Krugman sees A missed opportunity on This Week
So I was all ready to talk about Rick Warren on today’s panel, only to learn that he had cancelled out at the last minute. The show replaced him with pirates, plus an extended roundtable. But I think they should have done what the British show Have I Got News For You did when a guest failed to show: they replaced him with a tub of lard, addressed throughout the show as the Rt. Hon. Tub of Lard.Sully: Glenn Beck No Howard Beale
- Aravosis: Rick Warren suddenly cancels ABC appearance
At the very last minute, with no warning, he canceled on Stephanopoulos, on Easter Sunday no less, due to "exhaustion." Hmm... Stephanopoulos didn't sound convinced. Nor am I. It's Easter Sunday. Warren was going to be on ABC's This Week, doing his schtick as "America's Pastor." This was a big opportunity for him, on the biggest Christian day of the year (at least in my church, Easter is bigger than Christmas). And suddenly he cancels.
I suspect that Warren might have been worried that Stephanopoulos would ask him about the Moonie Times article in which top religious right leaders are slamming Warren for backing away from his previous anti-gay activism. While I think it's even odds that Stephanopoulos wouldn't have even gone there, it being Easter Sunday and all (not that that's a good reason to play softball with a guest, but I still think it would have happened) it looks as though Warren wasn't willing to risk it.
The dynamics are fascinating.- Think Progress: Why is Amazon delisting LGBT books for being too ‘adult’?
Yesterday, author Mark R. Probst noticed that Amazon has been pulling the sales rank numbers from many LGBT books. When Probst wrote to Amazon about the issue, he received this response:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Jezebel has a long list of the books that have been delisted, which fall into a wide range of categories. However, the LGBT books excluded include Nathan Frank’s “well-reviewed empirical analysis of military policy,” “Unfriendly Fire,” and a biography of Ellen DeGeneres. Books remaining include the biography of straight porn star Ron Jeremy and “A Parent’s Guide To Preventing Homosexuality.” Jessica Valenti, whose book “Full Frontal Feminisism” has also been delisted, has more here.
UpdateAn Amazon spokesperson told Publishers and Weekly that "a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy."
For the same reason CBS 11 in Dallas ran a story lastnight about some dimbulb who sees the Virgin Mary in her frickin’ pancake:
Because people are stoopid
April 12th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
This point is worth recalling:
let's drop the idea -- pushed hard by Beck himself -- that he's simply a modern-day Howard Beale, from the classic film Network, just an angry, I'm-mad-as-hell everyman lashing out at the hypocrisies of our time. Nonsense. Beale's unvarnished on-air rants from Network targeted conformity, corporate conglomerates, and the propaganda power of television. ("This tube," he called it.) Beale's attacks were not political or partisan. Beck, by contrast, unleashes his anger against, and whips up dark scenarios about, the new president of the United States. Big difference.
It's also striking to me that Beale's frustration was a long, long time coming. This has erupted in three months. And in protesting fiscal recklessness, there is no clear attack on the people who actually brought us to this sorry state: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. If they were burning effigies of Bush to protest the massive debt we now face, I might take their good faith more seriously.
via Daily Kos:
If you're wondering where to come down on the [Secy.] Gates [Pentagon budget] plan, here's a simple guide: John McCain, the most thoughtful, reform-minded legislator on military issues, "strongly supports" it. Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe—who has compared the EPA to the Gestapo, Carol Browner to Tokyo Rose and environmentalists to the Third Reich—warns that it will lead to the "disarming of America." You choose.
Think Progress: Krugman Calls Out GOP Hypocrisy On Job Creation And Defense Cuts
In February, only three Republican senators broke party ranks to vote for the economic recovery package. Zero House Republicans voted for passage. Part of their opposition centered around the belief that an increase in government spending would do nothing to create jobs:
– “And first off the government doesn’t create jobs. Let’s get this notion out of our heads that the government creates jobs. Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job. Small business owners do, small enterprises do. Not the government.” [RNC Chairman Michael Steele, 2/2/09]
– “Instead of focusing on three major issues — job creation, housing and compassion for Americans who have lost jobs through no fault of their own — to boost the economy, this bill has morphed into a bloated government giveaway.” [Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), 2/10/09]
– “When it comes to slow-moving government spending programs, it’s clear that it doesn’t create the jobs or preserve the jobs that need to happen.” [House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), 1/21/09]
However, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced plans to end production of the F-22 at the current 187 planes — down from the 381 planes the government was expected to order — many of these same conservatives were up in arms over the jobs that would be lost.
Chambliss, in particular, said that he was concerned people in his state would lose jobs if F-22 production was cut, because “when it comes to stimulating the economy, there’s no better way to do it than to spend it in the defense community.” Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), who also voted against the economic recovery package, similarly said, “I also believe that it is unacceptable that this administration wants to eliminate 2,000 jobs in Marietta and potentially 95,000 jobs nationwide at a time when unemployment rates are rising across the country.”
Today on ABC’s This week, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called out this hypocrisy:
KRUGMAN: What’s so wonderful is watching Republican congressmen saying, “But this will cost jobs!” The very same Republican congressmen who were denouncing the stimulus, saying government spending never creates jobs, but cutting defense spending costs jobs. It’s wonderful.
Watch it:
Military correspondent David Axe has pointed out that it’s possible very few workers will lose their jobs because of Gates’s announcement. In fact, thousands of workers will likely be “snapped up for active production lines churning out F-16s, F-35s, C-130s and modernized C-5s for Lockheed, not to mention the prospect that industry rivals Boeing and Northrop might lure Lockheed workers for their own active production lines for the F-15, F/A-18 and others.”
Benen: BRODER BEING BRODER....
You'll never guess what the Washington Post's David Broder wrote about in his new column: the importance of the "center" in American politics, and the need for President Obama to "pursue bipartisan support."Imagine that.
Instead of scrutinizing every paragraph in the piece, let's just focus on Broder's most problematic point.
Though badly underrepresented in Congress, where districting rules and campaign finance practices reinforce the two-party hegemony, the independent voters make up the swing vote in almost every contested election -- including the presidential race.
It is the reaction of those swing voters -- or the politicians' anticipation of their shifting opinion -- that drives the outcome of the big policy debates. You've had an example of this already with Obama's cap-and-trade proposal for protecting the environment from carbon discharges.
Once political independents, who like the idea of clean air, grasped that cap-and-trade would mean a big tax increase for them, Republican opposition was reinforced and Democratic support weakened to the point that the Obama plan may already be doomed this year.
First, this notion that political independents balked at a cap-and-trade policy is unsupported. The debate over a cap-and-trade proposal has barely begun, and I suspect the typical political independent not only has never heard of the idea, but couldn't even begin to explain what it is or what they think about it.
Second, the notion that cap-and-trade "would mean a big tax increase" for voters is near the top of the Republican Party's talking points, but it's also one of the most dishonest policy claims bandied about this year. "Republican opposition was reinforced," not because political independents turned against the idea, but because the GOP lied, even after having been told the truth.
Brad Plumer recently explained that "most carbon revenue would be rebated back to consumers, and that certain conservation measures could help reduce energy bills. But the actual MIT study implies that the welfare cost would be around $31 per person in 2015, rising to an average of $85 per person per year -- not including the benefits of cleaner air and a habitable planet." Brian Beutler added that "increased costs will be somewhat offset by rebates," but just as importantly, "consumers will respond to higher energy prices by being more efficient and reducing consumption and that alternative fuels will become cheaper and so on."
If only we had some respected, non-partisan media voice at one of the nation's leading news outlets -- say, a "dean" of the press corps -- who could cut through the nonsense and let news consumers know about these details, instead of using hackneyed GOP talking points to make an unsupported claim.
Krugman: Tea Parties Forever
This is a column about Republicans — and I’m not sure I should even be writing it.
Today’s G.O.P. is, after all, very much a minority party. It retains some limited ability to obstruct the Democrats, but has no ability to make or even significantly shape policy.
Beyond that, Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats.
But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties.
One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.
But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.
Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.
But the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because “liberal” doesn’t seem to carry the punch it used to. And if you go back just a few years, you find top Republican figures making equally bizarre claims about what liberals were up to. Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to the 9/11 terrorists?
Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff — but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers, claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh.
Speaking of Mr. Limbaugh: the most impressive thing about his role right now is the fealty he is able to demand from the rest of the right. The abject apologies he has extracted from Republican politicians who briefly dared to criticize him have been right out of Stalinist show trials. But while it’s new to have a talk-radio host in that role, ferocious party discipline has been the norm since the 1990s, when Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, became known as “The Hammer” in part because of the way he took political retribution on opponents.
Going back to those tea parties, Mr. DeLay, a fierce opponent of the theory of evolution — he famously suggested that the teaching of evolution led to the Columbine school massacre — also foreshadowed the denunciations of evolution that have emerged at some of the parties.
Last but not least: it turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.
But that’s nothing new, and AstroTurf has worked well for Republicans in the past. The most notable example was the “spontaneous” riot back in 2000 — actually orchestrated by G.O.P. strategists — that shut down the presidential vote recount in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.
So what’s the implication of the fact that Republicans are refusing to grow up, the fact that they are still behaving the same way they did when history seemed to be on their side? I’d say that it’s good for Democrats, at least in the short run — but it’s bad for the country.
For now, the Obama administration gains a substantial advantage from the fact that it has no credible opposition, especially on economic policy, where the Republicans seem particularly clueless.
But as I said, the G.O.P. remains one of America’s great parties, and events could still put that party back in power. We can only hope that Republicans have moved on by the time that happens.
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