Holiday Fundraiser Greatest Hits: Bipartisan Zombies

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Holiday Fundraiser Greatest Hits: Bipartisan Zombies

by digby

Once again, thanks for all of your support for this 10th year anniversary fundraiser. I really appreciate it.

I hope everyone enjoyed the Christmas holiday, whether it was a full fledged religious celebration, a family get together or just a laid back day off without any duties at all. It was nice to be on the streets and see them so quiet and non-commercial. We should do more of that.

But it's clearly over.  I turned on the TV this morning and the first thing I saw was every news anchor hand wringing and garment rending over the alleged fiscal cliff.  They insist that the country is demanding bipartisanship, which translates, inevitably, into Democratic capitulation.

This is not a new dynamic:

Sunday, December 30, 2007 

Bipartisan Zombies 

by digby

It was inevitable. I wrote about it right after the 2006 election --- as soon as the Republicans lost power, I knew the gasbags would insist that it's time to let bygones be bygones and meet the Republicans halfway in the spirit of a new beginning. GOP politicians have driven the debt sky-high and altered the government so as to be nearly unrecognizable, so logically the Democrats need to extend the hand of conciliation and move to meet them in the middle --- the middle now being so far right, it isn't even fully visible anymore. 

Today we have none other than the centrist drivel king, David Broder,reporting that a group of useless meddlers, most of whom who were last seen repeatedly stabbing Bill Clinton in the back, are rising from their crypts to demand that the candidates all promise to appoint a "unity" government and govern from the the center --- or else they will back an independent Bloomberg bid. 

Boren said the meeting is being announced in advance of Thursday's Iowa caucuses "because we don't want anyone to think this was a response to any particular candidate or candidates." He said the nation needs a "government of national unity" to overcome its partisan divisions in a time of national challenge he likened to that faced by Great Britain during World War II.
"Electing a president based solely on the platform or promises of one party is not adequate for this time," Boren said. "Until you end the polarization and have bipartisanship, nothing else matters, because one party simply will block the other from acting." 

Except the one party is called the Republican Party. When was the last time the Democrats blocked anything? 

Isn't it funny that these people were nowhere to be found when George W. Bush seized office under the most dubious terms in history, having been appointed by a partisan supreme court majority and losing the popular vote? If there was ever a time for a bunch of dried up, irrelevant windbags to demand a bipartisan government you'd think it would have been then, wouldn't you? (How about after 9/11, when Republicans were running ads saying Dems were in cahoots with Saddam and bin Laden?) But it isn't all that surprising. They always assert themselves when the Democrats become a majority; it's their duty to save the country from the DFH's who are far more dangerous than Dick Cheney could ever be. 

And here's that bucket of lukewarm water, Evan Thomas, insisting that Real Americans --- as opposed to the hysterics who are actively engaged in politics --- are tuning out, even though there's ample evidence that the opposite is actually true. He even evokes that moth-eaten old trope about Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan being best buddies over scotch and waters at night after battling all day over legislation. (If Sam Nunn and David Boren will promise to force the congress to outlaw ever telling that story again, I'll vote for the Bloomity 08 ticket myself.) 

The idea among these Village elders is that only through bipartisan cooperation can we "get anything done." Well, if bipartisanship is defined like this, I suppose they are right:

As Congress stumbles toward Christmas, President Bush is scoring victory after victory over his Democratic adversaries. He:
• Beat back domestic spending increases.
• Thwarted an expansion of children's health coverage.
• Defeated tax increases.
• Won Iraq war funding.
• Pushed Democrats toward shattering their pledge not to add to the federal deficit with new tax cuts or rises in mandatory spending.
[...]
"The Democrats are learning this isn't the early 1970s, when the Republican Party was Gerald Ford and 140 of his friends," said Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "There are 201 of us, and we will be heard."

Recall that the president's approval rating hovers at 30% and the rating of the is GOP minority in congress far lower. It appears to me that they know very well how to "get things done" not only on a purely partisan basis but with more than 70% of the country disapproving of their actions. They don't need no stinkin' bipartisanship. 

To be sure, that story includes old GOP deficit hawk Chuck Grassley howling in the wilderness, but the point cannot be missed that when the GOP was in power they spent like drunken sailors and now that the Democrats have the congress the elders are suddenly up in arms about spending. That will, of course, become the new mantra if a Democrat becomes president and the political establishment decides that the government must "get something done" on reducing the deficit and enlarging the military and lowering taxes and fixing social security and ensuring that Americans don't lose their excellent health care "choices" and keeping foreigners in their place. 

I guess everyone is going to have to pardon us cynics here on the liberal side of the dial for being just a teensy bit skeptical of this demand for bipartisanship. The last time the country elected a centrist conciliator who wanted to leave behind the "braindead politics of the past", he first got kicked in the teeth by fellow centrists Sam Nunn and David Boren over gays in the military and raising taxes on the rich, and then faced an opposition so vicious that it ended with an illegitimate impeachment and a stolen election. A lot more has happened since then, all of it bad. 

That is not to say it will play out the same way again. Things rarely do. But it's depressing that so many Democrats still seem to have this deep conceit that the Republicans are really reasonable people in spite of fifteen long years of being shown otherwise over and over again. And it's infuriating that after everything that's happened, the permanent political establishment is still more freaked out at the prospect of the dirty hippies passing universal health care than radical neocons starting World War III. If only the reasonable people could get together over scotch and waters and talk it all through everything would work as it's supposed to. 

It's a lovely idea, isn't it? The only problem is that they keep forgetting to tell the Republicans, who view politics as a blood sport. They aren't interested in compromise and haven't been since old Bob Michel shuffled off to shuffleboard-land. They play for keeps, which it seems to me, is perfectly obvious after all we've seen over the past 15 years or so. They don't let little things like electoral defeats keep them down. They always work it, no matter what, and in the process they twist the Democratic Party into pretzels. 

The bipartisan busybodies just don't notice (or care) that as a movement which doesn't believe in government, the conservatives are just as successful in the minority, obstructing any progressive advance the Democrats want to make. They feel no need to "get things done." Aside from starting wars, building an ever larger police state apparatus and pillaging the treasury on behalf of themselves and their rich friends when they're in power, they don't believe governmentshould "get things done." So, what do Republicans have to gain by cooperating with Democrats? 

I suspect that despite all evidence to the contrary many Democrats believe that the conservative movement is dying, if not dead, and that they will have no choice but to meet Democrats across the table and deal with them reasonably. But if that were true we would not see their many wingnut welfare demagogues ramping up a racist immigration campaign like we haven't seen since the days of George Wallace. They look pretty determined to keep fighting to me. Yes, they are in disarray because they can't find a single presidential candidate who perfectly embodies their philosophy of Wealth, God and Guns. (Or perhaps, more appropriately, they can't find a candidate their base is willing to pretend have all those attributes, even though they don't.) But that has little to do with the conservative movement as a whole, which functions just as well with a minority as majority. 

The truth is that they know the Republicans are very, very likely going to lose the presidency anyway. And they are fine with it. It brings them together. Here's old hand Richard Viguerie making his pitch for GOP to lose in 2006: 

[Sometimes a loss for the Republican Party is a gain for conservatives. Often, a little taste of liberal Democrats in power is enough to remind the voters what they don’t like about liberal Democrats and to focus the minds of Republicans on the principles that really matter. That’s why the conservative movement has grown fastest during those periods when things seemed darkest, such as during the Carter administration and the first two years of the Clinton White House.  

Conservatives are, by nature, insurgents, and it’s hard to maintain an insurgency when your friends, or people you thought were your friends, are in power.

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They use their time out of power to grow their movement and one of the main ways they do this is by obstructing anything positive the Democrats want to do. They are organized around the principle of being insurgents --- outsiders --- victims. It is not in their interest to cooperate with Democrats. 

Maybe Broder and Evan Thomas and the rest of the bipartisan brigade think that all of that is in the past and we can begin a new era of good feeling with the red and the blue bleeding into a lovely shade of mauve. But from where I sit, even with the best of intentions, the onus is on the Republicans to prove that after more than two decades of non-stop razing of decent political discourse and partisanship so fierce they are willing to take down the government if necessary, they are finally willing to work with Democrats to "get things done." 

I don't think they're there yet, do you?
 

Paul Krugman made a similar argument the other day much more concisely, by simply pointing out that it's not Bushism that's the problem --- it's the conservative movement. From a strategic standpoint it's just not enough to wish and hope that the conservative movement is going to see the errors of their ways. They are true believers and they are very politically adept at everything but actual governance --- assuming you think governance equals serving the people, which they don't. It is necessary for progressives to fight them and win, especially since Bush's massive unpopularity has given us the first opening in years to make a case for progressive politics. 

Matt Yglesias writes here about how polarization is actually good for the system. I think he's right. This is a bit country, naturally divided by culture, region and ideology. And that's ok. We all still identify as Americans and pull together when the chips are down. But we have always had substantial disagreements among us. There have been a few periods of calm, but for the most part we've been fighting this out from the beginning. It's only in the last few years that we've seen liberals run away from the battle and pretend that the goal is political comity rather than political progress. Not that I entirely blame them. The well-financed conservative 

movement has been awesome in its political effectiveness. And, like clockwork, the bipartisan zombies inevitably emerge at any moment of conservative weakness to ensure that the hippies aren't given even a moment's breathing room to accomplish something that might benefit someone other than rich people and corporations. (We wouldn't want them to do anything radical, like allowing a rogue vice president to redefine the constitution or enshrining torture as an American value. Good thing the grown-ups woke up from their naps before something really bad happened.) 

I dearly hope the Democrats, both politicians and voters, tune out this crap. If Bloomberg wants to run, let him. They need to run their own game and not let these high priests of irrelevancy influence this race. They don't have to make every last person in the country agree with them --- indeed, it's impossible. You can't be all things to all people. And they certainly don't have to please these villagers who are apparently convinced that the worst thing that could possible happen at a time like this would be Democratic rule. They just need to win and then govern as progressives. It is possible to make improvements, sometimes even real, substantial change. But it doesn't come easy, as Krugman reminds us here: 

...any attempt to change America's direction, to implement a real progressive agenda, will necessarily be highly polarizing. Proposals for universal health care, in particular, are sure to face a firestorm of partisan opposition. And fundamental change can't be accomplished by a politician who shuns partisanship. 

I like to remind people who long for bipartisanship that FDR's drive to create Social Security was as divisive as Bush's attempt to dismantle it. And we got Social Security because FDR wasn't afraid of division. In his great Madison Square Garden speech, he declared of the forces of "organized money": "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred."

I'm sorry it's unpleasant for some people to contemplate the idea of a progressive government. But if it's comity they want, it's in the hands of the "insurgents" who refuse to behave like decent human beings, whether in power or out. It's not in the country's best interest to continue to enable them. 

And anyway, the partisan divide is where the big battles in American politics are waged. It's where they've always been waged. The only time the political establishment even notices it these days is when the Republicans are on the run and they get nervous. Democrats should ignore them and take their case directly to the country. 

Lambert at corrente wire has an important and comprehensive post along similar lines.
An excerpt:

The “food fight,” obviously a partisan food fight, is purest Equivalation. The Democrats didn’t break the world record for filibusters when they were in the minority; but the Republicans just did. And when the press covered the (very few) Democratic filibusters, they called them “filibusters.” And when the press covers the (never-ending) Republican filibusters, the word “filibuster” gets magically transmuted into the “60 votes needed to pass.” And last I checked, Democrats were allowing anybody to come to their election rallies, but Bush was screening his to make sure only Republicans attended. This is the Conservative Movement in action. Sure, there’s a “food fight,” but most of the food that’s in the air is coming from one side of the cafeteria!

This all reminds me of the period before the Iraq war when everyone was trying to figure out some way to explain what they were seeing before their very eyes in light of what everyone was telling them. We aren't crazy. This stuff really is happening. 

We can wish for conciliation all we want, but unless the Democrats can do it without any cooperation from the Republicans, it will be just another game of Charlie Brown and the football. David Broder is fine with that. He's more afraid of hippies trashing the white house than of fascists* trashing the country, so he's happy to help Lucy hold the ball. Democratic voters must be clear eyed and willing to fight because if we don't, they will win again, even if they lose. I don't think the country can take it.

Uhm... yeah. How'd that work out for us?

Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that I've long held that that the 2011 debt ceiling was the real baseline for any "fiscal cliff" deal going forward. Apparently, John Boehner thinks so, although the President is not acknowledging it. And here's an example of how the fiscal cliff is being discussed on TV today.  I think you'll particularly enjoy the new question coming from the anchor: "why not just go back to the 2011 deal proposed by the president?"   It's airborne:

Notice the Democrats talking themselves into a corner. What can they possibly say no to after that?

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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The gungrabbers are the real shooters

The gungrabbers are the real shooters

by digby

Think about this: the person who wrote the following chain email is heavily armed.

The primary-school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, approximately 45 miles from the Colt Arms Factory, is just another one in the long line of government psyops designed to persuade the public to allow the government to take away their guns, and their means to defend themselves against the government and the banksters that the politicians really serve.

The small children murders are designed to create hysterical emotions in women to get them to demand that guns are banned. If that doesn’t work they will continue with their evil agenda with worse and worse atrocities on younger children, until they get their way and disarm the people, so that they cannot fight back against government tyranny.

Newtown is the U.S.A.’s Dunblane, which was orchestrated in Scotland in 1996 by the British establishment, to whip up hysteria in order to ban all handguns from the U.K. It was a follow-up to the Hungerford Massacre in England in 1987, which was carried out by mind-controlled Michael Ryan, who then shot himself so he could not be questioned, and it was used to ban semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.

It’s always the same people behind it –the gun-grabbers who want the people to be defenceless against the gun-grabbers’ employers – the banksters who own all of the politicians. They get their politicians to pass legislation for them, in order to remove the people’s freedoms and means of defending themselves, and enslave them in a draconian police-state, under a mountain of debt, and then exterminate the useless-eaters.

The Dunblane massacre was supposedly carried out by Thomas Hamilton, who was a paedophile and procurer of children, for a high level paedophile ring involving senior members of the Tony Blair Labour-Party shadow-cabinet and others. The massacre served two purposes, it achieved their desired handgun-ban and killed the abused children, so they could not be witnesses against the elite-paedophiles. They then had the findings of the inquiry sealed for 100 years, which is proof of the above.

Like Newtown there were two shooters, Hamilton and a hit-man who shot Hamilton and made it look like Hamilton committed suicide after shooting 16 children, so that he couldn’t be questioned. Hamilton was found in the school gymnasium slumped against a wall and still gurgling, when an off-duty policeman PC Grant McCutcheon entered the gym and saw two semi-automatic pistols, one on either side of Hamilton’s body.

The autopsy revealed that Hamilton was killed with a .38 revolver. These people always slip-up with their crimes. There was no .38 revolver for him to have shot himself with. Thus, there was a second shooter who killed Hamilton.

Similarly, the first reports from Newtown were of two shooters, just like mind-controlled James Holmes in the Denver Batman Cinema massacre, the story then quickly changes to just one.

Columbine was similar, in that a team of shooters in black outfits were seen there and the two accused were on mind-altering prescription-drugs.

Wake up and see the pattern and their modus operandi and don’t fall for it. Never let them take your guns, except from your cold dead hands.

All of these are staged events to whip-up hysterical public support for banning the people from having guns. It works the same in every country – Hungerford in England, Dunblane in Scotland, Port Arthur in Australia and the list in America is endless, because of the Second Amendment and the people having a pro-gun culture. That makes it much more difficult to break the Americans’ love of guns and the Second Amendment, which was put in place to protect the people from the government.

Gun bans work well for tyrants. They worked well for Hitler, Stalin and Chairman Mao, to name just three.

If you want to stop these massacres, wake-up and get rid of the banksters, their puppet-politicians and all gun-grabbers; arm teachers and ban gun-free zones.

From one who can see the pattern and hopes to enable you to see it too.

I'm pretty sure it's the Cubans, but what do I know?

h/t to TDP

The Shock Doctrine Comes to Egypt, by @DavidOAtkins

The Shock Doctrine Comes to Egypt

by David Atkins

The powers that be don't really care whom they do business with: fascist dictators, revolutionaries, Islamists, it doesn't matter. What matters is that nations pry open the riches of their people to be sold to the highest corporate bidder while their citizens work for the lowest possible wages.

It's already happening in Egypt, where Morsi and his merry band of conservative religious radicals are implementing shock doctrine "free market" reforms:

Hamdeen Sabahi was the most popular leader in the fight against Egypt’s new Islamist-backed constitution. Now he is preparing for his next battle: against Islamist leaders’ plans for Western-style free-market reforms.

Do not listen to your allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Sabahi said he warned President Mohamed Morsi, of the Brotherhood’s political arm, in a private meeting a few weeks ago. “Because the Brotherhood’s economic and social thought is the same as Mubarak’s: the law of the markets,” Mr. Sabahi said he had told Mr. Morsi, referring to Hosni Mubarak, the former president. “You will just make the poor poorer, and they will be angry with you just as they were with Mubarak.”

Mr. Sabahi, 58, a leftist in the style of another former president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, frightens most economists. He is an outspoken opponent of free-market economic moves in general as well as of a pending $4.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund that economists say is urgently needed to avert a catastrophic currency collapse.

The IMF has been used a tool of pure evil for the last forty years in destroying the economies of developing nations to benefit the corporate elite, and there's no reason to believe that the IMF's offer to Egypt is any different.

In the end Morsi will get support from the international community just as Yeltsin did and countless other corrupt "free market" reformers before him. These people don't much care if they deal with the left or the right, dictators or liberators, so long as they get the only thing that matters to them.

Just skip to the 8-minute mark of this James Bond clip and that'll give you a good idea of how the IMF and their friends deal with supposedly sovereign national governments and their leaders (the entire plot of Quantum of Solace having been beautifully based on Naomi Klein's work):




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A tale of scrappy grassroots Tea Partiers (and the millionaires who finance them.)

A tale of scrappy grassroots Tea Partiers

by digby

And the millionaires who fund them:

The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall.

Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back. The force behind their return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations.

Stephenson, the founder of the for-profit Cancer Treatment Centers of America and a director on the FreedomWorks board, agreed to commit $400,000 per year over 20 years in exchange for Armey’s agreement to leave the group.

The episode illustrates the growing role of wealthy donors in swaying the direction of FreedomWorks and other political groups, which increasingly rely on unlimited contributions from corporations and financiers for their financial livelihood. Such gifts are often sent through corporate shells or nonprofit groups that do not have to disclose their donors, making it impossible for the public to know who is funding them.

In the weeks before the election, more than $12 million in donations was funneled through two Tennessee corporations to the FreedomWorks super PAC after negotiations with Stephenson over a preelection gift of the same size, according to three current and former employees with knowledge of the arrangement. The origin of the money has not previously been reported.

Read the whole article, it's just delicious.

I would normally be skeptical about these stories of "disarray" among the conservative movement institutions. The truth is that they tend to thrive in these situations, regrouping, raising money from the faithful and laying low until their next opportunity to move the ball rightward comes along.

But the money is no longer coming from the old-school conservative types like Olin, bradley and Scaife, people who trusted the movement types to do the right thing. This new set of millionaires and billionaires are true believers and self-serving scam artists who watch Fox news and believe what they are seeing. They want to be involved.

In some ways, the right has become more like the left, whose rich donors have been notoriously fickle and meddling in details about which they are ill-equipped to make decisions. The right's millionaires haven't traditionally done that. They spent decades building up their very efficient movement institutions and let them have their way. It will be interesting to see if a new crop of wingnut millionaires will destroy them.

Update: And by the way, do they have open carry in DC?

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Silly hypocritical pearl clutch of the day

Silly hypocritical pearl clutch of the day

by digby

Politico "reports":

NBC was told by the Washington, D.C., police that it was “not permissible” to show a high-capacity gun magazine on air before Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” according to a statement Wednesday from the cops.

“NBC contacted [the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department inquiring if they could utilize a high capacity magazine for their segment,” Gwendolyn Crump, a police spokeswoman, said in an email. “NBC was informed that possession of a high capacity magazine is not permissible and their request was denied.”

That statement comes a day after the police department told POLITICO that an investigation is underway to determine whether any city laws were violated in a Sunday segment of “Meet the Press.” On the show, host David Gregory displayed what appeared to be a 30-round gun magazine while interviewing Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association.

What that article fails to note is that this is a trumped up hissy fit (is there any other kind?) by Malkin and Breitbart and friends. Crooks and Liars had it
I saw on Monday:

I will never understand the wingnut mind. Apparently their Second Amendment right are absolute and can never be subject to regulations, restrictions or even a suggestion of safety. But have a talk show host get tough on NRA President Wayne LaPierre on the inconsistency of his stance and they're clutching their pearls in outrage. Outrage, I tell you!

For example, the uber-right wing blog The Patriot Perspective was eager to cite chapter and verse of the DC gun ban to prove that David Gregory, by holding up the 30 bullet magazine in front of LaPierre, was flagrantly in violation. Of course, getting Stretch Gregory in trouble (with a maximum penalty of $1000 or one year in jail) is too delicious for Drudge, Malkin, The Blaze and the Breitbots to ignore, so they've hopped on the wagon too.

It's right up there with Fast and Furious for sheer incoherence. These are people who believe that everyone in the country should be armed at all times and that there can be no laws restricting their use. And yet they are calling for the smelling salts because the Justice Department allowed some guns to be released into the population and they got into the "wrong hands" --- criminals in fact. Just like gun show sellers do every single day. Their lugubrious pearl clutching makes absolutely no sense, but they're doing it anyway just because nobody ever bothers to point out that they're completely full of shit.

It's also true that these people don't believe in DC's ban on high-capacity magazines and will fight any restrictions with everything they have. But since David Gregory allegedly violated the law in order to illustrate what a psychotic idea it is that citizens have easy access to such weapons, they're suddenly members of the Brady campaign. They can't even contain their smartass smirks.

It will be interesting to see if they succeed in turning this joke into even the mildest scandal what with King of the Kewl Kidz being implicated. It certainly seems to be legitimate as far as Politico is concerned.

Starbucks CEO groovin' up slowly

Starbucks CEO groovin' up slowly

by digby

Oh my dear God:

In the spirit of the Holiday season and the Starbucks tradition of bringing people together, we have a unique opportunity to unite and take action on an incredibly important topic. As many of you know, our elected officials in Washington D.C. have been unable to come together and compromise to solve the tremendously important, time-sensitive issue to fix the national debt. You can learn more about this impending crisis at www.fixthedebt.org.

Rather than be bystanders, we have an opportunity—and I believe a responsibility—to use our company’s scale for good by sending a respectful and optimistic message to our elected officials to come together and reach common ground on this important issue. This week through December 28, partners in our Washington D.C. area stores are writing “Come Together” on customers’ cups.

Read the whole thing. But don't do it on an empty stomach.

What do you do when the boss seeks to force you to proselytize for a political cause you oppose? I often had political differences with my bosses over the years and worked for some real right wingers. But they never made me toe their line as part of my job.

I've heard of people being fired for their political beliefs, which is perfectly legal however noxious and unpatriotic, but I can't recall this sort of thing until fairly recently. I doubt that there's any legal restriction against it --- the boss gets to decide the job description, after all. But it's creepy how these plutocrats are now explicitly putting their employees and their businesses in service of their personal politics.

In any case, I guess I won't be patronizing Starbucks anymore, which is too bad because I have one almost next door to me. Oh well, I make a better espresso at home anyway.

Want to curb the deficit? Then go over the cliff already, by @DavidOAtkins

Want to curb the deficit? Then go over the cliff already

by David Atkins

It's been said before, but not often enough: you'll know the true deficit hawks if they eagerly choose to go over the "fiscal cliff" rather than cut a deal to protect tax cuts or spending. That's what has been most surreal about this entire charade: the fact that for all the preaching and hand-wringing, neither side actually seems very concerned about the deficit at all. Jonathan Bernstein lays it out:

Tea partiers have, The Post’s Jerry Markon reports, largely stayed out of the debate about the fiscal cliff. Markon gets several passive, fatalist comments from various leaders of tea party organizations, mostly to the effect that the whole issue is hopeless.

Well, I suppose. But what is missing from this article is any sense of the main context: Anyone who really wants deficit reduction immediately — as tea party activists have claimed since they got started — should support plunging over the fiscal cliff as fast as possible. No other possible outcome could do more for reducing federal budget deficits than simply carrying out the policies due to take effect in the next several days.

So: Do tea party leaders actually care about deficits? Is deficit talk all just a cover for a traditional (over the last 30 years at least) Republican insistence on low tax rates for rich people, regardless of what actually happens to the deficit? Do they have no idea what they’re talking about at all, and are lost when it comes to actual policy choices instead of easy slogans?

I think there are various answers to this question. Some truly are concerned about deficits, but also believe despite all evidence in their cult-like faith that trickle-down economics is the only path to economic salvation. Others are simply Norquistian snakes in the grass, using deficits as a temporally convenient excuse, only present during Democratic Administrations, for drowning the government in the bathtub. Most others are simply led around by the nose by the conservative media establishment, obsessing over whatever Fox News and the latest conservative chain emails tell them to obsess over. That last group includes members of Congress. And then there's the final group: the cocktail circuit crowd sitting at the Kool Kids table along with their neoliberal Democratic friends across the aisle, all of whom know that "serious" people are really worried about deficits by definition.

In any case, none of them deserve the respect or attention they're given except insofar as they serve as obstructions and useful idiots of the wealthy in America.


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The Bill of Rights has only one amendment

The Bill of Rights has only one amendment

by digby

... at least as far as the wingnuts are concerned:

CNN anchor Piers Morgan isn’t benefiting from much Christmas cheer, at least according to one measure: The number of signers on a petition urging the White House to deport Morgan has skyrocketed by Tuesday morning past 60,000 names.

“British Citizen and CNN television host Piers Morgan is engaged in a hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution by targeting the Second Amendment,” the petition to the Obama administration reads. “We demand that Mr. Morgan be deported immediately for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens.”

By Monday, the petition had passed at least 25,000 signatures — the number required to receive a White House response.

These people are citing the Bill of Rights to deport someone for exercising free speech. And they don't have the vaguest clue just how dumb they are. I'd laugh uproariously but unfortunately these idiots are all packing heat.

And that's why the gun debate has a slightly different character than your usual political disagreement, isn't it?

If you want it ...

If you want it ...

by digby

Fighting the War on Christmas one wingnut at a time

Fighting the War on Christmas one wingnut at a time

by digby

Vintage Seder (Via Americablog):

Preparing for Uncle Harry

Preparing for Uncle Harry

by digby

When your rich wingnut uncle Harry starts going on about "entitlements" over egg nog today, bring out Dean Baker to explain it to him,  just as he explained it to Fareed Zakaria:

In 1900, 1 in 25 Americans was over the age of 65. In 2030, just 18 years from now, 1 in 5 Americans will be over 65. We will be a nation that looks like Florida. Because we have a large array of programs that provide guaranteed benefits to the elderly, this has huge budgetary implications. In 1960 there were about five working Americans for every retiree. By 2025, there will be just over two workers per retiree. In 1975 Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid made up 25% of federal spending. Today they add up to a whopping 40%. And within a decade, these programs will take up over half of all federal outlays."

Yes, the facts are hard to dispute. That is why those of us on "the American Left" try to use them wherever possible. As Zakaria points out, apparently without noticing, we have already seen most of this aging disaster story. As he says, in 1960 there were about five working Americans for every retiree. Currently the number is less than three. It is projected to fall to around 2 workers per retiree by 2030 or "just over two" if we prefer Zakaria's 2025 date. And the big three programs grew from 25 percent of federal spending to 40 percent between 1975 to 2010, they are projected to rise another 10 percentage points in a decade.

Apparently Zakaria missed it, but this sharp decline in the ratio of workers to retirees did not prevent us on average from enjoying a substantial rise in living standards over this period. Of course the gains were not evenly distributed because of policies that redistributed income to people like Peter Peterson and his friends in the Campaign to Fix the debt (e.g. trade policy, anti-union policies, deregulation of the financial sector -- the fuller story is available here). However per capita after-tax income is more than twice as high today as it was in 1960, in spite of the scourge of a growing elderly population.

The reality known by arithmetic fans everywhere is that even modest gains in productivity growth swamp the impact of demographics. Here is the story for the years from 2012 to 2035, the peak stress of the baby boomers retirement.

Note that even in the most pessimistic productivity story, the slowest rate of productivity growth of the post-war era, the impact of productivity in raising living standards is more than three times as large as the impact of demographics in reducing them. Furthermore, this takes 2035 as an endpoint. After that year there is little projected change in demographics for the rest of the century whereas productivity will continue to grow.

Of course it is worth noting that our broken health care system can impose a serious burden on the economy. We already pay more than twice as much per person for our health care as do people in any other wealthy country with little to show for it in terms of outcomes. If the gap rises to a factor of three or four to one as some projections show, then it will impose a serious problem for the budget and the economy. However the answer is to fix our health care system, not to get angry at people for growing old.

The American Left is very willing to face the facts and look at the arithmetic. Unfortunately Mr. Zakaria and his editors at Time Magazine don't have the same interest.

And when your smartass young business school nephew comes at you with the patented Peterson Institute generational warfare rap about the selfish baby boomers stealing the future, try this one:

[T]he cohorts between the ages of 55 to 64 ... (Wealth typically peaks in these years, so these people are unlikely to have more wealth when they cross age 65.) The median wealth for this group was reported as $162,000... if they were to use this wealth to buy an annuity at age 65, it would be sufficient to get them an annuity of roughly $10,000 a year or just over $800 a month. This would supplement Social Security income that comes to less than $1,200 a month for a typical worker. The monthly premium for Medicare Part B is $100, which would leave $1,100 from a monthly Social Security check for a typical retiree.

Note that this calculation assumes that they have no equity in their home so they would either being paying rent or still paying off a mortgage out of this money. It is also worth remembering that the Medicare premium is projected to rise considerably more than the cost of living each year. This means that as retirees age, rising Medicare premiums will be reducing the buying power of their Social Security check each year. And this is the median; half of all seniors will have less income than this to support themselves.

This is the group that the Very Serious People in Washington want to target for their deficit reduction. While the Very Serious People debate whether people who earn $250,000 a year are actually rich when it comes to restoring the tax rates of the 1990s, they somehow think that seniors with incomes under $30,000 a year must sacrifice to balance the budget. There is a logic here, but it ain't pretty.

I hope you are lucky enough not to have to have this conversation today. Life is short and it's important to just enjoy your family, friends and leisure time if you can. But just in case one of the inevitable blowhards in your life decides to make an issue out of it, you'll be prepared ...

Merry Christmas

Dank u, Sinterklaasje

Dank u, Sinterklaasje

by digby

Being a military brat of a certain age,I spent much of my childhood in various post-war Imperial outposts, and my earliest memories come from the time we spent in Holland. I learned to speak Dutch right along with English (later forgotten unfortunately) and for quite a few years after we came back to the states my parents would pay me a dime to sing Sinterklaas, kapoentje for their friends. Via #everyoneontheinternet, this David Sedaris telling of the Dutch Christmas story is hilarious:

And yeah, the tradition of "Black Pete" is hideously racist and they should get rid of it:

[Sinterklaasje] used to be accompanied by a jester symbolising the devil. But in the mid-1800s, when the Dutch were major players in the global slave trade, this changed.

Nice.

Love one another and cherish your time together

Love one another and cherish your time together

by David Atkins

Less than 36 hours ago my beloved cockatiel Tiki suddenly passed away with almost no warning after 10 years of devoted companionship. My wife and I are committed bird people and watch them very carefully for signs of illness. So we were disturbed and surprised to see that after a normal-seeming day and evening with us, Tiki suddenly showed acute respiratory distress at around 2am. We took her to the local emergency clinic, but there was nothing they could do and directed us to a clinic with better facilities and bird specialists half an hour away. Tiki didn't make it more than ten minutes sitting in my lap as I drove before she passed. Our best guess is some sort of heart failure, but we just don't know.

I'm in shock and grief right now, happy to be with loved ones, but stunned and deeply depressed at her loss. The holidays and my life will never be the same without her.

Remember everyone: bad things can happen to cherished companions both animal and human at any time, and the end can come quite suddenly. Take precautions, make sure to enjoy your time together as much as possible, and cherish every moment you have with one another. Nothing else is more important, and that is in large part what the holidays are all about.


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Holiday Fundraiser Greatest Hits: The Eunuch Caucus

*This post will stay at the top of the page today. Please scroll down for newer material.

Holiday Fundraiser Greatest Hits: The Eunuch Caucus

by digby

Merry Christmas Eve everyone. Thank you so much for your support for this year's holiday fundraiser. If you're a last minute Christmas shopper, this one's easy:

A few years back I wrote the following post on the opening day of the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing's on the FISA controversy. People found it amusing because they assumed at first glance at the title that I was speaking of the Democrats. We were all feeling terrible frustration about the first year of President Bush's second term and the Democrats' ongoing inability to do anything to stop it.  My point of view was that it wasn't the Democrats who were weak, it was the Republican congress which bent over backwards to accommodate the president's wishes, despite the fact that his agenda wasn't exactly good for them or the institution --- or the country.

Considering what's happening now, I thought it was an interesting blast from the past:

Monday, February 06, 2006

The Eunuch Caucus

by digby 

I've been digesting this morning's hearings and I am dumbstruck by the totality of the Republicans' abdication of their duty. These men who spent years running on Madisonian principles ("The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse") now argue without any sense of irony or embarrassment that Republican Senators are nothing more than eunuchs in President Bush's political harem. They have voluntarily rendered the congress of the United States impotent to his power.  

I've watched this invertebrate GOP caucus since 2000 as they submitted themselves to this lawless administration again and again, shredding every bit of self respect, every figment of institutional pride, every duty to the constitution. The look in their eyes, which is somehow interpreted as strong and defiant by the equally servile media, is actually a window to empty little men who have given up their manhood to oblige their master. The only reward they seek is unfettered access to the taxpayers money for their own use.  

We are looking at fifty-five of the most powerful people in the country. Collectively the Republican Senators represent almost a hundred and fifty million citizens. And they have allowed a callow little boy like George W. Bush along with his grey Eminences Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to strip them of their consciences, their principles and their constitutional obligations. What sad little creatures, cowardly and subservient, unctuously bowing and scraping before Karl Rove the man who holds their (purse) strings and dances them around the halls of congress singing tributes to their own irrelevance at the top of their lungs. How pathetic they are.  

Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave. 

Update: Oh, and don't get excited about Huckleberry Graham's "tough" questions. This is his schtick. Going all the way back to the impeachment hearings, he has done this. He hems and haws in his cornpone way how he's "troubled" by one thing or another until he finally "decides" after much "deliberation" that the Republican line is correct after all and he has no choice but to endorse it. 

Merry Christmas everyone

Merry Christmas everyone

by digby

I just spent an hour with a five year old. No human being could possibly ever be as excited about anything as she is right now. I hadn't realized until tonight that this may be the peak experience of our lives. No wonder Christmas has such a hold on us.


Here's a beautiful Christmas song by a nonbeliever who, like me, loves it nonetheless:

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Courtesy my pal the freewayblogger.

Doomsday celebrities

Doomsday celebrities

by digby

I've been watching TV sporadically today but every time I tune in it's yet another voice of doom predicting the end of the world if "the grown-ups" don't come together to save us from the fiscal cliff. These people inevitably also claim that the deficits are killing us and must be fixed --- or it will be the end of the world. Either they don't know that going over the fiscal cliff will go a long way toward closing this deadly deficit they fear so much or they just want to ensure that the deficit is closed on the backs of the poor, the old and the sick. I'll let you decide if these people are really stupid or just selfish and cruel.

In case you needed something to really get your blood pressure up on Christmas Eve, take a look at what "centrist" David Gergen has to say about it:

With time rapidly running out, efforts have collapsed to reach a major agreement on federal spending and taxes before year's end, and both Congress and President are leaving town for the holidays. At best, they will return next week and construct a small bridge over the "fiscal cliff"; at worst, they won't. But who knows?

And that's a big part of the problem -- no one can be confident that our national leaders are still capable of governing responsibly. And in the process, they are putting both our economy and our international reputation at risk.

As the blame game heats up, Republicans are sure to pay the biggest price with the public. It was bad enough that they lost the message fight, letting themselves be painted as protectors of the wealthy. But it was inexcusable when they revolted against House Speaker John Boehner in his search for a way forward: that only reinforced a narrative that the Grand Old Party has fallen hostage to its right wing -- a narrative that already exacted a huge price in the fall elections.

President Obama is certainly not blameless in these financial talks. Early on, he overplayed his hand, alienating rank-and-file Republicans. Like Boehner, he has been more accommodating recently, offering concessions on taxes and entitlement spending that narrowed the negotiating gap between the parties, even as his leftward allies fretted.

Still, Boehner has a point in arguing that what Obama now has on the table comes nowhere close to what the he was advocating in the election season: a ratio of 2.5 dollars in spending cuts to 1.0 dollars in tax increases.

The buck stops on the President's desk, so that ordinarily one would expect him to take the lead in these final days before January 1. For reasons that are still unclear, he instead chose in his press statement late Friday to toss responsibility for negotiations next week into the laps of Congressional leaders.

Brilliant. Yes, it's true that the Republicans are a little bit wacky but that's not the real problem. The roadblock is that the president just has not agreed to hurt enough people for the elite centrist pundit's taste. And that's after the president agreed to throw Social Security on the pyre despite the fact that Social Security contributes nothing to this allegedly deadly deficit.

I am no fan of the Tea Party. But I don't think they are the real problem. They are, after all, doing what their voters want them to do, however ill-advised that might be. No, our real problem is David Gergen and his ilk.

Here's Paul Krugman from earlier today:

[V]ery few of the prophets of fiscal doom have acknowledged the failure of their prophecies to come true so far. And those who have admitted surprise seem more annoyed than chastened. For example, back in 2010 Alan Greenspan — who is, for some reason, still treated as an authority figure — conceded that despite large budget deficits, “inflation and long-term interest rates, the typical symptoms of fiscal excess, have remained remarkably subdued.” But he went on to declare, “This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency.” How dare reality not validate my fears!

Regular readers know that I and other economists argued from the beginning that these dire warnings of fiscal catastrophe were all wrong, that budget deficits won’t cause soaring interest rates as long as the economy is depressed — and that the biggest risk to the economy is that we might try to slash the deficit too soon. And surely that point of view has been strongly validated by events.

The key thing we need to understand, however, is that the prophets of fiscal disaster, no matter how respectable they may seem, are at this point effectively members of a doomsday cult. They are emotionally and professionally committed to the belief that fiscal crisis lurks just around the corner, and they will hold to their belief no matter how many corners we turn without encountering that crisis.

So we cannot and will not persuade these people to reconsider their views in the light of the evidence. All we can do is stop paying attention. It’s going to be difficult, because many members of the deficit cult seem highly respectable. But they’ve been hugely, absurdly wrong for years on end, and it’s time to stop taking them seriously.

That goes for the hand-wringing Villagers who love to prescribe painful cuts to vital services while pretending they are among those who will "sacrifice" as well.

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Bad Christmas Movies (and I mean baaaad)

Bad Christmas Movies

by digby

Now that a lot of people have instant download, I thought this would be a good opportunity to run one of Dennis Hartley's Greatest Hits with some recommendations for some shall we say, offbeat Christmas Movies for your misanthropes and Scrooges out there (who me?)  at least some of which you should be able to download on Amazon or Netflix.


Somewhat naughty and not so nice

By Dennis Hartley

Not the Coca-Cola Santa: Rare Exports

It’s official. I now have a new favorite Christmas movie. John Carpenter’s The Thing meets Miracle on 34th St. in Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a wickedly clever Yule story that spices up the usual holiday family movie recipe by folding in generous dollops of sci-fi, horror, and Norse legend. The twist here is that our protagonist, a young boy named Pietari (Onni Tommila) not only believes that Santa Claus is, in fact, real, but that he is buried just beyond the back 40 of his dad’s reindeer ranch, where some American archeologists are excavating a mysterious promontory. After bizarre and troubling events begin to plague the sleepy hamlet where Pietari lives, it looks that Santa may have just been “resting”. And if this is the mythical Santa Pietari suspects, then he is more Balrog than eggnog…and is best left undisturbed.

The director also works a sly anti-consumerist polemic into his narrative. Pietra’s dad (Jorma Tommila) and his fellow reindeer hunters-who are more chagrinned that the saturnine Santa is threatening their livelihood by slaughtering all the reindeer than by the fact that he is also methodically kidnapping the village children and spiriting them away to an undisclosed location, manage to capture him, and then demand a “ransom” from the corporate weasel who, for his own nefarious reasons, is funding the archeological dig. In the meantime, a legion of Santa’s nasty little “helpers” are running amuck and wreaking havoc. Pietari, the only one keeping a cool head, just wants to enjoy a nice quiet Christmas with dad-even if he has to transform into a midget version of Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness to rescue the children (and save the farm, in a manner of speaking).

There’s nothing “cute” about this film, yet it’s by no means mean-spirited, either. It is an off-beat, darkly funny, and wholly original treat for moviegoers hungry for a fresh alternative to the 999th lifetime viewing of It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Speaking as someone who lived for many years within a day’s drive of the Arctic Circle, the film also perfectly captures the stark beauty of midwinter in the far Northern Hemisphere; especially that uniquely dichotomous sense of both soothing tranquility and alien desolation that it can bring to one’s soul. And for god’s sake-let Santa rest in peace.

Holiday dispirited: Bad Santa , Female Trouble, The Ref, The Lion in Winter, The Rocking Horse Winner, Monty Python's Life Of Brian, Go , Trading Places, Nightmare Before Christmas,Christmas On Mars, The Matador, The French Connection, The Curse of the Cat People, Tokyo Godfathers, Less Than Zero, In Bruges , Roger & Me, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,Gremlins , Elves , Scrooged, Jack Frost (1997),You Better Watch Out, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Black Christmas.

Previous posts with related themes:

What Would Jesus Buy?

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