Month: December 2011

The alternate reality Village

by David Atkins

While the Administration restricts access to birth control and looks to give away gifts to the GOP in exchange for allowing Dems to pass a tax cut, here’s what passes for commentary in the Village:

Obama’s Aloof Behavior With GOP Could Hurt Agenda

President Barack Obama’s relationships with Congressional Republicans have withered in recent months, casting doubt on his ability to influence Congress during the election season next year as well as his ability to push an aggressive agenda if he wins a second term.

Though Republicans are in a good position to hold the levers of power in both chambers come 2013, several rank-and-file GOP Senators told Roll Call last week that Obama hasn’t called them at all this year — and several said his standoffish relations have hurt his agenda in a chamber that is pivotal to any White House legislative successes.

Obama did have all Senate Republicans up to the White House for a cattle call earlier this year, and he engaged in extensive discussions with Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) on this summer’s debt deal. But direct contacts between the president and lawmakers have slowed to a trickle as he gears up for re-election, Republicans said.

A senior Republican aide said Obama has had just three brief phone calls with Boehner since unveiling his jobs package — and there’s been no real effort to work with the Speaker.

In the Village, the only thing wrong with Washington is that the Obama Administration hasn’t made enough courtesy calls and dinner invitations to Republicans. If only he were a nicer guy all our problems would be solved, and Republicans would act like serious people and come to a 50-50 compromise with Democrats.

Fox News propaganda is easier to take, precisely because it’s partisan propaganda and everyone knows it. But the Villagers actually believe this stuff. They live in a world of endless cocktail parties, where no one truly suffers, public policy is an abstraction that only affects the little people, and all their personal dramas boil down to rumors over who is sleeping with whom, and gripes about who didn’t get invited to whose party. That’s the world these people live in, so it’s the world they overlay onto the political scene. It’s the social milieu they know, and they’ve spent decades convincing the public that Washington works that way, too: that the only problem with the place is that we don’t send nice, friendly people there who will all invite each other over for dinner and drinks to hash out compromise policies.

And in its own way, that’s far more damaging than anything Fox News has ever done.

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Postpartisan depression: The Democrats join the War On Women

by digby

Good news. It looks like we’ve finally gotten the long awaited post-partisan achievement: the Democrats have joined the war on science. And women! It’s a twofer:

In what can only be called an astounding move by an Administration that pledged on inauguration day that medical and health decisions would be based on fact not ideology and for which women are a major constituency, today Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) overruled a much-awaited decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make emergency contraception (EC) available over-the-counter (OTC) to women of all ages.

According to the New York Times, “no health secretary has ever [overruled an FDA decision] before.”

EC has been available over-the-counter for women ages 18 and older for at least two years. The FDA has been further reviewing data on whether the method should be available OTC without a prescription to those age 17 and younger at risk from unprotected intercourse.

In a statement this afternoon FDA underscored that it “had been carefully evaluating for over a decade whether emergency contraceptives containing levonorgestrel, such as Plan B One-Step, are safe and effective for nonprescription use to reduce the chance of pregnancy after unprotected sexual intercourse.”

Experts, noted the statement, “including obstetrician/gynecologists and pediatricians, reviewed the totality of the data and agreed that it met the regulatory standard for a nonprescription drug and that Plan B One-Step should be approved for all females of child-bearing potential.”

So, the battle is obviously no longer only about abortion (if you had any doubts.) In this case, it’s about denying emergency birth control for the very people who are most likely to need it — teenagers — and are the least likely to seek a prescription.

I’m guessing the official rationale here is that parents need to be informed if their 17 year old daughters are having sex. That’s very, very practical. I’m sure this will result in much closer parental guidance for their teenagers’ sexuality. Lord knows, that age group has never had sex until now but who knows what will happen if they get a “get out of jail free” card and go wild? Why, they’ll just start sleeping with each other all over the place.

The data shows that teenage girls can handle this:

CDER carefully considered whether younger females were able to understand how to use Plan B One-Step. Based on the information submitted to the agency, CDER determined that the product was safe and effective in adolescent females, that adolescent females understood the product was not for routine use, and that the product would not protect them against sexually transmitted diseases. Additionally, the data supported a finding that adolescent females could use Plan B One-Step properly without the intervention of a healthcare provider.

Teenage girls are dealing with all sorts of “down there” bodily accoutrements, so I think they can read the instructions and understand what it all means. The idea that they need to see a doctor (and probably tell their parents) is nothing more than an attempt to make it difficult for them to use this without involving adult authority in their sexual behavior — the very last thing they want to do. This form of birth control works when someone uses it immediately after unprotected sex. Making them go through hoops totally defeats the purpose.

If parents are worried that their girls are having sex without their knowledge, they need to wake up to the fact that they probably are. Requiring a prescription for this form of birth control will not change that, it just makes it more likely that their daughter will get pregnant. Why parents think that’s a good result I don’t know.

I’m all for parents talking about sex with their kids and passing on their values. But making teenagers bear children against their will for succumbing to the most natural, biological urge in human experience seems like a dreadful, superstitious value to me. Making it more likely that they’ll have an abortion seems like some kind of cosmic joke.

And those who are sentencing young women to a life’s promise cut short by early parenthood because of some religious belief that having non-procreative sex is a sin that must be punished are, in my mind, working for the other side (if you know what I mean.) It’s just wrong and I continue to be gobsmacked that I’m living in 2011 and these throwback views are once again gaining in currency.

Kathleen Sebelius is now going to eat the sins of the administration. I hope she likes the taste of it.

Update:

“This decision is stunning,” said Susan Wood, former head of the FDA’s Office of Women’s Health who resigned in protest over the agency’s handling of the drug in 2005.

“I had come to believe that the FDA would be allowed to make decisions based on science and the public’s health. Sadly, once again, FDA has been over-ruled and not allowed to do its job,” Wood said in a statement.

Yeah, a lot of people thought that.

Update II: I’m hearing that this is the fault of the women’s groups for not being better organized. Normally, I would agree that they are pretty hapless — and hopelessly compromised. But all indications are that they were told this was a done deal and they were taken by surprise by the move.

But it always kind of amazes me that women are considered a discrete special interest that requires organized advocacy groups to labor on our behalf. We are half the population.

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The welfare queen in a chiropractor

by digby

So I see the New York Daily News is dusting off the old Welfare Queen trope just in time for our coming election. This story features a Jewish Chiropractor, so you’d think it wouldn’t carry quite the same racial baggage, but if you look at the comments you’ll realize some things never change:

AHHH you speak of the chosen ones no doubt. My mother lives in rockland county so I am well aware of the situation of which you speak. Google New Square New York and read wikipedia. They are the chosen ones and we should be happy( sarcasm) to pay for their lifestyle. They are indeed the chosen ones, just ask any jewish person and they will tell you. Opps sorry they wont tell you because you are a goyim, a Non Jew. They have cost the rockland county taxpayer alot of money.

Nice, huh? To be fair, there’s plenty of hating going on from a number of different angles in those comments.

Look for more of these lurid stories of people collecting benefits while living like kings. This stuff about fraud always gets cranked up when the big money boyz need to rile up the rubes and redirect the anger at them back on Washington: all these gummint programs do is take money from you hardworking taxpayers and put it into the pockets of people who don’t deserve it. The only way to fix this once and for all is to get rid of the government programs. (Real Americans will get what they need, of course, because they are hard workers who have earned it.)

This is particularly useful when we are about to embark on our annual Christmas Unemployment Insurance game of chicken. It’s become part of our holiday ritual: Will you be able to eat past Christmas? Spin the dial and pray that Mitch McConnell is feeling the Christmas spirit.

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Who will be the biggest hater?

by digby

It looks like Rick Perry isn’t going to go down without a fight. He’s openly challenging Newtie for the most obnoxious hater in the GOP field. It’s a tough race, but he’s making a good run at it:

I should also note that there is a fair case to be made that the contrast, as Perry looks to consolidate the fractured evangelical vote, is also clearly aimed at Mitt Romney, as the question of whether Mormonism is an issue for Iowa caucus-goers will get tested.

It will be tested everywhere. Polls consistently show a strong undercurrent of religious intolerance among the Christian Right. Perry is trying to to exploit that.

Also too, liberal bashing. It’s what’s for dinner.

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Friendly Unctuous Gasbags

by David Atkins

My fellow Ventura County resident, sometime blogger at Grist and DailyKos and all around awesome person RL Miller and a group of people associated with Occupy Congress just tried to meet with our mutual Congressman Elton Gallegly (CA-24). Her account of the meeting spent most of the day yesterday on DailyKos’ recommended list, and deservedly so:

We arrive at Rep. Gallegly’s office at 12:30 PM. The office is closed for lunch, although other representatives’ doors are wide open. At 1 PM a staffer shows up with a styrofoam container, presumably leftovers, and a set of keys. He tells us that Gallegly can’t meet with us because he’s on an airplane flying in to DC for a vote this afternoon, and won’t meet with us because we’re not constituents. I tell him I’m a constituent. The staffer agrees to let me and my friends into the office to wait. But instead of opening the door, he walks away, whips out his Blackberry, and ducks into a side office.

Things get weirder.

The staffer refuses to open the door. I fume that I’m locked out of my own Congresscritter’s office. Another staffer enters through the secret side door.

The Congressional police are called.

At one point, five staffers are inside, presumably cowering in fear behind the locked door. They answer phones, but hang up as soon as they hear that I’m in the hallway.

We stand outside and hold a general assembly with two police officers listening. Whenever we sit, we are warned that we will be arrested if we sit.

The mail is not delivered because the office refuses to unlock the door.

At 3 PM, the Representative himself exits the side door to head to an elevator. Two dozen tired, footsore members of the 99 percent chase after him. He tells several people that they are not constituents so he doesn’t have to meet with them.

I push forward and tell him that I am a constituent.

He makes me recite my home address, in front of two dozen folk including security, to verify that I am, in fact, a constituent.

He gives me a practiced, polished politician’s smile and says, “Merry Christmas.”

We try to talk with him about jobs.

He tells us that he just donated 750 toys to children this weekend.

We ask to meet with him.

He tells everyone else that he doesn’t have to meet with any of them because they’re not his constituents.

As for me…he repeats that oozing smile and tells me, “I met with you just now – I wished you a Merry Christmas.”

To you and me, this shows Mr. Gallegly in the worst possible light: contempt for the unemployed and contempt for his constituents.

But in Ventura County, as with so many other places in America, politicians like Gallegly are all too common. Gallegly is a decades-long backbencher in Congress with little important legislation to his name. He has skated by for decades due to comfortable districting that hasn’t seriously threatened his re-election campaigns, as well as a general “nice guy” appeal honed by sending out personal letters and sending kids Christmas gifts.

The fact that politicians like Gallegly write nice letters, act courteously in public and support local charities is supposed to make up for the fact that they vote for endless wars, tax cuts for rich people, destruction of the safety net, privatizing Medicare, and opposing reduction of greenhouse gases.

But to many people, including even people active in local Democratic politics, the former often really does make up for the latter. There really are a lot of people out there, especially on the nominal “left,” who put personal civility ahead of good public policy, who don’t believe in endorsing one Democrat over another on the basis of public policy, and who would rather elect moderate-conservative Declined-to-States who seem “nice” over a totally electable Democrat progressive enough to be labeled as “polarizing” by the local conservative press.

So when Mr. Gallegly delivers his subtle sneer of gentility wishing his constituent a Merry Christmas and reminding her about the charity Christmas gifts he sent, he knows what he’s doing. He’s counting on superficial charm with gullible people to override decent policy, even as he actually insults his constituents.

Fortunately for the residents of Ventura County, the redistricting process in California is likely to cost him his seat next year, and not a moment too soon. But for far too many Americans, unctuous politicians like Gallegly can count on a few parade appearances and charity events to fool voters into thinking they’re “nice people.”

When it comes to politicians, the only proper judgment of values and character comes from their votes on issues and their respect for petitioning constituents. Conservatives already understand this. It’s time “moderates” and many so-called liberals did as well.

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This should be fun:

David Lewis will not be the next congressman from Ohio’s 8th District. But for Lewis, an unemployed former IT technician who is challenging House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in next year’s Republican primary, winning isn’t the objective.

By running for federal office, Lewis can compel local television stations to run grisly anti-abortion ads that would otherwise never stand a chance of making it on the air. Emphasis on grisly: Lewis’ ads feature what purport to be dismembered fetuses, tied together in neat little bundles, or simply mangled beyond recognition. “The FCC says that 45 days out from a primary and 60 days out from a general election, we can run ads on a television station with FCC licenses—unedited, uncensored, they can’t deny it as long as we buy the spot,” he explains.

That psycho Randall Terry is recruiting people to do this all over the country. (Terry himself will be “running” against Obama.)

The great moral challenge of our time

by David Atkins

Most of the political discourse in the country is focused on economics, taxes and spending. With so many people unemployed and the social safety under assault, that’s mostly appropriate. But it’s also worth remembering that the biggest legacy we have to leave to future generations isn’t about money. It’s about the planet.

About that? The news isn’t good, per David Roberts at Grist:

1. How much can global average temperature rise before we risk “dangerous” changes in climate? The current consensus answer is: 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F] above pre-industrial levels.

The 2 degrees C number has been around for over a decade and was reaffirmed by the Copenhagen Accord just last year. Deciding on an “acceptable” level of temperature is a political and somewhat arbitrary judgment, of course, since it lets one number stand in for a wide range of heterogeneous considerations. But it’s an important marker. And when it was first developed, it was based on the science of the day…

:
But…

Right now, global emissions are rising, faster and faster. Between 2000 and 2007, they rose at around 3.5 percent a year; by 2009 it was up to 5.6 percent. In 2010, we hit 5.9 percent growth, a record. We aren’t just going in the wrong direction — we’re accelerating in the wrong direction…

As you can see, if we delay the global emissions peak until 2025, we pretty much have to drop off a cliff afterwards to avoid 2 degrees C. Short of a meteor strike that shuts down industrial civilization, that’s unlikely.

How about 2020? Of the available scenarios for peaking in 2020, says Anderson, 13 of 18 show hitting 2 degrees C to be technically impossible. (D’oh!) The others involve on the order of 10 percent reductions a year after 2020, leading to total decarbonization by 2035-45.

Just to give you a sense of scale: The only thing that’s ever pushed emissions reductions above 1 percent a year is, in the words of the Stern Report, “recession or upheaval.” The total collapse of the USSR knocked 5 percent off its emissions. So 10 percent a year is like … well, it’s not like anything in the history of human civilization.

This, then, is the brutal logic of climate change: With immediate, concerted action at global scale, we have a slim chance to halt climate change at the extremely dangerous level of 2 degrees C. If we delay even a decade — waiting for better technology or a more amenable political situation or whatever — we will have no chance.

OK, so maybe we can’t stop the globe from warming by two degrees. How about four?

It might seem that, given the extraordinary difficulty of hitting 2 degrees C, we ought to lower our sights a bit and accept that we’re going to hit 4 degrees C. It won’t be ideal, but hitting anything lower than that is just too difficult and expensive.

It’s seductive logic. After all, to hit 4 degrees C we would “only” have to peak global emissions in 2020 and decline thereafter at the relatively leisurely rate (ha ha) of around 3.5 percent per year.

Sadly, even that cold comfort is not available to us. The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”

Yeeeah. You’ll want to read that sentence again. Then you’ll probably want to pour yourself a stiff drink.

Obviously, “incompatible with an organized global community” is what jumps out, but the last bit, “high probability of not being stable,” is equally if not more important. One of the most uncertain areas of climate science today has to do with feedbacks — processes caused by climate change that in turn accelerate (or decelerate) climate change. For instance, heat can melt the Arctic permafrost, which releases methane, which accelerates climate change, which melts more permafrost, etc.

Based on current scientific understanding, positive climate feedbacks — the ones that accelerate the process — considerably outweigh negative feedbacks. At some level of temperature rise, some of those positive feedbacks are likely to become self-reinforcing and effectively unstoppable, no matter how much emissions are cut. These are the “tipping points” you hear so much about.

It is a revolting commentary on the shortsightedness of human nature that this issue is not the #1 subject of debate around the world every single day among responsible policy makers.

But what is doubly depressing is that this issue could and should be a perfect rationale for the sort of stimulus spending that is exactly what would be needed to pull the world out of a global recession. One of the two supposed benefits of the capitalist model beyond consumer freedom of choice is supposed to be systemic efficiency. But if the world’s economic system were anything approaching efficient, all that money that is locked away uselessly and indeed counterproductively in the accounts of companies that play casino games in capital markets and crash economies, would be repurposed to invest in the sorts of jobs and research that would provide energy conservation yields and innovative breakthroughs to mitigate the climate crisis.

It should be a no brainer. Instead, the world is obsessed with austerity measures to please the already overfed bond market gods, in order to reignite a consumer economy dependent on fossil fuel manufacturing that is already killing the planet.

It’s so depressing that sometimes I wonder why smart people even bother with public policy instead of waiting out the inevitable generational destruction with a solid community of friends and family. One has to at least try, right?

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It’s the culture war stupid

by digby

I’ve been skeptical that Rick Perry tanked because of his immigration stance from the beginning and I think this bears that out:

Remember how Republican pundits declared that Newt Gingrich had inflicted major damage to his campaign because he dared to embrace what both Michele Bachmann and Romney described as “amnesty” during CNN’s November 22 Republican primary debate?
Well, ABC and Washington Post asked Iowa Republicans which candidate they thought would do the best job handling immigration issues. Their answer?

Regardless of who you may support, which of the Republican candidates do you trust most to handle immigration?
Gingrich: 27
Perry: 18
Paul: 13
Romney: 8
Bachmann: 7
Santorum: 3
Huntsman: 3

They just didn’t like Perry and I’m guessing it’s because if you close your eyes when he’s talking you hear George W. Bush. After 8 years of listening to someone over and over again you develop a subliminal reaction to the sound of his voice and I don’t think that reaction is a pleasant one.

be that as it may, it does raise the question of why these Hard (Tea) Partying primary voters are so willing to overlook Newtie’s immigration stance when they said they hated Perry’s. There’s not that much difference between them. So what gives?

I think Ben Adler gets it right in this piece in which he reports that the GOP establishment is getting desperate and looking for ways they might boost Huntsman:

Look at Will’s argument for Huntsman, and you see a crucial fallacious assumption: that Republican primary voters care about policy. Will writes:

[Huntsman] endorses Paul Ryan’s budget and entitlement reforms. (Gingrich denounced Ryan’s Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering.”) Huntsman would privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Gingrich’s benefactor). Huntsman would end double taxation on investment by eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends. (Romney would eliminate them only for people earning less than $200,000, who currently pay just 9.3 percent of them.) Huntsman’s thorough opposition to corporate welfare includes farm subsidies. (Romney has justified them as national security measures—food security, somehow threatened. Gingrich says opponents of ethanol subsidies are “big-city” people hostile to farmers.)… Between Ron Paul’s isolationism and the faintly variant bellicosities of the other six candidates stands Huntsman’s conservative foreign policy, skeptically nuanced about America’s need or ability to control many distant developments.

Does a Republican primary voter in Iowa favor eliminating subsidies for corn? Does a typical middle-class, home-owning Republican support privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Support for the free market is a rhetorical position for rank-and-file conservatives, not a principle strong enough to withstand any conflict with their own self-interest. (For an example, read Joe Klein’s description in Time of Romney contending on the campaign trail with Iowa Republicans who don’t want their ethanol subsidies to expire.)

For many Republicans, nominal fiscal conservatism is really about the culture war rather than economic policy. When I interviewed attendees at Newt Gingrich’s Staten Island Tea Party town hall meeting on Saturday, the grievances articulated were not inefficient programs like farm subsidies. It was an inchoate anger that some vaguely defined band of derelicts refuses to work and demands handouts. Sometimes the malefactors are hippies occupying Wall Street. Sometimes they are illegal immigrants. But they are never farmers.

This is what Newt has that Romney and Huntsman are missing: culture war cred.This is what they crave:

(Notice Frank Luntz’s delirious genuflecting …)

That’s what the base wants. They want their worldview validated. And their worldview is not concerned with “fiscal responsibility” or deficit reduction or shared sacrifice. It’s concerned with stopping liberals (and their various constituency groups) from achieving mainstream credibility and real political power. All else flows from that.

Think about some of the things the audiences have cheered for in these debates so far: executions, the uninsured being forced to “take responsibility” for their decisions, the collapsed moral system of the left (they are dirty and smelly too.) (And they booed an active duty gay soldier.) These are all hot button culture war issues. This is what really motivates them.

Newtie’s the only professional culture warrior in the race who is credible as a presidential contender. He helped them rediscover their true calling in these debates. Huntsman and Romney might as well be speaking in Swahili. Newt’s telling them exactly what they want to hear.

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This is an interesting post about a new study tracking the attitudes of people who have lost jobs in the Great Recession. You can click the link to get to the original data, but it’s distilled nicely here, where the authors have divided the results into several different categories:

• Workers who have MADE IT BACK consider themselves in excellent, good, or fair financial shape and have experienced no change in their standard of living due to the recession.

• People ON THEIR WAY BACK have largely experienced a minor change to their standard of living, but say the change is temporary. They also consider themselves in excellent, good, or fair financial shape.

• Workers who have been DOWNSIZED meet one of three conditions; they have experienced: a minor change that is permanent; a minor change that is temporary, but they are in poor financial shape; or a major change in their standard of living that is temporary and they are in at least fair financial shape.

• Workers classified as DEVASTATED have experienced a major change to their lifestyle due to the recession. They can be either in poor financial shape and think the change is temporary, or in fair financial shape but think this change is permanent.

• Workers that have been TOTALLY WRECKED by this recession have experienced a major change to their lifestyle that is permanent and are in poor financial shape.

Check out the numbers:

This entire society is going to be reeling from that for a long time to come. All that lost value, hope and ambition aren’t going to just automatically return. People’s lives are permanently changed by this sort of cataclysm, they don’t see the world the same way anymore. Risk, in particular, has a very different character to people who’ve been down and out.

And a lot of people who never expected it have been down and out for a long time now:

No wonder they feel totally wrecked.

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Another day another millionaire whiner

Honestly, I think he’s probably a nice person. But then so was Marie Antoinette by all accounts. He’s obviously spent a little too much time among his wealthy cohort and has no idea how out of touch he sounds when he says things like this:

“What pushed me over the fence was the president’s dialogue over the debt ceiling,” Mr. Cooperman said, explaining that just when it seemed like a compromise was near, President Obama went on national television and pressed harder on “millionaires and billionaires,” a phrase that has stuck in the craw of many of the elite. For example, Mr. Cooperman zeroed in on what he described as the president’s belittling remarks about taxing the wealthy: “If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the 1950s. And they can afford it,” the president said back in June. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”

That was all it took. One wonders what he would have done if the president had said something like this:

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

I’m afraid this would make him break down and have a good old fashioned cry:

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

Andrew Sorkin, who reported on this millionaires lament in today’s piece dryly notes: “The president’s tone can be debated. Some people would argue it is simply factual, others contend that it is dripping with derision.”

If that tepid little plea to give up their depreciation on their corporate jets is “dripping with derision” those comments by previous presidents are calls for pitchforks. When did our plutocrats become so soft?

But this is what burns. Our betters believe they have a right to dictate the agenda and they have no patience for the polloi insisting that their uninformed voices have equal weight. You want derision? I’ve got some derision:

But he says the president could do a better job of pressing for higher taxes on the rich without “the sense that we’re bad people.” He added, “I pay federal income tax. I don’t have any tax dodges.” He paused, before saying, “Most people I know are prepared to pay more in taxes as long as it’s spent intelligently.”

He added that he understood the politics of what he called “class warfare.” “Now, I am not naïve. I understand that in today’s America, this is how the business of governing typically gets done — a situation that, given the gravity of our problems, is as deplorable as it is seemingly ineluctable.”

Oh boo hoo. Class warfare is saying that rich people can afford to pay a little bit more for their corporate jets?