Month: August 2012

Two long reads for a Sunday afternoon

Infantile Randroidism hits the big time

by digby

Ryan Lizza has written a must-read profile of Paul Ryan for the New Yorker that will send chills up your spine:

Sitting in his office more than three years ago, Ryan could not have foreseen how successful his crusade to reinvent the Republican Party would be. Nearly every important conservative opinion-maker and think tank has rallied around his policies. Nearly every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted in favor of some version of his budget plan. Earlier this year, the G.O.P. Presidential candidates lavished praise on Ryan and his ideas. “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan,” Mitt Romney said on March 20th, in Chicago. The following week, while campaigning in Wisconsin, he added, “I think it’d be marvellous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan’s budget and adopt it and pass it along to the President.”

To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.

Indeed. In fact, the Veepstakes panty sniffers are all over the fact that Ryan cancelled a big speech this week-end, intimating that he’s undergoing some sort of Romney vetting. A heartbeat away?

The whole article is interesting, but this is key:

His father’s death also provoked the kind of existential soul-searching that most kids don’t undertake until college. “I was, like, ‘What is the meaning?’ ” he said. “I just did lots of reading, lots of introspection. I read everything I could get my hands on.” Like many conservatives, he claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand. After reading “Atlas Shrugged,” he told me, “I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to check out this economics thing.’ What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government.” He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he told the group. “The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” To me he was careful to point out that he rejects Rand’s atheism.

What that really says is that Ryan has not intellectually matured since he was a teenager. But we knew that. What follows shows just how powerful and influential this stunted boy-man has become:

[D]espite some desperate appeals by Republican pollsters, Ryan’s plan passed the House of Representatives, 235 to 193. Only four Republicans voted against it. Ryan told me that the class of Republicans elected in 2010 was transformational. “Usually, you get local career politicians who want to be national career politicians,” he said. “They’re more cautious. They’re more risk-averse. They’re more focussed on just reëlection.” He went on, “This crop of people who came up are doctors and dentists and small-business people and roofers and D.A.s. They’re not here for careers—they’re here for causes.”

Whatever benefit the White House had seen in raising Ryan’s profile, his increasing power, and his credibility as the leading authority on conservative fiscal policy, soon made his imprimatur essential for any Republican trying to reach a compromise with Democrats. Ryan helped scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement, Ryan’s detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with President Obama.

Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor’s aides quietly promoted stories about Boehner’s alleged squishiness on issues dear to conservatives, and encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.

“That’s what Cantor and Ryan want,” Jackson told a group of Republican congressmen, according to Robert Draper’s recent book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do.” “They see a world where it’s Mitch McConnell”—as Senate Majority Leader—“Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It’s not about this year. It’s about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being disgraced.”

2016’s right around the corner.

Lizza goes on at great length to describe how much money the stimulus and other government programs has helped Ryan’s own district and asks Ryan about it. And Ryan shows once again what a whining little adolescent he is whenever he’s confronted with the reality of his hideous misanthropic philosophy:

When I pointed out to Ryan that government spending programs were at the heart of his home town’s recovery, he didn’t disagree. But he insisted that he has been misunderstood. “Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature,” he said. “As if we’re some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It’s a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy.” He added, “Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports.”

As Lizza points out:

[I]ndependent assessments make clear that Ryan’s budget plan, in order to achieve its goals, would drastically reduce the parts of the budget that fund exactly the kinds of projects and research now helping Janesville.

Of course it does. He just refuses to admit that he doesn’t give a damn about the parasites, moochers and looters.

The article implies that Ryan is playing with fire and that the Republicans are doing their usual hubristic self-immolation by following his lead. We’d better hope that’s right because if this infantile extremist ever gets into high office we’re all going to need to go Galt in a hurry.

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Mitt’s character in pictures

by digby

I think it’s fairly telling that these are the two most iconic photographs of Mitt Romney, don’t you?

I’d say the first represents his business career and the second represents his political career.

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Sandra Day O’Connor haz a sad

by digby

Sandy can’t you see I’m in misery
We made a start now were apart
There’s nothing left for me
Love has flown all alone
I sit and wonder why-yi-yi-yi
Why, you left me oh Sandy

Ya think?

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggests that declining public approval of the court dates back to the controversial Bush v. Gore decision, which decided the 2000 presidential race.

“That was one that was widely talked about at the time, as you know, and involved the public in a presidential election,” O’Connor said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And that could be something that triggered public reexamination.”

She said she wasn’t sure if people thought the court had become too political.

“But I suppose that’s part of it, yes,” she said. “And of course, anytime you’re deciding a case involving a presidential election, it’s awfully close to politics.”

She cast the deciding vote in the case, but she demurred on taking responsibility.

“I don’t see how you can say anybody was the deciding vote,” she said. “They all counted.”

O’Connor said she has no regrets about her vote.

“No, I mean it was a tough deal; i[t] was a closely fought election; and it’s no fun to be part of a group of decision makers that has to decide which side the ball is going to fall on,” she said.

She had to “decide” which side the ball fell on, to be sure. But it’s not as if she carefully weighed the evidence and the arguments:

After 7:50 p.m. November 7, 2000: Supreme Court Justice on Projected Gore Victory: ‘This Is Terrible’

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, attending a Washington, DC, party and watching the news networks predict Florida, and thusly the presidency, for Democrat Al Gore, says aloud, “This is terrible.” Her husband explains that she is considering retiring from the Court, but will only do so if George W. Bush, a fellow Republican, is in office to appoint her successor.

And then there was this:

(November 29, 2000): Justice O’Connor Intends to Overturn Florida Supreme Court Decision, Grant Bush Election, Says Her Clerk

The clerks for the four liberal justices at the Supreme Court—John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—continue their speculation as to whether the Court will actually attempt to decide the presidential election ((see November 20-21, 2000 and November 22-24, 2000), especially in light of Florida’s recent attempt to certify George W. Bush as the winner (see 7:30 p.m. November 26, 2000). At a November 29 dinner attended by clerks from several justices, a clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor tells the group that O’Connor is determined to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s decision to go ahead with manual recounts of election ballots (see 3:00 p.m., November 16, 2000). One clerk recalls the O’Connor clerk saying, “she thought the Florida court was trying to steal the election and that they had to stop it.” O’Connor has the reputation of deciding an issue on her “gut,” then finding legal justifications for supporting her decision. Unbeknownst to anyone outside the Court, O’Connor has already made up her mind.

Perhaps Justice O’Connor has finally realized what she has wrought. Or not.

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QOTD: David Siegel

by digby

David and Jackie have been surprised by the criticism of their lifestyle. “So much negativity. You would think they would be happy for someone living the American dream,” Jackie says. … As for the notion that the divide between the wealthy and everyone else is grotesquely wide, David says: “There’s always been rich and poor, the 1 percent and the 99 percent.” And then he adds, “It’s like a prison. If you only have prisoners and no guards, you’d have chaos.”

Right. Well, at least we know we’re free.

That comes from the ertswhile “King of Versailles” via Jonathan Schwartz, who also notes this charming tid-bit from Bloomberg:

A lot of people are wondering how much influence a few rich businessmen will have on the presidential election. The rich businessmen might be wondering, too. But mostly they’re not talking about it. There’s one exception: David Siegel…In [The Queen of Versailles], Siegel says that he was personally responsible for the election of George W. Bush in 2000…

Here’s Siegel’s account of how he swung the election in Bush’s favor: “Whenever I saw a negative article about [Al] Gore, I put it in with the paychecks of my 8,000 employees. I had my managers do a survey on every employee. If they liked Bush, we made them register to vote. But not if they liked Gore. The week before [the election] we made 80,000 phone calls through my call center – they were robo-calls. On Election Day, we made sure everyone who was voting for Bush got to the polls. I didn’t know he would win by 527 votes. Afterward, we did a survey among the employees to find out who voted who wouldn’t have otherwise. One thousand of them said so.”

Click over to A Tiny Revolution for the whole story and a truly amazing Youtube about the movie.

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Cruel and unusual punishment just for dying

by David Atkins

Reading stories like this makes me want to destroy random inanimate objects:

“My husband has repeatedly asked me to give him a gun, he has asked me to shoot him, and he repeatedly begs to die.”

This came to me Wednesday afternoon in an email from a Northern California woman.

“All I can do is give him the prescribed doses of morphine provided and hope it’s enough to enable him to let go,” said Sandy Wester, whose 71-year-old husband, Donald — Donnie she called him — was in hospice care, with cancer spreading through his body. His dignity was gone, he had many of the same needs as an infant, and the long days brought nothing but anguish.

Wester wrote to say she had followed my accounts of my father’s death and was incensed by my July 22 column about the arrest of an 87-year-old Palm Springs man. Bill Bentinck was locked up for three days on suspicion of murder after his terminally ill wife removed her nasal oxygen catheter to speed death along. Bentinck, who quietly allowed her to pass, was held on $1-million bail but was later released without charges.

I called Wester as soon as I got the email, and she described the scene playing out in her cabin in the Sierra foothills. Donnie, who hadn’t eaten in days, was trying to lift himself off the bed, angry that death was making him wait so long.

“He’s flipping a chair,” Sandy said, describing a light, plastic lawn chair next to the bed. “He’s saying, ‘Why can’t I just die?'”

Why not, indeed? Where is the concern for “liberty” we so often hear from the right wing in cases like these?

Donnie’s line, according to Sandy, was that he wanted to wake up dead, meaning that if physician-assisted death wasn’t possible, he wanted to die in his sleep. Weeks of misery at the end of a good life “was not the way he wanted to go, and I think we need to have more control over the dying process,” Sandy said.

“My God,” said Sandy’s friend Sue, “we put our dogs down because they’ve got a terminal illness or can’t breathe or walk or whatever. But we make a human being … suffer.”

Sandy said Donnie had recently backed off his requests that she go fetch a pistol, but only because he didn’t want her to have to “clean him up.”

On Wednesday night, he fell out of bed and the fire department came to help Sandy lift him. On Thursday morning, he was barely hanging on.

“At 5:30, he laid there and that’s when the horrible breathing started,” she said of the death rattle that often signals the end is near. “And then it got worse. Oh my God, it was horrible.”

She used the word “barbaric” to describe the way Donnie died, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard that very description from a Californian wondering why we don’t have the same end-of-life options that residents of Oregon, Washington and Montana do. The answer is that religious organizations — chief among them the Catholic Church — and some medical associations have derailed such efforts in the past.

Revolting. Conservatism in all its forms, but especially in its most backward social forms, is responsible for untold misery and suffering. If only the eternity of suffering truly awaited them in equal exchange for the pain they cause others.

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Angst in my pants

By Dennis Hartley

“Why does one decide to marry? Social pressure? Boredom? Loneliness? Sexual appeasement? Love? I won’t put any of these reasons down…Last year, I married a musician who wanted to get married in order to stop masturbating…He is now separated, still masturbating, but he is at peace with himself because he tried society’s way.”
-from Little Murders (screenplay by Jules Feiffer)

Todd Solondz loves to make his audience uncomfortable. I can’t imagine anyone sitting through a film like Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness or Storytelling without squirming in their seat, grinding their teeth or occasionally putting their hand over their eyes and daring themselves to peek. And what is it that the viewer is afraid of looking at? It’s not what you may think. It’s not an axe murderer, lurking in the closet. It’s not someone being doused with gasoline and set ablaze or having their fingernails pulled out one by one. No, it’s much, much worse than that. Because there is nothing that human beings fear coming face to face with more than…human nature. Or the Truth. Because the Truth is…life is nothing like the movies. Paradoxically, Solondz’s films are a lot like life.

Refreshingly, his latest film, Dark Horse, does not induce the usual amount of squirming and grinding and daring yourself to peek. Not that it lacks the dark comedic flourishes that have become the director’s stock in trade, but it actually toys with sweetness and light. Sort of a twisty, postmodern art house re-imagining of Marty, the story centers on Abe (Jordan Gelber), a portly thirty-something nudnik who lives with his parents (Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow, worth the price of admission right there). Abe works for his father, collects action figures and doesn’t have any aspirations. You sense in Abe an undercurrent of angst and desperation, likely exacerbated by constant doting from his over-protective mother and verbal drubbing from his hyper-critical father. Abe also harbors a seething resentment toward his brother (Justin Bartha), a successful doctor.

Yes, Abe is a man-child…in the most petulant, cringe-worthy sense (which makes him a typical Solondz protagonist). Yet, he sees himself as a catch; a “dark horse” waiting to be discovered by some lucky lady (perhaps one who finds a delusional thirty-something man who works for his dad, collects toys and lives with his parents to be devastatingly attractive). Still, Abe registers genuine surprise when Miranda (Selma Blair), a lovely thirty-something woman he meets at a wedding, gives him her phone number after a few minutes of meaningless chatter. Of course, there is a catch. She’s completely nuts (and lives with her parents, too). She’s so profoundly depressed (and heavily medicated) that she can barely hold a conversation. However, she is startled from her psychotropic haze when Abe proposes marriage during their first date (“You’re not being ironic…like performance art or something?” she asks). Abe assures her that he is being dead serious.

From this point onward, the viewer begins to wonder if maybe it is the filmmaker who is being ironic…like performance art or something? Without giving too much away, we become uncertain whether some events are occurring in the protagonist’s reality, or in his imagination. Gelber (who reminds me of the late Jack Weston) imbues his troubled character with enough vulnerability to invite empathy, yet spikes the punch with a fair amount of edgy unpredictability (lest we get too comfortable). Blair slyly pinpoints the sweet spot between funny and sad with her deadpan performance, and Walken’s magnificently gauche toupee deserves its own star billing. Solondz has fashioned something akin to a modern Jewish morality tale, in the tradition of Jules Feiffer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Mordecai Richler (Could Solondz be their heir apparent?). He’s also delivered a thought-provoking treatise on life, love and death. While he doesn’t let anyone completely off the hook (including the audience), he slips enough humanity and compassion into the mix to make the Truth a little bit easier to swallow this time around.

Previous posts with related themes:
A Serious Man
Saturday Night at the Movies review archives

So the anti-communists were socialists?

by digby

The other day I wrote about Darrell Issa dissing the Depression and WWII era Americans as either commies or criminals. A reader sent this to school me about the fact that this is actually common wisdom on the right:

ON SEPTEMBER 12, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo published a wide-ranging interview with Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, prominent conservative activist, and Karl Rove ally. It was a long interview, presented in a traditional Q & A format. You can go to El Mundo’s website, access the interview, and find Norquist saying this (in Spanish):

Each year, two million people who fought in the Second World War and lived through the Great Depression die. This generation has been an exception in American history, because it has defended anti-American policies. They voted for the creation of the welfare state and obligatory military service. They are the base of the Democratic Party. And they are dying.

Or at least that’s how another news outlet, Agence France-Presse, translated the Spanish into English. And it took no time at all for publications like the New Republic and Slate to jump on Norquist’s incendiary language. Whereupon Norquist denied the whole thing. Sort of.

He denied that he’d called the anti-American. But not the rest.

I thought I was aware of most of the wingnut mythology and I certainly knew that they hated the policies of the New Deal and post WWII era. I didn’t know they blamed the entire generation for it though. It would have come as a hell of a surprise to the hardcore anti-communist right wingers in my father’s circles to know that pissants like Grover Norquist were counting the days until they died. After all, they never voted for a Democrat in their lives.

The funny thing, of course, is that many Democrats are counting the days until the baby boomers die, which also presumes that we are all right wingers. I’m not sure that generational theory is a very good guide to politics.

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“It’s called gravitas”

by digby

Colbert takes on Chris Hayes:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I’m pretty sure he read the book too.

Please, I beg you, at least stop talking about it

by digby

I don’t have a problem with the Democrats calling for extension of the middle class tax cuts as an election ploy. It’s good politics under the circumstances. But when I read this memo from David Plouffe to the congress I got that sick feeling again:

MEMORANDUM

THE WHITE HOUSE

August 3, 2012

MEMORANDUM FOR INTERESTED PARTIES

FROM: DAVID PLOUFFE

SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT

SUBJECT: August Recess Messaging

The President and Democrats in Congress move into the August recess with clear momentum on the question of who to trust on taxes and, more broadly, whose economic agenda will benefit the middle class. Over the coming weeks, there is an opportunity to build on this momentum and shape the legislative agenda this fall by highlighting the choice Congress faces at this make-or-break moment for the middle class. Three points can clearly define the legislative choice throughout August:

—The President and Democrats in Congress are fighting to create an economy built on a strong and secure middle class, but Republicans in Washington are determined to return to the exact same top-down policies that led to the economic crisis.

—The plans proposed by the President and Democrats in Congress will keep taxes low for the middle class and create jobs by investing in education, clean energy, manufacturing, and small businesses. The President’s plan to reduce the deficit in a balanced way by $4 trillion asks the wealthy to pay their fair share and preserves the investments we need to grow the economy.

—Both parties agree that tax cuts for the middle class should be extended. We should extend those tax cuts now. Republicans in Congress are holding middle class tax relief hostage by insisting on more budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthiest.

Highlighting Wednesday night’s vote on middle class tax cuts in the U.S. House of Representatives lays out the choice clearly. With one vote, House Republicans could have joined Democrats in the Senate and sent a bill to the President’s desk to prevent a $2,200 tax increase on a typical family in a few short months. Instead, House Republicans blocked the bill because it did not cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires even further. Rather than giving 98% of Americans and nearly every small business a little more certainty, House Republicans again chose to prioritize cutting taxes by $1 trillion for the wealthiest few.

I think having an argument about taxes for the middle class makes sense. This economy remains a mess and average people don’t need any more financial stress at the moment. But putting the deficit into the mix makes no sense. If 4 trillion remains the target, massive cuts are inevitable, even if the Democrats out-fox the Republicans and they end up allowing the Bush tax cuts for the rich to expire. This is approximately how much those taxes would raise:

If you tax only the rich, according to the New York Times analysis of the federal budget deficit (David Leonhardt’s recent “Fix the Deficit Puzzle”), by allowing taxes to go up for households earning income above $250,000 a year, the take would be $54 billion in 2015 (or 13% of the projected $418 billion 2015 budget shortfall) or $115 billion in 2030 (or 9% of the projected $1,345 billion budget shortfall in 2030).

Keep in mind that the Clinton tax rates weren’t exactly onerous by historical standards, and yet going back to them is the heaviest lift we can imagine. In fact, it’s a tremendous long shot. And I think we know how tough cutting the defense budget is going to be, don’t we? So, even if the Bush tax cuts for the rich are allowed to expire, what do you think will end up making the difference in that 4 trillion dollar promise?

The deficit projections are almost all a matter of rising health care costs, which the battle over the ACA shows is a political nightmare. It will be a miracle if the savings from the plan materialize. So, as long as they are focused on the deficit the safety net is in terrible danger, as are many other necessary government functions. And in a time of lagging growth, financial insecurity for the middle class and global economic drag, that’s insane.

Obviously if Romney wins, they’ll slash the hell out of everything and that will be that. I’d guess they’ll re-discover the joys of stimulus in the form of more tax cuts so we’d better enjoy the $11.26 most of us will get. Unfortunately, if Obama wins I’m not sure we’ll be a whole lot better off unless they can all agree to prioritize jobs and growth and table the deficit nonsense at least until the economy is really growing and unemployment is way down. It’s hard to see that happening.

So, we’ve probably got some form of austerity coming, no matter what, unless some faction in the congress is willing to obstruct it. I’ve been counting on the tea partiers to be idiots and I still think that’s our best bet. But maybe a group of Democrats will throw themselves in front of the bus and just say no to cuts.
Sadly, unlike the Republicans, they will be in mortal danger of losing their jobs if they do it. Democrats shun people who aren’t “reasonable” and since the reasonable grown-up President is still defining 4 trillion dollars as the deficit cutting target and is also selling the fiscal cliff mythology, these Democrats would be brutally dealt with by the press, the Party and probably the voters if they obstruct a deal. They will be seen as delusional lefties who refuse to face the reality that “entitlements” and other government functions must be sacrificed for the greater good. After all, everyone agrees that all the Republicans have to do is agree to some nominal “revenue” and it’s all good right?

This is where I think rhetoric plays a big part. Nobody’s making any argument against cutting spending. The need for a big deficit reduction plan is an article of faith and the question is only if they can get Grover Norquist to sign off on raising some phony tip money from millionaires or if they can out-maneuver the Republicans on the Bush tax cuts and raise some money that way. So, if a faction of progressives were to obstruct any deficit reduction bill that incorporates the stated goal of raising taxes “a little bit” on millionaires, it would be greeted with stunned disbelief. After all, that’s what has been touted as the big victory for the Democrats.

If the Party, including the President, would drop all this “balanced approach” hoohah and ran solely on the idea that we need jobs and growth and that worrying about deficit reduction right now is like selling your car to pay for your new couch while your house is burning down, some Democrats might be able to block a new Simpson-Bowles-PetePeterson-Grand Bargain extravaganza. At least people would understand that they are not doing it out of unreasoning petulance. But that’s not happening so we are stuck hoping against hope that Grover Norquist still has enough juice to blow up this deal one more time. I don’t know if he does.

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