Month: September 2012

Words I never thought I’d read

by digby

The NY Times on the debate prep:

Mr. Obama is not particularly fluid in sound bites, so his team is aiming for a workmanlike performance like his speech at the Democratic convention.

Four years of hell will do that, I suppose.

But I have to say, this promises to be wildly entertaining:

Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August.

I think we can all agree that the one personality trait that defines Mitt Romney is his sense of humor. Like that time he held down the kid and cut his hair.

I’m sure the far right would love it if he did that to Obama, but I have a sneaking suspicion his verbal skills aren’t quite sharp enough. He’s more of a “get the crowd together to gang up on the weak kid” kind of guy. I don’t think that’s going to work one-on-one.

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The Village Fix in in on Cutting Medicare

by David Atkins

Careful watchers of Hardball yesterday should have picked up on something remarkable and terrifying from Howard Fineman. Listen closely starting at the 2-minute mark:

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FINEMAN: “And if we’re going to be cutting Medicare at some point, which I think most voters understand, I thin kright now looking at these alternatives they’d rather have a Democrat they know than a Republican who never supported the program to begin with.”

Do most voters really “understand” that we’re going to be cutting Medicare? Or has the Village decided that we’re going to cut Medicare, and that it’s going to happen no matter what the American people actually want?

Let’s be clear on two things: first, from a policy stand there is no need for any cuts to Medicare. What is needed is universal insurance so that the wasteful profit motive is removed from the healthcare system. But granted the political impossibility of accomplishing that, if Medicare does become insolvent then the gradual cuts will take place automatically–no need to frontload them in advance with austerity measures. If one does want to be proactive as one should, then the program can be made solvent by slightly raising the maximum cap on which Medicare taxes are assessed. If all else fails, an alternate funding stream could be developed. There are numerous possibilities that do not involve cutting Medicare. To continue funding corporate welfare, wasteful wars and tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy while telling voters that Grandma should eat cat food is insane and immoral.

But second, Fineman is disastrously wrong on the politics. For a Democrat to cut Medicare would be politically disastrous.

If the Congress and the President take up Simpson-Bowles during the lame duck session or the new year and enact minor tip money tax increases for the wealthy in exchange for cuts to the most vulnerable, a majority of Republicans will oppose the deal. Democrats will be left holding the bag, insisting on being the “bipartisan adults in the room.”

Voters will hate the deal. Republicans will run successfully against Democrats for the next twenty years, accusing us of cutting Medicare and raising taxes. And when Republicans easily win that argument and gain Executive and Legislative power, President Christie and Speaker Ryan will voucherize Medicare, restore the funding for current seniors, and act as the cavalry riding to America’s and Medicare’s rescue.

The Village Consensus is awful, immoral policy. It’s also suicidal politics. And Howard Fineman and friends appear to be walking into it with open eyes and open arms.

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Innocent Life

by digby

This will be said to be a sign that the system worked. But it’s not:

A man who has been on death row for 15 years for the rape and murder of his 14-year-old step cousin was exonerated with the help of DNA evidence on Friday, according to the Innocence Project. He is the 300th person to be released due to this type of evidence.

He was convicted on the basis of a false confession. And it took years of volunteer effort on the part of top flight forensic scientists to prove he didn’t. It also took a DA who was willing to look at the evidence and act, which is not always the case.

We don’t know how many innocent people have been executed or how many more will be. But every exoneration like this proves that we are employing a barbaric form of punishment that quite easily ensnares the innocent as well as the guilty. It’s a moral travesty.

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“The wealthy are people too”

by digby

I’ve been chronicling the psychological breakdown among the sad, put-upon 1% since the beginning of the financial crisis and I’m thrilled to see that it’s become obvious to everyone else. I think we owe Mitt Romney a big thank you for that:

The Daily Show
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Todd Akin, irrational cult leader

by digby

Back in the glory days of impeachment and penis talk, Kelly Ann Conway was a constant presence on TV and a big wheel in GOP circles. She was up there with Victoria Toensing, Barbara Olsen and Ann Coulter on the prosecutorial blond wingnut circuit. Look what she’s been reduced to:

Perkins: The distance between them is narrowing, Todd Akin has bounced back up, and the evidence of that is pretty clear because now you see other Republicans who abandoned him are now taking a second look at the race and realizing just how important this seat is.

Conway: They are and they’re following your lead Tony. You saw former speaker Gingrich there on Todd’s behalf at a fundraiser on Monday, saying it’s just “conventional idiocy” that’s preventing people from backing Todd, and he predicts that come mid-October everyone will be following yours and his lead back to Missouri, with their money. Of course, former senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum and Senator Jim DeMint came out just yesterday to support Todd.

I believe that the establishment will have to look at this race and they will have to hold their nose because the first days—and I’ve expressed this to Todd as my client for a while now, I’ve expressed it to him directly—the first day or two where it was like the Waco with David Koresh situation where they’re trying to smoke him out with the SWAT teams and the helicopters and the bad Nancy Sinatra records. Then here comes day two and you realize the guy’s not coming out of the bunker. Listen, Todd has shown his principle to the voters.

I suppose in wingnutland comparing your Senate candidate to David Koresh is good politics. But doesn’t she remember what happened in the end? Not a good metaphor I’m afraid.

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Coming Together. Not.

by tristero

My cynicism about Republicans runs so deep that it really borders on paranoia, my friends said when I claimed, several weeks after the 9/11 attacks, that if Gore had been in the White House, he would have been impeached and forced to resign.

“No!” My friends said, “that’s crazy talk.” Of course the country would have come together around whomever was president in the face of an attack on our shores. Republicans, too, would have rallied around Gore for sure.

Yeah, right.

Adding: As I’ve mentioned before, I was astounded then, and remain astounded, that Bush wasn’t forced to resign within hours of 9/11. So it makes sense to talk about the level of responsibility Obama and his administration should take for this recent incident. But I’ll be goddammed if I’ll do so as long as Michael Huckabee’s greasy, corrupt, opportunistic thumb is a’tippin’ the scales.

There but for the grace of …

by digby

Jonathan Cohn:

Like all good public intellectuals, Harold is a policy omnivore—as comfortable discussing the latest thinking on anti-poverty efforts as he is talking about the intricacies of Medicare. But Harold offers some truly unique insights, because he knows the social welfare state as a user, as well as a scholar.

Several years ago, he and his wife became custodians for his adult brother-in-law, who is intellectually disabled and has various medical problems. Harold has written about this experience before, movingly—and what it’s taught him about the value of programs like Medicaid. Now he’s decided to put his thoughts on a video.

It’s quite a contrast to this, isn’t it? Both ideas are as American as apple pie, but one is decent and one isn’t.

Read this piece by Pollack too, about a young 18 year old mother who was suddenly homeless and trying to figure her way through the system to get some emergency help. It’s terrifying.

(Oh, and by the way, imagine illegal immigrants traversing that byzantine system. It just doesn’t happen.)

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Punitive austerity

by digby

Krugman today:

So much for complacency. Just a few days ago, the conventional wisdom was that Europe finally had things under control. The European Central Bank, by promising to buy the bonds of troubled governments if necessary, had soothed markets. All that debtor nations had to do, the story went, was agree to more and deeper austerity — the condition for central bank loans — and all would be well.

But the purveyors of conventional wisdom forgot that people were involved. Suddenly, Spain and Greece are being racked by strikes and huge demonstrations. The public in these countries is, in effect, saying that it has reached its limit: With unemployment at Great Depression levels and with erstwhile middle-class workers reduced to picking through garbage in search of food, austerity has already gone too far. And this means that there may not be a deal after all.

Much commentary suggests that the citizens of Spain and Greece are just delaying the inevitable, protesting against sacrifices that must, in fact, be made. But the truth is that the protesters are right. More austerity serves no useful purpose; the truly irrational players here are the allegedly serious politicians and officials demanding ever more pain.

He goes on to explain. once again, that Spain had no budget deficit until the crash and that while there is no way to escape a period of hard times without leaving the Euro (which hes says nobody wants) the cruel austerity measures the bankers and European officials are insisting upon are purely punitive — and unnecessary. In fact, because they are putting such stress on the populace, which is understandably agitated, the country is having trouble borrowing to pay its bills — because bankers are worried about the political instability they are causing.

It’s a mess.

Why, then, are there demands for ever more pain?

Part of the explanation is that in Europe, as in America, far too many Very Serious People have been taken in by the cult of austerity, by the belief that budget deficits, not mass unemployment, are the clear and present danger, and that deficit reduction will somehow solve a problem brought on by private sector excess.

It sounds as though if you were to compare the US to Europe in this matter (always a very dicey proposition) you would call the Germans the Villagers:

Beyond that, a significant part of public opinion in Europe’s core — above all, in Germany — is deeply committed to a false view of the situation. Talk to German officials and they will portray the euro crisis as a morality play, a tale of countries that lived high and now face the inevitable reckoning. Never mind the fact that this isn’t at all what happened — and the equally inconvenient fact that German banks played a large role in inflating Spain’s housing bubble. Sin and its consequences is their story, and they’re sticking to it.

Worse yet, this is also what many German voters believe, largely because it’s what politicians have told them. And fear of a backlash from voters who believe, wrongly, that they’re being put on the hook for the consequences of southern European irresponsibility leaves German politicians unwilling to approve essential emergency lending to Spain and other troubled nations unless the borrowers are punished first.

Of course, that’s not the way these demands are portrayed. But that’s what it really comes down to. And it’s long past time to put an end to this cruel nonsense.

All of our political and financial elite believe this garbage too. And they are selling this 47% trope as a way to divide this country in similar ways. Keep in mind that the Grand Bargain is predicated these days on “avoiding Europe.” You know, we’ll avoid it by doing it.

And if we aren’t lucky enough to avoid another recession, they’ll do the same thing that the Europeans are doing to Spain. This is a global illness and we’ve got it too.

But it’ll all turn out ok in the long run, so no worries. The wealthy will maintain their fortunes, which is the most important thing. And as Andrew Mellon told Herbert Hoover:

“liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.”

See? It’s all good.

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50 shades of wrong

by David Atkins

Remember back when the weak August jobs report was supposed to be the death knell of the Obama campaign? It turns out that, as many intelligent people noted at the time but were drowned out by many on both the right and the left, those numbers had yet to be revised. And it turns out that those figured underestimated actual job growth by about 400,000 jobs.

Here what John Boehner had said at the time, wrongly attempting to capitalize on incomplete data:

We need a president and a Senate with the courage to let go of the failed ‘stimulus’-style policies of the past and work with Republicans on proven pro-growth measures to tackle our debt, address high prices, and create a better environment for jobs.

A beautifully performed, poll-tested pile of meaningless gobbledygook. Also, wrong.

And Mitt Romney, arguing that the Fed could no longer do anything to help the economy:

“What we really need is to have policies coming from Washington that are fiscally sound and that get America back on track to having the kind of financial stability and foundation of economic growth that puts people to work.”

Is there a universe in which a statement like this can be taken seriously by reasonable people?

There isn’t a single economist or politician who can make a persuasive case for why that statement makes any sense. Yet such things are continually said by economists and conservative politicians as an almost religious mantra.

The national debt isn’t hurting the American economy at all. Unemployment and low economic demand is. If corporations aren’t investing in American jobs, it’s because there is no reason for them to. If there’s an uncertainty problem, it has much more to do with the stupidly imposed “fiscal cliff” than anything having to do with U.S. debt.

That’s not to say that debt can’t become a problem. It can become a problem if debt drives up borrowing costs. But it hasn’t done that by a long shot. Treasury bonds are still incredibly cheap. Debt can become a problem if paying down the interest on the debt starts to squeeze out spending on needed programs. But we aren’t there yet, either. And that itself is only a problem if there is danger of printing more currency leading to an inflation crisis–which as Paul Krugman incessantly notes is a baseless worry at this time. Besides, if the debt is a real concern, by far the easiest and best way to reduce the deficit is to put Americans back to work while leveling the tax playing field, as the People’s Budget does. Ending needless overseas wars and Pentagon spending would help as well.

Destroying the safety net and enacting austerity policies, on the other hand, will do nothing but increase economic pain, while shrinking the economy and increasing the debt–for whatever that’s worth.

So there were Mitt Romney and John Boehner, sitting there in early August shortly after the Democratic National Convention, spewing wrong nonsense about jobs numbers that had yet to be revised, arguing for bizarrely wrong economic policies based on bizarrely wrong economic assumptions.

The press has actually done a good job this year of calling out the Romney campaign and its allies for their lies and its ineptitude. But it would be nice if the press, especially the oh-so-serious economic and financial press, would also point out just how many prismatic variations on wrong they are as well. Of course, it would also help if the President and the neoliberals didn’t buy into so many of those wrongheaded assumptions on their own account.

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Just don’t call it an endorsement

by digby

And pay no attention to the parasite thing:

In a column and video posted by the official newspaper of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois and obtained by Right Wing Watch on Wednesday, Bishop Thomas John Paprocki called out the Democratic Party for temporarily removing God from their platform, supporting abortion and recognizing that “gay rights are human rights.”

“There are many positive and beneficial planks in the Democratic Party Platform, but I am pointing out those that explicitly endorse intrinsic evils,” the bishop explained. “My job is not to tell you for whom you should vote. But I do have a duty to speak out on moral issues. I would be abdicating this duty if I remained silent out of fear of sounding ‘political’ and didn’t say anything about the morality of these issues. People of faith object to these platform positions that promote serious sins.”

“So what about the Republicans? I have read the Republican Party Platform and there is nothing in it that supports or promotes an intrinsic evil or a serious sin,” Paprocki added. “One might argue for different methods in the platform to address the needs of the poor, to feed the hungry and to solve the challenges of immigration, but these are prudential judgments about the most effective means of achieving morally desirable ends, not intrinsic evils.”

“Again, I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against,” he concluded, “but I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy.”

This man is either stupid or evil if he doesn’t understand the human suffering that the Republican Party Platform will cause. He doesn’t sound stupid.