doing the “Gooble, gooble, one of us!”chant on the march to war.

The difference between civil libertarians and selfish jerks

by digby

This piece in Slate about libertarian philospher Robert Nozick has engendered quite a bit of online chatter and it’s very much worth reading if you are interested in the intellectual underpinnings of that side of our economic debates. There are lots of responses around the sphere, but this defense of libertarianism called “Libertarians Aren’t All Selfish Jerks” by Conor Friedersdorf caught my eye because this argument is so commonly wielded at liberals and it deserves a response. He refers to a number of libertarians who are working on such topics as the drug war and prison reform and terrorism policy etc (along with one of the hip libertarian issues of the day — onerous licensing of low wage service workers like hairdressers) and then writes:

There are a lot of libertarians working on issues that could be construed as self-interested – lowering taxes is the obvious example. There are even some hard core Ayn Rand sycophants who embrace little more than themselves. Find that repugnant? Have at ’em! But you’re just misinformed if you think that libertarians as a whole care for nothing more than their self-interest. Countless libertarians are working to advance the freedom and fair-treatment of people other than themselves. Often they do so more consistently than some of the liberals who sneer at them.

I don’t sneer at those libertarians at all. Indeed, I consider myself to be one of them. But I qualify it with the word “civil” in front of it.

Here’s how our friend Wikipedia describes it:

Civil libertarianism is not a complete ideology; rather, it is a collection of views on the specific issues of civil liberties and civil rights. Because of this, a civil libertarian outlook is compatible with many other political philosophies, and civil libertarianism is found on both the right and left of modern politics.

That is quite distinct from the hardcore libertarian philosophy as espoused by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia,(although his philosophy of individual liberty also applies to other areas.) In fact, libertarian economics is the specific topic of the essay in question. So, using civil libertarianism to sell libertarian ideology, particularly in this case, is a misdirection.

Many liberals work in common cause with libertarians on a whole string of issues. From time to time even a principled conservative joins in although it’s rare because they tend to have a philosophical bent toward authoritarianism. I suppose some liberals sneer at the ACLU, but it’s not nearly as harsh as what you hear from conservatives. And many of us are major supporters while I would doubt that even 1% of Republicans give money to the organization.

Where liberals part ways is in extending our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and civil rights to include a prohibition against redistribution of wealth, regulation or common social purpose. And that last is what the Nozick essay is about.

I identify strongly as a civil libertarian and support most of those causes that Friedersdorf uses as examples of unselfish libertarianism. I have ave had many a stimulating (if ultimately frustrating) conversation with thoughtful libertarians on economics. Although I think they have a utopian view of how humans organize and behave I have a grudging admiration for their consistency, however much I disagree with it. What I sneer at is the growing popularity of this Randroid libertarianism, which I see as intellectually shallow and definitely based in adolescent selfishness.

Those libertarians don’t care about police brutality or indefinite detention of terrorist suspects. That side of libertarianism doesn’t even exist for them. And sadly, those issues also seem to take a backseat for most self-identified libertarians who, when asked to choose, tend to go with the Randroid conservatives who care about taxes over the liberals who care about civil liberties. I’ll leave it to others to sort out why that is.

Anyway, the Nozick piece is interesting because the author puts the rise of libertarian thought in the historical context of the huge post-war boom in a way I hadn’t thought of before, which explains how the great influx of government money throughout the economy gave perverse rise to the distorted belief that such support was unnecessary.

*link fixed
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The terrorists yellow peril is coming to kill you in your bed

It’s going to be a long 18 months …