What does the U.S. look like if the Tea (Republican) Party wins?

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about the Obama Administration's political people thinking that they know best in the face of all evidence that their boss' presidency is crumbling around him is how vulnerable we all are to this Administration's blind hubris.

Ian Milhiser at Center for American Progress writes about what this country will look like under Tea Party doctrine, and even Americans who support the Tea Party now will be in for a very rude and unpleasant awakening when they see what it looks like:

In the Tea Party’s America, families must mortgage their home to pay for their mother’s end-of-life care. Higher education is a luxury reserved almost exclusively to the very rich. Rotten meat ships to supermarkets nationwide without a national agency to inspect it. Fathers compete with their adolescent children for sub-minimum wage jobs. And our national leaders are utterly powerless to do a thing.

At least, that’s what would happen if the Tea Party succeeds in its effort to reimagine the Constitution as an antigovernment manifesto. While the House of Representatives pushes Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to phase out Medicare, numerous members of Congress, a least one Supreme Court justice, and the governor of America’s second-largest state now proudly declare that most of the progress of the last century violates the Constitution.

It is difficult to count how many essential laws would simply cease to exist if the Tea Party won its battle to reshape our founding document, but a short list includes:

• Social Security and Medicare
  
• Medicaid, children's health insurance, and other health care programs
  
• All federal education programs
  
• All federal antipoverty programs
  
• Federal disaster relief
  
• Federal food safety inspections and other food safety programs
  
• Child labor laws, the minimum wage, overtime, and other labor protections
  
• Federal civil rights laws
  Indeed, as this paper explains, many state lawmakers even embrace a discredited constitutional doctrine that threatens the union itself.
  

What’s at stake

The Tea Party imagines a constitution focused entirely upon the Tenth Amendment, which provides that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”—which is why their narrow vision of the nation’s power is often referred to as “tentherism.” In layman’s terms, the Tenth Amendment is simply a reminder that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers—such as the power to regulate interstate commerce or establish post offices or make war on foreign nations—and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress’s authority.

Social Security? Gone. Medicare? Gone. Medicaid? Gone. Education? Subject to the whims of communities, some of which will send a generation of children out in a world of technological advancement believing that a giant man in the sky created the world in six days and refusing all evidence to the contrary. E coli in your child's hamburger and salmonella in his lettuce and unregulated pesticide residue in the tomato slice?? All A-OK in Tea Party America. Hurricane destroy yourself? It's your own fault for not living in a stronger house. You're on your own. You don't get your paycheck this week? Tough luck. Neighbor leaving threatening letters in your mailbox because he doesn't like people of your religion or race or sexual orientation? Too bad, you have no federal protection, and if the local police hate you too, you are shit out of luck.

That's Tea Party America -- a mean-spirited, venal, hateful, place of raw social Darwinism; a highly ironic condition given the penchant of Teabaggers to call themselves "Chritians" -- so-called Christians who have obviously never read the Sermon on the Mount.

And yet here we are, with a Republican frontrunner who makes George W. Bush look like Mother Teresa by comparison, and an incumbent Democratic president and a campaign team who utterly refuse to look at how dispirited the people who voted for him are. And so it is highly likely that on January 20, 2013, we will be living in a nation that even those who profess to support the Tea Party agenda won't even recognize. And it will be too late.

So here we are, those of us still living in the reality-based community, with a choice of voting for an inept, out-of-touch president who has sold us out to the Republicans at every turn, or a very dangerous theocratic sociopath. Just how dangerous remains to be seen.

Well, what do you know?

This is what happens when you do the bidding of Republicans. You can outdo even THEIR presidents and they still treat you as if you're Karl Marx.

Eleanor Clift:

Obama has invested so much time demonizing the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich that he has obscured the true narrative of his presidency. Class-war rhetoric aside, Obama is one of the most prolific tax cutters in recent history, with a record that puts him squarely alongside that of George W. Bush.

Crunching the numbers at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, analyst Michael Linden found that if one compares the cost of tax cuts in just the first four years of Bush’s term (2001–04) to the first four years of Obama's (2009–12), Obama’s tax cuts are bigger. The value of the Bush tax cuts were about $475 billion in those first four years, or about 1.1 percent of GDP. Obama’s total about $1 trillion, or 1.6 percent of GDP.

Obama has cut taxes to lower levels than Bush did, says Linden. This is because, of course, Obama thus far has extended all of the Bush tax cuts and then cut taxes on top of that. His original stimulus bill in 2009 had $290 billion in Making Work Pay tax cuts. His speech Thursday night before Congress advocated for another $175 billion in payroll tax cuts, which come on top of $110 billion from last December’s budget deal. Speeded-up expensing for business adds another $10 billion or so.

All in all, Obama is responsible for many billions in tax cuts, yet the popular perception is that he has raised taxes.

Because he has sat silently by while allowing Republicans to call him whatever they want. But of course he can't fight back, that would be unseemly and not in the spirit of Washington comity.

The logical response to this is that obviously tax cuts don't work as economic stimulus and it's time to stop doing it. But that would require courage.

Fear and terror and angry speeches, oh my!

There was one election year in which Mr. Brilliant and I were so fed up with electroal politics that we planned a Jamaican vacation for that week. Oh, we finally succumbed and watched a little bit of the election returns on our tiny TV while ensconced in a beachfront room at the old and alas now defunct T-Water Beach Hotel in Negril, but we managed to escape most of it.

I kind of feel that way about the approaching anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but unfortunately I'm stuck here in New Jersey. It almost seems as if politicians and the nation's security apparatus are happy about this opportunity to once again fan the flames of fear and war once again. Yesterday we heard rumblings of, and today lots of mediaflogging about an "unconfirmed credible threat" against New York City bridges and tunnels this weekend, accompanied by the same footage we see over and over again of guys wrapped in what look like rags, "training" on children's monkeybars. It's astounding that after a decade and over a trillion dollars spent on wars that we were told were an integral part of the so-called "war on terror", we're still in a situation where a bunch of bewildered-looking cops with rifles are going to be posted all around the city looking for...what, exactly? Unless we're prepared to stop and search every vehicle using every bridge and tunnel in the city, how do you stop something?

And again -- a bunch of guys in rags training on monkeybars are going to be whipping people into a panic.

It probably won't be the denizens of the city itself. After all, they don't have the luxury of being afraid. What we ARE going to see, I suspect, is another rush of rhetoric in the flyover states and the south against sharia law, and probably a few anti-Muslim hate crimes as well. But in some ways, these dead-enders who still insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist and that the few hundred Muslims in their state are somehow going to turn their entire state into a caliphate, aren't all that different from the terrorists they fear. The world to which they want to return, the world symbolized by the conspicuous and radical Christianity of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, is gone and can never return. It won't be long before every suburban neighborhood has a gay couple raising their children and a house co-owned by five young people who aren't coupled off and a multigenerational immigarnt family living in it. They can promise to return us to their never-existed TV vision of the 1950's, but unless a Rick Perry is prepared to run the entire country by executive order of forced conversion and incarceration/massacre of those who do not conform (and I'm not saying he wouldn't), the forces of a freedom that isn't represented only to corporate greed are already in play.

Andrew Sullivan has a long essay in Newsweek this week that's part of his ongoing mea culpa about having been such an ardent Bushflogger in the early days after the 9/11 attacks. We can grant him his absolution or not as we please, but one tiny excerpt struck me:

From the streets of Tehran to Cairo, it appears that the young Muslim generation does not want to withdraw from the modern world into a cultural and intellectual blind alley forever. They are too busy on Twitter.

There have always been mass movements. Tiananmen Square took place in 1989, long before anyone even thought of something like Twitter. But social networking has certainly made it easy, and the things we viddy on a computer or iPad screen are a window to a different kind of world. In 2001, the web was still largely a "push" medium; today it's participatory and immediate. When young people can see a different world in front of them, it becomes more difficult to talk them into sacrificing themselves for a vague promise of 72 virgins after death. The terrorist dead-enders are still out there, but if we as a nation can just keep from fucking it up, it's just possible that we might be able to help the protesters and fighters in Egypt and Libya and Yemen and every other country that's trying to shake off the despots we've tolerated in the name of oil to pull their nations, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the present. And then our task will be to keep our own from slding back to the past.

I'm not going to be opining much about the 9/11 anniversary, other than just a comparatively dispassionate piece I'll put up on Sunday about my own experiences on that day, because frankly, after a decade of living in a nation governed by one party that is willing to use fear and terror to further its own agenda and another so terrified of that party that it refues to call the sky blue if the other one says it's yellow, I just don't want to relive the last decade. And while New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has taken a lot of crap for limiting the invited guests to Sunday's memorial to the families of those lost, Sunday really should be for them, not for those of us who only had to watch it on TV and then get on with our lives.

And in the midst of all this, President Please-Like-Me was on the teevee again last night, doing another one of his quasi-populist bellowings in front of a Congress that predictably either sat on its hands of applauded furiously depending on which party they represent. The aforementioned Andrew Sullivan is so far into penitence mode that he actually used the name "Harry Truman" in his critique of the speech, so desperate is he to find something strong and resolute in this president. This was Obama's time to say, "You guys fucked this up, I've spent three years trying to fix it, and you've blocked me every step of the way. I'm sick of dealing with you, now here's what we're going to do." But instead he patronized the crowded under-bus crowd with a few crumb-words like "union" and "polluters" while talking about starving Social Security with "payroll tax cuts" (the better to gut it later in his quest to be Nixon in China) and making sure that already highly-skilled unemployed Americans have NO time to go on interviews for jobs that might pay a living wage by making them work for private companies for the pittance that unemployment pays. But hey, at least American companies will have access to cheap labor....and we'll see how many of them actually hire these people at even one penny more than unemployment pays.

Sullivan isn't the only one sold on the speech, but we know this guy gives good speechifying. But as Digby notes, after a bit of lip service paid to liberal ideals, the rest of it was all about cutting spending, making Medicare unavailable to people between the ages of 65 and 67, and tax cuts that are unlikely to get enough fuel into the demand side of the economy to get this stalled-out engine going again.

Happy Friday, everyone.

Why am I not surprised?

Via Americablog comes this little tidbit that won't be reported in the media:

The Keystone XL pipeline, awaiting a thumbs up or down on a presidential permit, would increase the import of heavy oil from Canada's oil sands to the U.S. by as much as 510,000 barrels a day, if it gets built.



Proponents tout it as a boon to national security that would reduce America's dependence on oil from unfriendly regimes. Opponents say it would magnify an environmental nightmare at great cost and provide only the illusion of national benefit.



What's been left out of the ferocious debate over the pipeline, however, is the prospect that if president Obama allows a permit for the Keystone XL to be granted, he would be handing a big victory and great financial opportunity to Charles and David Koch, his bitterest political enemies and among the most powerful opponents of his clean economy agenda.

Because maybe if he shovels a couple more billion dollars into the Koch brothers' pockets they'll be nice to him.



There is no longer anything this President can do to convince me he represents me one tiny iota.

Well, I guess Boehner "put him in his place"

Check out this screencap, from the front page of Rush Limbaugh's web site (red box added by me, for emphasis):







Yesterday Randi Rhodes played the clip of Limbaugh screeching about how John Boehner has to "put the guy in his place" about the timing of his speech on jobs. When you talk about putting someone in his place, and the person you're talking about is black, it is a racial remark, no matter how red faced and sputtering Limbaugh may be in denial of that fact. But if you still don't believe it, look at the graphic. Look at the photograph, which deliberately depicts the black President of the United States supplicating himself before a white (well, ok, orange) man.



So what does this president do when faced with a lying, hatemongering right-wing radio host demanding that the Speaker "put him in his place"?



He caves, of course (NYT link, emphasis mine):

In a surreal volley of letters, each released to the news media as soon as it was sent, Mr. Boehner rejected a request from the president to address a joint session of Congress next Wednesday at 8 p.m. — the same night that a Republican presidential debate is scheduled.



In an extraordinary turn, the House speaker fired back his own letter to the president saying, in a word, no. Might the president be able to reschedule for the following night, Sept. 8?



For several hours, the day turned into a very public game of chicken.



By late Wednesday night, though, the White House issued a statement saying that because Mr. Obama “is focused on the urgent need to create jobs and grow our economy,” he “welcomes the opportunity to address a joint session of Congress on Thursday, Sept. 8.”



The president had sent in the first volley with his request for a speech next Wednesday night, when Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is scheduled to debate his fellow would-be Republican presidential nominees for the first time.



“No, of course not,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, replied when a reporter asked if the timing of the president’s speech had been meant to play havoc with the Republican debate plans. He said that “one debate of many was no reason not to have a speech when we wanted to have it.”



Mr. Boehner was not budging.



“As the majority leader announced more than a month ago, the House will not be in session until Wednesday, Sept. 7, with votes at 6:30 that evening,” the speaker wrote. “With the significant amount of time, typically more than three hours, that is required to allow for a security sweep of the House chamber before receiving a president, it is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.”



Mr. Boehner did not specify what votes were scheduled for 6:30 that evening that could not be moved. The House calendar shows that members are expected to vote on the “suspension calendar,” generally minor bills like naming a post office.



Congressional historians said Mr. Boehner’s move was unprecedented.



“The Senate Historical Office knows of no instance in which Congress refused the president permission to speak before a joint session of Congress,” Betty K. Koed, associate historian with the Senate, said in an e-mail.

But then, we've never had a black president before, never mind one who has demonstrated over and over and over and over again that there is NO fight with Republicans from which he won't shy away.



Meanwhile, certain corners of the sizable Democratic base that this Administration threw under the bus very early in this presidency have stopped rumbling that perhaps it might stay home in 2012 and like Pavlov's dogs, are already falling for the same "We Suck But He's Crazy" card that Democrats have been playing for two decades:

Perry panic has spread from the conference rooms of Washington, D.C., to the coffee shops of Brooklyn, with the realization that the conservative Texan could conceivably become the 45th president of the United States, a wave of alarm centering around Perry’s drawling, small-town affect and stands on core cultural issues such as women’s rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the separation of church and state.



“His entry in the race is a signal and a wake-up call,” the Rev. Al Sharpton told POLITICO.



Perry, Sharpton said, “is looking to go to the O.K. Corral and start shooting. … Rather than the left get caught sleeping, we better load up, because he is bringing it.”



For Democrats, the pre-Perry GOP primary process was hardly for the faint of heart, as the other candidates have jockeyed to show who dislikes Obama the most. But even as the primary is fought on conservative turf, liberal leaders say they and their constituents see Perry as far worse than your average, hated Republican, and indeed as bad — if not worse — than his hated predecessor in Austin, George W. Bush. And progressives who might have had a hard time getting worked up about Mitt Romney find themselves struggling for superlatives with which to express their fear of a President Perry.

Oh, get real, people. Seriously. Does anyone actually see Barack Obama as some kind of bulwark against the kind of oligarchical theocracy that Rick Perry represents? The entire Republican Party has decided that an oligarchical theocracy is what it wants, and this president can't even stick to his guns about his own Constitutional right to call together a joint session of Congress? And people are looking to him to stop this relentless march backwards to the 13th century that Republicans now represent?



Idiots. They don't even realize that it's already a done deal. The only issue remaining is what the Obama Administration is going to say to try to tell us that massive tax increases on the poor and mandatory conversion to the teachings of R.J. Rushdoony are a GOOD thing.

Mr. President, good luck getting enough disaffected whie males to make up for this

It's REALLY crowded under this bus:

Whites and women are a re-election problem for President Barack Obama. Younger voters and liberals, too, but to a lesser extent.



All are important Democratic constituencies that helped him win the White House in 2008 and whose support he'll need to keep it next year.



An analysis of Associated Press-GfK polls, including the latest survey released last week, shows that Obama has lost ground among all those groups since he took office. The review points to his vulnerabilities and probable leading targets of his campaign as he seeks to assemble a coalition diverse enough to help him win re-election in tough economic times.

He had such a coalition in 2008. And the minute he took office, he threw us all under this bus so he could pursue his love for conservative white people.



How's that working out for him?

White independent voters, who divided their support evenly between Obama and McCain in 2008, may be the president's biggest challenge now. Just 3 in 10 white independents say Obama deserves to be re-elected and only 41 percent say he understands the problems of people like them.



Obama didn't win the largest share of white voters in 2008, when they made up 74 percent of the electorate. Still, his inroads were enough to beat McCain.



Fifty-six percent of all whites approved of how he was doing his job in the first three months of his presidency. But that support has fallen, with only 36 percent now liking how he's doing his job, while 59 say Obama deserves to be voted out of office.



In 2008, Obama won the backing of most whites in the Northeast and was competitive in the Midwest and West, outperforming the previous two Democratic nominees. Now, majorities of whites in every region but the Northeast say he deserves to lose in 2012 and that he is not a strong leader.



The outlook is negative for Obama among white voters in the Midwest and West, regions where so many electoral votes are at stake.



More than 6 in 10 white voters who did not graduate say the president deserves to be voted from office, while 53 percent of white college graduates say as much.

Real high-percentage move there, dude.

Now we'll see what Obama is made of

Does Barack Obama care about anything he ran on in 2008, or is he just another shill for big money interests, especially Big Oil? We will soon find out:

Already, more than a thousand people have signed up to be arrested over two weeks beginning Aug. 20 — the biggest display of civil disobedience in the environmental movement in decades and one of the largest nonviolent direct actions since the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle back before Sept. 11. (Among the first 500 to sign up, the biggest cohort was born in the Truman administration, followed closely by FDR babies and Eisenhower kids. These seniors contradict the stereotype of greedy geezers who care only about their own future.)

The issue is simple: We want the president to block construction of Keystone XL, a pipeline that would carry oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. We have, not surprisingly, concerns about potential spills and environmental degradation from construction of the pipeline. But those tar sands are also the second-largest pool of carbon in the atmosphere, behind only the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. If we tap into them in a big way, NASA climatologist James Hansen explained in a paper issued this summer, the emissions would mean it’s “essentially game over” for the climate. That’s why the executive directors of many environmental groups and 20 of the country’s leading climate scientists wrote letters asking people to head to Washington for the demonstrations. In scientific terms, it’s as close to a no-brainer as you can get.

But in political terms it may turn out to be a defining moment of the Obama years.

That’s because, for once, the president will get to make an important call all by himself. He has to sign a certificate of national interest before the border-crossing pipeline can be built. Under the relevant statutes, Congress is not involved, so he doesn’t need to stand up to the global-warming deniers calling the shots in the House.

But the president does need to stand up to the fossil fuel industry, which has done its best to influence the decision. Since the State Department plays a role in recommending a decision, the main pipeline company helpfully hired the former national deputy director of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign as its lead lobbyist. WikiLeaks documents emerged recently showing U.S. envoys conspiring with the oil industry to win favorable media coverage for tar sands oil. If you were a cynic, you’d say the fix was in.

Still, the final call rests with Barack Obama, who said the night that he clinched the Democratic nomination in June 2008 that his ascension would mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Now he gets a chance to prove that he meant it.

We have our first clue: The author of this article, Bill McKibben, was arrested outside the White House today:

Police arrested 65 environmentalists outside the White House Saturday as they staged a demonstration urging President Obama to block a proposed pipeline that would bring oil from Canada’s oil sands projects to Gulf Coast refineries.



People arrested include Bill McKibben, the prominent climate activist and founder of 350.org; Jane Hamsher, who founded the popular liberal blog Firedoglake; and Gus Speth, whose career includes co-founding the Natural Resources Defense Council and chairing the White House Council on Environmental Quality in the Carter Administration.

We have yet to see Barack Obama stand up to any industry, so its hard to imagine him standing up to the petroleum industry.



To keep up with this, visit Tar Sands Action.

Friday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

I've alluded multiple times to this pathological need Barack Obama seems to have to try to ingratiate himself with those who despise him, but today's honoree Nicole Belle nails this fatal character flaw of his perfectly.

Money quote:

It is not farfetched to believe that Barack Obama has spent pretty much his entire 50 years trying to make people who find him fearful comfortable. Even his white grandmother admitted to being nervous if an African American male approached her, an attitude that could not help but affect him in his impressionable years. Add to that someone who appears constitutionally conflict-averse (his pre-politician career as a community organizer was to get people to work together, not fight it out), and you have the makings of a person ill-suited for the divisive environment of Washington and the full-contact political battles that have to be fought.

And we've seen that tendency manifest itself as a politician who is always willing to bend over backwards to those who will not trust him, whether from their own innate racism or from their own personal agenda. There's no question that racism plays a much greater role than liberal white America may have wanted to acknowledge, although our minority friends and colleagues would probably say "duh!". One little moment of expressed irritation will give rise to literally hundreds of thousands of reports in the media and right wing blogs/publications/foundations of the angry black man. So rather than play to those disposed to give him the benefit of the doubt, Obama rather tries to win over those who will never do so.

Do you know what I want in a president? I want for once someone who's worked on his childhood issues in a therapist's office instead of feeling he has to do it on a national stage.

We can't say we weren't warned

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest, November 2007.

Angry Black Lady over at Balloon Juice is taking the White House's denials at face value, but if you want to say that the White House's position on Social Security is unchanged, I have to ask: Unchanged from when? 2007?

I think we all know how this is going to play out

In 2003, we saw a president who wanted to prove something to his father to resolve his childhood conflict take us into a completely unnecessary war, one which has cost us trillions in national wealth and thousands of lives.

Today we have a president so invested in proving he is no threat to the mainstream that he is going to inevitably allow the nation to succumb to a renewed recession -- or worse, simply because of his own need to belief that he can somehow transcend deep-seated differences.

Krugman, in the New York Times today:

The federal debt limit is a strange quirk of U.S. budget law: since debt is the consequence of decisions about taxing and spending, and Congress already makes those taxing and spending decisions, why require an additional vote on debt? And traditionally the debt limit has been treated as a minor detail. During the administration of former President George W. Bush — who added more than $4 trillion to the national debt — Congress, with little fanfare, voted to raise the debt ceiling no less than seven times.

So the use of the debt ceiling to extort political concessions is something new in American politics. And it seems to have come as a complete surprise to Mr. Obama.

Last December, after Mr. Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts — a move that many people, myself included, viewed as in effect a concession to Republican blackmail — Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic asked why the deal hadn’t included a rise in the debt limit, so as to forestall another hostage situation (my words, not Mr. Ambinder’s).

The president’s response seemed clueless even then. He asserted that “nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse,” and that he was sure that John Boehner, as speaker of the House, would accept his “responsibilities to govern.”

Well, we’ve seen how that worked out.

Now, Mr. Obama was right about the dangers of failing to raise the debt limit. In fact, he understated the case, by focusing only on financial confidence.

Not that the confidence issue is trivial. Failure to raise the debt limit — which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt — could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

But confidence isn’t the only thing at stake. Failure to raise the debt limit would also force the U.S. government to make drastic, immediate spending cuts, on a scale that would dwarf the austerity currently being imposed on Greece. And don’t believe the nonsense about the benefits of spending cuts that has taken over much of our public discourse: slashing spending at a time when the economy is deeply depressed would destroy hundreds of thousands and quite possibly millions of jobs.

So failure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.

Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.

So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

And the reason Republicans are doing this is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again. They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.

This fits nicely into what Bernie Sanders was saying on the Randi Rhodes Show the other day -- that the moneyed interests that have taken over our government really do not care what is left behind after their pillage, because they are already looking ahead to China and India. The notion that if the U.S. defaults on its debt, Wall Street will suffer too has been held up as a talisman against the assured destruction being held over our heads by the Republicans. Believe me, the big investors have already taken care of this in regard to their own interests...and investors who have less than billions of dollars don't even figure into this equation. Your 401(k)? Of no importance to these people whatsoever. Families being tossed into the streets? Old people dying in the gutters? Trivial. Because when people are as evil as those who currently dominate the Republican Party and their billionaire masters, it's impossible to fight them until you at least recgnize them.

In his 1983 book People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, the late M. Scott Peck referred to scapegoating as the primary manifesation of evil:

A predominant characteristic, however, of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because they consider themselves beyond reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to serve their self-image of perfection.

It's easy to see why people like this take Ayn Rand as their political guru, for Randian Objectivism reinforces their sense of "specialness."

Peck goes on:

Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault.

[...]

Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat...

Look at the the Koch Republican Party's scapegoats are: Women, especially women who want reproductive autonomy. Immigrants. Liberals. Black people. George Soros. Gays. The list goes on and on. This is the Peck model made real -- evil people scapegoating others so as to pass the "hot potato" of evil onto someone else.

What Peck didn't address in his analysis was greed. The book's primary example of evil is the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre, so he thinks of evil primarily in terms of war. He presumably would make the same connection of evil with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. But the kind of evil that would deliberately destroy the economy of a once-great nation purely out of greed, because there's another emerging market just across the sea that is just waiting for exploitation is something of which even Peck never dreamed.

Nor, apparently, has Barack Obama.

Even in his speech the other day, the one that prompted the hacktacular Mark Halperin to call him a dick, Obama still remained hopeful that the Republicans would ultimately step back from the brink and compromise. When one is simply misguided, but not evil, it's impossible to fathom party leaders who would destroy an entire country at the behest of the people who finance their campaigns. But that is what Barack Obama is dealing with, and that is why if he doesn't recognize pretty damn soon that what he is dealing with is not simple political differences, but a particularly vile form of evil, then we are all completely fucked.

I think we know already how this will play out.

Osama bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams

If you didn't see it last night, watch this segment from Rachel Maddow last night, in which she explains that Osama bin Laden's goal wasn't about Islam, or a caliphate, or even about U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia. No, like most rich kids whose wealth came from family money (including the one who occupied the White House when he attacked the US), his concern was about money:

Note in particular the Bin Laden quote from October 2004:

We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy ... as for the economic deficit, it has reached astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars. The real loser is you. The American people and their economy.

Think about where we are now: deficts as far as the eye can see -- deficits that the very people who used to wear 9/11 around their necks as "wingnut whistles" until a black Democratic president succeeded where THEIR guy failed (or didn't even try, as he ADMITTED barely six months after the attacks, when a visit to lower Manhattan still resulted in burning eyes) now insist have to be paid on the backs of the old and the poor. Think about the cost of two wars, one of which was sold to Americans as being for their safety when it had nothing to do with that. Think about the money shoveled into the pockets of Halliburton executives (including those of the then-Vice President) and other contractors -- unaccountable money resulting from no-bid contracts. Think about the spending for security theatre; for beefed-up patrols, for x-ray scanners at airports designed to make Americans accept being treated like criminals so that they can "feel safe." Think of the society we live in now as a result of a few hundred thousand dollars of expense by a guy who's essentially no different from Paris Hilton, except Paris Hilton buys chihuahuas and lends her name to perfume and likes to go to parties instead of pretending to be a holy man while living in a mansion and cynically recruiting the phony tough and the crazy brave to kill themselves for Allah.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Bill Maher was fired from his Politically Incorrect show on ABC for straying from the "terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center are cowards" line, pointing out that to take control of a jet you don't know how to fly and steer it into a skyscraper is many things, all of them horrible, but one thing it is NOT is cowardly. What IS cowardly is sitting in a Pakistan mansion, or even in an Afghan cave, knowing you can GO TO a mansion any time you want to and take a nice shower and have a good meal, knowing you have millions of dollars at your disposal, and let other people do your dirty work.

George W. Bush decided it was Saddam Hussein who was worth the effort, not Osama Bin Laden. Six months after the attacks, Bush had lost interest in the bright shiny object he'd vowed to "smoke out" "dead or alive" barely six months earlier. That Bin Laden was living in comfort in Pakistan ought perhaps to begin questioning again just what DID happen in Tora Bora, and whether Osama was really the black sheep of the Bin Laden family (which has become more difficult to believe, now that we know that HE was the one they all relied on for money), and why he was able to (or allowed to) escape.

Most of us felt after the 9/11 attacks that Afghanistan was a "just war" designed to bring the mastermind and financier of the attacks to justice one way or another. Over time, as we've installed a corrupt puppet in Hamid Karzai, and wandered in the desert for the last ten years, even that war has become just another American misadventure that is bankrupting us just as surely as the Soviets were bankrupted in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- while fighting Osama Bin Laden's minions, who were called mujahadeen then, and also called "our allies".

Many of us who weren't in thrall to the tough talk of the whiny little faux cowboy in the White House knew that Iraq was NOT a just war, that it was unnecessary, and that it was related to either oil (which has turned out to be true) or to George W. Bush's psychosexual issues with his father.

One war that may have started out just and has turned into a quagmire and another that never should have been fought in the first place. Both are wars from which we seem unable to extricate ourselves. Between the wounded and the dead, the body count of American servicepeople is approaching Vietnam levels. And that is the second great tragedy of 9/11 and what Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush have wrought (and what Barack Obama seems bound and determined to continue).

Captain Shannon P. Meehan writes in the New York Times what it's like to be a veteran of these wars:

As I sifted through the responses of my friends on social networks, I read comments like, “Great news. If only we hadn’t gotten off course with Iraq for so long.” Or things like, “Could have gotten him earlier if we hadn’t wasted our time in the illegal war in Iraq.”

All this made me realize just how disconnected I am from the killing of Bin Laden. The more I reflect upon it, the less I feel a part of it, and the less I feel that I was ever any part of our war against terrorism, in the public’s eye at least.

My war — the Iraq war — is being remembered as quite a different war than the “war on terror.” Its narrative, shaped by the media and the general public, breaks dramatically from that of the war in Afghanistan and the pursuit of terrorists around the globe. The Iraq war has become the “mistake war,” one so many critics feel we should have never been a part of.

I have come to realize that, regardless of my own personal beliefs and opinions, this is how the Iraq war will be remembered. And this brings me to question myself, my efforts and my own worth. How will our achievements and sacrifices in Iraq be remembered? Will all that I did while I served be nothing more than a mistake?

The more I travel and speak about my personal experiences, the more I feel the shifting cultural memory of this war. I’ve felt it devolve over time in those moments when I am thanked not for keeping us safe from terror, but rather shown appreciation mixed with pity for having had to fight in this “illegal”war.

I fear now that we soldiers will be remembered for being in the wrong war, fighting to bring the wrong man, Saddam Hussein, to justice. Consider the difference between the public reception of the killing of Bin Laden and the trial and execution of Hussein, a man responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers as well as years of oppression and systematic degradation of a land. The latter was met with questions and controversy. But the death of Bin Laden, a man who dared to bring horrific violence onto the shores of our country, has been met only with approval. Those differences are telling.

So, as much as I want to feel a part of this moment, to feel some sense that I contributed to it, I do not. As a veteran of the Iraq war, I do not feel entitled to any sort of meaningful connection to this achievement. Years of political and public criticism of the Iraq war has pushed me to believe that I did not fight terror, but rather a phantom.

After Vietnam, we hoped that this country would learn from that mistake and not enter into unnecessary wars ever again. We can still argue about Afghanistan, but as much as we recognize the honor the service and the self-sacrifice of Captain Meehan and others, we cannot face our feelings and our guilt about his feelings by recasting Iraq as some kind of noble cause when it so clearly was not. What we DO owe this man is again, a promise (this time to be kept) that we will not put his successors into a war without reason again, no matter how raw we are emotionally.

Such is the legacy of Osama Bin Laden: His enemy nation is on its knees, wracked by debt and declining standards of living and corporate greed and inequality. A nation whose citizens jump at the mere mention of Al Qaeda to the point that we have become willing to give up all of our privacy just to be able to believe, however falsely, that it won't happen again. A nation in which a Congressman can call McCarthyesque hearings demanding that people who are members of the religion Bin Laden professed to practice to somehow "prove" their loyalty to this country. A nation in which a President whose name is associated with Islam is hounded about what constitutes a valid birth certificate by people with no knowledge of legal documentation.

The demonstration in the street show that while George W. Bush wasn't "all that concerned" with Osama Bin Laden, Americans clearly were. We may be uncomfortable with the precedent of assassination (which may at some point in the future be used indiscriminately by another George Bush trying to prove his manhood to his father), and this does not mean the end of Al Qaeda or even of terrorism coming from the Middle East (as opposed to the terrorism brewing in our own heartland). But if we do not take time out from the celebrations and look at what we have allowed Osama Bin Laden to do to our country, not a decade ago, but in the decade since, then we deserve to continue our slow slog into oblivion.

More from Ezra Klein.

Obama channels his inner Colbert

This is some funny shit. He should do this more often.

Except there are idiots out there who will take this as an admission that he was born in Kenya.

Barack Obama thinks he's Nixon in China

I have to wonder about a Democrat who seems bound and determined to go down in history as The President Who Gutted the New Deal.

Gaius Publius:

How should a progressive think about Obama? Just in the last few news cycles, several items scream for attention.

First this, the budget cave, Paul Krugman's observation ("Celebrating Defeat", my emphasis):

Ezra Klein gets this right, I think; it’s one thing for Obama to decide that it was better to give in to Republican hostage-taking than draw a line in the sand; it’s another for him to celebrate the result. Yet that’s just what he did. ... It’s worth noting that this follows just a few months after another big concession, in which he gave in to Republican demands for tax cuts. The net effect of these two sets of concessions is, of course, a substantial increase in the deficit.

Cave Week 1 was the Lame Duck for the ages, in which Obama promised never to give in to the Bush tax cuts for the super-rich, then gave in. That blew a multi-trillion dollar hole in the long-term budget, which spending cuts are expected to fix.

Now we have Cave Week 2, Obama vs. the Teabags, in which the Teabags win big and Obama does a victory dance.

Next we find this, Obama vs. the Entitlements, a "major speech" on Wednesday, via Teagan Goddard (my emphasis again):

President Obama plans to deliver "a major speech" on Wednesday laying out an aggressive plan for deficit reduction -- including reform of entitlements, such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Cave Week 3? "Reform" of Social Security by Obama will mean the death of the Democratic Party, and yet Obama wants it bad.

So which is it? Was Obama always a Republican Trojan Horse, or is his childhood baggage of trying to straddle two racial worlds without pissing off either so pervasive that he will throw our most vulnerable citizens out into the cold in a vain and ultimately futile effort to continue his hopeless quest?

Anything...ANYTHING to try to make Republicans like him

This is really getting pathological:

President Obama’s budget will propose cutting in half the program that helps low-income families and senior citizens and disabled pay their heating and air conditioning bills, according to U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who signed a letter Friday urging the president to change his mind.

The cut would drop about 500,000 New Jersey residents from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program program that assisted nearly 1 million state residents last year, Menendez said in a statement released Friday.

"It defies common sense to shut off the heat to seniors and low-income families,’’ Menendez said. "Cutting these resources is colder than this winter. We need to get our fiscal house in order. But we should do it responsibly.’’

It wasn't that long ago that Barack Obama signed off on continued tax cuts for billionaires. And now he wants the poor to freeze in the dark. No sacrifice is too great for Barack Obama's need to have Republicans like him. He appears to care not one whit about the people who actually voted for him, it's all about the Republicans.

I'm about to send an extra $200 to the fuel oil company because we've gone through a lot more oil this year than usual because of this year's cold and snow...and we need the tank filled about three weeks earlier than in most years. I'm lucky in that I can absorb it. But there are many families in this country who can't. And now a Democratic President is about to pull the rug out from under them.

So which is it?

Has Barack Obama just had enough of his thankless job and is essentially saying "Take this job and shove it", or is he really living in so much of a bubble that he can't hear anyone but Republicans and Washington pundits?

It's one or the other.

OR, he was a Republican mole the whole time and it's all just kabuki.

Because unless we are all being misled somehow, it's very likely that in his upcoming State of the Union address, the President Of All Wall Street is going to talk about "tough choices" and "having an adult conversation" and "belt tightening" -- all in the context of cutting Social Security.

President Barack Obama's apparent willingness to consider cuts in Social Security benefits may be winning him points with Washington elites, but it's killing him with voters, who see the program as inviolate and may start to wonder what the Democratic Party stands for, if not for Social Security.

That's the conclusion of three top progressive pollsters who spoke to reporters Wednesday at a briefing sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, the Century Foundation and Demos.

"For the public, cutting benefits is the problem, not the solution," said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates.

As a result, the pollsters said that any Democrat seeking elected office in 2012 should be begging Obama not to say anything about Social Security cuts in his State of the Union address later this month.

A post-election poll by Celinda Lake's Lake Research Partners found that, by a margin of 3 percentage points, Americans now trust Republicans in Congress more than Democrats when it comes to Social Security -- surely the first time since the program became a signature issue for the Democratic Party in the 1930s.

The poll found confidence in Democrats on the issue dropping 14 points just since January 2007, accompanied by a 13-point increase for Republicans.

The public favors congressional Republicans over Obama on Social Security by an even larger 6-point margin. Obama's 26-percent rating is not only less than half Bill Clinton's (53 percent), it's even lower than that of George W. Bush (37 percent), whose proposal to privatize the program went down in flames.

Imagine that. The very people who would have signed on to George W. Bush's privatization plan to hand over Social Security to Lloyd Blankfein now poll better than Obama does on Social Security.

I'm starting to long for the good old days when Bill Clinton wanted EVERYONE to love him. This guy only wants REPUBLICANS and Wall Street investment bankers to love him.

It was one thing when he threw the progressives under the bus. But alienate everyone who is over the age of 30 (and yes, young people are also concerned about their own future benefits) and it's a sure one-way ticket back to Cubs games. As Blue Girl noted on Tuesday, the entire concept of the Social Security Trust Fund was designed to get the elephant that is the baby boom generation through the snake, and then with a better balance of workers to retirees, it can go back to the pay-as-you-go system it was before WWII veterans were told to Be Fruitful And Multiply after returning home. But since most people think of Social Security as a bank account anyway, it's far easier for people to envision a passbook with only fifty cents in it than the complexities of how a system that's worked for over a half a decade will work once everyone who's over 45 today meets all their old pets at the Rainbow Bridge.

So in his effort to be Nixon in China, and therefore perhaps part of his quest to become a throwaway line uttered by Zachary Quinto in a future Star Trek movie, Barack Obama seems not content to try to suck up to politicians who want to "repeal" him by returning to the Golden Bushian Age of Deregulation and ensuring that old people who lose their retirement savings to his good friends at investment banks and brokerage firms have NO money to live on in their old age.

So which is it?

I don't know why they hate him so much, he's doing exactly what they want

I really don't know what this right-wing jihad is against President Obama. He's attempted to be the agent of a health insurance industry shakedown of every American citizen (until a Federal court in Virginia struck that down yesterday). He's kept all of the worst offenses of the Bush Administration in terms of the so-called war on terror and also on civil liberties, he's given massive sums of cash to the banking industry so they can pay huge bonuses to banking executives. He's keeping us in Afghanistan, probably indefinitely (despite the literal last admonition of the late Richard Holbrooke), while the true Bush/Cheney agenda there begins.

And best of all, he's bound and determined to do what no Republican could do -- gut Social Security:

OBAMA: And so the payroll tax provision that is included in this package is going to help spark economic growth that will help. Now, it doesn't solve our medium- and long-term problems, so we're going to still have to make some very tough decisions — and these, too, are going to be unpopular.

And I promise, I'm going to get criticism from Democrats and Republicans throughout the year in terms of the choices that I am going to be forcing Congress to take a square look at. Because, look, the fact of the matter is that for a decade now, we have had the tendency to think that we can keep on having all the services we want and we keep them — can keep cutting taxes as much as we want and that somehow things are going to magically balance out.

The American people understand that's not the case, and so we're going to have to be responsible about thinking: What are the programs we don't need, that don't contribute to growth, don't contribute to competitiveness, don't make sure our kids are — aren't contributing to making sure that our kids are learning and able to compete in this 21st century economy, and which things are vital investments that we have to make?

And that conversation is going to be one that can't just happen in Washington; it's going to happen all across the country. And I'm looking forward to leading that conversation.

INSKEEP: Won't Republicans argue — and, in fact, won't reality argue that any cuts will have to be even deeper because this package that you're pushing for now will mean there's even less government revenue?

OBAMA: Actually, I think that if you talk to economists, both conservative and liberal, what they'll say is the problem is not next year. The problem is, how are we dealing with our medium-term debt and deficit, and how are we dealing with our long-term debt and deficit? And most of that has to do with entitlements, particularly Social Security and Medicaid.

We've made some progress as a consequence of my health care bill in identifying areas where we can start bending the cost curve on health care. But we're going to have some more work to do across the budget.

I think there's going to have to be a fundamentally different approach to things. And I described earlier what I think that approach has to be. It's not an issue of big government versus small government. It's an issue of smart government.

But there are very few people who think that we would be better off if we've got a contracting economy or economy that's growing very little over the next year — that that somehow is going to be good for our deficit.

INSKEEP: Let me ask you about two or three years out. I'm thinking of the 1990s when President Clinton famously said, "The era of big government is over."

Because of the medium- and long-term need to restrain or cut spending, are you going to be in a position where the era of big government is going to be over again; there's going to have to be a fundamentally different approach to things?

OBAMA: I think there's going to have to be a fundamentally different approach to things. And I described earlier what I think that approach has to be. It's not an issue of big government versus small government. It's an issue of smart government.

You know, when — when families sit around the kitchen table, they say to themselves, what are the things we have to have? College education for our kids. Paying our mortgage. Getting the roof repaired. A new boiler. What are the things that would be nice to have? A vacation. Eating out. Some new clothes. And if they can afford it, they'd buy things that they'd like to have. But the first thing they do is take care of the things that we have to have.

And under that category, I'd put things like research and development, education, making sure that we're sending our kids to college, rebuilding our infrastructure to compete on the 21st century, making sure that this country is safe.

The other stuff, then, we have to debate and figure out, can we get by with a little bit less in some of these other spending categories? And that's going to be a tough discussion, but it's one I’m confident we can have.

You'll — when — when we look at the deficit and the debt, I — I think it's important to understand this doesn't need to be Armageddon. This — this is not a situation where we've got to slash and burn everything. It does mean we've got to make choices. And it means that discussions have to be serious and they've got to be based on fact.

We — we're not going to be able to deal with our deficit just by eliminating foreign aid, for example, which some people suggest. Well, you know what? That only accounts for 1 percent of our budget. It's not going to happen just because we eliminate earmarks. I happen to think that that's a bad way of doing business, but earmarks account for 1 percent or less of the federal budget.

We've got to look at a whole range of things — where the money goes. And that includes entitlements; that includes defense; that includes a whole host of discretionary spending where we can probably do more and do it smarter with less money, if we are actually making some tough choices.

If anyone actually believes that defense is going to take this hit, guess again. The defense industry puts too much money into the pockets of Washington politicians to take a hit. And isn't it funny how Social Security is now called an "entitlement" -- as if no one pays into it but expects a handout.

Tell you what: Give me the almost $200K that I and my employers have put into Social Security over my working life, with accumulated returns according to the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1975, and I'll shut up about Social Security.

Obama may be the uniter Bush could never be

...except the unison is about what a terrible job he's doing.

Olbermann, last night:

The left isn't all in unison, however. Randi Rhodes made a compelling case on her show yesterday FOR the tax cut deal, but she's betting on this being enough of an economic stimulus to bring the economy enough into recovery in time for the 2012 election. She's also not taking into account how the "payroll tax holiday" that's part of this deal is yet another means of starving Social Security, all the better to further the Obama plan to gut it to the bone. And Lawrence O'Donnell desccribed it as the best deal Obama was going to get. Still, it's hard to see Obama's near-complete capitulation to the Republicans, when taken in the context of the health care sellout, as anything other than further fuel for the notion that Obama is simply amassing chits to be cashed in for a fat Wall Street job at the end of his term -- which after his smackdown of the very people who voted for him yesterday, seems more likely than ever to be coming sooner rather than later.

If this is the best deal Obama could get, then it's time to pack up any notion of this country as a place of opportunity, of anything other than a medeival-style plutocracy, with the wealthy amassing ever more riches and EVERYONE else scrambling for scraps:

The tentative deal includes a two-year patch for the alternative minimum tax, a reduction in the payroll tax and a plan to reinstate the estate tax with lower rates and higher exemptions than in 2009 — all of which will offer far more savings for high earners than those in the low- or middle-income bracket.

The wealthiest Americans will also reap tax savings from the proposal’s plan to keep the cap on dividend and capital gains taxes at 15 percent, well below the highest rates on ordinary income.

And negotiators have agreed that the estimated $900 billion cost of the cuts will simply be added to the deficit — not covered by reductions in spending or increases in other taxes. That is good news for hedge fund managers and private equity investors, who appear to have withstood an effort to get them to pay more by eliminating a quirk in the tax code that allows most of their income to be taxed at just 15 percent.

In fact, the only groups likely to face a tax increase are those near the bottom of the income scale — individuals who make less than $20,000 and families with earnings below $40,000.

[snip]

The proposal does not include an extension of Mr. Obama’s signature tax cut, the Making Work Pay credit, which provided a credit of up to $400 for individuals and $800 for families of low and moderate income. Instead, the plan creates a one-year reduction in Social Security payroll taxes, which are generally levied on the first $106,800 of income. For an individual earning $110,000, that provision would reduce payroll taxes by $2,136.

Although the $120 billion payroll tax reduction offers nearly twice the tax savings of the credit it replaces, it will nonetheless lead to higher tax bills for individuals with incomes below $20,000 and families that make less than $40,000. That is because their payroll tax savings are less than the $400 or $800 they will lose from the Making Work Pay credit.

“It will come to a few dollars a week,” said Roberton Williams, an analyst at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, “but it is an increase.”

To the wealthiest Americans, however, an assortment of breaks is available.

If Obama thinks that raising taxes on the very people in the flyover states who have joined up with the teabaggers in their rage at government are going to vote for him after seeing THEIR OWN taxes go up, then he's even more delusional than we thought.

UPDATE: Go read Nancy Altman (Chairman of the Board of the Pension Rights Center) over at FDL about what the "payroll tax holiday" means for the future of Social Security.

These are real people, Mr. President

These are the people whom you are sacrificing on the altar of "bipartisanship":

Is your need to prove that you're the NICE black man so deep-seated that you will allow Republicans throw these people out on the street? If the answer to that is yes, than pack up and go home. Just go home. Led Biden run things for a while and let the chips fall where they may in 2012.

Go back to Chicago, or move to New York and call in all your markers to Wall Street for that eight-figure job you know you can ask for in exchange for continuing to hand the store over to the bankers. Orszag might even be in a position to hire you. Yes, you'll be known forever as a quitter -- right up there with Sarah Palin -- except YOUR job may in fact BE unmanageable. But at least what's left of the middle class in this country after thirty years of Reaganomics might have a fighting chance, at least for the next two years, until people's angry is so red-hot that they put someone in charge who will accelerate the path of middle class destruction. And I'm sorry, Mr. President, but the people in this video, and the hundreds of thousands more who don't appear in it, and the many, many others, some in my own industry, for whom the axe will fall in the next year, are more important than you are.

You know the saying, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way"? Following is what you've been doing. Following is doing nothing to prevent the pulling the rug out from under tens of thousands of people EVERY SINGLE DAY. Either lead or get the fuck out of the way and make room for someone who does.

(via)

Krugman throws in the towel on Barack Obama

I'd pretty much thrown in the towel after health care "reform". I've realized for a long time that what we have in the White House is yet another guy replaying his childhood tape loops on a national stage. George W. Bush spent eight years and the nation's economy and reputation trying to simultaneously prove that his dick was bigger than his father's, and simultaneously gain that father's approval. Barack Obama seems bound and determined to spend four years (because it's impossible to believe that having completely alienated his base AND independence, he'll get eight) trying to prove to an intransigent Republican Party that would hang him by a rope from a tree if it thought it could get away with it that he's not one of those THREATENING, MEAN black men. No, indeedy, he's a NICE black man, one who won't knife them in a dark alley. And he seems bound and determined to spend four years and what's left of the nation's economy and reputation trying to prove that.

And that's the CHARITABLE interpretation.

One of the less charitable ones is that 56% of American voters were hoodwinked by a guy who's more like the Republicans than anyone even now wants to believe; a guy who BELIEVES in torture and assassination; a guy who BELIEVES in tax cuts for the wealthy and screw everyone else; a guy who WANTS endless war; a guy who is all about doing the bidding of corporations BECAUSE HE WANTS TO; a guy who feels every bit as "icky" about Teh Gays as John Edwards did, only who lacks even the courage that a weasel like John Edwards had to admit it; a guy who WANTS to gut Social Security and Medicare; a guy who decided to become president as a kind of ruling class internship; in which he spends four years doing Wall Street's bidding in exchange for a nice eight-figure gig upon leaving office.

The even less charitable, tinfoiley-scarey one is that American Presidents have absolutely zero power; that there are shadowy figures who really run things who sit every new president down and lay down the law. And that if he (or she) wants his/her children to survive to adulthood and not be gunned down on live television to be replayed over and over again on 24-hour cable news, the line is to be toed and their bidding is to be done without question. And that bidding is to wreck the middle class, push everyone who doesn't sit at their table into grinding poverty, and expand military adventures without end to feed the defense contracting beast. On the right they would call these shadowy figures "George Soros". There's FAR more evidence of this from right-wing corporate circles, what with the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch. But if such a shadow government exists, it's not run by anyone that we have ever heard of. It wouldn't be shadowy in that case.

But whatever the deal is with Barack Obama, there's no denying now that there is no game of 11-dimensional chess going on, -- that he really does know what he's doing and we should just trust him. No, it's clear that what we have to look forward to is two more years of utter sellouts to a lunatic right-wing House of Representatives and corporate interests, followed by an election in which a despairing public forgets what a grifter the Wackjob from Wasilla is and puts her in the White House.

If Obama has lost Krugman, he's lost America:

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.

About that pay freeze: the president likes to talk about “teachable moments.” Well, in this case he seems eager to teach Americans something false.

The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications. And, anyway, employee pay is only a small fraction of federal expenses; even cutting the payroll in half would reduce total spending less than 3 percent.

So freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It’s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don’t know anything about budget realities. The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit.

[snip]

Mr. Obama’s pay ploy might, just might, have been justified if he had used the announcement of a freeze as an occasion to take a strong stand against Republican demands — to declare that at a time when deficits are an important issue, tax breaks for the wealthiest aren’t acceptable.

But he didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have.

[snip]

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

Krugman is more charitable than I am. He implies that there ever was a purpose other than what we're seeing.

(Obama has lost the Kossacks, too. And yeah, what Yellow Dog said.)

Well, that worked out well, didn't it.

Remember when the White House expended everything it had in order to try to woo Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to vote for health care reform, because Barack Obama believed that if two Republican Senators voted for his sop to the insurance companies (which in no way satisfies their gaping maw), that made it "bipartisan"? That's why single-payer never even merited a passing mention, and a public option was taken off the table before anyone could discuss it.

Well, here's how that worked out:

ens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are co-signing an amicus, or friend of the court, brief to be submitted to the federal court in Florida that will hear a constitutional challenge of the federal health care reform law.

The brief was initiated by U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and boasts signatures of 30 Senate Republicans. The lawsuit was brought by the attorneys general for several states and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a small-business trade organization.

At issue is a requirement that U.S. citizens purchase health insurance beginning in 2014 or face a fine -- known as the "individual mandate."

Snowe was the only Republican to support any version of health care reform, but ultimately voted against the final bill. The version Snowe supported did include an individual mandate, but her aides said she opposed that provision and hoped to change it through the amendment process.

Snowe was concerned with the concept of government mandating an individual purchase of something, especially because she did not believe health insurance would be sufficiently affordable, her office has said.

Snowe and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., tried to amend the reform to reduce the number of people subject to the mandate and allow Congress more flexibility to review the mandate altogether, but it failed in committee.

"The individual mandate has no place in a health care reform bill unless and until affordable health insurance is available for all Americans," Snowe said in a release about the brief.

"We must take seriously the gravity of this imperious and intrusive government mandate and repeal the individual mandate before millions of Americans are forced to purchase health care coverage that they neither want nor can afford."

Supporters of the individual mandate say it will help keep health insurance costs down because it spreads risk: Those who decline to buy insurance are often the healthiest, while those who buy it are often need it most and, therefore, cost more to cover.

Snowe, one of the senators most likely to vote across party lines, faces re-election in 2012. Many expect she will face a strong primary challenge, given the experience of several incumbent Republicans in the 2010 election cycle.

Some also speculate she's trying to improve her conservative credentials by signing her name to the court challenge.

Collins and Snowe are going to get Tea Partied right out of the Senate, as is anyone who dares to put the good of the nation, or even its national security, above Mitch McConnell's stated primary agenda of ensuring that Obama is a one-term president.

Meanwhile, Obama continues to preach the gospel of conciliation with these people, who would murder him with their own hands if they thought they could get away with it.