Broken Plan

Frank Rich points out that Obama Trumanizing the election and breaking it down to a rational choice between Bush policies and Obama policies may not be the best idea when you're counting on the American public to vote with cool logic over hot rhetoric.

Betting on amnesia is almost always a winning, not a losing, wager in America. Angry demonstrators at health care town-hall meetings didn’t remember that Medicare is a government program, and fewer and fewer voters of both parties recall that the widely loathed TARP was a Bush administration creation supported by the G.O.P. Congressional leadership. So many Republicans don’t know Obama is a natural citizen — 41 percent in a poll last week — that we must (charitably) assume some of them have forgotten that Hawaii was granted statehood. The G.O.P. chairman is sufficiently afflicted with amnesia that he matter-of-factly regaled an audience with the counterfactual observation that the war in Afghanistan, Bush’s immediate response to 9/11, began under Obama.

The president is also wrong when he says that every single current G.O.P. idea is a Bush idea. Many are not. And those that are not are far more radical.

A political campaign built on Obama’s faulty premises cannot stand — or win. The polls remain as intractable as the 9.5 percent unemployment rate no matter how insistently the Democrats pummel Bush. To add to Democratic panic, there’s their “enthusiasm gap” with the Tea-Party-infused G.O.P., and the Rangel-Waters double bill coming this fall to a cable channel near you. Some Democrats took solace in one recent poll finding that if Republican economic ideas were branded as “Bush” ideas, the pendulum would swing a whopping 49 percentage points in their favor. But even in that feel-good survey, only a quarter of the respondents were worried that a G.O.P. Congress would actually bring back Bush policies.

Not only is Rich right, he hits upon the only real solution to the election conundrum.

Given this spectacle, Obama and the Democrats are, if anything, flattering the current G.O.P. by accusing it of being a carbon copy of Bush. But even if the Democrats sharpen their attack, they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart — joblessness. This requires stunning emergency action right now, August recess be damned. Instead we get the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, offering the thin statistical gruel that job growth has returned “at an earlier stage of this recovery than in the last two recoveries.”

The tragically tone-deaf Geithner is on his latest happy-days-are-almost-here-again tour. He made that point in multiple television appearances as well as in a Times Op-Ed page article in which he vowed to “do more” to give workers “the skills they need to re-enter the 21st-century economy.” On the same day his essay appeared last week, The Times ran a front-page report on “99ers,” the growing band of desperate jobless Americans who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits. The 99er featured in Michael Luo’s article, a 49-year-old unemployed corporate worker named Alexandra Jarrin, is a late-in-life college graduate and onetime business school student who owes $92,000, as she put it, “for an education which is basically worthless.” She’s on the verge of homelessness not because she lacks the skills she needs to re-enter the 21st-century economy. She and countless others like her, skilled and unskilled, lack jobs, period.

The Democrats have already retreated from immigration and energy reform. If they can’t make the case to Americans like Alexandra Jarrin that they offer more hope for a job than a radical conservative movement poised to tear down what remains of the safety net, they deserve to lose.

And there it is. Unless Obama and the Democrats take strong action over the recess to fix jobs now, the GOP will win. It really is a simple as that.

The Mask Slips Again

John Cole flags this Rep. Peter King quote confirming why Republicans are ignoring the Prop 8 ruling:

King, the Long Island congressman, said that in terms of social issues, the raging controversy over the Arizona border laws is providing more than enough ammunition for Republicans in key districts.

“The Arizona immigration law is there, there’s no reason to be raising an issue of gay rights” as a wedge, he said.

Hating the gay helped get Bush re-elected in 2004 but 2006 and 2008 were disasters for the Republicans as a result.  Now hating the brown is more than enough, it covers what they need to win in 2010.  2012 and onwards will be a disaster for them, but all Republicans care about now is making Americans hate people enough now so they can get back in power.

The rest is just frosting.

The Kroog Versus Rep. Paul Ryan Yet Again

Pro Tip:  if you're going to publicly pick a fight with a Nobel laureate economist about economics, bring your A game.  GOP Rep. Paul Ryan fails this simple test as he calls Paul Krugman out, only to get smacked down a second time in a few paragraphs.

Notice that Ryan does not address the issue of the zero nominal growth assumption, and how that assumption — not entitlement reforms — is the key to his alleged spending cuts by 2020.

I also see that Ryan is perpetuating the runaround on revenue estimates. If you read either this article or his original response to the Tax Policy Center, you could easily get the impression that nobody would do a revenue estimate, that CBO said it was JCT’s job, and JCT balked. Even Nate Silver has fallen for this. But read the original response carefully:

The Tax Policy Center analysis covers a 10-year period, but the Roadmap is a long-term plan with spending and revenue projections covering 75 years. As such, the analysis is not consistent with the long-term horizon of the plan. Staff originally asked CBO to do a long-term analysis of both the tax and spending provisions in the Roadmap. However, CBO declined to do a revenue analysis of the tax plan, citing that it did not want to infringe on the traditional jurisdiction of the JCT. JCT, however, does not have the capability at this time to provide longer-term revenue estimates (i.e. beyond 10 years) [my emphasis]. Given these functional constraints for an official analysis, staff relied on its original work with the Treasury Department and other tax experts to formulate a reasonable expected path for long-term revenues given the tax policies in the Roadmap combined with the economic growth projections available at the time.

In other words, Ryan could have gotten JCT to do a 10-year estimate; it just wouldn’t go beyond that. And he chose not to get that 10-year estimate. So it was Ryan’s choice not to have any independent estimate of the 10-year revenue effects.

And bear in mind that the Tax Policy Center critique was five months ago. If Ryan disagreed with the center’s estimates, he could have gone back to the JCT to get a different set of estimates. He never did.

By the way, if you look at the artful way his excuses are constructed — giving the false impression that he couldn’t get a revenue score for love nor money — how is that not flimflam?

Finally, why is Ryan denying that he proposes dismantling Medicare as we know it? Replacing the system with vouchers surely fits that description.

Ooooops.  Maybe Krugman's  characterization of Ryan as a "flimflam man" was impolitic, but it was accurate as hell.  Ryan then makes the classic mistake of doubling down on his own erroneous assumptions and expecting the Wingers/Reasonoids/McMegan to back him up on this.  The fact that it only takes Krugman about 300 words to completely win his argument shows you just how weak Ryan's position was.

Like most Republican policy positions, if you dig under the surface you find the same moldering Reaganomics idiocy from 30 years ago where tax cuts "fix" everything and only add to the deficit while transferring wealth up the ladder.  We need to have a serious debate about the economic direction of this country, but if Paul Ryan is considered a leading light when he's so wrong that even Paul Krugman has to come up to the guy and call him out, then one side -- the Republicans -- has nothing to say in that debate other than "no no no no no no" like a petulant child.

We need better.

Last Call

The latest Winger Poutrage?

"How DARE Michelle Obama go on vacation to Spain when there's 9.5% unemployment!?!?  How dare she take a vacation outside the United States like an America-hating liberal!  Where does she get the idea that she's allowed to pay for her own vacation when everyone knows the First Lady is just an opinion-free adjunct to the President?  The nerve of women like her!  You should hate her!  Are YOU getting to go to Spain?  No?  Why should she?  She works for US!"

Not all Obama Derangement Syndrome is directed at Barack, folks.  And this is mild compared to what's coming.

Warren Peace

Seems that Sen. Chris Dodd has gone from saying that Elizabeth Warren can't be confirmed to "It's not worth the fight" to get her confirmed.

When it first looked like Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren might stand a serious chance of getting appointed at the first director of the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a regulatory agency which she was the first to suggest — Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) poo-pooed the notion, saying there’s a “serious question” about whether Warren is “confirmable.”

The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber wrote that “after surveying a dozen insiders over the last few days — congressional aides, industry officials, progressive activists, and a few administration officials — I’ve concluded that the odds are good that Warren would be confirmed if nominated by the White House.” And Dodd now seems to have shifted his rhetoric, saying that even if Warren is confirmable, it’s not worth a potential fight to get her the job:

What you don’t need to have is an eight-month battle for who the director or the head or chairperson of this new consumer financial protection bureau will be.

Interesting there. Almost like Dodd is doing what he can to avoid actually having Warren run the new agency. Wonder why that is.

TIP O' The Hat

Nice to see after 20 years since I was there, Duke University's TIP program -- the ultimate summer geek camp -- is still going strong.

"Being labeled as 'gifted' as a middle school student is a social kiss of death," said Dr. Alison Stuebe, an alumna of the Duke TIP program, which had its largest season ever in 2010 with more than 3,100 students. "To go to a place where, rather than that being a liability, was actually a reason you got to go at all, was just a transforming experience," she said.

There is a misperception that talented youths get what they need in school. In fact, regular school classes don't always allow these kids to reach their full potential, said Brian Cooper, TIP's director of domestic educational programs. Summer sessions like TIP's are needed more and more because in tough economic times, schools are cutting programs for gifted students, he said.

TIP provides an environment where they can feed their passions for the subjects they love without having to worry about grades and competition, he said.

But first, kids have to prove themselves by taking the SAT in about seventh grade, and they need to score as well as or better than 50 percent of the college-bound juniors and seniors taking the SAT or ACT (you can retest later). Summer Institute for the Gifted, another program, also accepts letters of recommendation and participation in a gifted program as credentials. These camps have programs at various colleges in the U.S., and some in other countries, too.

And yeah, once my parents saw this (I had a pretty good guidance counselor back in the day) they bought me some test prep software and I knocked down a good enough score to get into TIP's science and math track all four years.  Not everyone's going to be the next Lady Gaga or Mark Zuckerberg, but hey, I turned out OK and learned a hell of a lot of stuff.  I still use my econ and programming class skills from there on a nearly daily basis and yeah, I turned out to be a pretty fearsome Ultimate Frisbee player too.

Even if I am a D-list political blogger.

Well, maybe C-list these days...

The Maine Event In Tea Party Paranoia

Maine's Tea Party community is ripping itself apart, apparently.  TPM has the story to the state's largest Tea Party group, the Maine Patriots, as the group falls to pieces:

On Tuesday night, Amy Hale -- one of the leaders of the Patriots group -- posted an odd message to the group's website, suggesting that she'd been forced to give up control of the site, according to media reports (the post has since been removed):

I was cornered in the parking lot by 10+ people and told that bad things would happen to me if I did not give them the password and hand over Maine Patriots. Therefore, I no longer have control of Maine Patriots. Amy

Hale reported the incident to the police. Last night, she refused to comment on the matter because, she told me, "the investigation is ongoing." Details beyond what she wrote that first night are sketchy.

Piecing together posts from tea party websites in the past couple of days, however, paints a picture of a state tea party in disarray -- and a look at tea party paranoia.

Since Tuesday, other tea party sites in Maine have been hotbeds of conspiracy theories and accusations, with some claiming that Hale was undermining the movement and others suggesting that those who allegedly removed her from the Maine Patriots site are anti-tea party plants.

"You're the evil liberal who is undermining our glorious cause!"

"No I'm not...YOU ARE!"   *scuffle breaks out*

As long as the Tea Party guys are locked in their little high school cliques fighting each other, I'm not terribly worried about them taking over the country this fall, you know?

Arnold And Jerry Do The Right Thing

On the heels of the Prop 8 ruling in California, Gov. Schwarzenegger and AG (and Dem candidate for Arnold's job) Jerry Brown are working together to convince Judge Walker to lift his stay next week and allow the state to resume gay marriages.

In an extraordinary court filing, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked Friday that gay marriages be allowed to resume immediately in California after a federal ruling that the state's voter-approved ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional.

The Republican governor filed his brief with U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker before a Friday deadline to submit arguments on whether to continue a stay of Walker's decision against Proposition 8.

"The Administration believes the public interest is best served by permitting the Court's judgment to go into effect, thereby restoring the right of same-sex couples to marry in California," wrote Kenneth C. Mennemeier, an attorney representing Schwarzenegger, in the brief. "Doing so is consistent with California's long history of treating all people and their relationships with equal dignity and respect." 

And that's really the basis of it.  Jerry Brown also filed a similar motion on Friday.  The state hasn't even bothered to try to defend the case, actually.  James Joyner at OTB disagrees however.

This is indeed extraordinary. Schwarzenegger is the representative of the people of California, a majority of whom voted to amend their constitution to reserve marriage to opposite sex couples.  So, it’s rather absurd to argue that “there is no public interest”   in upholding their decision.   Indeed, it’s his duty to stand up for their wishes here until the appeals have been exhausted.

Now, Schwarzenegger is sworn to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California,” so one could argue that this is a higher duty if he feels strongly that the amendment violates the U.S. Constitution (by definition, it can’t violate California’s Constitution, since it’s an amendment to it).   But, if he thinks that, he should have joined the suit on the other side rather than remaining neutral.

That's a weak argument at best.  He's the Governor.  Who is he supposed to pass the buck to on this?  Again, if it's clearly a violation of the US Constitution, then Arnold is indeed well within his rights to do exactly what he did.

The Legislative, Executive, and Judicial in California have all come out for treating marriage as a fundamental right that cannot be abridged by any power, even a referendum.  That's in the Constitution, and it wins the argument.  Period.

Abe Foxman's Failure

When you run an organization dedicated to correcting stereotypes and fighting bigotry and prejudice like Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League does to stop anti-Semitism (which is a clearly heroic goal), you lose all credibility when you then start tarring other people's religions.

The ADL has come out against the "ground zero mosque" and as a result, CNN anchor and Newsweek contributor Fareed Zakaria has returned a 2005 award he received from the ADL along with $10,000.  It's Fortman's response to Zakaria that removes any doubt about how the ADL feels about Islam.  Unfortunately, it removed any credibility they had too.  Greg Sargent:

In renouncing ADL's award, Zakaria wrote that the decision to oppose the Islamic center is "utterly opposed to the animating purpose of your organization," adding: "Your own statements subsequently, asserting that we must honor the feelings of victims even if irrational or bigoted, made matters worse."

To which Foxman responded, in part:

I hope you have read our statement on the proposed Islamic Center at Ground Zero and, more importantly, understand our position. We did not oppose the right for an Islamic Center or a mosque to be built. What we did was to make an appeal based solely on the issues of location and sensitivity. If the stated goal was to advance reconciliation and understanding, we believe taking into consideration the feelings of many victims and their families, of first responders and many New Yorkers, who are not bigots but still feel the pain of 9/11, would go a long way to achieving that reconciliation.

ADL has and will continue to stand up for Muslims and others where they are targets of racism and bigotry, as we have done at the request of and on behalf of Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf.

The "stated" goal, eh? Translation: The best way the builders of the Islamic center can show they're seeking reconciliation, as they claim to be doing, is to move.

This goes considerably further than ADL's initial statement, which didn't question the motives behind the center. In other words, this is no longer just about the feelings of those still wounded by 9/11, as ADL initially claimed.

It's terribly unfortunate.  I'm not sure if Foxman is trapped here or feels he has no choice but to oppose Cordoba House, but for an organization dedicated to fight religious intolerance, this seems...intolerant, yes?

Greg's take:

But look, many of those who are insinuating that the Islamic center isn't really about promoting reconciliation are targeting Muslims with bigotry. These folks are the ones who are going beyond saying this is just about respecting 9/11 victims. You've probably seen people calling this the "victory mosque," and so on. Those good people are actively trying to associate all Muslims with the 9/11 attackers. Seems to me ADL is coming perilously close to effectively siding with the bigots here.

Exactly.   But Foxman's not the only one who has failed at his mission.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles -- which has recently opened the Museum of Tolerance in NYC -- has also come out against Cordoba House.

The group behind the recently opened "Museum of Tolerance" museum in Manhattan has come out against a planned Islamic community center, which includes a mosque, near Ground Zero.

"Religious freedom does not mean being insensitive...or an idiot," Rabbi Meyer May, the Wiesenthal Center's executive director, told Crain's New York.

"Religion is supposed to be beautiful," he said. "Why create pain in the name of religion?"

It's a topic he knows something about. The Wiesenthal Center caused an uproar in for building one of its Museums of Tolerance on top of an old Muslim burial ground in Jerusalem. 

And if that idiocy doesn't put this whole thing to bed, the other location where 9/11 victims were killed at the Pentagon has had a mosque in the building for years now specifically because it wanted to remind the United States Military that Muslim soldiers are above all American soldiers and deserve the rights to their religious practices like Christians and Jews do.  It's nice to allow our soldiers the freedoms these same soldiers risk their lives to protect, yes?

Oh, and Rep. Anthony Weiner?  Punted.  Which is better than being an asshole.

A Moose Like A Snowhill

Sarah Palin is now deep into Captain Ahab territory on her war against PolitiFact and now she's just playing the "mean ol media" card because of course nobody would dare call Sarah Palin out on the facts unless they were America Hating Liberal Elites.

SA and the Rumpies have the rundown:

Which is why—after tripling-down on the same strawman arguments and bogus numbers that drew howls of derision the first two times she floated them—the Kween of Kommon Sentz felt compelled to remind her Facebook pals that, however hare-brained and spurious her challenge to the Evil Liberal Fact-Checkers, it had been righteously issued by a hard-working person on an actual fishing boat with, like, hooks and shit:

(By the way, the Left sure gets wee-wee’d up when they’re called on something like this, eh? And here I am, thousands of miles away from DC out on a commercial fishing boat, working my butt off for my own business, merely asking the Democrat politicos and their liberal friends in the media: “What’s the plan, man?”, and they seem to feel threatened by my question. So, I’ll go back to setting my hooks and watching the halibut take the bait, and when I come back into the boat’s cabin in a few hours, I’ll log back on here to read their reply. I’ll have succeeded if they’re forced to finally reveal to Americans how they plan to increase taxes, and what they intend to do with our money. In the meantime, I’m catching fish.)

“Watching the halibut take the bait” is, I assume, Palin-Speak for checking the PayPal balance on SarahPAC. As for the rest of Snooki’s smirking nautical aside, here’s hoping her more-authentic-than-thou dingy gets towed by Mitt’s proletarian pickup truck...around the Horn, and around the Norway maelstrom, and around Perdition’s flames.  

She's actually right:  Hey Village?  When you reply to Sarah Palin and treat her as a serious political figure with a serious political opinion, you've already lost.

Stop playing her game, morons.  Ignore her.  She's meaningless.  The more you take her seriously, the more she can punk you.  It's been her m.o. for two years now.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• A 100-square mile chunk of Greenland's ice shelf has broken off of the island's Petermann Glacier.
• Wyoming's GOP Gov. Dave Freudenthal is threatening to sell part of the Grand Teton National Park unless his state gets federal aid to close its education budget gap.
• As many as 31,000 clean-up workers may have been affected by the toxic oil and chemicals from the Gulf oil spill.
• The Obama administration may be considering lifting the Cuba travel embargo on students and academics.
• A federal appeals court has ruled that police must have a warrant to track suspects by GPS.

Last Call

Dick Morris plays the GOP hand far earlier than he should have.  You knew this was the logical endpoint of the whole "any aid to states is evil" crap that the Republicans keep spouting.  Morris gives the whole game away:

As long as the Democrats control Congress, they will continue to rubber-stamp Obama’s requests for bailouts of profligate states. But when the Republicans take control, they will be less than forthcoming. Republicans will ask the central question: Why should taxpayers from states that have cut their budgets and observed spending restraint, pay for the extravagances of the other states? Why should forty-seven states have to pay for California, New York, and Michigan?

Pause.  Reflect.  We're the United States of America.  But Dick Morris has decided we don't need a federal government anymore.  Dick Morris's "central question" is the same one Southerners were asking in 1860, dig?  Should we dissolve this union?  Should we not punish anyone who has a public sector job, because they are being salaried by the taxpayer?  It's time to scapegoat someone, and this is the plan:  such rampant, virulent anti-government rhetoric that the endpoint is literally to take everything from these workers.

The Republican solution to state financial distress should be simple: The Party should insist on a change in the federal bankruptcy law providing for a procedure for state bankruptcy (none now exists). This process must call for abrogation of all state and local public employee union contracts as is usually done in private sector bankruptcies. By freeing states and local governments (including school boards) of their union obligations on wages, work rules, staffing, and pensions, they have a chance to survive and, indeed, to prosper. But merely subsidizing these massive expenditures just prolongs the misery of the states in question.

And there you have the Republican plan:  to strip millions of local and state government workers of everything and to tell everyone else "fend for yourselves, there is no government help anymore."  Randian Libertarian extremism.  Game over.

Like I said, played it too early.  This is all supposed to be the plan AFTER the election.

Don't You Dare Legislate!

Digby notes that the GOP's latest barbaric yawp is to scream bloody murder about the Democrats trying to do anything in the lame duck session in November and December because it will be "agaisnt the will of the American people" and if the Democrats try, they'll be punished or something.

As Dave Weigel reminds us, those of us who remember our history realize that Bill Clinton was impeached in a lame duck session in 1998 by Newtie and the GOP.

Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., won his last election on Nov. 3, 1998. Not enough of his fellow Republicans came with him. Gingrich's party lost five seats in the House of Representatives after a year exploring impeachment charges against President Bill Clinton. Gingrich, who was House speaker, acknowledged the unexpected setback by announcing his resignation. His final act of power was to call a lame-duck session of Congress to deal with the impeachment.

Democrats were horrified and helpless. As far as they were concerned, the election had been a referendum on impeachment, and the Republicans had lost it. Republicans who were retiring or being replaced by Democrats were going to provide votes for impeachment that wouldn't be there when the new, Gingrich-free Congress took over in January. "Listen to the American people," said Democratic investigative counsel Abbe Lowell, one of many members of his party who spent weeks wringing hands, pointing at polls, and watching the impeachment train chug along.

One week before Christmas the majority party held votes on four articles of impeachment, passing two of them. Gingrich cast his final votes in the House for all four articles. Two weeks later, he departed.

You know, if Democrats can't pass legislation now, why would they be able to magically pass anything in November?  Answer:  they can't:  they still would need Republican support in the Senate to defeat the inevitable filibuster.  But the GOP doesn't even want the Dems to dare try to call the session into order.

The minority party is so confident they are threatening the majority party to do nothing or else, and the majority party is cringing like a bunch of beaten stray dogs in the rain.

It's depressing.  After all, the man leading the charge to flog Nancy Pelosi until she stops?

Newt Gingrich.

The Center Cannot Hold

Just remember when conservatives are screaming that government is too big, that government is never and can never be a solution to any problem, that it needs to be starved to death and then drowned, and that raising taxes can only be met with revolution, that America is now literally falling apart at the seams as Double G notes.

Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further -- it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.

Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.

Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

We have cities that can no longer afford buses, schools, streetlights, police, and basic services.  It gets worse.

It's probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month -- with a subheadline warning:  "Back to Stone Age" -- which describes how "paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue."  Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional.  And it was announced this week that "Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free."

We can't even afford libraries and roads in America anymore.  Maybe the fact we have two 8 year plus wars that has cost us trillions of dollars has something to do with it.  Maybe the fact we gave trillions more to the largest banks does too.  And now we're being told that we must cut taxes on the wealthy and on corporations so that they'll save our economy?

Really?

Greenwald's right.  We really are at the end of empire here.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Dan Riehl's blog is a just a little bit obsessed with Dave Weigel, don't you think?

Creeptastic.