Month: May 2013

Don’t underrate the intimidation factor

by digby

Ed Kilgore follows up on the story I wrote about over the week-end about the proposed armed march on Washington with this observation:

[E]ven if no violence ensues, this exercise is actually typical of an awful lot of the stockpiling-guns-to-resist-tyranny talk on the Right (and on rare occasions, the Left) these days. It’s actually the inverse of what Kokesh says: it’s an effort to intimidate political opponents with the threat, if not the immediate actuality, of violence. Otherwise, what’s the point of carrying guns to your nonviolent protest? The point, it seems clear, is to make extraconstitutional claims for the legitimacy of the “constitutional” protests against Big Government. We can peacefully debate, the potential “armed resistance” forces suggest, this or that aspect of gun regulation or Obamacare or drone policy or taxes or “welfare looters” via conventional politics. But in the end, our conviction that your “progressive policies” represent “tyranny” trumps all civil discourse, and that’s when the shooting may start.

I agree. I was appalled at those “open carry” yahoos showing up at Tea Party rallies and Town Halls during the health care debate packing heat.And as Kilgore points out,  they’re always talking about how anything they disagree with is “tyranny.”  I think there are plenty of people who would think twice about putting themselves in the cross hairs, if you know what I mean. Like these people:

A member of Moms Demand Action said that she felt unsettled by their presence and said that the organizers would have to think twice before holding another event, particularly one where children could be present.

You’ve probably seen the story about the five year old who accidentally shot his 2 year old sister with a “kids” rifle. Here’s just one little piece of evidence about how this sort of thing plays out in American “civil discourse.”

After the funeral service, two men advanced across North Main Street toward a single television crew present, from the German network RTL, and punched the cameraman, bloodying his face and knocking him down.

Two other men told a newspaper reporter, “If you had any sense, you’d get out of here. You’re next, buddy.”

Now sure, this is probably hyperbole from some people who are embarrassed by their barbaric custom that puts lethal weapons into the hands of babies. But the larger point that Kilgore makes is correct. These gun nuts are basically saying, “do what we want or we’ll shoot you.” They believe their “second amendment remedy” legitimately cancels out the rest of the bill of rights.

That’s un-American.

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End the war on drugs for pity’s sake

by David Atkins

I’ve angered many in the progressive community by making common cause with benign interventionists over the years. The arguments against intervention are powerful and familiar, but I still can’t square myself with watching brutal genocides and horrific oppression without feeling that international organizations should be equipped to step in put a stop to the worst cases. It’s a problem, of course, since more often than not the perpetrators of crimes against humanity don’t respond to shame or peaceful action. That in turns leads to the difficult choice of opening the Pandora’s Box of war, or sitting back in silence as horrors proceed unhindered right under our noses. Some say war is always the worse option. Some disagree. It’s not an easy call.

But there are some cases where stopping evil doesn’t require a single gun to fire or bomb to drop. The ongoing drug cartel nightmare in Mexico is one of those. The Investigative Fund at The Nation has a chilling story about drug violence along a cartel corridor in Mexico. The war between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels has left tens of thousands dead. The police and the military are entirely bought off by one cartel or the other, serving as intimidation, enforcement and torturers on behalf of the cartels. Anyone who speaks up is silenced by hit squads that operate in broad daylight under the eye of corrupted law enforcement. In some towns there is nothing left of the government or police forces: city councilors and cops are killed one by one until the few that remain flee for their lives, leaving literally no government infrastructure in place beyond the cartels and their partners in the military. Families that protest their treatment under the regime are eliminated as police first detain and frisk households to get information, then cartel gunmen show up to slaughter the entire household mere hours later:

We moved to the next devastated home, where I found a collection of melted family albums of a wedding party. We tried to make out their faces, but the plastic crumbled in our fingers. Behind the house, I noticed a one-room structure that hadn’t been torched. I gingerly made my way toward it through broken glass and blackened rubble. Along the perimeter of the house someone had raked little pyramids of desiccated dog turds into tidy piles. Inside the one-room structure, birth certificates, land titles and other personal documents were strewn across the floor beneath a layer of sand. Scattered among the papers were glossy campaign leaflets with a photo of Apolonio Amaya, a former Guadalupe mayor for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI. I would later find out that gunmen had killed Polo in 2006, and his son Omar, also a former mayor, in 2007. Polo’s daughter, a schoolteacher, was shot dead in 2008 while driving her car on the outskirts of town. Polo’s wife was also killed. The documents in the small wood-paneled room were all that remained of the family…

Little remains of the town’s government. Anybody who worked for the town of Guadalupe prior to 2008 has either been killed or fled. There was once a police force of 10 officers, but by the end of 2010 none remained. More than half of them had been killed, some of their heads placed on the gazebo and park benches of Guadalupe’s town plaza as a warning. The remaining officers fled. The mayor and city council left town after two city council members were gunned down in 2009. Gunmen caught up with Mayor Jesus Manuel Lara in 2010, killing him outside the home he’d fled to in Juarez. After Lara’s death, Tomás Archuleta, an accountant, became Guadalupe’s new mayor. Upon assuming office, he asked Erika Gandara, his 28-year-old niece and a former security guard, to be the town’s lone police officer.

At the same time, in the neighboring county seat of Praxedis G. Guerrero, population 2,200, Marisol Valles, a 20-year-old criminology student in black-rimmed glasses, was appointed police chief after the entire police force was killed and city hall strafed by machine gun fire. Newspapers called Valles the “bravest woman in Mexico.” Archuleta and other mayors were desperate to assemble some sort of civilian law enforcement in their towns. They hoped gunmen would not target young, unarmed women who served mostly administrative roles. Two days before Christmas 2010, armed men kidnapped Erika Gandara. Her body was found several months later in the desert. After Gandara disappeared, Marisol Valles and her family began to receive death threats and fled to the United States.

The fact that these horrors are occurring every day in a nation that borders our own should shake the conscience of every American. But fortunately, we don’t need to drop a single bomb or fire a single gun to put an end to it. All we need do is end the failed war on drugs.

The drug trade is a $39 billion industry in Mexico. Beyond the lawlessness, intimidation and murder, there is no way to achieve a thriving Mexican economy without bringing much of this underground economic activity out of the shadows and into less harmful and more open industries. But none of that will happen as long as American black market demand continues to drive cartel profits. Decriminalizing most drugs and localizing production in the United States will dry up the revenue these cartels need to operate, reduce the nightmarish violence occurring south of the border, and give Mexico and other Central and South American nations room to grow their economies in a productive way. It will also do a wealth of good here at home in reducing needless incarceration and in bringing addicts out of the shadows and into a regulated environment where they can get the treatment they need.

This one is an easy call.

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QOTD: Elizabeth Smart

by digby

This is so sad:

“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value. Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value. … [Kids should know] you will always have value and nothing can change that.”

Via thefrisky, which points out:

Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped at 14, held captive and raped for nine months, spoke recently at Johns Hopkins University on a forum about human trafficking. Here she is explaining why she didn’t run after her captor raped her, which he did daily during her entire ordeal. As the now-25-year-old told Johns Hopkins, she was raised in a religious family and had learned from abstinence-only education that a person whose virginity has been ‘sullied’ is worthless.

Her mention of chewing gum is not random: A popular teaching in abstinence-only education, “the gum game,” is to compare people to chewing gum: a person who has had multiple partners is just like dirty, grimy gum that’s been chewed over and over again by multiple people. It’s a way of teaching children to feel ashamed and guilty about sex.

That just made me feel sick.

Straw man on fire alert: Even-the-liberal Kirsten Powers makes a really stupid analogy

by digby

The lengths to which “even-the-liberals” will go to insult real liberals is always amazing. But Powers takes it to a new level with her latest unctuous screed about the Goslin horrors, the atrocity that made her a star:

Speaking as a liberal who endorses more government regulation of practically everything—banks, water, air, food, oil drilling, animal safety—I am eternally perplexed by the fury the abortion rights contingent displays at the suggestion that the government might have a serious role to play in the issue of abortion, especially later-term abortion. More and more, the abortion rights community has become the NRA of the left: unleashing their armies of supporters and lobbyists in opposition to regulations or restrictions that the majority of Americans support. In the same way the NRA believes background checks will lead to the government busting down your door to confiscate your guns, the abortion rights movement conjures a straight line from parental consent to a complete ban on abortion.

Such an attitude makes having an honest conversation about abortion almost impossible. That is just one of the many reasons I hate talking about it. Additionally, there is no upside in our media culture to challenging this sacred cow. More likely, there is a price to be paid, which is why so few people take it on. However, I cannot legitimately say I am a person who cherishes human rights—the animating issue of my life and a frequent topic of my writing—and remain silent about our country’s legally endorsing infanticide.

Poor Kristen Powers. Like all members of that scrappy, beleaguered band of anti-abortion zealots, she’s been silenced. Except for her constant TV appearances and columns expressing her anti-abortion views, she might as well have a gag order against her.

I do have to wonder what “liberals” she’s talking about, though. It certainly isn’t abortion rights activists who were every bit as appalled by the illegal, back alley Goslin hellhole. It’s exactly the kind of horror show they’re trying to prevent. I cannot think of one person who has ever defended his actions or who thinks that what he did was legal or proper.

But she’s not arguing a real point is she? She’s carving out a little niche for herself as the “Even-The-Liberal” Fox News scold, a lucrative position an excellent wingnut welfare career move. Defining her alleged “liberalism” as an obsessive regulator is just a teensy bit of a giveaway, though. Liberals don’t define themselves that way. While we do believe in the common good, we don’t worship regulation for regulation’s sake. If the corporate community polices itself and doesn’t pollute, poison and steal from everyday people with impunity, regulations aren’t necessary, are they? But somebody needs to at least try to keep the air breathable, the water drinkable and the bank accounts safe from predators. I’d be thrilled if government didn’t need to do that. I don’t enjoy having to pay taxes either. But I do like to breathe and I think it would be nice if little kids born in 2013 could breath when they’re my age too. If the rapacious greedheads could be persuaded to stop counting their money long enough to take on that responsibility I couldn’t be happier.

But liberals also have a strong belief in individual and civil rights, the chapter on which Powers apparently skipped over in the liberal indoctrination manual. Therefore, when it comes to reproduction, we tend to believe that the fully formed human in whose body this “life” resides is not merely a gestation vessel whose agency is irrelevant, but rather someone in whom the rights of personhood are already fully vested. Therefore, liberals don’t find it a simple matter of flipping a switch to completely divest a woman of her autonomy the minute she become pregnant and assume that she must adhere to a certain subset of society’s beliefs. Her right to make decisions about her own reproduction is fundamental.

Unlike Kristen Powers and her ilk, most liberals also tend to understand that there are no easy answers and that a question as intimate and personal as when to give birth and raise a family is best answered by the person who is charged by nature with giving birth.  But since we  understand that this is a uniquely complex matter, very few people object to the Roe vs Wade formulation which never allowed late term abortion on demand. It was only legal in the case of a woman’s life or health being endangered and there are extremely few instances of anyone having them for other reasons. Nobody wants women to be in that position — and no woman wants to be there.  Indeed, it’s why abortion rights activists always favor easier access to birth control and early abortion.

All of that means that the offensive comparison between the NRA and the pro-choice community is just plain wrong. Abortion rights advocates haven’t been making some slippery slope argument about late term abortion. They argued the case on the merits — that it should be legal under the original Roe vs wade framework in the rare situations where it was necessary, such as when a fetus was already dead, so severely malformed that it will not survive outside the womb or when a woman’s health and possibly her life is on the line if she is denied the procedure. Nobody in the pro-choice camp ever argued that something like the Goslin clinic should be legal or that regulation of such clinics would lead to the usurpation of abortion rights. The abortion rights movement has spent decades fighting to keep clinics like Goslin’s from ever existing.

It’s the same with parental permission. Abortion rights advocates don’t oppose parental control because it’s a slippery slope to abolition, it’s because they worry about the poor teen-agers who cannot talk to their parents and are too immature to understand the ramifications of waiting too long. They want teen-agers to talk to their parents if possible. But we live in the real world and know that many of them will not and will end up bearing children at much too young an age or harming themselves trying to deal with it on their own.

By contrast, the NRA refuses to allow even the slightest regulation of guns. In fact, they actively encourage people to own more of them, to carry them in public, to use them in dangerous situations when bullets are flying. They are even threatening armed insurrection if anyone even tries to regulate them. The abortion rights movement doesn’t ever tell people they must get abortions. Indeed, Planned Parenthood is dedicated to helping prevent pregnancy, which people like Kirsten Powers’ allies would deprive women of having access to in their simple-minded quest to end legal abortion at all costs.

It’s the anti-abortion folks who are like the NRA, I’m afraid, with their history of resorting to violence to get their way and their relentless attempts to ban abortion while simultaneously opposing birth control. It’s clear that they believe that women have no right to avoid pregnancy and childbirth, period. And sad truth is that if these extremist anti-abortion zealots and gun advocates have their way, we’ll be living in a world that features many more Newtowns — and many more Goslin clinics. That’s not freedom or morality — it’s dystopia.

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Your armchair activist assignment of the day

by digby

I get lots of good stuff in my email box, much of it informative with lots of good causes to contribute to. So, I thought I’d start sharing one of them each day that makes sense to ask a citizen who is working and has a busy life to spare a few minutes to make the world a better place.

Here’s today’s easy armchair activist assignment from Social Security Works:

Congress recently eliminated a part of the sequester that would affect people who fly frequently. All it took was a few words from wealthy business travelers who donate to their campaigns. It took only four days for the supposedly gridlocked Congress to ‘fix’ this part of sequester–just in time for Congress themselves to fly home for recess.

Yet Congress refuses to hear the cries of the 800,000 jobless workers in 19 states who suffered cuts of an average of $120 a month in their unemployment checks.

If you haven’t taken this action yet–or tried, but couldn’t–please take a moment and do so. Congress needs to know that the people are watching. Click here to tell your member of Congress to repeal the sequester.

Or the thousands of children about to be locked out of Head Start.

Or the disabled veterans who can’t get the Social Security benefits they earned because of cuts to the Social Security Administration.

Click here to tell Congress: Repeal the Sequester.

The cuts are costing jobs and slowing already weak growth. With millions out of work, and the economy in trouble, they are not just dumb, but dangerous.

Join us, and wake Congress out of its stupor. Repeal the sequester.

Often signing petitions and joining groups is simply a way of boosting someone’s membership list. This is not one of them. Social Security Works has been doing amazing work gathering data and putting together actions to save Social Security from the deficit fetishists for a long time.

Repealing the sequester has been assumed to be a complete non-starter among the Villagers from the very beginning. But it is the only principled position for anyone who cares about average working families and the most vulnerable members of our society. And it is an absolutely necessary tactical position for liberals who refuse to accept a Solomon’s Choice of betraying the old and sick of the future for the young and sick of today. (By the way, you’ll notice that it ends up being the same people…) It’s not necessary — deficit reduction is a sham. The economy will be much better off if they abandon it. This is a rich nation with more than enough money to cover its current bills and keep it’s promises to pay them in the future.

Just say no. Repeal the sequester.. Liberals have to hold that position or the centrists will sell us out one meager, life-sustaining benefit at a time.

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Another nail in the Medicaid coffin

by digby

Well, I guess this was predictable:

If expanding Medicaid does not make people measurably healthier, the cost and benefit equation needs reviewing: dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/06/wil…
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 6, 2013

That’s pretty much what I’s seeing all across the blogosphere today. And I’m going to guess that the conservatives will continue to use this Oregon study as an excuse to cut Medicaid funding for some time to come, with the acquiescence of Democrats who are all to eager to sign on to “efficient” and “pragmatic” arguments against anything that makes them feel like a hippie.

But it turns out the study they are all quoting with such glee was badly designed and couldn’t have shown, one way or the other, what they were seeking to find. Kevin Drum does a nice analysis of the data and concludes this:

[W]hat’s a fair thing to say about the results of this study?

One fair thing would be to simply say that it’s inconclusive, full stop. It tells us nothing about the effect of Medicaid access on diabetes, cholesterol levels, or blood pressure maintenance. I’m fine with that interpretation.

Another fair thing would be to say that the results were positive, but the study was simply to small to tell us if the results are real.

Or there’s a third fair thing you could say: From a Bayesian perspective, the Oregon results should slightly increase our belief that access to Medicaid produces positive results for diabetes, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure maintenance. It shouldn’t increase our belief much, but if you toss the positive point estimates into the stew of everything we already know, they add slightly to our prior belief that Medicaid is effective.

But you can’t say that the results are disappointing, at least not without a lot of caveats. At a minimum, the bare fact that the results aren’t statistically significant certainly can’t be described as a disappointment. That was baked into the cake from the beginning. This study was never likely to find significant results in the first place.

So that’s that. You can’t honestly say that the study shows that Medicaid “seemed to have little or no impact on common medical conditions like hypertension and diabetes.” That just isn’t what it showed.

Keep your eye on the Village gasbags over the next few days. If the Ruth Marcus-David Brooks nexus gloms onto this study, we’ll know that this has hit the centrist sweet-spot already.

The Medicaid expansion along with the ban on pre-existing conditions exclusion was always the most compelling part of Obamacare from a liberal perspective. It was a badly needed expansion of government provided, single payer health care for the working poor and it was supposed to cover a very large number of people in our growing underclass. But because it covered the working poor, it was always going to be subject to cutting and slashing either in big chunks or through incremental cuts over the course of many years. The Democrats who were supposed to protect it have shown that they are willing to trade it away for other things “they like”, as the president likes to term it. (As if what Democratic politicians “like” is the same thing as what average citizens “need.”)

And so it begins. I had been hopeful that the Obama administration would do everything it could to protect its signature achievement and would therefore protect Medicaid as a huge part of it —after all,  it was supposed to end up covering more than 20 million people. The budget negotiations have shown otherwise, which means that they really define Obamacare as the new regulations, the mandate and the exchanges, which is fair enough. But the Medicaid expansion was the liberal heart of Obamacare and the reason why so many progressives in congress were compelled to vote for it.

Now, it remains to be seen if they will fight for it.

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The “Fix the Debt” scam

by David Atkins

IPS and Campaign for America’s Future came out with a report last week detailing the rank hypocrisy of the people behind the “Fix the Debt” campaign:

A new report by IPS and Campaign for America’s Future shows that America’s top CEOs are pocketing massive taxpayer subsidies at the same time they’re pushing austerity cutbacks in government programs that benefit ordinary citizens.

Thanks to a “performance pay” tax loophole, large corporations in the United States today are routinely deducting enormous executive payouts from their income taxes. In effect, these companies are exploiting the U.S. tax code to send taxpayers the bill for the huge rewards they’re doling out to their top executives.

During the three-year period 2009-2011, the 90 publicly held corporate members of the austerity-focused “Fix the Debt” lobby group shoveled out $6.3 billion in pay to their CEOs and next three highest-paid executives.

These 90 Fix the Debt member firms raked in at least $953 million — and as much as $1.6 billion — from the “performance pay” loophole between 2009-2011. The exact full value of corporate windfalls from this loophole will remain impossible to compute until we have more complete mandated disclosure for executive compensation.

Top executives at these same Fix the Debt companies are aggressively advocating cuts to government programs that benefit the ordinary American taxpayers subsidizing their compensation. Many of these executives have also added to America’s debt and deficit by using tax havens and other accounting tricks to have their corporations avoid paying their fair tax share.

Of course, none of these people and organizations are actually interested in “fixing the debt.” They’re interested in a direct wealth transfer from regular wage earners to their executive and corporate bank accounts. “Fixing the debt” is an excuse to slash social welfare spending to the bone so that employees become more desperate and malleable cogs in the economic machine while keeping taxes low on the John Galts. It’s just a scam, plain and simple.

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So, that worked out well

by digby

As our attention is once more turning toward war in the middle east, perhaps we should check in and see how our last big adventure is working out:

With more than 700 people killed in just 30 days, April was the deadliest month in Iraq in five years. According to the United Nations Mission in the country, 712 Iraqis lost their lives in acts of terrorism and acts of violence in the month of April. Nearly 600 of the dead were civilians.

The string of attacks continued in the first days of May. On Friday, a bomb outside a Sunni mosque in Rashidiya killed at least seven, the Associated Press reported. In a separate incident, nine police officers and four militants were killed during clashes Thursday evening in the northern city of Mosul.

The new wave of violence spread over large parts of Iraq in the wake of a deadly raid by security forces on a Sunni protest encampment in the city of Hawija, north of Baghdad, earlier in April. The brazen assault by the army and police against the protesters — Sunnis who were demonstrating against the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — set in motion a string of counterattacks by militants against Shiites and security forces. Shiite militants have returned the assaults by bombing Sunni targets.

Yet tension had been building long before the clashes in Hawija. “The situation has been deteriorating for the last two years, but particularly since December tensions have risen,” Human Rights Watch’s Erin Evers told The Huffington Post.

But I’m sure it was all worth it, right?

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Talkin’ bout a revolution

by digby

What an excellent idea:

On the morning of July 4, 2013, Independence Day, we will muster at the National Cemetery &; at noon we will step off to march across the Memorial Bridge, down Independence Avenue, around the Capitol, the Supreme Court, & the White House, then peacefully return to Virginia across the Memorial Bridge. This is an act of civil disobedience, not a permitted event. We will march with rifles loaded &; slung across our backs to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated &; cower in submission to tyranny. We are marching to mark the high water mark of government &; to turn the tide. This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent. Should we meet physical resistance, we will peacefully turn back, having shown that free people are not welcome in Washington, &; returning with the resolve that the politicians, bureaucrats, & enforcers of the federal government will not be welcome in the land of the free.

This supersmart event is the brainchild of Ron Paul supporter Adam Kokesh, a veteran who protested the Iraq war (and was kicked out of the army for doing so.) 

And for all his assurances that they come in peace:

When the government comes to take your guns, you can shoot government agents, or submit to slavery.
— Adam Kokesh (@adamkokesh) May 3, 2013

He’s not alone:

Nearly half of all Republicans surveyed said they believed that “an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years,” a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University found.

While 44% of registered Republican voters indicated that they believed armed rebellion would soon be a reality in the U.S., just 18% of Democrats agreed. As for Independent voters, 27% indicated that guns would soon be used to settle the country’s political problems.

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“In Britain even pain is popular” — not so much

by digby

Fareed Zakaria four years ago in a post called The Center Holds: In Britain even pain is popular”:

Three weeks ago the new chancellor, 39-year-old Tory George Osborne, presented a budget that promised to get Britain’s fiscal house in order with sharp cuts in spending, coupled with tax increases. It landed in the midst of a heated debate across the industrialized world about how to best get the economy back on track. Osborne and his boss, Prime Minister David Cameron, have come down firmly on one side of this debate, hoping that a major effort to reduce the deficit will reassure bond markets and investors that Britain is a safe and compelling place to put their money.

Leaving aside the economics of this, what struck me as I spent time in Britain last week was the politics of deficit reduction. Having announced major cuts in popular programs, plus hefty tax increases, the Cameron government might be expected to be losing popularity by the day. But in fact the budget was well received by the public—though attacked ferociously from the left—and the governing coalition has actually inched up a bit in the polls.

There are several possible reasons for this. Cameron has played the public role of prime minister exceedingly well, making a pitch-perfect apology for the British Army’s wrongful use of force in Northern Ireland in 1972, and handling himself on the global stage with grace and ease. It’s also true, of course, that the effect of the cuts and taxes have not yet been felt, and when that happens, the government’s poll ratings might plunge. But clearly the honesty of the budget has resonated with voters.

It’s heartening to see a government do something that it must have thought would be deeply unpopular, and then be rewarded by the public…

Today on his show:

ZAKARIA: May day was a day of protests this week across Europe and England, France, Spain, Greece and beyond. Protesters hit the streets angry about the economy. But they are also expressing anger about austerity, the policy of trimming government expenses. With a number of politicians in the West admitting that austerity is failing, is it the end of austerity? I’m joined by two very smart economic thinkers and writers Gillian Tett from “The Financial Times” and Rana Foroohar from “Time” magazine. Welcome.

ZAKARIA: This economy looks pretty good. That is the private sector engine — companies and people is moving pretty well. Do you think that people now feel that the government has been cutting back too much in a period of weak economic demand? In other words, are we actually witnessing a kind of shift where people are going to say, enough austerity. Let’s try to actually doing it. Because I hear the academic debate, but I don’t see any government policy changing.

FOROOHAR: Yeah, well, I think, you know, political gridlock in Washington is going to make it hard to come up with the kinds of spending that would actually be useful. I mean yes, I would love to see more spending on things like infrastructure and education. You’ve written about that. We’ve all talked about that. I think that’s going to be difficult. But there is this push back now against austerity. We can see that it hasn’t worked well in Europe and we can see that the government and public spending, the lack of public spending is a real drag on growth in this country. We just have the effect of being the prettiest house on an ugly block. You know, so we are still doing pretty well compared to others.

ZAKARIA: What does it look like in Europe, because in Europe you’re actually having, you know, people like the president of Ireland saying austerity is — led us nowhere.

TETT: We had some astonishing statements from Ireland this week about the fact that actually, it’s not just about an economic union, it’s about a social union, a political union and if that phrase, it really could be a lot of upheaval (ph) in the Euro zone, because the reality of the countries like Ireland, like Greece, like Italy and Portugal are getting absolutely fed up by being told by the Germans and the IMF that they have to do more austerity. You can see the results. I mean 27 percent unemployment rate in Spain. Potentially even higher, if you actually look at the numbers properly. Similar levels in Portugal and Greece. You have an entire generation that’s essentially being thrown into the garbage can right now and the problem with that is they’re not spending, they’re not stimulating the economy, you’re not seeing the kind of green shoots to the demand that you’re getting in America that Rana has been writing about.

FOROOHAR: You know, I think, also, you may start to see a shift in Germany after the elections. You know, there’s always been a lot of posturing on the part of Merkel and other German leaders because they want the rest of Europe to get the sense that, well, Germans will cough up money, but if you behave better, if you behave more German, if you’re thriftier. So that’s the stance politically she has to take to sell any kind of bailout within Germany. I think after the election, there’s going to be an increasing realization that Germany has as much to lose if not more than any other European country if there is a fracture in the Euro zone. Because if you think about it, a lot of their trading partners are in the Euro zone. If they go under, Germany’s export economy, which is the driver, is really going to suffer.

He immediately changed the subject to the Bangladesh disaster.

Zakaria still rails against “entitlements” (which his earlier guest Stephen Haas described as a “cancer” to no objection from anyone) but he hasn’t exactly come clean about the disastrous effects of the austerity measures in Europe that “heartened him” so strongly, has he? No, today he sits there like a potted plant while the bill of indictment rolls right over him.

But then he’s a card-carrying Very Serious Person which means never having to say you’re sorry.

Update: Here’s a reminder of another of Zakaria’s Very Serious contributions to the austerity debate:

ZAKARIA: OK, let me ask – let me ask – we’ve got to go, but I have to ask Ann this, which is there’s – there is a strong case that he has made – Obama has made, which is about Medicare. And, on that issue, I want to know whether you think it will work. Not – I know that you wish that the Democrats’ took entitlement reform more seriously, and I happen to agree with you there.

But, when you ask the American people, should – are you willing to deal with the budget deficit by cutting Medicare, 78 percent say no. I mean, I don’t think you can get 78 percent of Americans to agree on the time of day.

ANN COULTER: Right.

ZAKARIA: Where do (ph) –

COULTER: It’s the utter irresponsibility of former Democrats. It’s hard to take treats away from people, and that’s what we’ve done. And Democrats set up a Ponzi scheme with social security and Medicare, and it’s running out now. And, yes, it’s very hard to take the treats away once you start giving them away, which is why it was utterly irresponsible for Democrats long dead and gone to set up these systems that could never last.

But, you know, it would be very helpful –

ZAKARIA: But will it work? That’s what I’m asking.

COULTER: — if we could get Democrats to acknowledge the system’s about to go bankrupt rather than showing commercials of Paul Ryan –

ZAKARIA: But will it – OK.

COULTER: — pushing an old lady in a wheelchair off a cliff.

Thank goodness for Chrystia Freeland, because Zakaria agrees with Ann Coulter as he admits right up front:

FREELAND: … What it shows, actually, is that Americans don’t see successful government programs as treats, which they are childish for enjoying. They see successful government programs as what the government should be doing.

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