Month: March 2012

The older generation of trash talking wingnut pundits get desperate

by digby

The lengths to which the poor things have to go to get attention these days …

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Ok, game’s over boys and girls

by digby

Oh my. Apparently, Rick Santorum is getting punchy. For such a religious right winger you’d think he’d remember the 11th commandment:

Rick Santorum today suggested it would be better to stick with President Obama over a candidate that might be “the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future” — a shot at chief rival Mitt Romney.

“You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there,” said Santorum. “If you’re going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the etch a sketch candidate of the future.”

That must be why they brought in the big guns today. Here’s Jim DeMint:

“We all need to look at this presidential primary and encourage the candidates to do a little self-reflection here on what’s good for our country,” the influential South Carolina conservative told reporters in the Capitol after attending a group meeting with Romney. “The sooner we can make a decision, the sooner we can focus on the real problem, which is Obama.”

Asked if he was making a diplomatic case for former Sen. Rick Santorum and former Speaker Newt Gingrich to drop out, DeMint said “You can take from that what you will.”

“There’s no need to drag this to a convention if it’s pretty clear who our nominee is,” DeMint said.

I’ve been wondering when they’d start this in earnest. Political elites hate it when the people are refusing to stop voting for candidates who have been determined by all the important people to be losers. Evidently, it’s wrong to even be allowed to vote a protest or carry a message during apolitical campaign if it’s going to “hurt” the frontrunner.

This is a bipartisan disease, by the way, and every election it reminds me just how much the political establishment and the media hate democracy. It’s fine for the little people to have their cute little votes, but when the Big Boys determine that it’s time for them to fall in line, they’d better fall in line.

I hope Newt and Rick take it all the way to the convention and make Mitt beg for their endorsements to bring the party together.(Ron, it seems, has already cut some kind of a deal so I don’t think he’s holding out for anything.) It’s Mitt’s fault if he can’t close the deal, not his rivals’ and every vote they get in these primaries is a vote from a GOP constituent who has a right to have that vote taken into consideration.

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Another bipartisan wonder for the big money boys

Hey look–the Senate found its long-lost “bipartisanship” today! Too bad it’s on behalf of one bad bill, and one defanged bill. Dave Dayen:

It’s unusual when the Senate passes one bill in a single day, but today they’ve passed two. And both are an indication of the seriousness of legislating in the modern age.

First, we have the JOBS Act, a bill that promises an impossible solution to an unrelated problem, which is a mask for its true agenda, to weaken investor protection rules to the benefit of Wall Street firms and corporations. If there’s an actual policy rationale for this deregulation I’ve yet to see it. That didn’t stop 73 Senators from voting to pass it today, after 300-plus members of the House voted for it previously…

The way this has generally worked in this Congress is that the Senate, for some reason, accepts the House version. This is a change from the last Congress, where the Senate’s filibuster rules were seen as a reason for the House to have to take whatever the Senate would give them. Now the roles have been reversed. For example, the Senate also took up the STOCK Act today. They had previously passed a version and so did the House, but the House version eliminated two key provisions. One responded to a Supreme Court ruling and would allow prosecutions on “honest services fraud” to resume. The other would force “political intelligence” analysts, people paid to hang around Congress and find out information on upcoming legislation to report back to hedge funds, to register like other lobbyists. So the House and Senate versions were different. But instead of a conference committee, the Senate, reflecting a pattern, decided to just pass the House bill. And because the STOCK Act, the main thrust of which bans insider trading by members of Congress and their staffs, is broadly popular, that passed 96-3.

So what’s the common thread here? The JOBS Act, which does absolutely nothing but deregulate Wall Street, passes with one minor regulatory inclusion. The STOCK Act passes, but without two key provisions that have impact on… Wall Street. When Dick Durbin said that the banks “own the place,” you didn’t think that somehow stopped applying, did you?

The fruits of glorious bipartisanship, ladies and gentlemen.

Note to observers in the press: if a bill of consequence passes with broad bipartisan support, it’s usually bad or toothless legislation. Bipartisan bills are almost always worse than party-line bills.

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Flooding the zone

by digby

Hilarious:

Rick Perry is back in Texas, apparently trying to be as evil as humanly possible while he still has a government job. Perry recently refused $35 million intended for Planned Parenthood to provide preventive healthcare to low-income women, basically denying reproductive care to all uninsured women in Texas. Now women are bombarding Perry’s Facebook page with all those extremely graphic questions about menstruation and other vaginal activities that Rick would never have to hear about if he’d just give them back their Planned Parenthood. It’s a brilliant response, since based on his doth-protest-too-much anti-gay stance, we’re betting the vagina is the last thing Rick Perry has any interest in thinking about.

Check it out:

More at the link.
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Hunt for Blue Dogs

by digby

There is a supposed truism among many progressives that the only thing the Democrats understand is pain and until they are soundly defeated they will not learn that they must listen to us. I agree that the worst Democrats must be defeated — but it truly matters who defeats them. And that’s because the lesson they learn from being defeated by conservatives is that they lost because they weren’t conservative enough. Indeed, they run as hard and fast as they can to the right the next time. It is, after all, more rewarding for them anyway, in any number of ways.

Howie has a post up today with all the big news about how the Blue Dogs and New Dems are reconstituting themselves as a power base in the wake of the 2010 Tea Party tsunami that nearly destroyed them. Let’s just say they didn’t exactly decide to become less beholden to corporate America or more ideologically progressive.

Conservative Dems are working hard– hand in hand with the DCCC– to come back to life after 2010;s Blue Dog Apocalypse. It was also an apocalypse of sorts for the New Dems who lost many of their members, most noteworthy being the Chamber of Commerce’s #1 shill inside the Democratic caucus, Melissa Bean, a huge Schneider booster. But corporate whore extraordinaire Steny Hoyer and “ex”-Blue Dog Steve Israel and corrupt New Dem chieftain Joe Crowley are doing their best to undermine progressive candidates this cycle and push the same brand of hideous, anti-family corporatists who led the Democratic Party to ruin in 2010. Some people never learn– or they learn the wrong lesson. They are funneling money into conservative candidates, telling big donors to not contribute to progressives, and beating up on progressives in one-on-one meetings. A Blue Dog endorsement has become tantamount– or a prelude– to a DCCC endorsement under Israel. He called himself “Rahm without the potty mouth” when he was first installed in his DCCC job; he’s far worse and far more insidious. And, as much as I can’t stand Rahm, at least he’s smart in a tactical, street smart way. Israel is a boob who is leading the House Democrats to defeat with his dangerous ideological mania.

Tuesday, Open Secrets focused on how smartly Blue Dog funding has been climbing under these circumstances.

Read his whole post for the bad news.

I do agree that these Democrats must lose. But I don’t think that losing to Republicans will ever change the culture or practice in the congress, which grows ever rightward with each cycle. I believe to do that, it’s vitally important that we strengthen the Progressive bloc in the House by electing the best progressive leaders we can in deep blue districts and beating corrupt Blue Dog and New Dems in primaries.

There are some very exciting progressive movement leaders running in this cycle. You can see them all here. As for the deep blue leadership requirement, I’d say that we have two exceptional candidates in Norman Solomon and Alan Grayson, both of whom are in newly drawn, heavily Democratic districts. Grayson, so far, has not drawn a challenger and so will almost certainly be back in congress next January. Solomon, however, is running for his deep blue California seat against several other Dems, none of whom are progressive leaders who will challenge the status quo or push the edge of the envelope as he will.

He needs our support — he is exactly the kind of representative we need in congress, one who is able to lead the progressives from the safety of a very liberal district. Seriously folks, we need this one badly and there is no good reason he should not be able to win it as an upfront progressive.

Another great prospect is Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania who is seeking the Holy Grail of progressive electoral politics — he’s running in a newly drawn Democratic district primary to defeat and egregious Blue Dog, Tim Holden. If he does, he will be a hard charging champion for civil liberties — it’s been the cause of his life. I think we could use a few more of those in the congress, don’t you? (And it would beautiful to see Steny’s favorite Blue Dog go down …)

Talk about an empty cupboard

by digby

Anyone who still believes that Karl Rove is a political genius will have to admit that this is just … sloppy. From Greg Sargent:

Rove cites this quote from Bill Clinton in the documentary to make the case that any president would have made the call Obama made:

As for the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief would have done in the same situation. Even President Bill Clinton says in the film “that’s the call I would have made.” For this to be portrayed as the epic achievement of the first term tells you how bare the White House cupboards are.

“That’s the call I would have made,” Clinton said in the documentary, according to Rove. And it’s true, Clinton did utter those words. But here’s the full quote from Clinton, at the 12:30 mark in the film:

“He took the harder and the more honorable path. When I saw what had happened, I thought to myself, `I hope that’s the call I would have made.’”

I guess I can see why he would do this. After all, he got away with a presidential campaign exploiting the journalistic malpractice feedback loop that had Al Gore saying things he didn’t say. But in this day of Youtubes and Mr Google, I’m not sure it’s a successful strategy.

But then, he’s not trying to reach people who are looking for facts. He’s trying to reach people who want anti-Obama red meat and this will do quite nicely.

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Revolutionary Wonk

Here’s a fascinating post at Noahpinion about the economic arguments of the past few years. It references an equally fascinating paper called “Consensus, Dissensus and Economic Ideas: The Rise and Fall of Keynesianism During the Economic Crisis,“by Henry Farrell and John Quiggin.

Noah writes:

[A] layperson might conclude that the insurgency that Krugman launched in September 2009 – and which has consumed and defined the econ blogosphere since then – was ultimately defeated. But I do not believe that this is the case. Although the battle for New Old Keynesianism is mostly over, the Krugman insurgency launched a much deeper, more profound, and more long-lasting war. It shook the philosophical foundation of macroeconomics, and that foundation is still shaking.

Since 2008, everyone had been asking: “Why did macroeconomists miss the crisis?” Even the Queen of England asked it! Shouldn’t we expect macro theory to help us avoid macroeconomic disasters? Of course, the profession at first closed ranks against the criticism. Economists protested that Rational Expectations or the Efficient Markets Hypothesis made it impossible to predict a crisis. These protests mostly fell on deaf ears (and rightly so, because they are logically fallacious). Still, the reflexive wagon-circling made it hard to pin down exactly where economists had gone wrong – after all, if all the experts insist that experts have value, who are non-experts to disagree?

But when Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, came out and said publicly that the macro profession had allowed itself to be satisfied with uselessness and irrelevance, it broke the facade of unity. Like Greg Smith departing Goldman Sachs, here was an insider who was willing to stand up and say that the whole system was rotten. And then Krugman went further. After revealing that top economists were dissatisfied with macro’s ability to predict crises, Krugman revealed that they also couldn’t agree on how to deal with crises. That’s where the push for Old Keynesianism came in. It may not have resulted in a permanent sea change in macroeconomists’ modeling consensus, but it told the public that there were deep divisions within the profession on the question of how to fight recessions.

And that, really, was all the public needed to know. If macroeconomists hadn’t conclusively discovered how to avert crises and also hadn’t conclusively discovered how to recover from crises, what good had they done for society? Why were we paying professors hundreds of thousands of dollars to study this subject if nothing usable had emerged?

Of course, it would be wrong to paint the challenge to macro as a one-man Krugman Show. It isn’t. Even the stalwarts of the profession have been questioning how much macroeconomists really understand – see John Cochrane and Greg Mankiw, for a couple of examples. But it was Krugman who took this argument public, who took the case to the wider educated lay populace, and aired macro’s dirty laundry to millions of engineers, scientists, financiers, businesspeople, politicians, lawyers, and journalists. What Krugman (and Brad DeLong) did to macro was similar, in some ways, to what Lee Smolin and Peter Woit did to string theory – except on a much bigger stage, since Krugman is such a huge name in his field, and macroeconomics has a lot more important policy ramifications than the theory of black holes.

He says the argument’s winding down now with the green shoots seeming to show a little bit of hardiness. But it’s hardly settled. The hardcore Friedman types haven’t changed their minds. Clearly, nothing can change their minds. (That, of course, is Krugman’s central observation.) But more importantly, you can’t help but wonder if this fragile recovery will open the door to a deep round of budget cuts that will send us flying back into recession. Certainly, if the Republicans have their way it will — and there are signs everywhere that the Democrats are ready to jump on board. They’ve done it in Europe. And we did it in 1937. There’s just some kind of deep, instinctive resistance to the concept. It’s hard to know if it’s ideological or psychological or both. But one thing’s sure, as Krugman’s pointed out many times, it isn’t a product of dispassionate scholarship. There’s something else at work.

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Bill Moyers reminds us how dysfunctional American politics have become

by David Atkins

Bill Moyers is still going strong, and still a national treasure. My local NPR station just re-aired this amazing hour-long segment on the how the big banks are rewriting our economic rules. It doesn’t say much that close readers of this blog, of Michael Lewis and Matt Taibbi haven’t already stated before, but it does so in a way that makes it painfully, clearly evident that this country still has gaping hole of criminality and wretched excess in our economic system. Wall Street greed nearly wrecked our entire future, and still nothing much has been done about it, basically due to corruption of the electoral system. The two main guests of the program are former Senator Byron Dorgan, and former Citigroup Chairman John Reed. They don’t mince words.

The fact that naked credit default swaps are still legal, that the too-big-to-fail banks are even bigger than before, and that one of our two political parties is about to nominate a vulture capitalist who argues that the regulations on Wall Street are too strict, is a sign of just how deeply rotten to the core the political system in this country has become.

But instead of this issue, we spend our time debating whether global warming is actually real, how much Social Security should be cut to please Standard and Poors, and how much birth control women should allowed to take.

Completely, totally dysfunctional.

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This should be helpful:

Bob Kerrey, the Democrat and former governor of Nebraska who is running this fall to win back the U.S. Senate seat he held from 1989 until 2001, said Tuesday he was lured back into public life by something many in Washington find increasingly elusive: the potential to solve lingering national problems the old fashioned way, with strong bipartisan cooperation.

“The thing that pulls me back into the public space, into a campaign that will be exceptionally difficult to win, is the fact that we postponed a number of very significant problems that will only get worse with the remedies on the table,” he told The National Memo.

His initial campaign announcement on February 29 came one day after Maine Republican Olympia Snowe retired because she said she couldn’t deal with the partisan gridlock caused by a Republican Party that has raised filibustering in the upper chamber to a high art form. And to be sure, Kerrey is well aware that the disastrous war in Iraq and economic collapse have sharpened ideological divides since he left Washington to become president of the New School in New York. But the former businessman and Vietnam Medal of Honor winner believes that the fights of the Obama years don’t have to break along party lines, and is fond of conjuring up images of a time when now-legendary bipartisan Senate relationships like that between Democrat George Mitchell and Republican Bob Dole forged national policy.

Let’s take a little trip down memory lane shall we?

A Budget For All

by digby

Not that anyone in Washington will pay any attention because it doesn’t insist that average Americans feel pain and deprivation so the “producers” in society are free to pillage create jobs, but here is the one page outline of the new budget from the Progressive Caucus. Like last year, it actually reduces the deficit much more than Paul Ryan’s plan (if anyone actually cares about that.)And it also protects the safety net and stimulates the economy.

It does ask that the obscenely wealthy people kick in a fair piece of their ill-gotten gains and requires the government to stop fighting useless wars. But I have no problem with that. I would be surprised if most people do.

The Budget for All

Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus
Fiscal Year 2013

The Budget for All makes the American Dream a reality again. By putting Americans back to work, the
Budget for All enhances our economic competitiveness by rebuilding the middle class and investing in
innovation and education. Our budget protects Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, invests in
America’s future, and asks those who have benefited most from our economy to pay their fair share.

Our Budget Puts Americans Back to Work
Our budget attacks America’s persistently high unemployment levels with more than $2.4 trillion in job-
creating investments. This plan utilizes every tool at the government’s disposal to get our economy
moving again, including:
 Direct hire programs that create a School Improvement Corps, a Park Improvement Corps, and a
Student Jobs Corps, among others.
 Targeted tax incentives that spur clean energy, manufacturing, and cutting-edge technological
investments in the private sector.
 Widespread domestic investments including an infrastructure bank, a $556 billion surface
transportation bill, and approximately $1.7 trillion in widespread domestic investment.

Our Budget Exhibits Fiscal Discipline
 Unlike the Republican budget, the Budget for All substantially reduces the deficit, and does so in a
way that does not devastate what Americans want preserved.
 We achieve these notable benchmarks by focusing on the true drivers of our deficit –
unsustainable tax policies, the wars overseas, and policies that helped cause the recent recession –
rather than putting the middle class’s social safety net on the chopping block.

Our Budget Creates a Fairer America
 Ends tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans on schedule at year’s end
 Extends tax relief for middle class households and the vast majority of Americans
 Creates new tax brackets for millionaires and billionaires, in line with the Buffett Rule principle
 Eliminates the tax code’s preferential treatment of capital gains and dividends
 Abolishes corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal companies
 Eliminates loopholes that allow businesses to dodge their true tax liability
 Creates a publicly funded federal election system that gets corporate money out of politics for good

Our Budget Brings Our Troops Home
 Responsibly and expeditiously ends our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving America
more secure at home and abroad
 Adapts our military to address 21st century threats; through modernization, the Department of
Defense will spend less and stop contributing to our deficit problems

Protects American Families
 Provides a Making Work Pay tax credit for families struggling with high gas and food cost 2013-2015
 Extends Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child and Dependent Care Credit
 Invests in programs to stave off further foreclosures to keep families in their homes
 Invests in our children’s education by increasing Education, Training, and Social Services

It’s really not that hard. If we lived in a sane country it would be passed by acclamation.

But we don’t …

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