Month: August 2012

More on the new austerity campaign

by digby

Matt Yglesias makes the right point on the Ryan pick: the campaign is now about competing deficit plans.

There’s an ineluctable math built into the current federal budget that is forcing choices onto the table that make everyone think their own plan is moderate and their rivals are wild-eyed radicals. Never overestimate the impact of a vice presidential pick on a presidential campaign, but insofar as choosing Ryan makes a difference, the difference is to further focus attention on this choice.

But attention is to an extent a zero-sum game. And focusing attention on the big-picture disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about long-term fiscal policy means we won’t be focusing attention on what ought to be the most pressing economic policy issue of our time—mass unemployment and the tragic waste of human and economic potential it represents. To be sure, politicians will still talk about this. But obviously Obama would prefer at this point to talk about long-term vision and the contrast between his “balanced approach” and the GOP’s cut-cut-cut approach. With Ryan on the ticket, he more and more gets his way. Which means conservatives also get their way. Romney doesn’t just run as “Mr Fix-It” who’ll clean up the mess, he’s running as an ideological candidate with a major vision for changing the country. But that means the terrible economic performance since 2009 and the large jobs deficit built up during that period are going to receed further into the rearview mirror. Romney is essentially conceding that the past 18 months of 150,000 jobs per month are good enough to get Obama re-elected, and he needs to wage a campaign about something bigger.

Which means that, a bit weirdly, the issue that ought to dominate the campaign is going to fade into obscurity.

You’ll notice that this great debate only features two competing ideas: the “drastic cuts in exchange for some small tax hikes for millionaires” and “drastic cuts.” (I guess the perfect compromise would be “even smaller tax hikes for the millionaires and drastic cuts.”) But no matter what, the one thing we can all agree on is that whatever ails our economy is nothing that firing a few more government workers can’t cure.

I’ve thought about this for a couple of days now and I still don’t know whether it’s better for this to be part of the campaign in the (probably vain) hope that R&R will force the Democrats into a defensive posture on the so-called entitlements they can’t get out of or whether the more we talk about it publicly the more the public will believe there’s no other option and give either winner a mandate to slash the hell out of government. I just don’t know.

But it’s going to be a big part of the campaign for the next two months no matter what so I guess we’ll find out. At least the lame duck session brought to you by Pete Peterson won’t be a surprise.

BTW: There is an alternative deficit reduction plan that nobody will hear about. And hey, we could just agree to raise some taxes on the wealthy who are currently drowning in a sea of money and then table the rest of the deficit reduction crap until the economy improves and we can see where we are. But it’s looking more and more like we’re going to be “grown-ups”. And it’s “grown-ups” who caused this mess in the first place. It’s “grown-ups” who cause all the messes.

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On books about Mormonism and Mitt

by digby

Adam Gopnik reviews four new books about Mormonism that are very thought provoking:

All four authors retell Mormonism’s origin stories. In the eighteen-twenties, in Palmyra, New York, a man named Joseph Smith—who had already been arrested for “glass looking,” the phony detection of underground treasures—said that an angel named Moroni had directed him to a set of buried golden plates, inscribed with an ancient script, which, after various stops and starts, Smith and a friend had translated into a Biblical-sounding English. The plates contained the Book of Mormon, the secret history of a native people of America, who turned out to be lost tribes of Israel. They had long ago emigrated to America, and were the ancestors of the contemporary Indians. These American Hebrews had divided, after long internecine warfare, into two groups, the Lamanites (mostly bad) and the Nephites (mostly good), and—during a trip somehow overlooked by the Gospels—had been visited by Jesus, after the Resurrection and before the Ascension.

Scholarly opinion on Smith now tends to divide between those who think that he knew he was making it up and those who think that he sincerely believed in his own visions—though the truth is that, as Melville’s “Confidence Man” reminds us, the line between the seer and the scamster wasn’t clearly marked in early-nineteenth-century America.

This is where the atheist in me tends to get rude and make enemies, so I’ll Mark Twain speak for me:

Mark Twain read the Book of Mormon and, knowing what Smith would have read, not to mention knowing about frontier fakery, came to conclusions about both the sources of its prose and the sequence of its composition:

The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel—half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern—which was about every sentence or two—he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and made things satisfactory again. “And it came to pass” was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

I realize that it’s wrong to harshly judge people for their religious beliefs — and let’s face facts, most of them feature some pretty far-fetched tales. But this one, like Scientology, is easily traced to its bullshit origins since it wasn’t that long ago. So, I find it a little bit hard to take that someone who wishes to lead the most powerful country on earth is not just a follower, but a leader and true believer of such a religion.

Granted, the lessons of any religion are arguably more important than the specious origins of the sacred books. And in that respect, these days Mormonism carries most of the same moral doctrine as most other Western religions. But considering how those moral lessons are broadly applied, that’s not exactly comforting.

On the other hand, Gopnik is surely right that Mitt’s real creed is American capitalism (which he shows has also become Mormonism’s) and in that he truly is a Real American:

He believes, with shining certainty, in his own success, and, more broadly, in the American Gospel of Wealth that lies behind it: the idea that rich people got rich by being good, that the riches are a sign of their virtue, and that they should therefore be allowed to rule.

Then again, almost every American religion sooner or later becomes a Gospel of Wealth. Forced into a corner by the Feds, Young’s followers put down their guns and got busy making money—just as the Oneida devotees who made silverware for a living ended up merely making silverware. (The moneymaking activities of the major churches hardly need outlining.) Christmas morning is the American Sabbath, and it runs, ideally, all year round. The astonishing thing, and it would have brought a smile to Nephi’s face as he and his tribe sailed to the New World, is that this gospel of prosperity is the one American faith that will never fail, even when its promises seem ruined. Elsewhere among the Western democracies, the bursting of the last bubble has led to doubts about the system that blows them. Here the people who seem likely to inherit power are those who want to blow still bigger ones, who believe in the bubble even after it has burst, and who hold its perfection as a faith so gleaming and secure and unbreakable that it might once have been written down somewhere by angels, on solid-gold plates.

Again, the atheist in me rises up to complain. But as with all such complaints, it’s just screaming into the void.

Update: Via Spocko, this humorous video sums up my beliefs about much of it:

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Wow. According to Nate Silver:

[T]he statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates [Ryan] as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

By this scoring system, he’s more conservative than Dick Cheney. Quite a bit more:

But hey, just because he scores exactly the same as nutcase McCarthyite Michele Bachmann doesn’t mean he isn’t a very, very serious person whom everyone in the country should respect, right Cokie?

Some of Mitt’s best friends are mere millionaires

by digby

In keeping with Romney’s admission that he’s friends with some NASCAR owners, here’s his latest attempt to relate to the 99%:

In an attempt to show his concern for farmers hit by the devastating drought that has swept 78 percent of the country, Romney had a photo-op with Iowa “farmer” Lemar Koethe. However, Koethe isn’t exactly the rugged down-home farmer struggling to keep his operation going that you might expect.

Or should I say operations — 54 of them. Yes, according to the Des Moines Register, Koethe owns 54 soy and corn farms. And that’s just one of his jobs.
In previous reports on his activity over the years from the Des Moines Register, Koethe is also a described as a millionaire, a real estate mogul, and a former concert promoter who booked acts like Slipknot at his 24,000 square foot event center.

Making this farmer’s life that much different from the average person, Koethe lives in the spaceship house pictured below. It might not have a car elevator like Romney’s planned home, but it’s got its own car wash bay and recreation center:

By Mitt’s reckoning, he’s just a salt ‘o the earth farmer, struggling along like ole Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. I mean, the man doesn’t even have a car elevator, for Pete’s sake!

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People are rarely people, my friend

by digby

Wow, Romney’s media strategist and top surrogate is a truly perfect example of everything that’s destroying journalism and politics. He’s also a perfect adviser for the cruel, practical jokester, Mitt Romney:

Eric Fehrnstrom began to panic when he landed on Sanibel Island off Florida’s Gulf Coast in December 1989. Fehrnstrom, a scandal-sniffing veteran reporter for the Boston Herald, the then-Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, was on a juicy story he knew had page one potential. It might even, as he would later describe it, become a “kill shot.”

With Massachusetts in a fiscal free fall, the lieutenant governor, Evelyn Murphy, had jetted down to the island for a short vacation. If Fehrnstrom could find her, the story of an out-of-touch politician would write itself. But out in the island heat, away from the smoky cocoon of the fourth-floor statehouse press room, “Fernie,” as he was known, wasn’t so sure he could land his prey.

He had a lot of beach to cover and no addresses for Murphy. “I thought it was crazy,” recalled Michael Fein, a Herald photographer who accompanied Fehrnstrom. “We were lost as to what we were going to do.”

A day into their search, they were no closer to finding Murphy. If it’s possible to feel despair on a tropical island, they found it driving around in their rental car, Fein told The Huffington Post. They began to question and debate their strategy. And pray for luck. It was then that they spotted Murphy jogging past the palm fronds along West Gulf Drive.

Shaking off their disbelief, they sped far enough ahead for Fein to jump out and find a hiding place behind a bush. “I had a long lens,” he said. “I was just like, ‘Wow, this is unbelievable.'” They got their kill shot. “The next day, we splashed her picture across page one, her middle-aged thighs flouncing across more than 300,000 newspapers,” Fehrnstrom boasted in a subsequent Boston Magazine essay. The next time Fein saw Murphy, he said he felt the need to explain that he was just doing his job and that he hoped there were no hard feelings.

Not Fernie. He had, after all, effectively reduced an accomplished female politician contemplating a run for governor to one unflattering picture and was proud of the tabloid accomplishment. A decade later, he began his Boston Magazine piece recounting his Sanibel scoop. And it wasn’t really his. After all, he didn’t snap the picture.

“In my trade, politics was never personal. Hell, people were rarely people — they were ducks in a shooting gallery,” he wrote. On his triumphant return from Sanibel, he recalled in the piece, “I was greeted with the highest praise in tabloid journalism: ‘Nice hit.’”

I’m pretty sure that R & R agree with him on all counts. We’re all just ducks in a shooting gallery.

Read the whole thing at Huffington Post. It’s a fascinating portrait of a real asshole.

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So much for “my dog Millie”

The New Austerity Campaign

by digby

I see that the New York Times is helpfully reframing the election away from jobs and the economy. Here’s the headline on the dead tree version:

Huzzah. As Tristero points out below, this would be a lot less scary if the debate wasn’t going to be between the moderate centrist plan for a “balanced approach” that slashes vital government programs in exchange for some ephemeral tip money from millionaires in the middle of an historic slump and a radical right wing plan that simply slashes vital government programs in the middle of an historic slump. In my view, that’s a losing debate no matter who wins.

The idea that this election will now be about deficit reduction is almost impossible for me to believe, but the Obama campaign believes they can win on this turf and I assume that’s correct. After all, Ryan is an extremist on these issues and it’s going to be impossible for Romney to disavow his extreme plan. The problem is that the Obama balanced approach is a terrible alternative.

We are in the midst of a long and painful economic downturn. It’s barely improving and the rest of the world is likely going to be a further drag on it as it goes back into recession, largely as a result of their idiotic austerity programs. Interest rates are at historic lows and the United States can borrow as much as it needs. It’s insane to be talking about deficit reduction at a time like this.

I just don’t know if we’re better off having a national discussion about it on the off chance that Democrats feel bound to publicly defend the government programs people depend upon or whether it was better to leave it up to the elites to do their backroom deals in the lame duck and spring it on the people as a fait accompli. The first would seem to be preferable, but I loathe the idea that the president will be able to rally the people behind his “balanced approach” as part of the electoral bandwagon to defeat something worse. The one thing we might have had going for us was the people’s unwillinginess to sacrifice their own futures on the rotting corpse of the confidence fairy. If the president gets a mandate, I fear the worst.

But the Peterson runaway train was gaining speed, so maybe there’s just no stopping it anyway. Which is also nuts. After all, we don’t actually have to pass a deficit reduction plan right now and even if we did it wouldn’t actually have to degrade the social safety net. So maybe it’s worth taking the chance that the Democrats will be forced into a corner by the demands of the election and defend the people’s interests.

But sheesh. When we look back this will be seen as a time when the everyone in the corridors of power fiddled while their countries burned.

Here’s Krugman with a reminder of how well all that’s worked so far:

A further thought on the observation that Britain’s slump has now gone on longer than the slump in the 1930s: it’s worth remembering the rapturous reception the Cameron austerity program received here, not just from the right, but from centrists. Here’s David Broder:

Cameron and his partners in the coalition have pushed ahead boldly, brushing aside the warnings of economists that the sudden, severe medicine could cut short Britain’s economic recovery and throw the nation back into recession.

Heh heh, silly economists. Broder went on to urge Obama, after his salutary midterm defeat, to “do a Cameron” and agree to sharp cuts in the welfare state.

And he did. It’s just that the Tea Partiers refused to take yes for an answer. Perhaps the defeat of the Romney-Ryan candidacy will make them even less inclined to do it after the election. But that’s a very thin reed to hang on to.

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Ah, Hubris!

by tristero

Joan Walsh in Salon:

Ryan’s selection by Mitt Romney is a huge gift to Barack Obama and Joe Biden – and to the country. This is a clear electoral choice, with the potential for a rousing debate about the future of our country.

I don’t want “a rousing debate about the future of our country” between centrist/moderate and extreme rightwing presidential candidates. I want a serious debate between liberal and conservative (in the Rockefeller/Eisenhower meaning of the term) presidential candidates about the future of our country.

As for Ryan’s selection being “a huge gift” to Obama/Biden – how? As discussed yesterday, with Ryan as a VP candidate, Ayn Rand’s kooky nonsense has advanced to the exact center of the national discourse, openly espoused by a candidate who, if his ticket wins [perish the thought], will be one hearbeat away from You-Know-What.

I hope Joan Walsh is right, but where she sees a gift, I see the potential for serious problems. Anything can happen in the next few months, including scandal, illness, and catastrophe. And if it happens to Democrats, and Obama is discredited or disabled, the only choice remaining will be two power-hungry far-right lunatics hell-bent on impoverishing this country to enrich their own class.

As I see it, this is a deeply frightening moment. Perhaps I’m a worry wart, but either way, let’s not rejoice at the injection of more extremism into the mainstream discourse. We have far too much already.

You can rely on the old man’s money: The Queen of Versailles

It’s nearly impossible to observe the disconnect of these privileged aristocrats carrying on in their gilded bubble while the impoverished and disenfranchised rabble sharpen up the guillotines without drawing parallels with our current state of affairs (history, if nothing else, is cyclical).

Winning by losing

by digby

I guess the beltway CW is that Romney putting Ryan on the ticket spells the end of the right wing jihad because the conservatives will not be able to say that Romney lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. Ding dong the witch is dead. (Again. The last time I heard this much celebrating was when Obama vanquished the Republicans for all time in 2008.) Let’s just say that I think that’s a bit of wishful thinking.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ABC News’ Barbara Walters that she is seriously considering a run for the White House and believes she can beat President Obama in 2012.

“I’m looking at the lay of the land now, and … trying to figure that out, if it’s a good thing for the country, for the discourse, for my family, if it’s a good thing,” Palin said in an interview scheduled to air in full Dec. 9 on ABC as part of Walters’ “10 Most Fascinating People” of 2010.

Asked Walters: “If you ran for president, could you beat Barack Obama?”

Replied Palin: “I believe so.”

This is the second time this week that the 2008 vice presidential nominee has shown that she is considering a run for the presidency.

If the rightwing didn’t blame Palin for the McCain failure, despite the fact that it is clear she was instrumental in putting the final nail in his coffin, I can’t imagine what Paul Ryan could do that would make them reject him.

No, he will be the most powerful Republican in the country if Mitt loses, and the next in line for the presidential nomination. Thinking that Republicans will reject him simply because the wishy-washy, robotic, unlikable, Mormon, gaffe prone, ex-Taxachusetts health-care-guru-Governor Mitt Romney failed to be conservative enough is a real stretch.

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