Those Wacky Wingnuts 3-13-09

Yglesias asks: Does Congress Want to Tackle America’s Problems?
When I read stories about Democrats signing letters urging the leadership not to pass cap & trade through budget reconciliation, or whining that Clinton-era tax rates will wreck the economy, or preemptively caving on permit auction, then it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s not the administration doing something wrong is that the key members of congress just fundamentally agree with George W. Bush and Mitch McConnell that it doesn’t matter if people die of treatable illness or if the planet ceases to support human life. It’s not, after all, as if any great mystery over how you move legislation that you think is important. Fifty is a smaller number than 60, and it’s easier to get smaller numbers of votes that bigger ones. If these guys have some genius alternative plan of preventing atmospheric carbon from reaching deadly levels, I’m all ears—but if they’re convincing then, again, I would want that plan to pass with a minimum of procedural hurdles. But it seems to me they don’t have any such plan, they just want to keep letting our problems get worse and worse indefinitely, but they don’t have the guts to admit it.

• TPM: Eight Dem Senators Defend the Right to Filibuster Climate Change
  

  When President Obama submitted a budget that predicted passage of a revenue-raising climate change bill, hopes rose that Congress could successfully rein in carbon emissions this year.
  
  But a cap-and-trade climate bill is almost certain to be filibustered by Republicans -- and in a letter delivered to the Senate Budget Committee yesterday, eight Democratic senators joined 25 Republicans to defend the GOP's right to set a 60-vote margin for passing emissions limits.
  
  "We oppose using the budget process to expedite passage of climate legislation," the senators, including eight centrist Democrats, wrote in their missive.
  
  Using the procedure of budget reconciliation, which would allow a climate change measure to become law with 50 votes while preventing filibusters, "would circumvent normal Senate practice and would be inconsistent with the administration's goals of bipartisanship, cooperation, and openness," the 33 senators wrote.
  
  ...
  
  Democrats' reluctance to take advantage of their procedural arsenal to pass climate change and health care this year doesn't mean that both pieces of legislation would necessarily fall to filibusters. But it does mean that Republicans will have significantly more opportunities to insert pro-business provisions into these pivotal bills.
  
  Late Update: The eight Democratic senators who signed on to the letter are Robert Byrd (WV), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), Evan Bayh (IN), Mark Pryor (AR), Bob Casey (PA), Carl Levin (MI), and Mary Landrieu (LA).
  
  *Late Late Update: Baucus has not ruled out reconciliation entirely. As he told the Kaiser Family Foundation last week, "I am doing whatever I can to avoid reconciliation [on health care] and don't take it off the table totally, because it is a backup.

  
  

JedL: A failing grade you can believe in

So the rightwing media thought they'd figured out the perfect way to attack Obama: promote a Wall Street Journal survey of economists in which President Obama received a failing grade.

The usual suspects at Fox were all to eager to please their Republican masters, but even CNN and MSNBC joined in pimping the story.

Watch:

The thing is, these weren't a group of randomly selected economists -- these are a group of conservatives, the overwhelming majority of whom backed John McCain's economic policies in the presidential campaign. Moreover, they aren't too bright: half of them thought the recession ended seven months ago!

Check out these numbers from the WSJ archives of previous surveys:

• February 2008: 76% of the economists surveyed by the WSJ said they supported either McCain or Romney on economic policy over Obama or Clinton
• May 2008: 75% of these economists said they preferred McCain's fiscal policy to Obama's
• August 2008: 49% said the recession had already ended, and 50% believed the economy would be the same or better by election day.
• September 2008: 66% said they opposed any new stimulus plan
• December 2008: the economists predicted the unemployment rate would peak at 8.4%. It's already at 8.1% and rising.

In short, this was a survey of the same bloody idiots who got us into the mess President Obama is now trying to extract us from.

Thank god they don't approve of the job he's doing! Their disapproval is a badge of freaking honor!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Benen astonished WHEN BILL O'REILLY IS THE VOICE OF REASON...

One of the right's more disgusting habits is exploiting violent tragedies for ideological gain. After the shootings at Virginia Tech, Newt Gingrich blamed liberals' "situation ethics" for the tragedy. After the shootings in Arvada, Colo., the Family Research Council blamed the "secular media" for the rampage. After Columbine, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay took to the floor to blame public school science classes for teaching young people that "they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup." Just 48 hours after 9/11, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed liberals for "helping this happen."

And on Tuesday, a man named Michael McLendon shot and killed 10 people in Alabama before turning the gun on himself. It's unclear what, if anything, led to the rampage, but on Fox News yesterday, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly tossed around an idea on the subject.

BECK: But as I'm listening to [the description of McLendon]. I'm thinking about the American people that feel disenfranchised right now. That feel like nobody's hearing their voice. The government isn't hearing their voice. Even if you call, they don't listen to you on both sides. If you're a conservative, you're called a racist. You want to starve children.

O'REILLY: Sure.

BECK: Yada yada yada. And every time they do speak out, they're shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?

O'REILLY: Well, look, nobody, even if they're frustrated, is going to hurt another human being unless they're mentally ill. I think.

BECK: I think pushed to the wall, you don't think people get pushed to the wall?

O'Reilly said he didn't buy it. Let's pause to appreciate how extraordinary it is to see Bill O'Reilly serve as the voice of reason.

As for Beck, just how deranged must one be to think 'political correctness" pushed a madman to go on a shooting rampage and kill 10 people? For that matter, just how far gone does a cable network have to be to give a nut like Beck a platform to broadcast lunacy?

DougJ Mainstreaming birtherism

This important piece of legislation was just introduced in the House:

H.R. 1503. A bill to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to require the principal campaign committee of a candidate for election to the office of President to include with the committee’s statement of organization a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate, together with such other documentation as may be necessary to establish that the candidate meets the qualifications for eligibility to the Office of President under the Constitution; to the Committee on House Administration.

The big birther question is this: who will be the first “serious journalist” to embrace birtherism? The obvious candidates are Michael Barone and Fred Barnes, but don’t be shocked if it’s someone with more clout.

digby discovers The Phelps Effect

So the Vice President has declared that there will be no money spent on swimming pools in the stimulus. (Sigh. Again with the braindead validation of wingnut propaganda ... oy vey.)

I wondered aloud why swimming pools were being targeted since they were infrastructure projects, community building and good for kids and Mr Digby speculated that "it's the Phelps effect --- they probably think swimming pools are a gateway drug."

It makes as much sense as anything else.