Paul Krugman has been pretty shrill about the debacle that's taken place in Washington since a black Democrat became president and the right wing had a collective nervous breakdown. But today he fills in for David Brooks by taking a well aimed swipe at...well....David Brooks (and others of Bobo's ilk) in a column called "The Centrist Cop-Out" (NYT link):

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

[snip]

Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself. I don’t. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily reside in the middle of the road, and I want leaders who do the right thing, not the centrist thing.

But for those who insist that the center is always the place to be, I have an important piece of information: We already have a centrist president. Indeed, Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan administration, argues that Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

[snip]

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

Snap!

And there you have it -- Krugman at his best, taking off the gloves against his own absent colleague. So should we now watch for Paul Krugman to be fired from the New York Times and replaced by, say, Erick Erickson? You know, for balance and all.

Labels: false equivalencies, Paul Krugman, telling it like it is, truth, what liberal media

Krugman on the Shock Doctrine in action in Wisconsin:

What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.

And then there’s this: “Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).”

What’s that about? The state of Wisconsin owns a number of plants supplying heating, cooling, and electricity to state-run facilities (like the University of Wisconsin). The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim. Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.”

If this sounds to you like a perfect setup for cronyism and profiteering — remember those missing billions in Iraq? — you’re not alone. Indeed, there are enough suspicious minds out there that Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire brothers who are playing such a large role in Mr. Walker’s anti-union push, felt compelled to issue a denial that it’s interested in purchasing any of those power plants. Are you reassured?

Labels: corporatism, Cronyism, government for sale, Greedy Republican Bastards, Paul Krugman, Wisconsin 2011

Today's honoree: None other than the Shrill One himself, Paul Krugman, on the right wing Climate of Hate.

Money quote:

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Meanwhile, Ross the Douchebag joins Matt Bai in trying to distance Jared Lee Loughner from any of the violent anti-government rhetoric that's making a few individuals who identify themselves as "simply entertainers" preposterously wealthy.

Labels: America Gone Mad, eliminationism, Paul Krugman, right-wing hatemongers

The mantra among the lazyasses in the media is that if we just cut business taxes more, if we just deregulate more, they'll start hiring, that it's all that business simply can't make a profit with that Socialist Fascist Nazi Black Panther Muslim terrorist in the White House. Except that it just isn't true, and only Paul Krugman has the guts to say so:

But no. All the buzz lately is that the Obama administration is “antibusiness.” And there are widespread claims that fears about taxes, regulation and budget deficits are holding down business spending and blocking economic recovery.

How much truth is there to these claims? None. Business spending is indeed low, but no lower than one would have expected given widespread overcapacity and weak consumer spending. Business leaders are feeling unloved, but giving them a group hug won’t cure what ails the economy.

Ask the Obama-is-scaring-business crowd for some actual evidence supporting their claim, and they’ll tell you that business spending on plant and equipment is at its lowest level, as a share of G.D.P., in 40 years. What they don’t mention is the fact that business investment always falls sharply when the economy is depressed. After all, why should businesses expand their production capacity when they’re not selling enough to use the capacity they already have? And in case you haven’t noticed, we still have a deeply depressed economy.

Historically, there has been a close relationship between the level of business investment and the “output gap,” the difference between the economy’s actual output and its long-run trend — which means that there’s nothing surprising about low investment now, given the fact that the output gap is hugely negative. If anything, it’s surprising how well business investment has been holding up.

Alternatively, we can look directly at measures of unused business capacity. Capacity utilization in industry is up over the past year, but still far below historical norms. Vacancy rates at industrial and retail properties are at historic highs. Again, given that businesses have plenty of idle structures and machines, why should they be building or buying even more?

So where’s the evidence that an antibusiness climate is depressing spending? The answer, supposedly, is that this is what you hear when you talk to entrepreneurs. But don’t believe it. Yes, when you talk to business people they complain about taxes, regulations and the deficit; they always do. But the Obama’s-socialist-policies-are-wrecking-the-economy chorus isn’t coming from businesses; it’s coming from business lobbyists, which isn’t at all the same thing. Read the report on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the latest Washington Monthly: peddling scare stories about what Democrats are up to is a large part of what organizations like the chamber do for a living.

[snip]

So why are we hearing so much about the alleged harm being inflicted by an antibusiness climate? For the most part it’s the same old, same old: lobbyists trying to bully Washington into cutting taxes and dismantling regulations, while extracting bigger fees from their clients along the way.

Beyond that, business leaders are, as I said, feeling unloved: the financial crisis, health insurance scandals, and the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico have taken a toll on their reputation. Somehow, however, rather than blaming their peers for bad behavior, C.E.O.’s blame Mr. Obama for “demonizing” business — by which they apparently mean speaking frankly about the culpability of the guilty parties.

Labels: economic death watch, Greedy Republican Bastards, Paul Krugman

This tidbit from today's Krugman column on Zombie Reaganism jumped out at me:

The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.

You'd think it wouldn't be difficult to make the case that if the fear is that the government plan will be better than what private insurers (who will still be able to raise premiums indiscriminately) offer, then isn't it true that those opposing a public option for health care WANT Americans to be forced to buy crappy insurance? Perhaps someone ought to ask the Republicans and Democrats on the take from the insurance industry that question. There's your sound bite: "Why do you want to force us into insurance that you KNOW doesn't do the job?"

Labels: health care, Paul Krugman

That's a very simple concept that Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner don't seem to be able to understand.

You'd think that these guys, who are supposed to be the top money guys in the country, would understand this simple fact of Economics 101 better than, say, the builder of the unfinished McMansion three blocks away from my kitchen window, who has been trying to sell his unfinished spec house for over a year now, dropping the price from $1.5 million to $1.35 million to $1.249 million -- and no more -- while similar bash-and build houses in the neighborhood languish on the market for $849K. But you'd be wrong, as Paul Krugman points out today:

Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.

Thus, in a recent interview Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, tried to make a distinction between the “basic inherent economic value” of troubled assets and the “artificially depressed value” that those assets command right now. In recent transactions, even AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities have sold for less than 40 cents on the dollar, but Mr. Geithner seems to think they’re worth much, much more.

And the government’s job, he declared, is to “provide the financing to help get those markets working,” pushing the price of toxic waste up to where it ought to be.

What’s more, officials seem to believe that getting toxic waste properly priced would cure the ills of all our major financial institutions. Earlier this week, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, was asked about the problem of “zombies” — financial institutions that are effectively bankrupt but are being kept alive by government aid. “I don’t know of any large zombie institutions in the U.S. financial system,” he declared, and went on to specifically deny that A.I.G. — A.I.G.! — is a zombie.

This is the same A.I.G. that, unable to honor its promises to pay off other financial institutions when bonds default, has already received $150 billion in aid and just got a commitment for $30 billion more.

The truth is that the Bernanke-Geithner plan — the plan the administration keeps floating, in slightly different versions — isn’t going to fly.

[snip]

So why has this zombie idea — it keeps being killed, but it keeps coming back — taken such a powerful grip? The answer, I fear, is that officials still aren’t willing to face the facts. They don’t want to face up to the dire state of major financial institutions because it’s very hard to rescue an essentially insolvent bank without, at least temporarily, taking it over. And temporary nationalization is still, apparently, considered unthinkable.

And why is it unthinkable? Because Republican politicians who are still fighting the Cold War and the same cable news idiots that Jon Stewart and the Daily Show writers so masterfully skewered the other night will scream "SOCIALISM!!!"

This knee-jerk wingnut terror of "the S word" is why we don't have universal health care in this country, with over half of the low-income unemployed without coverage already. And out here in the real world, almost three-quarters of Americans want Federal involvement in the health care distribution system to reduce costs and increase access and six in ten favor think it's the government's responsibility to provide such coverage and access. When the price of laissez-faire subsidize-the-rich corporatism starts to hit home in the form of unemployment and loss of health care coverage, Americans begin to realize the human cost of unfettered Objectivist capitalism, and they don't much care for it.

So while Bernanke and Geithner don't dare take the bols step of nationalization, instead making the absurd claim that toxic assets are "undervalued", they've forgotten the very basic principle that no asset is worth a plug nickel unless someone is willing to pony up the bucks for it.

Labels: economic death watch, Paul Krugman

In today's New York Times Paul Krugman states some pretty stark realities about the edge we're teetering on:

Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

I think there is a reason that Paul Krugman won the Nobel peace Prize in Economics, so I think I'll go with his view of the stimulus rather than Morning Schmoe's. Its not just that I disagree with Joe or his thuddingly simplistic and narcissistic view of whats happening, it's that we don't really have the luxury of listening to idiots seemingly nostalgic for Reaganomics. We used that up with Bush, and his plans didn't even have some destructive nostalgic past touchstone, unless you want to count the Third Reich.

I don't know if the suits at MSNBC think that its good for ratings to have these people on television every morning to spew simplistic crap, and then have someone like Krugman on to disprove it, but in terms that are maybe hard to understand at the crack o' dawn. I had to watch this a few times myself, but maybe that's just me. I think it would be better for everyone if we didn't have to start with a week of lies and propaganda before we get to the meat of this thing:



Krugman continues, in the face of the pundits waxing on about conservative values and how bending the truth about slumps of the past and the Great Depression"

Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive.

So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.

It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.

Listen to this guy; people are losing their jobs left and right in my area, and those who are secure are not spending. At some point the conservatives have to stop and decide if they want to be contrary or they want to save this country. It's that simple, because Krugman thinks that the package is too small, and that Obama is gonna have to stand up and explain to us in stark terms why it shouldn't be cut anymore...forget the friendly approach to this; we are in a kind of trouble that we can't base on stories of the past.

You can let MSNBC know what you think of Morning Joe and similar programming here.

c/p RIP Coco

Labels: Great Depression, Joe Scarborough, Paul Krugman, punditry, The Second Great Depression

Today's honoree: Paul Krugman, for pointing out what ought to be obvious: that when you decide to "look forward rather than backward" when official wrongdoing is of the scale of that committed by the Bush Administration, you make a mockery of the entire concept of rule of law.

Money quote:

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

[snip]

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

Labels: Paul Krugman

Last week you said that "If Paul Krugman has a good idea, in terms of how to spend money efficiently and effectively to jump-start the economy, then we’re going to do it."

Well, here you go:

On Saturday, Christina Romer, the future head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, who will be the vice president’s chief economist, released estimates of what the Obama economic plan would accomplish. Their report is reasonable and intellectually honest, which is a welcome change from the fuzzy math of the last eight years.

But the report also makes it clear that the plan falls well short of what the economy needs.

According to Ms. Romer and Mr. Bernstein, the Obama plan would have its maximum impact in the fourth quarter of 2010. Without the plan, they project, the unemployment rate in that quarter would be a disastrous 8.8 percent. Yet even with the plan, unemployment would be 7 percent — roughly as high as it is now.

After 2010, the report says, the effects of the economic plan would rapidly fade away. The job of promoting full recovery would, however, remain undone: the unemployment rate would still be a painful 6.3 percent in the last quarter of 2011.

Now, economic forecasting is an inexact science, to say the least, and things could turn out better than the report predicts. But they could also turn out worse. The report itself acknowledges that “some private forecasters anticipate unemployment rates as high as 11 percent in the absence of action.” And I’m with Lawrence Summers, another member of the Obama economic team, who recently declared, “In this crisis, doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.” Unfortunately, that principle isn’t reflected in the current plan.

So how can Mr. Obama do more? By including a lot more public investment in his plan — which will be possible if he takes a longer view.

[snip]

So my advice to the Obama team is to scrap the business tax cuts, and, more important, to deal with the threat of doing too little by doing more. And the way to do more is to stop talking about jump-starts and look more broadly at the possibilities for government investment.

While Thomas Friedman is still closing his eyes to H-1B abuses by American corporations far too much for my taste, there are areas in which he doesn't have his head up his ass, and his December 23 column about how this country is essentially General Motors writ large right now was largely spot on. The Republicans are already singing that old Reagan song again, despite the fact that nearly three decades of Reaganism in various suits of clothing have brought this country to its economic knees.

The idea that a small business is going to keep on a $40,000 employee and his $13,000 family health insurance coverage in exchange for a $3000 tax credit is absurd, especially when there is no market for that company's product because no one can afford to buy anything. It's time for Obama to stop caving in to Republicans and their disproven ideology which is even more of a religion for them than their professed Jesus-worship and start doing something to get this country back on its feet.

Labels: economic death watch, Paul Krugman

"Republicans think government is the problem because they're so incompetent at doing it effectively."

Krugman today (also revealing that the hurricane preparation and response isn't even being done by FEMA, because that agency is rotten to the core with theocrats and hacks:

On Sunday morning the White House Web site featured photos of the president talking to Gulf state governors about Hurricane Gustav while ostentatiously clutching a red folder labeled “Classified.” On Monday, instead of speaking at the convention, reports suggest that Mr. Bush will address the nation about the storm.

And a report on Politico.com suggested that John McCain might give a speech “from the devastation zone if the storm hits the U.S. coast with the ferocity feared by forecasters.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

Let’s start with that red folder. Assuming that the folder contained something other than scrap paper, is the planned response to a hurricane a state secret? Are we worried that tropical storm systems will discover our weak points? Are we fighting a Global War on Weather?

Actually, that’s not quite as funny as it sounds. Some observers have pointed out that daily briefings on preparations for Gustav, which should be coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency — which is, you know, supposed to manage emergencies — have been coming, instead, from the U.S. military’s Northern Command.

It’s not hard to see why. Top positions at FEMA are no longer held by obviously unqualified political hacks and cronies. But a recent report by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security said that the agency has made only “limited progress” in the area of “mission assignments” — that is, in its ability to coordinate the response to a crisis. So FEMA still isn’t up to carrying out its principal task.

That’s no accident. FEMA’s degradation, from one of the government’s most admired agencies to a laughingstock, wasn’t an isolated event; it was the result of the G.O.P.’s underlying philosophy. Simply put, when the government is run by a political party committed to the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution, that belief tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Key priorities are neglected; key functions are privatized; and key people, the competent public servants who make government work, either leave or are driven out.

The political cost of Katrina shocked the Bush administration into trying to undo some of the damage at FEMA, and it’s a good bet that the initial response to Gustav will be better (it could hardly be worse). But because the political philosophy responsible for FEMA’s decline hasn’t changed, the administration hasn’t been able to reverse the agency’s learned incompetence. Three years after Katrina, and a year past a Congressional deadline, FEMA still doesn’t have a strategy for housing disaster victims.

Hopefully people will remember that when John McCain is in an apron, dishing out red beans and rice to the now-homeless, to demonstrate "Message: I care."

Labels: Hurricane Gustav, John McCain, Paul Krugman

Somehow I expect that if by some miracle we have a Democratic president who somehow manages to implement policies that start extricating us from the economic mess that the Bush Administration is leaving us, conservatives will say it's because of policies Ronald Reagan implemented. Because before George W. Bush was worshipped as a god by hard-core conservatives, it was Saint Ronnie. Republicans have been searching for their new Ronald Reagan ever since George Herbert Walker Bush proved a bit honking dud as a campaigner, expressing astonishment at a supermarket scanner and saying to middle class Americans about whom he really didn't give a damn except to the extent that they might keep him in power, "Message: I care."

To the extent that Ronald Reagan is to be admired, it's as a highly effective snake oil salesman, convincing middle class people that if you shovel enough cash into the pockets of the wealthy, the change that trickles out of their overflowing pockets will enrich the middle class as well. Reagan also fed into the deep-seated emotional need that conservatives have for a father figure, though in those waning days of the Cold War, nutually assured destruction seemed a remote prospect at most. Reagan was the affable daddy, the one who'd keep the bogeyman (welfare queens) away from you but still go out in the backyard and have a catch. In this year's Search for the New Reagan, the Republican candidates are running as the punitive, controlling daddy; as Robert DeNiro in This Boy's Life or Robert Duvall as The Great Santini.

That Charlie Wilson's War turned out to be a dud at the box office is actually a positive sign that people outside those on the hard-core right with their daddy issues are re-evaluating the Reagan era. Whether it's that Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are past their prime as box office draws, or if it's that people now understand that the events described in that particular story are what led to the creation of al-Qaeda remains to be seen. But it's clear now that the American role in putting the last nail in the Soviet expansionism coffin helped put us in the mess in which we find ourselves now.

It's in the area of economic policy where the current crop of Republicans persist in embracing the Reagan Doctrine, despite the fact that it was a Democratic president that had to clean up the mess that Reagan and Bush left in their "borrow and spend" policies. Today Paul Krugman sets the record straight on the Republicans' Reagan nostalgia in pointing out how there is absolutely no reason for any Democrat to invoke Ronald Reagan as an example for anything:

The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.

Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.

For example, I’m not sure what “dynamism” means, but if it means productivity growth, there wasn’t any resurgence in the Reagan years. Eventually productivity did take off — but even the Bush administration’s own Council of Economic Advisers dates the beginning of that takeoff to 1995.

Similarly, if a sense of entrepreneurship means having confidence in the talents of American business leaders, that didn’t happen in the 1980s, when all the business books seemed to have samurai warriors on their covers. Like productivity, American business prestige didn’t stage a comeback until the mid-1990s, when the U.S. began to reassert its technological and economic leadership.

I understand why conservatives want to rewrite history and pretend that these good things happened while a Republican was in office — or claim, implausibly, that the 1981 Reagan tax cut somehow deserves credit for positive economic developments that didn’t happen until 14 or more years had passed. (Does Richard Nixon get credit for “Morning in America”?)

But why would a self-proclaimed progressive say anything that lends credibility to this rewriting of history — particularly right now, when Reaganomics has just failed all over again?

Like Ronald Reagan, President Bush began his term in office with big tax cuts for the rich and promises that the benefits would trickle down to the middle class. Like Reagan, he also began his term with an economic slump, then claimed that the recovery from that slump proved the success of his policies.

And like Reaganomics — but more quickly — Bushonomics has ended in grief. The public mood today is as grim as it was in 1992. Wages are lagging behind inflation. Employment growth in the Bush years has been pathetic compared with job creation in the Clinton era. Even if we don’t have a formal recession — and the odds now are that we will — the optimism of the 1990s has evaporated.

This is, in short, a time when progressives ought to be driving home the idea that the right’s ideas don’t work, and never have.

It’s not just a matter of what happens in the next election. Mr. Clinton won his elections, but — as Mr. Obama correctly pointed out — he didn’t change America’s trajectory the way Reagan did. Why?

Well, I’d say that the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan.

Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.

I would say that the reason the Clinton Administration didn't change the narrative had nothing to do with policy, and everything to do with the Clintonistas' underestimation of whom they were dealing with on the other side of the aisle, and Bill Clinton's inability to exercise the extra caution in his personal life that was required when the vultures are constantly circling.

Ronald Reagan ought to be the third rail of Democratic politics in that anything that smacks of praise of the Republicans' most cherished icon is to be strictly avoided. I have to wonder how much of Barack Obama's disappointing performance in Nevada was a result of him touching that third rail. It may be that he was trying to win the endorsement of the Reno newspaer that was conducting the interview, but ultimately none of the newspaper endorsements in the world will compensate if you don't get the support from voters who never, ever, want anything that smacks of Ronald Reagan running the country ever again.

Labels: 2008 election, Paul Krugman, Ronald Reagan

At least until wingnuts stop calling for the assassination of anyone who doesn't march in lockstep with them?

Labels: Paul Krugman, wingnuttia

Today Paul Krugman joined the well deserved pile-on urging Congressional Democrats to take a stand and act like they have some balls when General Petraeus testifies about the white house penned report on Iraq this week. It is unreal that we are at a point where we are looking at our representatives as cowards who are afraid, not as much of what we might think of them, but of the political bubble-world of Washington DC that seems to be so hermetically sealed that any statement of dissent is treated like a huge achievement. I think that these politicians might do themselves a service by taking a look around outside of the beltway, because Americans are disgruntled, to say the least. According to Krugman, we should plan on the report to be a bunch of bullshit, twisted facts, and numbers:

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. After the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops.

This report is just a piece of fluff which cherry picks information down to the smallest detail, but clearly overlooks the secondary (or, hell, primary at this point,) effect of this occupation on what is left of Iraqi society; in that we might perhaps expect an increase in crime, not just because there is an increase in crime but because we are there and have disrupted everything...of course we have to count those deaths!

Its clear at this point that Bush likes to have something going on that lets him feel like he is "kicking ass," but alot of us have known for a long time that he is a sociopath riding a hobby horse, and even the doubters are beginning to realize the truth, so why are these white house Rovian operatives allowed to shape the debate? How dare any of them call Democrats who question this clearly erroneous report unpatriotic? And where do our representatives get off backing down after promising to go and deliver a strong and brave message for us. The founders would spit on the way that their hopeful plans have been twisted by this crowd. What kind of cowards do we have running this country?I hope to hear something from someone, maybe even a question that makes sense, but I'm not hopeful.

Krugman notes that Petraeus "...has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters." And if its true, as Krugman believes, that the democrats will be accused of being unpatriotic no matter what they say or what happens, then I would hope to hear some all out probing of this report and perhaps even some dissent and protest. One thing we can be sure of is that this report is not likely to hint at the very real need for, and the strong possibility of, a draft.

So why bother with this piece of theater? Because Americans like to see committees and circumstance, and guys in suits acting like they are actually solving problems. Americans also like symbols...like, um...Osama Bin Laden, as the universal bad guy killer. Its a shame that Fred Thompson chose now to belittle the importance of the Bin Laden symbolism to American culture, considering that the government already has the pre-release of Bin Laden's yearly 9-11 commemoration tape, and the outrage is already palpable, even all these years later.

Thompson would do well to pull himself up by his bootstraps, get out of his limo, and try to take the pulse of the American people a little more carefully. What the hell is this guy doing talking about where he thinks Bin Laden is? We haven't caught him because we are in the wrong place doing the wrong thing, and the last thing we need is the suggestion that we should invade another country for the hell of it, when its clear that the guy moves around pretty easily in the Middle East and its gonna take good intelligence work to find him.







In other disgusting news, apparently Joementum Lieberman is co-chairing a meeting of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Monday. Again we are in a position where this pseudo liberal "I" who is supposedly caucusing with the Democrats, (but always threatening to flip to the other side,) is going to be the one representing the left side for balance...I have alot of trouble getting my mind around this! This guy gets to keep all of his committee posts and chair all sorts of meetings...representing US!...and who will ask the important questions about our security? No one...forget it.
Its gonna be a clown parade, with Skeletor Chertoff leading other top officials in making assessments about our security and how safe we are..,or not.... The clear fact that we are not safer now than we were before 9-11 points to more of the same; especially knowing how the reports are presented and how afraid our representatives seem to be to make waves.

Its been another day in the car listening to news, podcasts of Ring of Fire, and an old Majority Report rant by Janeane Garafolo about cognitive dissonance, (which has long been one of my favorite subjects.) She was talking about the woman who had the face transplant and the story of how she lost her face: passing out from drugs and alcohol and waking, but not realizing that the dog had removed her face for some reason...that is until trying to light a cigarette and, oops, what the fuck?? Janeane likened the strange shocky feeling of having just had your face eaten off by your dog to what has been going on in this country. Its strange how well some of those Air America shows from over a year ago still hold up...and sad that they still apply, even though the truth is out. Everyone knows that this is all wrong, but they just look uncomfortably at each other and hide their cowardice in some sort of idea of respect for the office and protocol. Fuck that! The feeling of embracing the lie because one can't come to terms with the fact that one was wrong in the first place, or over-identification with the lie, is the only way that some people can live with themselves. Its a form of mental illness that drives itself, in that the stress caused by conflicting belief and evidence needs to resolve so the truth is actively shifted in order to relieve the stress....and then there you are; your dog just took a bite out of your face...but it all makes sense because....because...because...it does!

Here I am in my house of cement pouring, alarm going off, firemen swarming, and contractors moving piles of my laundry round the basement, strangely quiet...for a minute...seeing what it might be like to feel like everything was OK out there...but then, on the news comes Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, who is, against all odds, holding his own in the weak Republican field...the debate, ugh...the news ugh....How did this happen? How did he manage to plow under his extreme weakness as a human being and a leader? His popularity is not dropping the way it should, which worries me, and makes me think that the American people are, as usual, not paying attention.

That Rudy has the nerve to say that he is not a perfect person but was a strong leader in NYC is just laughable. The idea that he could even fill the position of dogcatcher is incredible; but then...look what we have now!
The reign of Rudy in NYC was a strange time of knee jerk over-reaction to Dinkins and his PC liberalism. The swing was not so much to the right, because Rudy is pretty left on social issues, but more towards the Reich.

Among other insanity the homeless folks that were all over the place were hassled all the time and told to move on, with no place to go, and it was said that a large number of them had moved underground into old subway stations or were given one way tickets to places like Bridgeport, CT. I kept wondering where those people went...it was like they were just loaded on trucks one day and removed. The idea of just jostling sleeping people over and over is sort of inhumane, and the lack of real programs to help people made the whole exercise rather abusive.

Rudy set about defining the rules of what he felt was right, as if he was the arbiter of all things social, artistic and monetary. His people were less than sophisticated, and the whole thing echoed a strange mafia novella with goombas and good-fellas. Yeah, Rudy played tough, and he reversed some of Dinkin's soft policing measures, but his real focus was not on infrastructure and safety, but on surface and shine. This was not good management and it alienated many, many people...real New Yorkers for one, were disgusted, and many people who work to make the city work were disgruntled. He didn't solve problems so much as to sweep them away and make things look pretty. But, as we know about those shiny apple Republicans these days, the core is rotten, and sooner or later the worm is gonna crawl out. I'm just waiting for Rudy to blow. He not only lacks the personality for the office but he is rotten to the core.

Rudy left us in a very vulnerable position while he shined up his command center that was in the middle of his universe...with a big target on it. For anyone who doubts that Rudy absolutely sucked as a leader, and for anyone who thinks that it might make sense to have a strong guy like him at the helm, take a visit to The Real Rudy and lift the rock on old Rudy. I don't say this lightly: for anyone who might ever consider giving this guy a job with big responsibility, do some research. Your life may depend on it!


Cross Posted from RIPCoco

Labels: General Petraeus, Iraq War, Joe Lieberman, Paul Krugman, Rudy Giuliani

Paul Krugman does....all too well:

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. After the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops, if he feels like it.

There are five things I hope Democrats in Congress will remember.

First, no independent assessment has concluded that violence in Iraq is down. On the contrary, estimates based on morgue, hospital and police records suggest that the daily number of civilian deaths is almost twice its average pace from last year. And a recent assessment by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found no decline in the average number of daily attacks.

So how can the military be claiming otherwise? Apparently, the Pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told The Washington Post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.” So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people.

Oh, and by the way: Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city. And guess what? When a Sunni enclave is eliminated and the death toll in that district falls because there’s nobody left to kill, that counts as progress by the Pentagon’s metric.

Second, Gen. Petraeus has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters.

I’ve written before about the op-ed article Gen. Petraeus published six weeks before the 2004 election, claiming “tangible progress” in Iraq. Specifically, he declared that “Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt,” that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward” and that “there has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security.” A year later, he declared that “there has been enormous progress with the Iraqi security forces.”

But now two more years have passed, and the independent commission of retired military officers appointed by Congress to assess Iraqi security forces has recommended that the national police force, which is riddled with corruption and sectarian influence, be disbanded, while Iraqi military forces “will be unable to fulfill their essential security responsibilities independently over the next 12-18 months.”

Third, any plan that depends on the White House recognizing reality is an idle fantasy. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, on Tuesday Mr. Bush told Australia’s deputy prime minister that “we’re kicking ass” in Iraq. Enough said.

Fourth, the lesson of the past six years is that Republicans will accuse Democrats of being unpatriotic no matter what the Democrats do. Democrats gave Mr. Bush everything he wanted in 2002; their reward was an ad attacking Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, that featured images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Finally, the public hates this war and wants to see it ended. Voters are exasperated with the Democrats, not because they think Congressional leaders are too liberal, but because they don’t see Congress doing anything to stop the war.

In light of all this, you have to wonder what Democrats, who according to The New York Times are considering a compromise that sets a “goal” for withdrawal rather than a timetable, are thinking. All such a compromise would accomplish would be to give Republicans who like to sound moderate — but who always vote with the Bush administration when it matters — political cover.

Yes, you DO have to wonder? Is it simple gutlessness? Too much spending time eating mini spanakopita with David Broder and William Kristol and not enough time talking to the people they're supposed to represent? Is it a lack of understanding that they are no longer dealing with intelligent people of goodwill who disagree when they are dealing with this administration, but instead with a bunch of power-mad criminals? Is Washington so rife with potential scandal and corruption, whether sexual impropriety, financial corruption, or something else, that the White House's warrantless surveillance was really all about pulling Democratic skeletons out of closets and using them as cudgels to browbeat Democrats into compliance? Or is it simply that despite their rhetoric, the Democrats are the same kind of corporatists as the Republicans in a different suit of clothing, and that despite their rhetoric, they're owned by the same defense contractors and others who benefit from Republican policies as the Republicans?

The latter would certainly explain the relentless and depressing march of Hillary Clinton towards the Democratic nomination. But is it that simple?

Labels: Democrats, Paul Krugman, spinelessness

Krugman delivers a resounding, if veiled, smackdown to his colleague David Brooks:

In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits — amazingly, they still exist — to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.

What I don’t understand is why we’re supposed to consider Mr. Bush’s continuing confidence a good thing.

Remember, Mr. Bush was confident six years ago when he promised to bring in Osama, dead or alive. He was confident four years ago, when he told the insurgents to bring it on. He was confident two years ago, when he told Brownie that he was doing a heckuva job.

Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush’s poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.

Sorry, but that’s not reassuring; it’s terrifying. It doesn’t demonstrate Mr. Bush’s strength of character; it shows that he has lost touch with reality.

Actually, it’s not clear that he ever was in touch with reality. I wrote about the Bush administration’s “infallibility complex,” its inability to admit mistakes or face up to real problems it didn’t want to deal with, in June 2002. Around the same time Ron Suskind, the investigative journalist, had a conversation with a senior Bush adviser who mocked the “reality-based community,” asserting that “when we act, we create our own reality.”

People who worried that the administration was living in a fantasy world used to be dismissed as victims of “Bush derangement syndrome,” liberals driven mad by Mr. Bush’s success. Now, however, it’s a syndrome that has spread even to former loyal Bushies.

Yet while Mr. Bush no longer has many true believers, he still has plenty of enablers — people who understand the folly of his actions, but refuse to do anything to stop him.

Krugman goes on to mention Richard Lugar and Gen. David Petraeus, but it's clear to whom he's really talking.

Labels: Paul Krugman

The first person in the Bush Administration who should be removed from office, because he poses the most immediate threat to the American people is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

From attempting to place restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act, to fighting to keep Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force records secret, to drafting the document to allow military tribunals for terrorist suspects, to the USA PATRIOT Act, to advocating torture, to asking Senators to adopt legislation requiring ISPs to monitor and keep records on all web sites visited by all Americans, to stating that Americans do not intrinsically have the right of habeas corpus, to the latest outrage of firing prosecutors who do not fall in line and investigate Democratic malfeasance while leaving Republicans alone, Gonzales has proven that he cares not for the rule of law and the Constitution.

Krugman:

For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

Mr. Christie’s actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we’ve learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez’s claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.

In fact, it’s becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power. Bear in mind that if Mr. Menendez had lost, the G.O.P. would still control the Senate.

For now, the nation’s focus is on the eight federal prosecutors fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In January, Mr. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he “would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.” But it’s already clear that he did indeed dismiss all eight prosecutors for political reasons — some because they wouldn’t use their offices to provide electoral help to the G.O.P., and the others probably because they refused to soft-pedal investigations of corrupt Republicans.

In the last few days we’ve also learned that Republican members of Congress called prosecutors to pressure them on politically charged cases, even though doing so seems unethical and possibly illegal.

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: “We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.”

And let’s not forget that Karl Rove’s candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed federal investigations. Last year Molly Ivins reminded her readers of a curious pattern during Mr. Rove’s time in Texas: “In election years, there always seemed to be an F.B.I. investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press. After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.”

No one is advocating that malfeasance go uninvestigated. But the highly selective pattern of investigations skewed by party, combined with the documented firings of those prosecutors who refused to toe the Bush party line such as Carol Lam, who put Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham behind bars, demonstrates conclusively that Alberto Gonzales has no business being the top law enforcement officer in the country.

If the Democrats want to start investigating this administration, Gonzales would be a good place to start.

And while we're on the subject, anyone seriously considering supporting Joe Biden for the presidency would do well to his immortal words to Gonzales during the latter's confirmation hearing: "I like you, you're the real deal."

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Paul Krugman