Month: October 2012

Meet the blood-sucking 47%-er who picks up Romney’s trash

by digby

Mitt Romney says it’s not his job to worry about people who won’t take personal responsibility and care for their lives. Like Richard Hayes.

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Housekeeping

by digby

Comments will be down for a few days. But they’ll be back.

You can still tweet!

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It’s a political disaster, too

by David Atkins

Digby highlighted Paul Krugman’s excellent piece immediately below, but I just wanted to reinforce this bit with emphasis:

Barring an upset, however, that environment will come to an end on Nov. 6. This election is, as I said, shaping up as a referendum on our social insurance system, and it looks as if Mr. Obama will emerge with a clear mandate for preserving and extending that system. It would be a terrible mistake, both politically and for the nation’s future, for him to let himself be talked into snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Sounds like something I said the other day:

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.

Krugman is right, of course. But the fix is in. Everyone knows what cuts are coming down the pipe, because the only thing that would prevent those cuts is a reorientation of the economy that would make the plutocrats a little uncomfortable.

And we can’t have that, now, can we?

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A mandate to preserve and extend our social insurance system

by digby

Those of you who read this blog know that I’ve been nearly apoplectic over the past few months over the behind the scenes maneuvering to enact a Grand Bargain after the election.

It is a great relief to see Paul Krugman take up the cause:

If the polls are any indication, the result of that referendum will be a clear reassertion of support for the safety net, and a clear rejection of politicians who want to return us to the Gilded Age. But here’s the question: Will that election result be honored?

I ask that question because we already know what Mr. Obama will face if re-elected: a clamor from Beltway insiders demanding that he immediately return to his failed political strategy of 2011, in which he made a Grand Bargain over the budget deficit his overriding priority. Now is the time, he’ll be told, to fix America’s entitlement problem once and for all. There will be calls — as there were at the time of the Democratic National Convention — for him to officially endorse Simpson-Bowles, the budget proposal issued by the co-chairmen of his deficit commission (although never accepted by the commission as a whole).

And Mr. Obama should just say no, for three reasons.

First, despite years of dire warnings from people like, well, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, we are not facing any kind of fiscal crisis. Indeed, U.S. borrowing costs are at historic lows, with investors actually willing to pay the government for the privilege of owning inflation-protected bonds. So reducing the budget deficit just isn’t the top priority for America at the moment; creating jobs is. For now, the administration’s political capital should be devoted to passing something like last year’s American Jobs Act and providing effective mortgage debt relief.

Second, contrary to Beltway conventional wisdom, America does not have an “entitlements problem.” Mainly, it has a health cost problem, private as well as public, which must be addressed (and which the Affordable Care Act at least starts to address). It’s true that there’s also, even aside from health care, a gap between the services we’re promising and the taxes we’re collecting — but to call that gap an “entitlements” issue is already to accept the very right-wing frame that voters appear to be in the process of rejecting.

Finally, despite the bizarre reverence it inspires in Beltway insiders — the same people, by the way, who assured us that Paul Ryan was a brave truth-teller — the fact is that Simpson-Bowles is a really bad plan, one that would undermine some key pieces of our safety net. And if a re-elected president were to endorse it, he would be betraying the trust of the voters who returned him to office.

Thank you.

I feel as if I’ve been caught in a nightmare, watching a slow motion trainwreck right in front of me and nobody could hear me scream.

Someone was talking the other day about the President’s mandate and I wondered what exactly it would be. There’s a lot of unfinished business from the first term, but he’s not exactly running on any of it this time. It’s “stay the course” without saying it, I guess.

But Krugman makes an explicit claim that I would love to believe will be seen as the mandate, by the people, the press and the president should he win:

This election is, as I said, shaping up as a referendum on our social insurance system, and it looks as if Mr. Obama will emerge with a clear mandate for preserving and extending that system. It would be a terrible mistake, both politically and for the nation’s future, for him to let himself be talked into snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

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Amateurs Played For Suckers

by tristero

The joke in the music industry is that if you want to go be creative, you go into accounting. And like many such jokes, it’s no joke at all:

Fender’s chief executive, Larry Thomas, used to be the chief of Guitar Center. He sold the company to Bain at the top of the market in 2007 for $2.1 billion, including debt.

Guitar Center has been losing money since. Moody’s issued a junk rating of B2 on Guitar Center’s debt in October 2007, and has since downgraded the company two more times, most recently in November 2010, to Caa1.

When it comes to money, you really shouldn’t fuck with the music industry unless you know exactly what you’re doing.

(As the proud owner of two Fender guitars – neither bought from Guitar Center, btw – here’s a personal digression:

(I’ve actually had my hands a few times on vintage Strats from the 50’s and despite being awed by the experience of playing a legendary instrument, I can’t say I noticed any particularly magical difference in the sound, so I concluded the obsession with vintage Strats was probably hype. Hell, modern Strats are built to quality standards no one practiced in the 50’s. These people are guitar obsessives. Fender really does makes great, great guitars.

(Then again, I was never a very good guitar player. And musicians I do respect strongly believe those 50’s and early 60’s Strats are doubleplus better than anything since.  Therefore, I’ve concluded that the most likely reason why older Strats might sound better is because of the wear and tear on the instruments. They’ve been broken in, the pieces have settled in a way that makes for a grateful experience, especially the woods. And that takes time.

(And that means that in 50 years, my 2004 Strat is gonna sound awesome!)

Creepy video of the day

by digby

It looks like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, but it isn’t. It’s the police trying to round up activists in Spain:

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More loons on the way

by digby

Move over Steve King and Michele Bachmann, and make room on the crazy couch for Chris Stewart:

Glenn Beck likes to say that he never endorses candidates—he just tells his followers how he feels about them. In Chris Stewart, the Republican nominee in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District, Beck has found someone he feels pretty damn good about. “If he wasn’t running, I’d be trying to convince him to work for me, to help me stay the course, strategize, and save the country,” he said last winter , as Stewart’s campaign was just getting off the ground. “I’ve actually tried to talk him out of running, because it’s a lion’s den in Washington.”

But, Beck added, “I believe he’s a Daniel.”

Beck’s a great fiction writer himself so he knows a genius when he sees one:

The villain of the Great and Terrible series—other than Satan, that is—is Drexel Danbert, a cigar-smoking, white-haired, ultra-rich European émigré. Danbert controls politicians across the globe like a puppeteer and, as one would expect from an agent of Satan, has the power to control the media too.

In one scene, Danbert and a Saudi crown prince (also an agent of Satan) plot a strategy to undermine the US government by planting a fake story in the media about a massacre by American troops. “Those who hate the United States will believe it, no matter what evidence is eventually revealed. The New York Times will front page the story for five weeks, at least,” the crown prince says. The pair ultimately succeed in creating global chaos by setting off an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that destroys America’s electrical infrastructure and forces a small group of heroes to band together to survive and defeat the forces of evil.

Stewart scoffs at the notion that his books, like the Left Behind­ series to which they’re often compared, are religious tracts. “They’re not theological books; they’re not history books or predictions,” he says. “They’re not nonfiction. They’re just novels. And we would never read anything more into them than that. They’re just a way of telling a story.” He adds, “The only thing that we think is meaningful in the book in terms of, ‘Listen people, we should be aware of this,’ again is the threat of electromagnetic pulse.”

Of course we should. Plus Satan.

I really love this:

It’s near certain that Stewart, running in a deep-red district in a deep-red state, will get his chance at fixing Washington next January. But his campaign has raised eyebrows in Utah, where Stewart has left a trail of furious Republicans calling for an investigation into electoral dirty tricks and old hands in both parties predicting the second coming of Michele Bachmann. “From time to time, we get a certified nutcase,” one former Utah Republican politician told me. “And Chris Stewart truly is a certified nutcase.”

More than “time to time” I’m afraid. He’s going to have lots of company.

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