Month: October 2011

I keep hearing that Rick Perry isn’t a racist just because he had a hunting camp that was once called Ni**erhead or because he called for secession in the wake of the election of the first black president. He says the name was changed not long after his family leased the place and his secession talk was supposedly in reference to the Republic of Texas rather than the civil war. Ok fine. I don’t know what’s in his heart.

Politico analysis
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Politico is just now noticing the significant rhetorical shift from the White House is a headline article hilariously titled “Has Obama found his inner populist?” The article itself is vacuous and scarcely worth the read, doing little to evidence that the President has an “inner populist” streak. Nor does it even do the simple task of truly documenting evidence of the real shift in the President’s tone over the the course of the last month.

The appeal of Politico is baffling. Most of what Politico does is Drudge link-baiting (Politico gets more hits from Drudge than it does from Google.) The rest of the website features political analysis that scarcely rises to college freshman level, albeit with slightly more sophisticated writing style.

It’s one thing for television and radio news to be vacuous and nearly useless. Those media are not exactly suited to in-depth reporting. But the Internet should provide the perfect medium for quality journalism and real insights. The fact that Politico is considered one of the prime spots on the web for political news and analysis in America is just another sign of everything that is broken about the media in this country.

.

Fergawdsakes:

James Taranto criticizes Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor for The New York Times, for retweeting Think Progress’ link to its post comparing the Wall Street protests to the Boston Tea Party. Retweeting a link to a liberal blog like Think Progress “would be unremarkable coming from, say, the editor of the Times editorial page,” Taranto writes. “From Roberts, however, it reinforces perceptions that the Times’s news coverage is biased in favor of the left and against the Tea Party.” Taranto notes that many journalists disclaim that retweets don’t necessarily constitute endorsements; he sometimes tweets to material he disagrees with. Roberts, however, usually links to news stories, Taranto argues, while the Think Progress post is “pure opinion … One imagines that Roberts doesn’t mean to be partisan — that he thinks TP is making an interesting, salient point whose merits are obvious to all right-thinking people.” Roberts retweeted Think Progress’ link to the Journal story, prefacing it with “This RT is NOT an endorsement.” Zach Seward, the Journal’s editor of outreach and social media, says of Taranto’s story: ”It’s a cheap shot and contradicts itself.”

Really? Well I’ll take your NY Times retweet and raise you a CNN tweet delete! (I’m sure Taranto thinks tha this is evidence of CNN’s liberal bias as well.)

I would direct him to this fascinating discussion at Nieman Watchdog about the media’s relationship to the growing protest movement. An excerpt:

Will Bunch, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News who covered the Wall Street protests early on, gave as good an explanation as we’re likely to get during a recent appearance on Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” program on Current TV. Commenting on the early non-coverage or condescending coverage of the Wall Street protests, Bunch said: “A lot of people in newsrooms still are not in touch with the real pain and the real suffering of 25 million who are unemployed and underemployed.” Paraphrasing PressThink weblog editor Jay Rosen, Bunch said: “It’s kind of un-cool for a journalist to take these people who want to change the world seriously.” Olbermann chimed in that if the more than 1,000 people on the first day of the Wall Street protests had been Tea Party-ers protesting Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s monetary stimulus policies, it would have been “the lead story on every network.”

Rosen, who also teaches journalism at New York University, coined the term “the church of the savvy” for Washington journalists who regard savviness – rather than being right or wrong – as “the prime virtue.” As Rosen has observed: “The savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you…They say: I am closer to reality than you. And more mature.” To the savvy, “the center is the holy place: political grace resides there. The profane is the ideological extremes. The adults converse in the pragmatic middle ground where insiders cut their deals. On the wings are the playgrounds for children.” The savvy position themselves as “practical, hardheaded, unsentimental, and shrewd where others are didactic, ideological, and dreamy…”

Many journalists, it seems, pay lip service to the First Amendment, but turn their backs or grow disdainful when people actually exercise these rights in the streets. In such a climate, idealistic activists such as those at the tar sands pipeline and Wall Street protests, obviously, can be safely ignored by the major news media or condescended to as not being rooted in the practical, real world. Real grown-ups don’t need to protest.

I’m sure that Taranto wants desperately to keep it that way. His paycheck, after all, depends upon it.

.

Why Harvard should claim 1/5th of the blame for the mess we’re in

by Jon Stokes

This is a guest post by writer and thinker Jon Stokes, author of Inside the Machine

From his perch at ThinkProgress, lefty uberblogger Matt Yglesias has a message for the #OccupyWallStreet crowd, and that message is this: get a real message, because you can’t get real results without a real message. He then cites the 2001 Harvard living wage protests as an example of the right way to protest.

Well, as a historian who spent a few years studying Jewish and Christian apocalyptic movements as a grad student at Harvard, and who saw how that whole living wage thing went down, I have a message for any Very Serious Person from our elite institutions who’s complaining that the Wall Street protests lack a certain focus… that there’s an air of naivité about the whole affair: if a real grassroots protest movement actually comes along and turns this country upside down, VSPs will be the last to see it coming. Why? Because our elite institutions are a core part of the problem.

I have a good friend who worked as a Wall Street banker on the M&A side for over a decade at two of the top banks there. He once told me that the banks hire their people, almost without exception, from one of five elite schools, Harvard being one of them. I’ve since heard this fact corroborated from other sources. To my way of thinking, this makes Harvard—its culture, its history, the values that it instills in its students, and literally everything else about the place—at least one fifth to blame for how unbelievably screwed we all are. But I get various alumni mailings and magazines from the school, and I’ve yet to see a Harvard panel dedicated to examining how the university’s students went forth from its mahogany-panelled halls and messed up the entire country so badly over the course of the past three decades.

No, Harvard is a school that considers itself to have been at the forefront of every progressive movement to fix what’s wrong in America for the past four hundred years. In the Harvard mythology, the abolition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights movements couldn’t have happened without some Harvard-trained Unitarians out there leading the charge for justice and equality. (Every time I saw the school trying to retroactively insert itself into some transformative scene from history, I’d let out a “yeah whatever” under my breath. The pervasive self-congratulation rankles.)

But Harvard is also the institution that gave us Larry Summers, Bob Rubin, and a very sizable fraction of the other leaders in banking, finance, government, and the media who have mired the country in third-world levels of income inequality, perpetual war, record unemployment, failing infrastructure, rampant corporate corruption and greed, environmental catastrophe, and… hey, waitaminute… I’m starting to sound like one of those loopy #OccupyWallStreet kids who needs a Very Serious dose of pragmatism and message discipline (and maybe some Ritalin).

This brings me to Yglesias’s living wage campaign, which was indeed a shining example of professional protest organizing… that ultimately didn’t achieve much of anything but some tweaks to the salaries of a handful workers. Seriously, look at this page, and think about the fact that there were far more students involved in getting that dollar and change wage boost than there were workers getting a raise. The students didn’t solve any sort of big problem because they didn’t even try; all they hoped for and all they ultimately achieved was some very narrow, targeted fiddling around at the margins, and a promise from the school to convene a committee to look into maybe doing more. Oh, and the campaign also greatly burnished the resumes of its organizers, and let a bunch of otherwise very well-behaved undergrads get their 60’s on, so there’s that.

During my time at Harvard (I was at the Divinity School), I was fortunate to find a friend and mentor in fellow Div schooler Tom Conry. Tom is an old-school radical Catholic dissident from the 60’s—a former priest, he worked the sound at Woodstock, and was deeply involved that era’s anti-war and civil rights protests. Tom once shared with me his amazement at the savvy and discipline of the living wage campaign; they had talking points and media liaisons, and all sorts of strategy and tactics. In the 60’s, Tom told me, they were a lot more clueless; they were just pissed off youth, and were out to Fight the Power over the generally sorry state of the world. It was just so raw then. Also, there were lots of drugs and way better music.

No, the hippies didn’t manage to eliminate war and poverty and inequality, nor did they raise the global consciousness through the mass use of mind-altering drugs, or whatever else a Very Serious Person of that era might have taken to be the utopian vision of a disorganized mob of stoned, shaggy, jobless, angry, young people. But the protests at least tried and succeeded at shifting the cultural and political terrain on which a set of national debates was playing out. They set out to rock the boat in a serious way, and they absolutely succeeded, which is so much more than can be said for Harvard’s elite little cadre of Very Serious but non-status-quo-threatening living wage campaigners.

.

Revisiting Santelli

by digby

Ezra is featuring some thoughts by veteran organizer Rich Yeselson on his blog today that are well worth reading. I think his insight about face to face involvement is particularly interesting. I’m hearing from people who are involved in the protests that the energy is all coming from being there in person — that people are learning about the issues from one another. I confess I’m a little bit surprised by this because I had thought that social media and the internet would have filled much of that gap, but apparently not. (For instance, the Paul contingent are kids who like Ron Paul’s stance on the war but have also absorbed his lunatic economic message without understanding that it’s antithetical to their complaints, so there’s quite a bit of education to be done.)

As for goals, Yeselson has some very insightful advice I think:

The phrase, “we are the 99 percent” nicely encapsulates the potential of OWS to become a movement of democratic extension. But right now, the precise demands of the Wall Street demonstrators include grandiose ideas like abolishing consumerism. A bit vague, and can even Lloyd Blankfein get it done by the end of the next quarter? As Harold Meyerson [wrote Tuesday] in The Washington Post, other groups around the country with a different leadership structure are making more concrete demands, including the modification of student and household debts and the imposition of a financial transaction tax.

Reworking debt should be distinguished from either “demand the impossible” notions, like abolishing consumerism, or smart lefty wonkmanship, like a financial transaction tax. I won’t dispute that an FTT is good policy, but neither it nor posturing about stopping other people from buying stuff that you find tasteless changes the lives of ordinary people in a clear and measurable way. It won’t affect how much they are paid and how they deal with their boss, or how they use public accommodations, or whom they choose to live happily ever after with. But lowering the crushing debt burden on millions of people in the midst of a “balance sheet” recession can do just that—it hits people where and how they live. If, as in this example, the demonstrators make proposals which have an organic connection to the pressing concerns of millions of people, they will heighten the potential of developing a movement which can leverage political change.

This is interesting. Recall the speech that inspired the Tea Party, Santelli’s rant, delivered from the trading floor in Chicago:

RICK SANTELLI: The government is promoting bad behavior. Because we certainly don’t want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check, and think that they ought to save it, and in terms of modifications… I’ll tell you what, I have an idea.

You know, the new administration’s big on computers and technology– How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?

TRADER ON FLOOR: That’s a novel idea.

(Applause, cheering)

JOE KERNEN: Hey, Rick… Oh, boy. They’re like putty in your hands. Did you hear…?

SANTELLI: No they’re not, Joe. They’re not like putty in our hands. This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.

(Booing)

President Obama, are you listening?

TRADER: How ’bout we all stop paying our mortgage? It’s a moral hazard.

KERNEN: It’s like mob rule here. I’m getting scared. I’m glad I’m…

CARL QUINTANILLA: Get some bricks and bats…

SANTELLI: Don’t get scared, Joe. They’re already scaring you. You know, Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now, they’re driving ’54 Chevys, maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit.

KERNEN: They’re driving them on water, too, which is a little strange to watch.

SANTELLI: There you go.

KERNEN: Hey Rick, how about the notion that, Wilbur pointed out, you can go down to 2% on the mortgage…

SANTELLI: You could go down to -2%. They can’t afford the house.

KERNEN: …and still have 40%, and still have 40% not be able to do it. So why are they in the house? Why are we trying to keep them in the house?

SANTELLI: I know Mr. Summers is a great economist, but boy, I’d love the answer to that one.

REBECCA QUICK: Wow. Wilbur, you get people fired up.

SANTELLI: We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.

(Whistling, cheering)

That’s pretty much the opposite of debt relief, isn’t it? OWS then, is quite literally the anti-Tea Party. That’s worth contemplating a little bit, I think.

Update: Speaking of Chicago, here’s a current picture from the Board of Trade Building:

.

Plutocracy is a Greek Word
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

As a general strike against austerity stops Greece in its tracks today, it’s worth remembering this from May of last year:

The price of houses and flats costing more than £1m jumped 21pc last month compared with a year earlier, new figures from Knight Frank showed. It’s the sharpest annual rise since April 2008. For the month, prices were up 1.3pc.

Knight Frank, a high-end estate agency, said that Greeks now account for 6pc of all properties in the UK capital sold for more than £2m, double the level of a year ago.

The Greek Government this week pledged to enforce the toughest austerity measures in its recent history in return for a bail-out from the Eurozone and the IMF. The plans by Prime Minister George Papandreou call for tax increases on a swathe of goods, including cigarettes and alcohol, as well as a series of deep cuts in benefits and public spending.

“Greek buyers have been especially active and have been competing hard for the limited number of high-quality properties currently available,” said Rupert des Forges, a partner at Knight Frank. “There has been a real trend for wealthy Greek families to invest in UK property for a variety of reasons, but the safe haven driver is a big one.”

Keep in mind that one of the biggest drivers of the Greek financial crisis is not so much a generous safety net so much as tax evasion on a mind-boggling scale, mostly by the wealthy. The Greek government has found that attempting to address its tax evasion problems has been fairly difficult, particularly since much of the recent enforcement efforts have fallen regressively on small business and the middle class.

Meanwhile, commentators on the BBC news on NPR tonight were mentioning that wealthy Greeks were reportedly fleeing the country to avoid not only the possible riots, but also the possibility that their wealth might actually be taxed for a change.

In other oligarch news, two Russian plutocrats who may have been attempting to murder one another for years are involved in a lawsuit for a mere $5 billion in damages over the sale of oil investments.

The plutocracy problem is not just an American or even an Anglosphere problem. It is a global problem caused by rise of the new global elite. Countries with a legacy of strong social democracy have fared better than America which was not blessed with such advantages, but Europe and East Asia will not be immune from the economic disease bestowed by the financial Masters of the Universe.

Nations will either cooperate in coming to grips with the problem and bringing the plutocrats to heel in a global way, or the entire world will erupt in the sort of turmoil that we are seeing in Greece and even in Zuccotti Park. It’s just a matter of time.

.

Erin goes blah (blah)

by digby

CNN is very serious about getting a big piece of that very valuable Old White Guy audience:

It’s so great they gave Burnett her own show. She’s just the right gal for the moment, which with all her Wall Street experience and economic savvy:

Here’s an example of her insights back in January of 2009:

Here’s “wall street analyst” Erin Burnett just a few minutes later talking about the layoff announcements today:

Burnett: It is pretty concerning because when you look at that stimulus plan you could be looking at somewhere between 800 and 900 billion dollars spent and how quickly are you gonna get job announcements, job creation out of that bill. That is a big question right now on Wall Street.

O’Donnell: Yeah, and I know Democrats and President Obama’s team using that to make that argument that we’ve got to get this done quickly.

There is some good news out there about the housing market.

Burnett: Yes there was, and this is funny, I guess it’s the world we’re in right now Norah. This is going to sound horrible but it’s actually better news than expected. Home prices were down 15% from a year ago, but existing home sales overall were up, and what really sticks out here was inventory, how much of the stuff we’ve got to work through before we are to get back to a healthy market. We saw a big drop there, we have 9.3 months of inventory which means at the current selling rate it would take 9.3 months to actually work through everything but that is a big improvement from where we were just a month ago.

So there are a few signs of improvement, raising to some the question of how big and how quick this stimulus actually needs to be to stimulate. The economy’s trying to turn itself around.

She’s an expert on finance donthcha know. Take this brilliant observation:

I think people should be careful what they wish for on China. You know, if China were to revalue its currency or China is to start making, say, toys that don’t have lead in them or food that isn’t poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up, and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up, too. So I would say China is our greatest friend right now. They’re keeping prices low and they’re keeping prices for mortgages low, too.

This was good too. Question to Larry Summers:

“In the longer term, are you willing to stand up and say, ‘Hey, America, your pensions are going to be smaller, your Medicare benefits are going to be lower, your Social Security retirement age is going to go way up and your benefits are going to go lower even if you paid in?’Are we at the point where the government has to say, ‘These are painful facts, and we might lose re-election by telling you, but we’re going to telling you the truth?'”

Say what you will about Summers, but this was an awesome retort:

“Erin,” replied Summers, “listening to you, it sounds like it’s an exercise in sadism, who can cause the most pain.”

I could go on. I’ve been writing about Burnett for years and she’s always a very, very earnest defender of plutocrats everywhere. And God knows we need to see even more of that.

Oh, and by the way her report on the protest tonight was just as contemptible.

Update: I guess congratulations are in order

She has a large male following due to her extraordinary beauty and brawn as business news anchor and reporter for CNBC.

And many of them will no doubt be disappointed with the news that 34-year-old Erin Burnett has become engaged.

The brunette beauty is set to tie the knot with Citigroup executive David Rubulotta.

h/t to AJC

A Republican Surfaces for a Final Breath
by David Atkins

This is interesting:

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) launched a verbal assault on an unconventional target Tuesday, taking aim at Grover Norquist and his highly influential tax policy group, Americans for Tax Reform.

In a speech from the House floor, Wolf accused Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform of complicating the deficit-cutting process with their efforts to encourage Republican politicians to sign onto a “no new taxes” pledge, which has recently stretched far past the issue of personal taxes.

“Everything must be on the table, and I believe how the pledge is interpreted and enforced by Mr. Norquist is a roadblock to realistically reforming our tax code,” Wolf said, after first clarifying that he didn’t “support raising taxes on the American people.”

“Have we really reached the point where one person’s demand for ideological purity is paralyzing Congress to the point that even a discussion of tax reform is viewed as breaking a no-tax pledge?”

I applaud Congressman Wolf’s courage, and look forward to seeing which Tea Party challenger will defeat him in a primary battle next year.

The fact is that for Congressman Wolf and anyone else in the GOP with even an ounce of sense, the time to speak up against Norquist and his brigade was years if not decades ago. It’s too late now. He who lives by riling people up into anti-tax hysteria will die by it, too.

The same phenomenon is taking place as casual observers nervously fret over the embarrassing spectacle that is the the GOP Presidential debates. Republicans have managed to muscle their way into power in this country by carefully nurturing a poisonous, nonsensical and unrealistic view of the world among somewhere between 30% and 40% of the American public. Like a foolish comic book or B-movie villain, they thought they could keep that monster in check to use for their own ends. In reality, that monster now controls their destiny.

Fox News is no longer the propaganda arm for the GOP. The GOP is the legislative arm of the conservative media empire. Grover Norquist is no longer a useful vote-getter for the GOP. The GOP is a useful policy-making tool for Grover Norquist and his allies.

Congressman Frank Wolf is about to find out who really runs things in Republican land, and it’s not John Boehner or anyone in official GOP leadership.

.

Still waiting for a hero

by digby

Here’s a fascinating read about The Man Called Petraeus called “The dangerous allure of Washington hero worship”. (The first part called “The Petraeus projection: The CIA director’s record since the surge” here.)

It goes into great detail about how he’s completely failed at his job yet is still revered as a demi-God. I particularly enjoyed this insight, since it applies to so many people:

But even an understanding of the collusion between senior officials and journalists does not fully explain the extraordinary position Petraeus occupies in the American psyche. To understand why journalists and the public avert their eyes from Petraeus’ record of failure since Iraq, one must turn to the realm of psychology, and particularly the phenomenon of projection, one of the most powerful forces driving human behavior.

While the technical definition of psychological projection is attributing one’s own repressed negative traits to others, a “positive projection,” whereby one projects desires for security, love, respect, understanding and other desirable traits onto others, is equally strong.

Anyone who has ever fallen in — and out — of love can understand the unconscious power of projection. As a therapist friend says, “You fall in love with a projection not a person, and the first task of building a relationship is to separate the two.” When we first “fall in love” we inevitably project onto our love-object (whom we may not really know) our desires to love and be loved, valued, cared for and admired. It is only after time that we discover the person behind the projection, a process that often leads to primal bitterness at the failure of one’s projections.

Unconscious projections are particularly strong in the case of powerful politicians and military leaders. Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Denial of Death,” has theorized that the origin of hierarchy itself lies in our unconscious desires to be protected from death — the reason why for most of human history leaders, for example, claiming “the divine right of kings,” have exercised both secular and sacred power.

People naturally project their desires to be protected onto military leaders like Petraeus, especially at this moment in our history. Americans were understandably terrified by the Sept. 11 attack and naturally looked to someone like Petraeus for protection. In addition, we live in a largely hero-less age. Presidents have launched war on false evidence or engaged in adultery. Popes have covered up child abuse. Baseball players have cheated with steroids. Bankers have grabbed huge bonuses after wrecking the economy. We have gone from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, from David Sarnoff to Rupert Murdoch, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Al Sharpton. It is thus understandable why so many Americans, lacking other heroes, have projected their deep desires to be safe and protected onto Petraeus.

Projection itself is not necessarily harmful, of course. Many have been inspired to noble and selfless needs by their projections about their leaders, nation or religion. People who project deep feelings onto actors, musicians or athletes are at worst engaged in harmless fantasy.

But projections can also be quite dangerous. Human history is replete with catastrophes caused by humans either projecting their own repressed negative traits onto hated “others.” In the cases of military leaders from Napoleon to Gen. Westmoreland, people have projected their positive desires onto once-heroic leaders whose subsequent lack of judgment brought ruin to their nations.

I have beaten this particular man on a white horse for so long that I doubt anyone’s listening anymore. But I have long considered David Petraeus to be a dangerous man, mainly because he occupies this space in American politics that makes him immune to the usual criticism. As the piece points out, virtually every institution in the world has lost credibility except for the military — and Petraeus in particular. And he’s not only not the hero that everyone persists in seeing him, he’s quite bad at his job.

Obama deftly took him out of the political mix for 2012, and by all accounts he has genuine high regard for his abilities, which is disturbing in itself.But if things keep going the way they are going, the nation may very well turn it’s eyes to this man in four years. And that’s not good.

.

Unanimously skittish

by digby

This is sad:

[The jobs bill is] dead on arrival as far as Republican leadership is concerned, but it also lacks unanimous support among Democrats. And since the Senate is the one body Democrats control, that’s creating a bit of dissonance. Obama says vote on the bill, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) doesn’t have the votes, and, if he put it on the floor today, he’d probably lose a handful or more Democrats.

That would invite Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to reprise his oft-repeated line that the only thing bipartisan about President Obama’s jobs bill is the opposition to it. And that’s something Reid wants to avoid.

So while Republicans taunt Reid and his party for not doing as Obama says and passing the jobs bill “right now,” Democrats are looking at ways to tweak the legislation so that it can get unanimous support from his party, and Democrats can make a case to the public that they’re united behind a jobs plan Republicans are refusing to support.

This is not going to pass in any case so it’s just a campaign issue. Maybe it doesn’t matter what they unanimously agree to as long as they unanimously agree to something that’s called a “jobs bill.”

But when you look at what the hang-up is, it’s a bigger problem:

Senate Democratic aides say the tax enforcement mechanism is the key sticking point for the caucus, but have yet to identify which specific tax proposals would have to go, and what alternatives could be swapped in for them. Democrats from fossil fuel states have objected to the bill’s call to end tax benefits for oil and gas companies. Other Democrats have expressed concern about a call to end the so-called carried interest loophole, which allows hedge fund and private equity managers to count their income as capital gains, and thus pay taxes at a significantly lower rate than most individuals.

It’s theoretically possible that some Democrats running for office combined with the activities happening on the streets will be able to create a mandate for higher taxes on the rich. But it’s going to be a very tough slog. Decades of propaganda have convinced an awful lot of people that to tax the wealthy and highly profitable industry is economically and politically suicidal.

At this point, I think they should concentrate on help now, pay later. This confusion between jobs and deficits and taxes has twisted them into a pretzel and they need to keep it simple if they actually hope to create a political environment in which it’s possible to do what’s necessary for the economy.

.