Last Call

Former Reagan economist David Stockman goes off the deep end into Doomsday Prepper territory, and the New York Times is happy to run with it.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble. 

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth. 

In other words, Stockman is now predicting America's collapse and a Second Civil War.  And of course it will be all Obama's fault. 

 Instead, the White House, Congress and the Fed, under Mr. Bush and then President Obama, made a series of desperate, reckless maneuvers that were not only unnecessary but ruinous. The auto bailouts, for example, simply shifted jobs around — particularly to the aging, electorally vital Rust Belt — rather than saving them. The “green energy” component of Mr. Obama’s stimulus was mainly a nearly $1 billion giveaway to crony capitalists, like the venture capitalist John Doerr and the self-proclaimed outer-space visionary Elon Musk, to make new toys for the affluent. 

Less than 5 percent of the $800 billion Obama stimulus went to the truly needy for food stamps, earned-income tax credits and other forms of poverty relief. The preponderant share ended up in money dumps to state and local governments, pork-barrel infrastructure projects, business tax loopholes and indiscriminate middle-class tax cuts. The Democratic Keynesians, as intellectually bankrupt as their Republican counterparts (though less hypocritical), had no solution beyond handing out borrowed money to consumers, hoping they would buy a lawn mower, a flat-screen TV or, at least, dinner at Red Lobster.

Nowhere does Stockman take responsibility for quadrupling the national debt under Reagan.  In the end it's GOLD WEED END THE FED Paultard nonsense, only with a veneer of minor credibility.  That veneer gets eaten through by the acid about halfway through the screed.  It was all doom the second we went off the gold standard, which has been the case for generations now.

Nonsense is boring.

Here's Your Spirit Of Easter

Meanwhile, the NRA's official magazine is warning that only NRA's armed members that "only you can save our guns" and instructing armed gun owners to "stand and fight" against "King Pinocchio" Obama.




There's a word for wanting a bunch of armed people to "stand and fight" the President. It's not a very nice one.

Victim Mentality

Josh Marshall has the right of this:

Over the last few days, as the emerging national marriage equality consensus has become more clear, a number of social conservatives have begun suggesting they are now in a new and oppressive climate in which they’re no longer able to speak their minds about the immorality of homosexuality or why laws should discriminate against gays.

Or, to put it more bluntly, they say they’re losing their right to calls gays gross and weird.

Every single 19th century counter-attack by the right against the modern, 21st century left is based along these lines.  "Reverse discrimination" is nothing new, but today's conservatives use it constantly.  The war on women's reproductive rights is really the war on lost white men, robbed of their right to bully others, and emasculated by having to perform duties that should "traditionally belong" to women.  The antagonism towards African-Americans is to try to balance the scales because obviously racist black voters go 95%+ for black Democrats like Obama.  Hatred for Latinos is all about them taking jobs from good white men and bringing crime along with them.  Always white men are the victims.

At a certain point during the civil rights struggle it ceased to be acceptable in mainstream political rhetoric to say that the government should privilege whites over blacks. It basically happened between 1965 and 1970. That obviously didn’t end the issue of race or racial discrimination or widespread racism. But, in public, it displaced it onto a different set of questions and policies, a different kind of rhetoric. Pity party notwithstanding, the folks who oppose full equality for LGBT Americans seem to realize that we’re on the cusp of a similar transition.

And all of this is happening in the space of a few short years.  It is overwhelming, but that's just because of all the pressure built up behind the dam when it broke, and now the forces of privilege are drowning in it.  We're all going to have to learn to get along eventually, but now we can at least start.

[UPDATE] And speaking of victim mentality, behold the screaming from our Christian brethren over today's Google Doodle celebrating March 31 as Cesar Chavez's birthday.  It's persecution of the Christian majority, I tell you!