Circular logic

Proving that he is both hip and smart, a Krugman blog title: All your downside are belong to us (and, for those who don't know why that makes him hip here's All Your Base Are Belong To Us.)

Just read Greenwald: The newly released secret laws of the Bush administration

Related: Harper's columnist and international human rights lawyer Scott Horton:

We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it.

QOTD, Steve Benen: Republican hacks like Kelly and Franks aren't just lying, they're getting their own lie wrong, screwing up the manufactured controversy that they helped create.

This piece by the Political Animal, and the blogs posts it links to, are as clear a look into the mind of Rush Limbaugh (and his minions) as you are likely to ever find. The phrase "circular logic" does come to mind. Highly recommended.
Benen: REJECTING THE PREMISE....

Greg Sargent sent a note to Rush Limbaugh's producer this morning, hoping to get a point clarified, and ended up getting a response from the radio personality himself. Greg was then able to engage Limbaugh in some email discussion, asking him some of the questions many of us have wondered about over the last couple of weeks.

As Limbaugh sees it, he'd like to see the country "succeed," but he'd also like to see the country's president "fail." How he arrives at this conclusion is, well, a little complicated.

...[to get the meat, you have to follow the links]

Got it. To summarize, Limbaugh won't say whether it would be good for the country to have Obama's policies succeed, because as far as Limbaugh is concerned, Obama doesn't want his own policies to succeed.

What a strange man. The Republican Party sure has picked an odd one as their leader.

• Josh Marshall: Rush Not Likin' TPM
  

  From Rush's show today. We're sort of dragged in as a way of knocking Greg Sargent, who'd caught Rush out on his Obama mumbojumbo. So he was a little touchy ...

  "Until a couple months ago, just so you know who Greg Sargent is. He was a blogger at a far left blog post, calls itself Talking Points Memo. This is the website that is now trying to distort Bobby Jindal's story about Hurricane Katrina, in order to make it look like Bobby Jindal lied in his response to Obama a week ago. So that's the place Greg Sargent comes from."

  Late Update: TPM Reader LP raises an interesting and ominous question: how long before TPM is forced to recite an abject apology to Rush?

• James Moore: I Hope Rush Succeeds

  ... ... Man, I hope you succeed. And I hope your angry voice and cigar-smoking mug become the profile and the sound of the Republican Party for the next four years. Whenever anyone thinks about the GOP I hope they can't help but see your round puss with a long Montecristo Cuban sticking out of it as you stand at the tee box on your private golf course or board your private jet or waltz around the grounds of your mansion in West Palm and they realize you are the ideologue that guides conservative thinking. And every solitary time there is a person who wonders what the GOP might do differently or better, I hope all that individual hears in their ears is the sound, "I hope the president fails." ... Tell everyone you can what you think and why you want him to fail. The ragtag band of Republicans that the previous president (oh crap, I have to think about him for a last sentence) bequeathed the conservative movement needs a leader. You're perfect. Angry. Rich. And loud. You can steer that party anywhere you want. ... And, at the moment, I'd say you're leading them further into the wilderness. Here's hoping they all recognize your leadership skills and follow wherever you may go.

• Amato: GOP tells Michael Steele: Shut up about Limbaugh or you're fired

  Apology to Rush Limbaugh aside, new Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is coming under fire from his own GOP troops to shut up and focus on his job of organizing the party and raising money, not fighting with his own political kind. Several Republican advisers to Congress and the previous Bush administration told Whispers that they are worried that the war of words is fracturing the party when it should be healing the division between conservatives and moderates in the wake of the 2008 election.

• Josh sees a Moronometer Fluttering According to US News, Republican insiders are getting concerned that Michael Steele may be too big a moron to remain RNC Chairman.
• JedL sees Bad politics

  So the GOP is tying themselves to this:

  

  Other than about 3 out of 5 Republicans, nobody really likes Rush Limbaugh -- and among independents and Democrats, he's actively loathed.

  It's enough to make you ask what kind of idiot would want to make Rush Limbaugh the de facto leader of their political party.

• Aravosis: A conservative's take on Rush Limbaugh

  Rod Dreher is a funny bird. He's a former NY Post columnist, and a rather arch conservative who sometimes makes you want to pull your hair out (like when he's writing about the need to send Dan Savage to jail). But I remember having a back and forth by email with Dreher, probably 7 years ago, about some gay issue, and he was quite a decent fellow. No, that doesn't exonerate some of his meaner writings, but it means he's more nuanced that you might think.
  
  To wit: His article this week on Rush Limbaugh at CPAC, entitled "White kids on dope." It's blistering. It's further evidence that the Republicans, and conservatives more generally, are not of one mind about their future. There are conservatives out there who find Rush Limbaugh, and the dogmatic conservatism he represents, every bit as loathsome as we find both of them.

• Just when you thought this couldn't be any more fun, here is TPM's Day in 100 Seconds. I'm dying here!
  

Matt is wonderfully clear and concise here:
Yglesias: Our Interrelated Crises

David Brooks seems to think that Barack Obama is trying to do too much at once. Steve Benen retorts that “The notion that multiple problems — healthcare, energy, education, infrastructure, economic growth — may be inter-connected seems to elude Brooks entirely.”

Obviously, people who want to do a lot of stuff like to make those kind of interconnection arguments. So it’s worth trying to think clearly and explicitly about the relationships. The starting point, I would say, is growth. There are a lot of factors behind growth including, of course, old fashioned human ingenuity at coming up with new products to offer and new ways to offer old products. But perhaps the most important things policy can do to impact the capacity for sustainable growth—i.e., growth that’s not based on asset price bubbles—is to increase the availability of high-quality human capital and the availability and quality of public sector physical capital. Which is to say education and infrastructure. Energy is related to this in two ways. First, the power grid on which our electricity flows is part of the infrastructure. And second, a lot of energy is used in transportation, and the quantity of energy used in this way is impacted by the nature of the available transportation infrastructure. The goal of curbing carbon emissions probably isn’t vital to our growth prospects except in the sense that over the long run an increasingly deadly and inhospitable environment will be disastrous for all human endeavors. But though avoiding ecological catastrophe is something of a freestanding goal, our growth prospects require new investments in infrastructure, so it makes sense to try to make sure this new infrastructure is suited to our environmental goals. Last, health care. These kind of investments we’re talking about will cost money. Some of that money can and should come from taxes. And some of that money can and should come from short-term borrowing. But to make the investments sustainable we need to put the budget on a sustainable basis. And that requires tackling the health care system in a systematic way.

And so—ta da—it’s all connected. I think there’s plenty of room for disagreement as to exactly what needs to be done on those fronts. But I really don’t think it’s credible to say that we ought to just slow-walk things. What it is fair to say is that it’s too bad the previous administration spent eight years doing nothing whatsoever on the infrastructure, health care, and energy pieces of the puzzle. They tackled education, the smallest of these segments, early on and made some progress but then didn’t seem very interested in following-through.

Olberman does a terrific job (the best and most wide-ranging I've seen) discussing why the Republican Party is waging a war against President Barack Obama's budget, and effectively presents the counterpoints to their more dishonest arguments.

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Joe Sudbay: GOP Rep. Paul Ryan, who supported Bush's policies for eight years, is really mad at Obama because Obama is standing by his budget.

...

Rep. Paul Ryan, who has been in Congress since 2001, had his GOP hissy fit at the Budget Committee today, in front of Peter Orszag, who heads the President's Office of Management and Budget. First, according to The Hill, Ryan attacked Obama because Obama defended his own budget. Huh? Because Obama shouldn't fight for his budget? More like the Republicans are used to being bullies and Obama isn't taking their crap on the budget. He doesn't have to.

Ryan is a typical GOP knucklehead and he's totally oblivious to the current crisis in our economy, which he and his party created. Keep in mind, Ryan arrived in DC with George W. Bush. They did this to America together. Yet, Ryan wants to stick with the Bush way:

Ryan also said that the president's budget proposal would only increase the size of government and will slow down an economic recovery.

"It takes a decidedly ideological turn away from the principles that built this country and built this economy," Ryan said during a House Budget Committee hearing.

Does Paul Ryan have any idea 1) that we're in an economic crisis and 2) he helped George Bush get us into this mess? It was the Bush/Ryan ideological policies that destroyed the American economy. Obama was elected to fix it. ...

Ryan had the misfortune of taking on Peter Orszag. This guy is smart. ... He really knows his stuff, which is something Hill Republicans aren't accustomed to after eight years of Bush:

Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, defended the administration's budget plan from Ryan's attacks during the hearing. He said that it seeks to tackle big issues such as the nation's dependence on foreign oil, the growing deficit and the rising cost of healthcare.

"This simply is not a big spending bill," Orszag said.

Orszag quoted country music artist Toby Keith to make his point that the healthcare system needed to be fixed.

"There ain't no right way to do the wrong thing," Orszag said.
...

• Josh on yet another repug So Not Ready for Prime Time Gov. Pawlenty (R-MN) reportedly said this morning that US government Treasury bonds will soon be as worthless as all those toxic mortgage assets.

digby: Poker

This is good:

President Obama’s budget director said the White House would consider using a Senate procedural tactic so that only 50 votes would be rquired to pass major healthcare and energy reforms.

Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the administration would prefer not to use the budget reconciliation process to push through its package. But he added: "We have to keep everything on the table. We want to get these.... important things done this year." Orszag called healthcare in particular "the key to our fiscal future."
...

The Obama blueprint calls for major changes in both energy and healthcare policies that is likely to engender significant opposition from Republicans and business lobbies. The reforms are expect to win widespread support from Democrats and more left-leaning constituencies.

It appears that the administration learned its lesson on the stimulus and won't be going into the negotiations under the assumption that the other side wants comity and so will act as partners. They are prepared to drive a real bargain this time. I'm much relieved. ...

• Benen: THE HSR LIE GETS A FOX NEWS TWIST....

  Republicans and their adjunct outlets have been touting one specific lie above all others lately. As the argument goes, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) inserted an $8 billion earmark in the stimulus package to build a high-speed rail connector between Las Vegas and Disneyland. The claim is completely wrong, and there is no such spending project. ...
  

  I love the way Megyn Kelly adds "we kid you not" while blatantly lying to a national television audience.

  But notice the evolution of the lie. First, the non-existent project was in the stimulus bill; now it's the omnibus. First, the HSR was headed to Vegas; now it's Carson City. First, Reid was quietly sneaking this non-existent spending into law; now he's fighting for it publicly in the face of criticism.

  Republican hacks like Kelly and Franks aren't just lying, they're getting their own lie wrong, screwing up the manufactured controversy that they helped create.

  In an apparent attempt to win some kind of irony award, Kelly asked Franks about how to hold lawmakers accountable for made-up earmarks that don't exist outside Republican talking points and the GOP's cable news channel. ...
  

atrios: Community Health Centers

Some ideas make too much sense.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama has been vague about details of his healthcare reform efforts, but he provided a hint on Monday of one direction he could take -- community health centers.
...

"These health centers will expand access to care by helping people in need -- many with no health insurance -- obtain access to comprehensive primary and preventive health care services," Obama told a news conference.

So much sense that I get puzzled why hospitals haven't banded together more to create them themselves given the emergency room issues.

DougJ: Postmodern, post-Clinton liberalism

Froomkin quotes Obama and nails what’s really gone on the last thirty years:

“A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations… were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”

The inevitable conclusion here is that establishment Washington is complicit in what went wrong. That includes all the people in positions of power who accepted what was happening as simply politics as usual—even as the country was slowly but inevitably headed to that day of reckoning.

After all, since the Reagan era, even mainstream Democratic leaders have internalized the trickle-down, free-market, small-government mentality which Obama now blames for our woes. Few in the Democratic party—or the mainstream media—did much more than watch as the economic playing field tilted further and further to the advantage of the rich.

One year later, a Package of Dodgy Debts by Bird and Fortune, on the subprime collapse and market sentiment and all those oh-so-very smart people on Wall Street, still makes it all both crystal clear and devastatingly funny. Thanks to sully for the reminder.


NYTs Editorial: The Never-Ending Bailout

... It is also painfully clear that more of the same black-hole bailouts are failing to restore stability or confidence. Stock markets worldwide tanked on Monday. A growing chorus of economists and commentators — including this page — are urging the Obama administration to adopt a more comprehensive solution: a government-run restructuring, or nationalization.

The government would not only take an ownership stake in firms that require extensive and ongoing bailouts — as it has done with A.I.G. and Citigroup — but also direct control of the weakest ones. It would get a realistic assessment of the assets crippling them and revamp their finances before returning them to the private sector, where they would be smaller and healthier and could start lending again.

We know that many Americans are uncomfortable with the word nationalization — politicians even more so. But each new bailout of old losers only feeds mistrust of the government and weakens public support for the even tougher decisions to come.

Sully's Dissent Of The Day.

A reader writes:

You're wrong about Geithner. I think he has a pretty basic problem -- the political will to do what needs to be done with the banks doesn't exist. They can't really move until that accumulates. It's necessary to nationalize the sick institutions. If we do that, the market will plunge. The administration doesn't have the strength to do something that will crater the market. So we're doing this death by a thousand cuts thing.

You're squeamish about nationalization, and I understand why. Everything the critics say about it is true. The problem is that the sickness in the finance industry is a cancer that's taking the whole economy down, and we have to cut it out. Cutting it out is dangerous, and it's going to create all sorts of problems, some of which are really serious. But we have to cut it out.

I have a friend whose father ...

Yglesias: Getting Some of Our Money Back From AIG Executives

I’m only over the past few days really coming to understand what’s been going on with AIG. But the long and short of it is that all this money we’re giving “to AIG” isn’t really going to AIG, it goes to AIG’s counterparties. These are mostly banks (many of them abroad) who bought insurance from AIG against the possibility of a global financial meltdown. ...

... The whole idea of the insurance industry is that if I buy insurance from you, you pay off the claims. Absent ability to pay claims, there’s no business there at all. It’s just fraud. Whether or not it meets the legal standard for fraud, I couldn’t say. But in ordinary language sense, it’s a fraud—you’re selling a service you have no capacity to deliver. And AIG executives made a bunch of money engaged in it. Felix Salmon says: “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Hank Greenberg was still a billionaire, even as the policies his company wrote have cost the average American household some $1,600. It’s time for his wealth to be confiscated: it might be only a drop in the bucket compared to AIG’s total losses, but it would feel very right.”

I don’t think it would just feel right, it would be right. Thus far, there’s been an extraordinary aversion to actually punishing any of the people responsible. It’s true that most of them are less rich than they once were, but they’re still far richer than most people. And it shouldn’t be that wrecking your company and wrecking the world economy is a good way to become richer than most people.

Ezra Klein: BAD MEDIA, GOOD MEDIA.

Jon Chait has a nice catch here.

I've seen a lot of dumb news reports in my life, but I'm not sure anything can quite match this one from ABC News. .... [you've already seen it]

Just so we're clear on the math here, letting the upper-end of Bush's tax cuts expire means that income beyond $249,999 will be taxed at 39.6 percent rather than 35 percent. A family forgoing that final dollar is 60.4 cents poorer than if they had earned the money. Either way, their after-tax earnings on the first $249,999 are unchanged.

But let's not just bash bad press coverage. The AP's Stephen Ohlemacher had a very good story on Obama's tax plans. The innovation? It explained how the plan would affect different families differently.

"A typical American family would get a tax cut under President Barack Obama's budget proposal, and their low-income neighbor would fare even better. Their wealthier counterparts, however, would face some steep tax increases, starting in 2011," he wrote. See? Not so hard. And later in the story, we get the numbers:

A typical family of four making $50,000 a year would receive a payment of $40, according to the Deloitte analysis. Before the stimulus package was enacted, that same family would have owed $760 in federal income taxes.

A similar family making $35,000 a year would get a payment of $4,100, an increase of $1,200. The median household income was $50,233 in 2007, according to the Census Bureau.

The stimulus package provided most working couples with a new tax credit of up to $800 for 2009 and 2010 — single filers get up to $400. Obama's budget proposal would make the credit permanent for families making less than $190,000 and individuals making less than $95,000.[...]

a typical family of four making $300,000 a year would see their federal income taxes increase by $1,100, while a similar family making $500,000 would get an $11,300 increase, according to the Deloitte analysis. Single filers with no children would be hit with even bigger tax increases.

That's how it's done.

Benen: MENENDEZ GETS THE CUBA DEBATE OFF TO A BAD START....

Sen. Robert Menendez's (D-N.J.) push on U.S policy towards Cuba is a reminder of who frustrating the foreign policy debate has been for far too long.
...

Menendez supports a policy that hasn't worked after decades of trying. That's his right. But President Obama ran on a campaign platform that vowed to change U.S. policy towards Cuba, and managed to do quite well with Cuban-American voters. (Indeed, most Cuban Americans support lifting the counterproductive embargo.)

But Menendez isn't just making his case to continue with a failed policy, he's now blocking two White House nominees -- Obama's choices to be White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- to get the senators' attention on his Cuba-related concerns.

...

Perhaps this seems like piling on... Pile On!
Olberman and Wolfe piling on.

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Olberman and Chris Hayes - substantive discussion.

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