Let's resolve for 2009 to never, ever listen to conservative economists ever again

This one comes to us via the inimitable Driftglass, and as you watch these bozos giggling at Peter Schiff like Maureen Dowd making fun of Barack Obama, you understand why the word "douchenozzle" was coined:

Saturday Big Blue Smurf Bloggin: What They Said

I really wish that someone would teach some basic geography to television's pundits.

Today's honoree: Skippy, who systematically and symbolically eviscerates The Idiocy of Peggy Noonan with a finely-honed verbal knife.

Money quote:

she made up a thing, and she does not like it? what is this, a dr. seuss poem?

i do not like a placeness lack
of maverick john or slick barack
i wish this campaign would go back
to rizzlety-diggle dork race quota tack!

because as little peggy noo drones on and on, it becomes clear that what she really misses is not placenss itself, but the time when the all the little raceness knew all their little placeness:

i miss the old geographical vividness. but we are national now, and in a world so global that at the olympics, when someone wins, wherever he is from, whatever nation or culture, he makes the same movements with his arms and face to mark his victory. south korea's park tae-hwan moves just like michael phelps, with the "yes!" and the arms shooting upward and the fists. this must be good. why does it feel like a leveling? like a squashing and squeezing down of the particular, local and authentic.

how dare those koreans act just like a white person! how dare barack be as articulate as john! how dare those uppity coloreds presume to mix w/our people, trying to run things like corporations and cities and states and (shudder) countries!

I'm serious. Why am I about to be out of work while people like Peggy Noonan are actually paid six-figure salaries to proufly display their stupidity?

Meet the Republicans' new Willie Horton

His name is Barack Obama:

Same shit, different year.

(h/t)

The legacy of Lee Atwater: Making America safe for mean-spiritedness

The coarsened political environment that pundits decry and then perpetuate is the legacy of Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who helped Ronald Reagan implement his "I Got Mine and Fuck You" economic policies with a smile. But underneath the smiles and the geniality lay a profound sense of entitlement; that the wealthy were that way because they were simply better people than the poor. The middle class was there only to manipulate, to pull them over to the side of the wealthy with rhetoric about shining cities on a hill and false promises that if you only worked as hard as they did, you too could enter the club. This served, and continues to serve to this day, to make sure that the middle class shared their loathing of the unfortunate and allow punitive economic policy to become a reality. In the Reagan years it was welfare queens with Cadillacs. Today it's immigrants. Either way, it's manipulating people into loathing what they fear most.

The problem is that after nearly thirty years of uninterrupted Republican and DLC rule, the middle class is finally realizing that the door to the country club is padlocked. A health care system reliant on employer-provided insurance now has ever-fewer employers offering health insurance. Private insurance is prohibitively expensive, as is the COBRA coverage to which laid-off workers are entitled for eighteen months, because the latter involves the employee paying the entire premium, something one is ill-equipped to do while on unemployment compensation. My own insurance, which covers Mr. Brilliant and me, would cost us $13,000/year on COBRA. Let's not even get into the fact that for-profit insurance is about denying rather than paying for care.

Health insurance costs for working families are rising four times faster than wages, and American workers find themselves increasingly in a low-wage economy, as high-paying jobs move overseas.

But inside the beltway, American workers dealing with lower pay, fewer benefits, and spiralling health insurance costs are the new welfare queens. For those whose jobs are not in any danger of being outsourced and whose benefits are secure, that those Americans who haven't bought into the I Got Mine And Fuck You Doctrine is hysterically funny.

Paul Krugman:

Here’s what Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” which made him a national political figure: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

Today’s leading conservatives are Reagan’s heirs. If you’re poor, if you don’t have health insurance, if you’re sick — well, they don’t think it’s a serious issue. In fact, they think it’s funny.

On Wednesday, President Bush vetoed legislation that would have expanded S-chip, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, providing health insurance to an estimated 3.8 million children who would otherwise lack coverage.

In anticipation of the veto, William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, had this to say: “First of all, whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it’s a good idea. I’m happy that the president’s willing to do something bad for the kids.” Heh-heh-heh.

Most conservatives are more careful than Mr. Kristol. They try to preserve the appearance that they really do care about those less fortunate than themselves. But the truth is that they aren’t bothered by the fact that almost nine million children in America lack health insurance. They don’t think it’s a problem.

“I mean, people have access to health care in America,” said Mr. Bush in July. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

And on the day of the veto, Mr. Bush dismissed the whole issue of uninsured children as a media myth. Referring to Medicaid spending — which fails to reach many children — he declared that “when they say, well, poor children aren’t being covered in America, if that’s what you’re hearing on your TV screens, I’m telling you there’s $35.5 billion worth of reasons not to believe that.”

It’s not just the poor who find their travails belittled and mocked. The sick receive the same treatment.

Before the last election, the actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s and has become an advocate for stem cell research that might lead to a cure, made an ad in support of Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Missouri. It was an effective ad, in part because Mr. Fox’s affliction was obvious.

And Rush Limbaugh — displaying the same style he exhibited in his recent claim that members of the military who oppose the Iraq war are “phony soldiers” and his later comparison of a wounded vet who criticized him for that remark to a suicide bomber — immediately accused Mr. Fox of faking it. “In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it’s purely an act.” Heh-heh-heh.

[snip]

Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.

By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared “zero tolerance of people breaking the law,” even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren’t getting from his administration.

What’s happening, presumably, is that modern movement conservatism attracts a certain personality type. If you identify with the downtrodden, even a little, you don’t belong. If you think ridicule is an appropriate response to other peoples’ woes, you fit right in.

William Kristol is the son of one of the founding fathers of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol. He went to a fancy prep school. He was able to establish The Weekly Standard with fellow neocon scion John Podhoretz with the help of family friend Rupert Murdoch. Presumably he is insured by either the Standard, Fox News, the American Enterprise Institute, or Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor. Not exactly a guy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and pays for health insurance on the open market.

We all know about George W. Bush, and how his cowboy rancher persona is just that. His wealth is estimated in the $20 million range. He is the beneficiary of health insurance paid for by the taxpayers. He comes from a family whose matriarch made her donations for Hurricane Katrina relief contingent on the funds going to her son Neil's educational software company and said that for those dispossessed living in the Houston Astrodome:

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

Both of these guys think it's funny when families can't afford what they take for granted.

This is the modern conservative movement. These are rich guys who were, as Ann Richards once said of George H.W. Bush, "born on third base and think they hit a triple." There's no sense of noblesse oblige here. The overarching philosophy of modern conservatism is "I got mine and fuck you."

And this is what they want to spread around the world.

These people are absolutely fucking batshit crazy

Have you torn off your own head today?

If not, go look at what Digby found.

This is your conservative movement, folks.

Fear of a Progressive Planet

John Edwards really scares the bejeezus out of them, doesn't he?

GIBSON: Our John Gibson program fraud alert today focuses on the biggest fraud running for president, and that takes some doing. We're talking about the Breck Girl, Silky, the former senator from North Carolina, the baron of a 28,000-square-foot manse, the protector of the poor while ensconced on a pillow of 100 million dollars.

ANGRY RICH: A man who whored his wife's cancer as a fundraising gimmick.

GIBSON: John Edwards today was going after other Democratic candidates, and by other he meant Hillary Clinton, for taking money as political contributions from Rupert Murdoch or from certain employees or executives of either the Fox News Channel or News Corporation, which owns the Fox News Channel. Edwards has a real kind of problem about Fox. He just -- well, actually he doesn't have a problem about Fox. He realizes there are a whole bunch of really far-lefters who hate Fox and he's busy sucking up to them.

[snip]

GIBSON: -- bull, bull, bull. I mean, first of all, he won't come on Fox.

ANGRY RICH: Because he's a pansy.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet your Republican Party. The above tells you a lot more about them and what they fear than it does about John Edwards.

Frankly, I think John Gibson wants to fuck John Edwards and he's jealous of Elizabeth. But that's just me.

Compassionate conservatism in action

Further proof that in Bushworld, the life of a fetus is sacred, but once you leave the womb, you're on your own:

The White House said on Saturday that President Bush would veto a bipartisan plan to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program, drafted over the last six months by senior members of the Senate Finance Committee.

The vow puts Mr. Bush at odds with the Democratic majority in Congress, with a substantial number of Republican lawmakers and with many governors of both parties, who want to expand the popular program to cover some of the nation’s eight million uninsured children.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said: “The president’s senior advisers will certainly recommend a veto of this proposal. And there is no question that the president would veto it.”

Still think that in the free hand of the marketplace, corporations will police themselves?

In the wake of Tom Tomorrow's latest cartoon, which shows the demented illogic of the conservative notion that if a law is not 100% effective, that means it does not work and should be disbanded, comes this WaPo story about how the FDA knew contamination problems at the Georgia plant that made contaminated Peter Pan peanut butter and the California spinach farm whose products killed three people:

Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents.

Congressional critics and consumer advocates said both episodes show that the agency is incapable of adequately protecting the safety of the food supply.

FDA officials conceded that the agency's system needs to be overhauled to meet today's demands, but contended that the agency could not have done anything to prevent either contamination episode.

[snip]

Last week, the FDA notified California state health officials that hogs on a farm in the state had likely eaten feed laced with melamine, an industrial chemical blamed for the deaths of dozens of pets in recent weeks. Officials are trying to determine whether the chemical's presence in the hogs represents a threat to humans.

Pork from animals raised on the farm has been recalled. The FDA has said its inspectors probably would not have found the contaminated food before problems arose. The tainted additive caused a recall of more than 100 different brands of pet food.

The outbreaks point to a need to change the way the agency does business, said Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA's food-safety arm, which is responsible for safeguarding 80 percent of the nation's food supply.

"We have 60,000 to 80,000 facilities that we're responsible for in any given year," Brackett said. Explosive growth in the number of processors and the amount of imported foods means that manufacturers "have to build safety into their products rather than us chasing after them," Brackett said. "We have to get out of the 1950s paradigm."

Tomorrow, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing on the unprecedented spate of recalls.

"This administration does not like regulation, this administration does not like spending money, and it has a hostility toward government. The poisonous result is that a program like the FDA is going to suffer at every turn of the road," said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the full House committee. Dingell is considering introducing legislation to boost the agency's accountability, regulatory authority and budget.

In the peanut butter case, an agency report shows that FDA inspectors checked into complaints about salmonella contamination in a ConAgra Foods factory in Georgia in 2005. But when company managers refused to provide documents the inspectors requested, the inspectors left and did not follow up.

A salmonella outbreak that began last August and was traced to the plant's Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter brands sickened more than 400 people in 44 states. The likely cause, ConAgra said, was moisture from a roof leak and a malfunctioning sprinkler system that activated dormant salmonella. The plant has since been closed.

[snip]

The FDA has known even longer about illnesses among people who ate spinach and other greens from California's Salinas Valley, the source of outbreaks over the past six months that have killed three people and sickened more than 200 in 26 states. The subsequent recall was the largest ever for leafy vegetables.

In a letter sent to California growers in late 2005, Brackett wrote, "FDA is aware of 18 outbreaks of foodborne illness since 1995 caused by [E. coli bacteria] for which fresh or fresh-cut lettuce was implicated. . . . In one additional case, fresh-cut spinach was implicated. These 19 outbreaks account for approximately 409 reported cases of illness and two deaths."

"We know that there are still problems out in those fields," Brackett said in an interview last week. "We knew there had been a problem, but we never and probably still could not pinpoint where the problem was. We could have that capability, but not at this point."

According to Caroline Smith DeWaal, who heads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer-advocacy group, "When budgets are tight . . . the food program at FDA gets hit the hardest."

This is what happens when you "drown government in a bathtub." If Republicans believe that government doesn't work and that oversight functions like the one the FDA is supposed to serve aren't necessary, then let Republicans get out of the way and allow people who DO know how to make it work do the job.

I guess dynasties too are OK if you're a Republican

Funny how the conservatives scream "No more dynasties!" when it comes to a Hillary Clinton presidency, but already they've forgotten what a botch job the Crawford Caligula has made of this country -- and they're cheering his brother as the new Bush standard bearer:

At a time when the conservative movement is looking bereft, humbled by midterm-election defeats and hungering for a presidential candidate to rally around, Jeb Bush delivered yesterday in Washington a resounding endorsement of conservative principles, bringing his audience repeatedly to its feet.

In his lunchtime remarks to the Conservative Summit, Bush struck every conservative chord, blaming Republicans' defeat in November on the party's abandonment of tenets including limited government and fiscal restraint.

"Don't take offense personally if I get mad at Congress," the Republican former Florida governor began. "It's important for us to realize we lost, and there are significant reasons that happened, but it isn't because conservatives were rejected. But it's because we rejected the conservative philosophy in this country."

He added, "If the promise of pork and more programs is the way Republicans think they'll regain the majority, then they've got a problem."

Bush's speech prompted three standing ovations from the audience of hundreds at the National Review Institute's conference at the JW Marriott Hotel, reflecting the widespread concern among conservatives that exorbitant government spending led to the loss of majorities in the House and Senate and concern about whether Republicans would again embrace the traditional principles.

To Ed Gillespie, a prominent lobbyist and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Bush's two terms in Tallahassee -- where he developed a reputation as a tax-cutter and staunch spending hawk -- exemplified conservative politics at its best, and what makes for a compelling presidential candidate.

"For those who are worried if you can put forward a vigorous conservative policy agenda in a state like Florida and still get elected and still be popular: Our keynote speaker left office with approval ratings above 60 percent," Gillespie said.

"If he were former two-term governor Jeb Smith, he might be in Des Moines today," Gillespie said, alluding to presidential hopefuls' campaigning.

Bush says he will not run for president in 2008, however, and conservatives continue to look for a candidate to excite their interest.

"So far there's definitely a lukewarm feeling about the field, but it's still early, and conservatives want to see how these guys run. And it's still possible that one or the other of the candidates will really inspire conservatives," said Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review.

Sounds like the folks at National Review really, really, really want Jebbie to run in 2008 -- as if we hadn't had enough of the Bush family.

The king is dead. Long live the king.