Month: March 2013

“How shallow, smug, bitterly angry partisanship can blind you to common sense”

by digby

This made my day already:

In the March 11 post, Breitbart.com editor at large Larry O’Connor mocked the Pulitzer Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist for his alleged financial mismanagement. Unfortunately for O’Connor, the report that Krugman went bankrupt is clearly a joke and originated from the satirical website The Daily Currant. O’Connor has since deleted the post without explanation.

In his post, O’Connor jabbed Krugman for supposedly spending “$84,000 in one month” on Portuguese wines and “a dress from the Victorian period,” and concluded that “apparently this Keynsian [sic] thing doesn’t really work on the micro level.” O’Connor sourced the report to a Boston.com post written by “Prudent Investor.” The post by “Prudent Investor” sources an Austrian website, which reprinted the original Daily Currant story.

Just last month, the Breitbart team laid into the Washington Post when the paper’s website adopted a satirical story about Sarah Palin from Daily Currant. In a post about the snafu, Breitbart blogger John Nolte ripped the paper for not letting “facts get in the way of a good Narrative.” Post blogger Suzi Parker offered a correction for her error, but the Breitbart team was not satisfied. According to Nolte, if Parker “had a shred of self-awareness, integrity, and dignity, she would have changed the headline to ‘Too Good To Check,’ and under it posted an essay about how shallow, smug, bitterly angry partisanship can blind you to common sense.”

I think they missed the real story. I’m fairly sure Krugman’s a “Friend of Hamas.”

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Resisting the siren call of the cheating right in 2014

by David Atkins

Politico leads off with some troll bait today about how President Obama’s supposedly more liberal stance is endangering retaking the House in 2014. The article has a number of quotes from Democratic challengers in tough, usually Romney-voting districts across America, but mostly in the South and in districts like those held by Michele Bachmann. These challengers are mewling that the President has been too liberal on marriage equality and gun control, while the writers at Politico lionize Rahm Emanuel for “reaching across the aisle” to retake the House in 2006 (conveniently ignoring Howard Dean’s role in making that happen.)

One could take issue with Politico‘s reporting here in a number of ways: the first page and headline screaming about “distance from Obama” is begging for a link from Drudge, while the key lede information about GOP gerrymandering and the advantage of Democrats in difficult districts being able to show independence by pivoting away from the President on a few key issues is buried in the second and third pages.

But the point here isn’t to criticize Politico for sensationalist hackery in playing to a conservative audience. That would be easy.

The point is that from now until 2022, Democrats are going to have a difficult decision to make. The country is on their side on nearly every issue of importance and controversy. But to win the seventeen House seats it will take to wrench the gavel out of John Boehner’s hands may require Democrats to water down their brand and take unpopular conservative positions out of step with the American people.

Democrats can choose to spend the next 9 years chasing Republicans to the right in the hope of knocking out a few Michele Bachmanns. Or Democrats can spend that time painting conservative Republicans farther and farther into a corner, potentially taking the House over the next four to six years, with a view to an overwhelming knockout blow after redistricting in 2020.

It’s a difficult choice. Republican cheating via the gerrymandering process certainly makes the Rahm Emanuel decision more attractive. And the experience of the wrecking ball that is the GOP House just these past few months makes the prospect of nine more years of similar gamesmanship almost unthinkable.

But chasing the Republicans to the right is a fool’s errand. Playing politics that are deeply unpopular and harmful public policy on a national level in order to win over a few abnormally conservative districts will weaken the brand and deflate the base such that victory will not be possible. On the other hand, as with the immigration debate and even possibly the gun debate, pushing the Republicans farther off the brink of unpopularity may force them into the moderating ground on a number of fronts, whether or not they continue to hold the House.

It will be difficult, but the right choice for America and for the Democratic Party lies in holding popular ground and not shifting rightward for the sake of a few outlier districts. Even if it means giving up already vain hope of retaking the House in 2014.

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Preventive medicine for a rough week ahead

by digby

Take two viewings and go to bed:

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Nope, still not ready to make nice

by digby

There are a lot of Iraq war anniversaries coming up over the next couple of months, but Greg Mitchell commemorates one that I think was an important object lesson in what our freedom-loving All-American fellows are capable of when they get their blood up:

It was years ago tonight that the Dixie Chicks, extremely popular then and far from controversial, caused a massive stir when singer Natalie Maines declared on stage in London: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” It was a little more than a week before their fellow Texas launched a war based on lies.

Of course, hatred was quickly spewed in the Chicks’ direction by media types, political figures, and country music yahoos–who never then or now get so excited when right-wing entertainers and media celebs make threats against a Democratic president […]

Good old true American Merle Haggard weighed in:

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching.

But President Bush argued: “The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say … they shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out … Freedom is a two-way street ….”

“Feelings hurt” = death threats. What a lovely man.

These women were real heroes in that hideous environment. Not very many entertainers spoke up for them, and most of the one’s who did were very tepid in their support. It wasn’t the “liberal” entertainment media’s finest hour.

And I’m still not ready to make nice:

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QOTD: Chris Hayes

by digby

Very wise words:

To say another country or another country’s leadership’s record is complicated is not to issue an apology for wrongdoing. We shouldn’t simply be neutral in the face of beatings and disappearances and state repression or bullying. But condemnation and outrage are no substitute for knowledge about the world and other countries’ politics which are tangled and complicated just like our own. And I can’t help but think there’s a relationship between our tendency to know nothing about a country other than if they are bad or not, and the fact we spend more money on defense than the next 13 countries combined.

If all we see are Hitlers we will forever be at war.

I love the show — I think it’s essential, actually — but I miss reading Chris. The humanity and humility that comes through in that quote is who he is, to be sure, but it really comes through, very elegantly, in his writing.

Click to the link to read his entire piece and watch the whole discussion on Hugo Chavez. It will make you realize you really didn’t know a damn thing about it before.

Update: Here’s one interesting way to go about increasing your knowledge of Latin America: watch South of the Border:

There’s a revolution underway in South America, but most of the world doesn’t know it. Oliver Stone sets out on a road trip across five countries to explore the social and political movements as well as the mainstream media’s misperception of South America while interviewing seven of its elected presidents. In casual conversations with Presidents Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Cristina Kirchner (Argentina), as well as her husband and ex-President Nėstor Kirchner, Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), and Raúl Castro (Cuba), Stone gains unprecedented access and sheds new light upon the exciting transformations in the region.

Here it is on Youtube.

A fatal typo

by digby

The good news in this heartbreaking story is that the much superior private sector handled this instead of faceless, uncaring Government bureaucrats who make too much money:

On the morning of Dec. 19, 2012, in a Torrance courtroom, Larry Delassus’ heart stopped as he watched his attorney argue his negligence and discrimination case against banking behemoth Wells Fargo.

His death came more than two years after Wells Fargo mistakenly mixed up his Hermosa Beach address with that of a neighbor in the same condo complex. The bank’s typo led Wells Fargo to demand that Delassus pay $13,361.90 ­— two years of late property taxes the bank said it had paid on his behalf in order to keep his Wells Fargo mortgage afloat.

But Delassus, a quiet man who suffered from the rare blood-clot disorder Budd-Chiari syndrome and was often hospitalized, didn’t owe a penny in taxes.

One of his neighbors, whose condo “parcel number” was two digits different from Delassus’, owed the back taxes.

In a series of painfully tragic events, Wells Fargo relied on its typographical error to double Delassus’ mortgage — from $1,237.69 to $2,429.13 — as its way of recouping the $13,361.90 in taxes Delassus didn’t owe. Delassus, a retiree living on a $1,655 check, couldn’t meet the mysteriously increased mortgage. He stopped paying, and soon was far behind on his mortgage.

Delassus and his attorney did not discover until May 2010 that a mis-entered number had dragged Delassus into this spiral. As court documents obtained by L.A. Weekly show, after admitting its error, Wells Fargo foreclosed on Delassus anyway and sold his condo.

Delassus had to move to a tiny apartment in an assisted-living home in Carson.

Friends say he didn’t die of heart disease that day in court, as the coroner found. He was, they believe, killed by a system so inhumane that it could not undo a devastating piece of red tape the system itself created.

They had to do what they had to do. Because moral hazard.

Obviously, this is just one many thousands of similar stories across the nation during the past few years. And it’s still happening. But I’m pretty sure that if we can just cut Social Security and Medicare and get millionaires to fork over the money they lose between their couch cushions it will all be good.

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Jebbie’s roadshow

by digby

It turns out that Jebbie is out of practice (or overrated to begin with.) TPM provides a timeline on his epic flip-flop on immigration in which he now says that he wrote in his book that he was against a path to citizenship in order to persuade conservatives to back a path to citizenship during the election season. Now it’s no longer necessary because after the big defeat in November so many Republicans have come over to his side. (If you can figure out what his side really is … ) He was all over TV this morning selling this bizarre story.

But guess what? According to the TPM timeline during the election campaign Jeb was for a path to citizenship. And as recently as last week he was saying that he had changed his mind!

March 4, 2013
In a shocking reversal, Jeb Bush gives an interview to Matt Lauer to preview his book “Immigration Wars: Forging An American Solution,” in which he reveals he no longer supports a path to citizenship, instead favoring permanent legal status for the undocumented. He warns “if we’re not going to apply the law fairly and consistently then we’re going to have another wave of illegal immigrants coming in the country.”

It’s not just a matter of lagging publication dates or the November results changing the need to “bring Republicans around”, as they’ve tried to spin it. Six days ago he was on TV saying publicly that he was against a path to citizenship. He should have known better.

I have no idea if this is going to hurt his changes for 2016 (zzzzzz….) but it tells me that he is very much off his game. If he was going to repudiate what he wrote in his book now that the Republicans have allegedly “come around” it sure was odd for him to endorse what he said just a week ago.

But it’s always possible that Jeb’s never been as good as everyone always said he was. It may just have been the contrast with Junior that made him seem that way.

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Krugman on the IMF paper

by digby

The IMF has just released a new paper on austerity that is kind of heavy going (unnecessarily, I think), but ends up making a simple but important point.

Suppose that a government imposes fiscal austerity in a realistic fashion, with spending cuts getting steadily deeper relative to baseline over a period of several years. If the negative impact of these cuts is fairly large — which all the evidence coming in suggests is the case under current liquidity-trap conditions — and if the country starts from a fairly high level of debt — as the austerity countries do — something alarming is likely to happen. Instead of falling, the ratio of debt to GDP is likely to rise for years.

In part this is because a weaker economy shrinks revenues, offsetting a large part of the direct austerity. What pushes it over the top is the weakening of GDP, which increases the ratio.

I ran my own version of their simulations for a hypothetical country — call it Osbornia — which starts with debt at 100 percent of GDP and a budget deficit that would, left to itself, be consistent with a stable debt ratio thanks to 2 percent growth and 2 percent inflation. On this economy I impose 5 years of tightening at the rate of 1 percent of potential GDP each year, with a multiplier of 1.3 (which is about where recent estimates have been converging). Output ends up 6.5 percent below the baseline; debt looks like this:

Why does this matter? As the paper says,

Although this effect is not long-lasting and debt eventually declines, it could be an issue if financial markets focus on the short-term behavior of the debt ratio, or if country authorities engage in repeated rounds of tightening in an effort to get the debt ratio to converge to the official target.
(My emphasis).

And, of course, this destructive behavior is especially likely if said country authorities are firm believers in the notion that austerity does not depress output; they’ll see the weak performance either as “structural” or as showing the need for more confidence. Either way, they’ll see it as a reason to tighten even more.

Sound like anyone you know?

Uhm, yes. And how convenient that will be for the anti-government, anti-tax zealots.

But hey, I hear that if we can make a deal right now to only impose the trillions in cuts we’ve already agreed to in the short run and commit to cut trillions more from the “entitlements” down the road, we’ll take all this messy deficit schmeficit stuff off the table and everything will be smooth sailing. What could go wrong?

Update: This piece pressuring liberals to come around on entitlements by holding them responsible for the hideous discretionary cuts shows just how this is supposed to work:

“The aging population and the growth of health-care costs make enacting reforms to entitlements imperative. Enacting them now would help the economy by reducing uncertainty. This would also instill more confidence in government, give people time to adjust and release the pressure on the small portion of the budget that so far has absorbed virtually all of the cuts. “

Really? It looks to me as if the evidence Krugman cites says exactly the opposite.

But don’t let that stand in the way of shamefully holding liberals responsible for what the centrists and conservatives are doing to this country. That’s par for the course.

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More guns in fewer hands

by David Atkins

The New York Times has a new report consistent with other recent data showing a trend downward in the number of people with guns, even as the number of gun sales skyrockets:

The gun ownership rate has fallen across a broad cross section of households since the early 1970s, according to data from the General Social Survey, a public opinion survey conducted every two years that asks a sample of American adults if they have guns at home, among other questions.

The rate has dropped in cities large and small, in suburbs and rural areas and in all regions of the country. It has fallen among households with children, and among those without. It has declined for households that say they are very happy, and for those that say they are not. It is down among churchgoers and those who never sit in pews.

The household gun ownership rate has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s and 35 percent in the 2000s, according to the survey data, analyzed by The New York Times.

In 2012, the share of American households with guns was 34 percent, according to survey results released on Thursday. Researchers said the difference compared with 2010, when the rate was 32 percent, was not statistically significant.

The findings contrast with the impression left by a flurry of news reports about people rushing to buy guns and clearing shop shelves of assault rifles after the massacre last year at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

“There are all these claims that gun ownership is going through the roof,” said Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “But I suspect the increase in gun sales has been limited mostly to current gun owners. The most reputable surveys show a decline over time in the share of households with guns.”

Go to any conservative or gun-oriented blog or forum, and the trend is obvious: no longer is it considered appropriately macho to just own one or two guns. The true American hero must be in possession of an entire arsenal. That’s what the gun lobby has led them to believe–in large part to boost their own profits even as the number of people who want to own these instruments of death plummets. It has worked handsomely for them.

As with so much else in American political life, the gun debate is being driven by an increasingly extremist set of hyper-conservative activists whose numbers are dwindling even as their voices grow louder. At some point politicians are going to realize there just aren’t that many of these people anymore. It will take some time to reach that tipping point, but it’s coming fairly soon.

A brighter future does lie ahead. It’s just a function of time, hard work, and whether the rump conservative base of the country decides to go out of power with a bang or a whimper.

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By Dennis Hartley

Greedy Lying Bastards: Get the picture?

MacArthur’s lark: Fox and Jones in Emperor

The heroes and villains are not so easily delineated in Emperor, an uneven hybrid of History Channel docudrama and Lifetime weepie based on Shiro Okamoto’s book and directed by Peter Weber. Set in post-WW 2 Japan at the dawn of the American occupation, the story centers on the roundup of key Japanese military and political leaders to be tried for war crimes. President Truman has appointed General Douglas MacArthur (a scenery-chewing Tommy Lee Jones) to oversee the operation; he in turn delegates “Japan expert” Brigadier General Bonner Fellers (tepid leading man Matthew Fox) to see that the task is executed pronto. Fellers is also directed to investigate whether the biggest fish, Emperor Hirohito (Takataro Kataoka) gave direct input on war strategy. MacArthur has allotted him only a week or so to conduct his investigation (no pressure!).

Indeed, the question of the Emperor’s guilt is a complex one (and the most historically fascinating element of the film). Was he merely a figurehead, kept carefully squirreled away in his hermetic bubble throughout the war and occasionally trotted out for propagandistic purposes? Or did he have a direct say in day-to-day military decisions, perhaps even giving a direct blessing for the attack on Pearl Harbor? And there is the cultural element to consider. MacArthur (at least as depicted in the film) was shrewd enough to realize that if he could build a working relationship with Hirohito, perhaps the Emperor could in turn persuade the populace to cooperate with their overseers, thereby expediting the rebuild of Japan’s socio-political infrastructure. Even if he was a paper tiger, the Emperor’s words traditionally held substantial sway over the Japanese people.

Unfortunately, screenwriters Vera Blasi and David Klass shoot themselves in the foot and sidestep this potentially provocative historical reassessment by injecting an unconvincing romantic subplot involving Fellers’ surreptitious search to discover the fate of a Japanese exchange student (Aya Shimada) who he dated in college (the young woman, whose father was a general in the Imperial Army, returned to Japan before the war). The flashback scenes recapping the relationship are curiously devoid of passion and dramatically flat, grinding the film to a halt with each intrusion. While Fox has a touch of that stoic Henry Fonda/Gary Cooper vibe going for him, his performance feels wooden, especially when up against Jones, who makes the most of his brief screen time (even he is given short shrift, mostly relegated to caricature and movie trailer-friendly lines like “Let’s show them some good old-fashioned American swagger!”). I get the feeling that at some point during the film’s development there was an interesting culture-clash drama in here somewhere. But when the denouement is a re-enactment of an historic photo that slowly dissolves from the actors into the actual photo? That is almost never a good sign…

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