They will never go away

Anne Laurie: Masters of Their GOP Domain

Must-read nightmare fuel. Tim Dickinson has an article in the May 27 issue of Rolling Stone explaining how Karl Rove is taking the Republican Party “boutique”. (Warning: the header cartoon is NSFW or if you’ve eaten in the last several hours).

... Along with his protégé Ed Gillespie, who succeeded him as George W. Bush’s top political adviser, Rove had gathered together the heavyweights of the GOP’s fundraising network. In attendance were the political director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as well as the leaders of two new megadollar campaign groups loyal to Rove: American Crossroads and the American Action Network. Rove’s plan was straightforward: to seize control of the party from Michael Steele, whose leadership of the Republican National Committee was imploding in the wake of a fundraiser at a lesbian bondage club. By building a war chest of unregulated campaign cash – an unprecedented $135 million to be raised by these three groups alone – Rove would be able to wage the midterm elections on his own terms: electing candidates loyal to the GOP’s wealthiest donors and corporate patrons. With the media’s attention diverted by the noisy revolt being waged by the Tea Party, the man known as “Bush’s brain” was staging a stealthier but no less significant coup of the Republican Party.

“What they’ve cooked up is brilliant,” says a prominent Democrat. “Evil, but brilliant.”

... [T]aking control of the party, they knew, would require a new kind of political machine. The Supreme Court, in its recent decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, opened the floodgates for unlimited political spending by corporations and individuals. But the court left in place strict limits on contributions to party committees – and it preserved the legal firewall that bars campaigns from coordinating directly with the outside groups now empowered to spend millions on their behalf.

That’s where Rove and Gillespie come in. As free-agent strategists, they are in a unique position to skirt such prohibitions and coordinate all parts of the GOP – both inside and outside the official party structure – because they’re not officially in charge of any of it. In the run-up to November, they will be the ones ensuring that the many tentacles of the court-sanctioned shadow party – from startups like American Crossroads to stalwarts like the National Rifle Association – operate in concert. “They will be making sure that everybody is expending themselves properly, as opposed to duplicating efforts or working at cross-purposes,” says Mary Matalin, who served with Rove in the Bush White House. “That’s something that the committees and the campaigns really don’t do – legally cannot do.”

[...]
The linchpin of Rove’s coup is American Crossroads – a shadow version of the RNC for the party’s richest donors. Organized under the same part of the tax code that gave us Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the fundraising group can collect unlimited contributions from individuals and corporations. Before the Citizens United decision rewrote the rules of campaign finance, these so-called “independent expenditures” could only be used to support issues, not candidates. But now groups like American Crossroads can use their funds to openly back GOP candidates – or quietly work to destroy Democratic opponents by investing in the dirty tricks of which Rove is a Jedi master.

The group is intended, Gillespie tells Rolling Stone, to become a fixture in GOP politics for 2010 and beyond: “The idea is that there needs to be an institutional entity – a transparent, professionally run Republican operation – that will be there every cycle.” The strategic logic behind the group is simple: to narrow the fundraising deficit that has daunted the GOP since Democrats discovered how to raise megabucks online. “Obama had $1.1 billion in 2008,” says Gillespie, who chaired the RNC under Bush. “John McCain and his supporters spent $634 million. That’s a sizable gap.” American Crossroads, he boasts, will be the place where the real money goes to “play.”

[...]
As soon as Steele took control of the RNC, Rove and McConnell began scrambling to keep the party’s big money together – under their control, rather than Steele’s. The plot to form American Crossroads was hatched over breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel in early 2009 by their lieutenants, Gillespie and Steven Law, McConnell’s former chief of staff and a ruthless advocate for big business. As a top deputy to Bush labor secretary Elaine Chao – McConnell’s wife – Law had steered a “modernization” of the nation’s labor laws that stripped 6 million middle-class workers of the right to overtime pay. He then decamped for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he spearheaded a $20 million campaign to block a new law that would facilitate unionization. Today, Law serves as the CEO of American Crossroads, overseeing the group’s day-to-day operations, while the board of directors is run by Duncan and another Rove ally, former RNC communications director Jim Dyke.

With these top aides in place, Rove and Gillespie blessed American Crossroads as the destination for the GOP’s big money. Since last year, they’ve helped the group raise millions from elite donors like Harold Simmons, the Dallas billionaire who pioneered the leveraged buyout. The move represents a dramatic transformation of the traditional approach to party fundraising. “This is the plutocratic wing of the GOP getting together and deciding that, in the era of unlimited corporate contributions, they don’t need a formal Republican Party anymore,” says a top Democrat. “It’s all about the accumulation of power. McConnell and Duncan are not movement conservatives. They are establishment guys – absolutely unapologetic for that. They’ve got all the money they need – and now they don’t have to put up with those pesky, true-believing activists.”

[...]
A third group integral to Rove’s plan – the American Action Network – is so closely integrated with American Crossroads that it has moved into neighboring offices two blocks from the White House. Co-founded by private-equity titan and longtime GOP operative Fred Malek, who once helped Richard Nixon target a “Jewish cabal” in the administration, AAN bills itself as an “action tank” – a think tank that will also inject money directly into federal races. It plans to raise $25 million for its campaign efforts this fall – expenditures that will be directed by a former chief of staff to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor. “It’s the beginning of the future,” says Rollins. “Independent expenditures will play a very, very significant role. There are no rules anymore.”

Even leading advocates of election reform concede that, given the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, there is little to prevent Rove from running the whole show. Political parties are barred from coordinating specific ads with “independent” groups – but that leaves plenty of wiggle room for other forms of strategizing. And even if Rove and Co. were to cross the line, there would likely be no consequences: The Federal Election Commission, which has sole enforcement responsibility, is gridlocked by its three GOP-appointed commissioners, who consistently vote to stymie any oversight. “The existing FEC is not going to enforce the laws,” says Fred Wertheimer, the founder of Democracy 21, an advocate of campaign-finance reform.

... “We’re on a parallel course here, with two very different concepts of how our democracy should function,” says Wertheimer. “One is based on involving massive numbers of small donors to be the primary funders of elections. The other is based on involving massive amounts of corporate wealth to literally overwhelm our elections and dominate Washington. You couldn’t have two more conflicting approaches to the way our democracy ought to function. This is going to be an enormous battle.”

Notice how the malignant shadow of the Nixon White House continues to poison American politics almost 40 years after we let Gerry Ford “put that dark chapter behind us”. Another argument, as if we needed it, to demonstrate why a full public examination of the crimes of the Cheney Regency less-than-transparent behavior of the George W. Bush administration is the only way to keep our political grandchildren from suffering the consequences of a Mary Cheney/Pierce Bush/Track Palin coup d’etat.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. President Obama may be less of a savior than even us more cynical progressives hoped, but we can’t afford to turn away from the political arena as long as people like Karl Rove walk among us.

• from the comments:
  

  Mike in NC
  

  Notice how the malignant shadow of the Nixon White House continues to poison American politics almost 40 years after we let Gerry Ford “put that dark chapter behind us”.

  Everybody really needs to read “Nixonland”. Then go read it again, for Christ’s sake. Scum like Rove and Gillespie and Luntz will never go away.

DougJ: Why Newt Is So Much Fun To Watch

This was the title of a piece Joe Klein wrote a few years back. Klein continued:

It’s almost always a joy listening to Gingrich when he’s on a tear. And he’s almost always on a tear of some sort. I caught up with Newt as he wandered around New Hampshire last week, which is what people who think they’re running for President do. Please, God, no, you say. Not that angry guy again. “He’s probably carrying too much baggage to be President,” said Peter Bergin, a Republican state representative from Amherst, N.H. “But he sure is a terrific idea man. He needs to be part of the debate.”

Absolutely. We might even create a new federal position to accommodate him, sort of like party ideologist in the old Soviet Union, except that the U.S. job would be the opposite of what it was in the U.S.S.R. Instead of imposing orthodoxy, the party idea-ologist—ideology is so un-American—would propose unorthodoxy. Gingrich was certainly wild with ideas last week, flicking them off at warp speed, like a dog shaking himself clean after romping through a pond.

You can see how much fun Newt is to watch here or read about it here:

The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.

Krugman’s piece today on the media’s recent discovery that the right is insane got me thinking about this:

Maybe it was just deference to power: as long as America was widely perceived as being on the way to a permanent Republican majority, few were willing to call right-wing extremism by its proper name.

I think this is about right (though in fairness, Klein’s Newt fluffery took place in 2006, after Republicans had lost some power).

“Liberal hawks” have never given a very good explanation of why they were so gung-ho about Iraq—just a lot of “no one could have predicted Bush would screw it up so badly” etc. Likewise, liberal wingnut fluffers (not all of whom were that pro-Iraq War) have never given an adequate explanation of why they thought George W. Bush and Newt Gingrich and the like were such serious people.

The answer in both cases is probably the same: it made a lot of sense professionally to suck up to the right at the time. I’d like to see Klein and others admit this for once.

Think Progress: NRA Members Echo Fiery Right-Wing Anti-Obama Rhetoric: ‘He Hates The Second Amendment’

ThinkProgress reported from the NRA Convention this past weekend. This is our sixth dispatch. See our previous posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Last weekend, ThinkProgress interviewed dozens of NRA members at the NRA’s annual conference in Charlotte, NC. While many offered reasonable positions on issues that haven’t been widely publicized — such as closing the “terror gap” gun loophole and whether gun owners should be to allowed bring weapons into bars and consume alcohol — the vast majority of NRA members ThinkProgress spoke with echoed the misinformed and extreme anti-Obama rhetoric espoused by right-wing heroes such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and other Fox News hosts.

Indeed, right-wing leaders brought their inflammatory rhetoric to this year’s conference. NRA favorite Ted Nugent repeatedly claimed that “there’s a Marxist in the White House,” while Palin and Beck entertained thousands of NRA members with classic anti-Obama one-liners.

PALIN: Don’t doubt for a minute that, if they thought they could get away with it, they would ban guns and ban ammunition and gut the Second Amendment.

BECK: The people that we have running the country, these are not Democrats. These are revolutionaries! They are Marxist revolutionaries!

Not surprisingly, many of the NRA’s members repeat this right-wing noise. ThinkProgress has compiled a video of some of the more egregious examples of anti-Obama rhetoric taken from interviews at the conference:

NRA MEMBER 1: He’d just as soon get rid of all the guns in the country I’m sure.

NRA MEMBER 2: I think he would try to eliminate the Second Amendment if he could.

NRA MEMBER 3: I think we’re headed toward socialism. And I think if that happens we’ll be not long after that we’ll be headed toward communism.

NRA MEMBER 4: He has no respect for the country, no respect for the Constitution. … I believe he hates the Second Amendment.

NRA MEMBER 5: He’s an idiot. … I think that he’s anti-American. I think he’s trying to destroy our country and turn it into a socialist country.

Watch the video compilation:

The fear campaign has paid off for the gun industry. Since Obama took office, gun and ammunition sales have skyrocketed.

And while Attorney General Eric Holder has said he would seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban — a move that Americans overwhelmingly support — the White House has said it’s not looking to push the issue. Obama has said repeatedly that he believes in the Second Amendment, and has no intention of taking away anyone’s guns. “I continue to believe that we can respect and honor the Second Amendment rights in our Constitution,” he said last year, “the rights of sportsmen and hunters and homeowners who want to keep their families safe to lawfully bear arms, while dealing with assault weapons that…are helping to fuel extraordinary violence.”

Think Progress: CA lawmaker proposes bill to keep away TX’s textbooks (which call slavery the ‘Atlantic triangular trade’).

Earlier this year, Texas faced national scrutiny for the efforts of a determined bloc of far-right ideologues on the Texas State Board of Education to rewrite history in the state’s social studies textbooks and curriculum. They succeeded in making students learn about the “conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s,” “documents that supported Cold War-era Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” and the difference “between legal and illegal immigration.” Because of the state’s size, Texas has significant pull in shaping what the nation’s social studies books will say. However, California state Sen. Leland Yee (D) has introduced a bill to keep Texas at bay:

Under Yee’s bill, SB1451, the California Board of Education would be required to look out for any of the Texas content as part of its standard practice of reviewing public school textbooks. The board must then report any findings to both the Legislature and the secretary of education.

The bill describes the Texas curriculum changes as “a sharp departure from widely accepted historical teachings” and “a threat to the apolitical nature of public school governance and academic content standards in California.”

Tom Adams, director of the state Department of Education’s standards and curriculum division, said the Texas standards could make their way into national editions of textbooks, but those aren’t used in California. “Our main concern is whether materials meet California’s standards,” he said. “There’s nothing in our review process that says we should be following Texas or anything like that.”

A new report in the Guardian reveals that the Texas State Board of Education also “dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous ‘Atlantic triangular trade,’ and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism.” The board will be meeting again this week and conservatives have promised to “keep working to the last moment to correct years of liberal bias in history classes.”

Extremists

digby: "Shoot To Kill"

Here is perhaps the most bizarre commencement speech in history, courtesy C&L (click the link for the full write up)

Have you ever listened to those Jim Jones sermons down in Guyana just before he told them to drink the kool-aid? Just saying.

digby: Making The Argument

Rick Perlstein alerted me to this fine post by Dante Atkins in which he gives a spirited and moving argument for liberal values. It's particularly gratifying since he made the argument around the issue from which so many Democrats are running as fast as they can: abortion rights.

He is engaging in a sort of dialog with a retrograde, throwback outfit called "The Ruth Institute" which is apparently some sort of white supremacy group concerned that the birthrate of the right sort of people is going down because selfish and slutty white women are refusing to properly submit themselves to men and breed early and often.

It's a fascinating back and forth, but as Perlstein noted what's especially notable is the way Atkins makes the argument. Here's an example:

See, in Dr. Morse's opinion, it's not sexist of her to advocate that women's economic and social advances be rolled back. Why? Because many women actively want take on what one could call a traditional domestic role. That is definitely true: many women do actively seek that role, just as there are many men who actively desire the corresponding role of economic provider. What Dr. Morse seems to want, by contrast, is to force all women to reject the technological, medical and social advances that guaranteed their freedom to choose something else. And why? Because her main concern is, of course, birthing children ahead of the replacement rate of 2.1 per woman, and active Western wombs are apparently the only method for the purpose. After all, Dr. Morse doesn't even consider immigration as a potential solution for the aging population and social services issues that she seems so concerned about.

[...]

The Ruth Institute wants to ban no-fault divorce. They want to ban same-sex marriage. They apparently want to ban the Pill. They want the government, in fact, to do all sorts of social engineering to make sure that women revert to being baby factories to generate Western babies at a replacement rate. And we fevered "leftists," by contrast? All we want is to make sure that each individual has the freedom to choose his or her own destiny.

In Dr. Morse's mind, that type of freedom is far too much for her fellow women to handle. But as a progressive man who loves strong, smart and capable women, I respectfully beg to differ.

He sets forth the fundamental liberal value --- the freedom to choose your own destiny, a value which almost never seems to make it into the discussion of abortion anymore, as if bearing children, whether one then raises them or not, is a trifling matter that only the most depraved or selfish person would refuse to do. Parenthood is at once nothing and everything.

For an insight into how the allegedly anti-statist Ron and Rand Paul libertarian right are able to justify their intellectually incoherent anti-choice views, here's a pretty good example of the argument. They're all about individual freedom --- for blastocysts. Women, on the other hand, are begging for "special rights" when they resist the idea of forced childbirth. No matter which way the right comes at the argument, the autonomy of the woman never rises to the surface of concern. She is a vessel of God or a vessel of nature, but never a human being with full dominion over her body or her future.

Krugman: Going to Extreme

Utah Republicans have denied Robert Bennett, a very conservative three-term senator, a place on the ballot, because he’s not conservative enough. In Maine, party activists have pushed through a platform calling for, among other things, abolishing both the Federal Reserve and the Department of Education. And it’s becoming ever more apparent that real power within the G.O.P. rests with the ranting talk-show hosts.

News organizations have taken notice: suddenly, the takeover of the Republican Party by right-wing extremists has become a story (although many reporters seem determined to pretend that something equivalent is happening to the Democrats. It isn’t.) But why is this happening? And in particular, why is it happening now?

The right’s answer, of course, is that it’s about outrage over President Obama’s “socialist” policies — like his health care plan, which is, um, more or less identical to the plan Mitt Romney enacted in Massachusetts. Many on the left argue, instead, that it’s about race, the shock of having a black man in the White House — and there’s surely something to that.

But I’d like to offer two alternative hypotheses: First, Republican extremism was there all along — what’s changed is the willingness of the news media to acknowledge it. Second, to the extent that the power of the party’s extremists really is on the rise, it’s the economy, stupid.

On the first point: when I read reports by journalists who are shocked, shocked at the craziness of Maine’s Republicans, I wonder where they’ve been these past eight or so electoral cycles. For the truth is that the hard right has dominated the G.O.P. for many years. Indeed, the new Maine platform is if anything a bit milder than the Texas Republican platform of 2000, which called not just for eliminating the Federal Reserve but also for returning to the gold standard, for killing not just the Department of Education but also the Environmental Protection Agency, and more.

Somehow, though, the radicalism of Texas Republicans wasn’t a story in 2000, an election year in which George W. Bush of Texas, soon to become president, was widely portrayed as a moderate.

Or consider those talk-show hosts. Rush Limbaugh hasn’t changed: his recent suggestion that environmentalist terrorists might have caused the ecological disaster in the gulf is no worse than his repeated insinuations that Hillary Clinton might have been a party to murder. What’s changed is his respectability: news organizations are no longer as eager to downplay Mr. Limbaugh’s extremism as they were in 2002, when The Washington Post’s media critic insisted that the radio host’s critics were the ones who had “lost a couple of screws,” that he was a sensible “mainstream conservative” who talks “mainly about policy.”

So why has the reporting shifted? Maybe it was just deference to power: as long as America was widely perceived as being on the way to a permanent Republican majority, few were willing to call right-wing extremism by its proper name. Maybe it took a Democrat in the White House to give some observers the courage to say the obvious.

To be fair, however, it’s not all a matter of perception. Right-wing extremism may be the same as it ever was, but it clearly has more adherents now than it did a couple of years ago. Why? It may have a lot to do with a troubled economy.

True, that’s not how it was supposed to work. When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments — and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.

That’s the message of a recent paper by the economists Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner, who find a striking correlation between economic performance and political extremism in advanced nations: in both America and Europe, periods of low economic growth tend to be associated with a rising vote for right-wing and nationalist political parties. The rise of the Tea Party, in other words, was exactly what we should have expected in the wake of the economic crisis.

So where does our political system go from here? Over the near term, a lot will depend on economic recovery. If the economy continues to add jobs, we can expect some of the air to go out of the Tea Party movement.

But don’t expect extremists to lose their grip on the G.O.P. anytime soon. What we’re seeing in places like Utah and Maine isn’t really a change in the party’s character: it has been dominated by extremists for a long time. The only thing that’s different now is that the rest of the country has finally noticed.

Benen: GINGRICH, MEET GODWIN

It was the latest in a series of reminders that this is nothing -- literally, nothing -- that a far-right media personality can say to be driven from polite American society.

Disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), inexplicably one of the nation's most ubiquitous Sunday-show guests, sat down with Chris Wallace yesterday on "Fox News Sunday." The host confronted Gingrich with one of his recent quotes: "The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."

Wallace said, "Mr. Speaker, respectfully, isn't that wildly over the top?" "No," Gingrich replied, insisting that he believes President Obama intends to "decide who earns how much."

The host pushed back, but Gingrich was entirely serious. As the former Speaker sees it, President Obama believes there's such a thing as excessive wealth, which means the president intends to be "the arbiter of your dreams," which means the president will try to "decide who earns how much," which means the president is some kind of communist. Or something.

Gingrich added that the Obama administration therefore poses a threat comparable to the Nazis and Soviets, not on a "moral" plane, but as "a very serious threat to our way of life."

Now, I think it's fair to say most reasonable people would charitably describe this as idiocy. Comparing America's leadership to Nazis and Soviets is as offensive as it is ridiculous. This isn't exactly a new observations, but Newt Gingrich, the disgraced pseudo-intellectual, is quite obviously stark raving mad.

But here's the kicker: it won't make a bit of difference. Given the way the political establishment is "wired" for Republicans, there simply aren't any consequences for this kind of abject stupidity.

Gingrich was driven from office by members of his own party more than a decade ago, under a cloud of ethical lapses, policy failures, and personal scandal. He hasn't held office since, but the media can't stop turning to him -- he was the single most frequent guest on "Meet the Press" in 2009 -- giving him a national platform to spew nonsense, including yesterday's remarks comparing Americans to Nazis.

The media-driven discourse of 21st-century America often leaves much to be desired.

The Media We Have.

Devilstower (DKos): The Disaster Disaster

The BBC television show Top Gear is well known for showcasing beautiful examples of automotive art alongside classic bits of British buffoonery. Any given week is likely to feature cars that cost more than most homes being whipped around a track, followed by some adventure that may include shooting an old Reliant Robin into the air or turning a Toyota pickup into a boat. It's a formula that's made Top Gear consistently one of the most popular programs in the world. But it's not exactly the place you turn for the news.

So when, during the 2007 season, Top Gear set one of their episodes in the southern United States, I wasn't expecting to learn much more than how the hosts of the show would choose to get themselves in trouble that week. I wasn't disappointed on that front, as they managed to get stones thrown at them in a small Alabama town after painting "Man-love rules" on one of their vehicles. I was surprised by what happened next.

As the show rolled into the New Orleans region, the camera revealed block after block of devastation. Even the hosts of the show appeared to be in shock as the scale of Katrina's impact on the region became clear. For miles there was not one open store, not one building undamaged, not one house without shattered windows and sagging walls. On and on they went, with things becoming progressively worse. It was like a drive through the tiers of hell, and if there were attempts to repair the damage, they were invisible. The hosts dropped their usual banter for what was clearly a mixture of surprise and disgust at how little the United States had done to help the stricken area.

The most surprising thing was that, not only was the area still in rubble two years after the storm hit, the visit from a BBC entertainment program did a better, more hard-hitting job of revealing what had happened than any program in the US from the time of Katrina till now. That evening was the first time I had a real sense of just how huge and all pervasive the damage had been. It was certainly the first glimpse I'd seen of just how utterly inadequate was the government's response. Heck of a job, Brownie. Heck of a job, all of us.

And heck of a job, US news media, for not coming close to showing what was really happening in one of America's great cities.

It not as if our three 24 hour news networks and the dozens of news programs on the broadcast channels didn't cover Katrina. They devoted hundreds, if not thousands of hours to the coverage. The only thing is that the coverage was focused on a very few areas -- the people trapped inside the Superdome, helicopters rescuing people from rooftops, aerial shots of people breaking into supermarkets in a search for food and water, interviews with local, state and federal officials, George W. Bush back-lit by a battalion of generators brought in just for his speech. Those features were covered over, and over, and over again, with the obligatory discussion by dozens of regular pundits and hundreds of guests. After the immediate effects of the storm had passed, occasional New Orleans coverage continued -- mostly in the form of showing FEMA trailers parked in sodden yards, volunteers unloading food from trucks, and more speeches from officials.

None of those shows came close to showing the width and breadth of the damage and the picayune nature of the response. If the media had done a better (and by this I mean much better job) of showing the nation what had really happened to the Gulf coast region, there might have been a lot less resentment in some quarters toward the amount of aid that was required, there might have been a lot more attention paid to seeing that the real problems were addressed, there might have been a lot less tendency to treat New Orleans like a political petri dish ready for experimentation. But that didn't happen. What America saw was a few locations, a little looting, a lot of talking heads. TV Katrina was a disaster in a jar -- shrunken not just to fit our screens, but to fit pre-composed narratives and scripted bits of drama.

The same thing can be said of the coverage in Iraq. Despite the celebrated program of "embedding" reporters to provide "unprecedented" access to events as they happened, what America saw of the war was not just sanitized beyond recognition, it was reduced, scaled back, turned into repeat clips of Humvees roaring past and statues being dragged to the ground. The media fumbled back and forth, trying to find the right plotline for Iraq, and ultimately shredded the script and consigned the whole series to token coverage. The best Iraq footage as far as the networks were concerned was no Iraq footage at all -- just conversations with "experts" who met the requirement for square-jaws and steely-eyed resolve.

Any American who has traveled outside the US in the last few years and caught a glimpse of the war in foreign coverage is bound to feel as if they've been sucker punched. Leveled towns, blocks of smoldering ruins, walls that cut through cities, and everywhere ordinary families screaming and crying at their loss. Streets packed with people who are tired, dirty, and beaten. It's like a view from another world. Who are these people? What are these places? What are they doing in our war?

But really, all of this shouldn't be surprising. Because the United States no longer boasts a television news media. That's been replaced with entertainment programs. Newsy programming. Saying that watching the Daily Show gives you a better glimpse of what's really happening in the world may be funny, until it's true.

Newsy programming is what you get when there are no reporters, only anchors -- anchors that almost uniformly have no background in journalism. It's what you get when the first qualification on your network is a high-def friendly complexion. On newsy programming, you don't have reporters who stay on the scene for days, you have aerial cameras and helicopters to bring your anchor in for some well-framed views in front of the most scenic areas. Everything else can be done back in the office with enough loops and some snazzy sound effects.

Newsy programming is great at spectacle, at stories that lack scope but make up for it in stupid. They'd love to order up a season worth of balloon boy. Newsy programming also likes stories where almost nothing is known and everything is open to interpretation. Missing white girl isn't the staple of newsy programming because it's interesting. It's a regular series because they know how it goes. Those scripts are written. The emotions have already been practiced. The cross-program interactive synergy is known down to the product placement. Missing white girl has a theme song.

What newsy programming doesn't cover is disaster. Disasters are big, messy, always in transition. Disasters don't stay neatly in frame.

When you have a smashed oil rig under a mile of water and ripped-open pipes spewing unknown quantities into the Gulf, news programs might question the statements coming from the companies that created the issue.

A news program might question why BP has been restricting the video recordings that could be used to get an accurate estimate of the scale of this disaster.

A news program might wonder why both BP and the government have consistently underestimated the flow and only nudged up their numbers when confronted by irrefutable evidence collected by independent sources.

A news program might question BP on why it has stopped providing updates on the rate of flow and refuses to answer questions about the size of the total loss.

A news program might stop repeating numbers that have turned out to be false over and over, and instead work toward uncovering the true scale of what's happening.

A news program might investigate the truth behind insistence that the US can't meet its energy needs without more deep water drilling.

But we don't have news programs. We only have newsy programs. So they'll continue to interview "experts" who tsk over this "unfortunate accident" and assure us that this isn't a big problem. In fact, they'll use the same experts who they talked when the "debate" over drilling happened last time. It's easier that way. Our newsy networks will repeat what they're told, repeat the corporate line on our need for offshore oil, and provide dutiful coverage for whatever top hat-dome-pipe BP is lowering into the sea today. Now and then they might pause to shake their heads over the completely uniformed numbers circulating on the web, numbers that have most definitely not been provided right from the mouths of the people responsible for this disaster.

But hey, they will keep some cameras poised to pick up a dead sea turtle or two, because baby, that's spectacle.

If you want to get an idea of the real scale of what's happening, the real cost to the Gulf both in the long and short term, the real risk we take by allowing this type of drilling or the real options for future development... well, I hear there are still some cheap tickets overseas. Why not plan for a few days somewhere where they still show news on TV? Or you could wait until some imported comedy show provides a little insight. That 2012 episode where The Peep Show stars frolic on the black sands of Florida? Hilarious.

In the meantime, there are plenty of pundits ready to fill some airtime, and I hear they've put new carpet in the situation room. Now that's news.

"cheney’s chernobyl"

Ann Laurie: Best Gulf-Spill Cleanup Suggestion Yet

My personal suspicion is that Halliburton’s got way more incriminating stuff buried in its file cabinets, just because we haven’t had Darth Cheney all over the Media Village telling the DFHs and other sane people to go fvck ourselves.

John Cole: And Then Obama Blew Up That Oil Rig And Tried to Get Away Blame Free

Chip Reid knows who is to blame for the oil spill in the gulf:

Angry Obama Seeks to Deflect Blame for Gulf Oil Spill Crisis

The president seemed genuinely angry today, on a beautiful spring afternoon in the Rose Garden. Having watched him on a daily basis for about a year and a half, I’m confident he wasn’t faking it.

He seems deeply upset about the growing calamity in the Gulf, about the environmental damage, about the irresponsibility of the companies involved, and about their efforts to shift the blame.

“I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle during the congressional hearings into this matter,” he intoned. “You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else.”

President Obama may have decried finger-pointing today, but he also did a fair amount of it himself. Not only at the three companies, but at previous administrations.

Yeah. I can’t imagine why the White House doesn’t want you assholes anywhere near Supreme Court nominees or why they view you all with sheer contempt.

• from the comments:
  

  valdivia
  

  assholes. deflect? this is cheney’s chernobyl (someone here coined it) and Reid says Obama is deflecting. Fucking jerk.
  

  dmsilev
  

  Didn’t you hear? Obama dug the well himself, using slave labor supplied by ACORN, under direct orders from Fat Al Gore, whose diabolical plan to discredit the worlds’ oil companies is proceeding nicely.

  The really sad thing is that parts of that above paragraph have been advanced in all seriousness by various members of the conservative media establishment.

Benen: PLUMES IN THE GULF

Lately, there seems to be a pattern in developments surrounding the BP oil spill disaster: the news is always bad.

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

"There's a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water," said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. "There's a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column."

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. "If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months," she said Saturday. "That is alarming."

The AP, meanwhile, reports that BP launched a new effort to use a mile-long pipe to capture much of the oil flowing into the Gulf, "but engineers failed to connect two pieces of equipment a mile below the water's surface."

Officials from BP said they're confident the pipe can be adjusted and that this effort may prove to be effective, but then again, officials from BP say a lot of things.

Matt Yglesias: Jack Bauer Republicans

Here’s a frightening piece from Benjy Sarlin in the Daily Beast:

Call them the Jack Bauer Republicans.

Two Iraq veterans who left the military after surviving charges of crimes against detainees are running credible campaigns for Congress. And far from minimizing the incidents, both candidates have put the accusations front and center in their campaigns, attracting rock-star adulation from conservatives nationwide in the process. But critics, including human-rights activists, veterans, and now even defeated primary opponents, warn that their records should disqualify them from office.

Love of violence and brutality is deeply ingrained in the conservative worldview, which I think is what you can see here.

Benen: ANOTHER ANGEL LOSES ITS WINGS

Just three weeks ago, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank had a perfectly reasonable column on the Republican Party's shift to the hard-right. It was premised on Florida Gov. Charlie Crist "being drummed out" of the GOP, but it captured nicely the larger context of the party's increasingly radical transition.

But Milbank couldn't leave well enough alone. In a column devoted to highlighting Republican extremism, the Post writer just had to say, "Both parties have been undergoing ideological cleansing." The observation was both wrong and superfluous.

Today, Milbank has an even more compelling column, which is just devastating for the GOP. It laments the "crackup of the Republican Party," chronicling Bob Bennett's purge in Utah, and the truly ridiculous new platform adopted by the Maine Republican Party. He proceeded to make note of the larger trend, which also includes the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Alabama who's under fire for only being a partial Biblical literalist, and Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) literally laughable new anti-immigration campaign ad.

The Republican Party, Milbank observed, "is turning into this One-World-Government, Obama-worships-Satan, Jesus-opposes-climate-bill melange."

It's a really strong, persuasive, well-argued piece, raising an important point that many observers at major media outlets deliberately avoid.

But once again, Milbank just had to go there.

Democrats are having purity putsches, too, in Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Colorado.

[bangs head against desk]

First, Democratic primaries are not necessarily evidence of "purity putsches." We've been through this. Taking the Pennsylvania case, for example, we see Arlen Specter facing a Democratic challenger in large part because Specter was a Republican for the last three decades, and he endorsed Bush/Cheney and McCain/Palin. Subjecting him to a primary is hardly an example of the Democratic base imposing some kind of rigid ideological test, or moving too far to the hard-left.

Second, there's really no comparison between a handful of Senate primaries and a Republican Party that, by Milbank's own admission, appears to have gone stark raving mad.

And third, reporters at major outlets have to realize one of these days that there's nothing wrong with a publishing a piece critical of the GOP -- and leaving it at that. I'm well aware of the unwritten rule -- all criticism of Republicans has to include related criticism of Democrats, whether it makes sense or not -- but it's wildly unnecessary, and at a certain level, misleads the public into thinking "both sides" are equally guilty of the same transgressions. They're not.

There's no need to put a pox on both houses, when only one deserves it.

• from the comments:
  

  Milbank is right. The Republican party is a serial killer - hacking co-eds and children to pieces and burying them in the backyard. B-b-but the Democrats are really bad too - they have an overdue library book.

  Posted by: ckelly on May 16, 2010 at 9:07 AM

Benen: ACT FIRST, THINK SECOND

I've made a conscious effort to avoid coverage of a certain former half-term governor lately, but Sarah Palin's recent remarks demanding more coastal drilling seem pretty important under the circumstances.

It's not just the topical nature of her misguided comments -- there is, in case she hasn't heard, a devastating oil spill in the Gulf, that gets worse every day -- but Palin's demands are also evidence of a larger problem with the far-right approach to public policy.

"After inheriting a good pro-development GOP plan that opened up both coasts for drilling, the Obama administration halted development ... and now we're gonna study, more study of the South Atlantic and parts of the Gulf of Mexico ... my goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death ... I have seen so many, many studies!

"I say, let's send the White House this message: that, you know, we can save taxpayer time, save money and announce: there is oil and gas down there, and we can produce it safely and responsibly! We don't need more studies, we need more action! Because energy produced in America is security for America, and it is jobs for American workers, jobs that can't be outsourced. Let's drill baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!"

It's hard not to chuckle at the notion that the conspicuously unintelligent former half-term governor has actually "seen so many, many studies" -- as if she spends her free time digging through reports from the Department of Interior.

But the larger point Palin is trying to make here is pretty straightforward: stop being methodical, stop worrying about consequences, stop getting the facts together, and just do stuff. Evidence and research are fine for eggheads and East coast intellectuals, but who needs thinking when there are oil rigs to erect along the nation's coastline? Everything will probably work out for the best, right? We can obviously count on oil companies to do the right thing and deal with any problems that arise.

The right-wing media personality couldn't possibly understand this, but her approach is exactly what helped create this nightmare in the first place. Federal officials cleared drilling in the Gulf "without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species -- and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf." Officials could have also required remote acoustic shutoff switches, but was more concerned with getting the process underway -- without "stalling" -- with minimal burdens on the industry.

In other words, we already tried the "act first, think second" approach Palin recommends. We'll be dealing with the costs for a very long time.

Competence

Benen: BACK TO WORK

Ron Brownstein published a paragraph this week that actually seemed hard to believe: "If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush's presidency."

At first blush, it's tempting to think that couldn't possibly be true. The Republican economic policies -- tax cuts for the wealthy, huge deficits, weak recovery, minimal public investment, even less oversight and regulation -- were a spectacular mess that failed miserably. But can 2010 really top the job creation of Bush's entire presidency?

Actually, yes. This chart, published by the Washington Post in January, tells a pretty remarkable story, showing job growth by decade. (You can click on the chart to see it larger.) Notice that red line down towards the bottom? That shows the anemic job creation over the first decade of the 21st century.

Indeed, it went largely ignored at the time, but the Republican Bush/Cheney ticket sought a second term in 2004 despite the fact that it was the first administration in the modern era to go four years with a net job growth of zero. The campaign was largely about national security, so voters overlooked this painful detail.

And so it creates the dynamic that Brownstein describes. If job growth holds steady the rest of this year -- by no means a certainty, of course -- the U.S. economy will create a net gain of about 1.7 million jobs. From start to finish, the net gain under Bush was about 1 million.

The Obama presidency, of course, will have a long way to go before it can start talking about a net gain. It inherited an economy in freefall, and over 4 million jobs were lost in 2009 alone. Making up that kind of lost ground will take quite a long time, though the stimulus has obviously helped get us back on track.

But in some ways, that only helps make the Bush comparison worse -- he inherited an economy with a 4% unemployment rate, a huge surplus, and sunny skies ahead. Worse, Bush/Cheney and congressional Republicans got exactly what they wanted in terms of huge tax cuts, but the economic benefits they promised never materialized.

Oddly enough, these same Republicans think the economy will soar if we just return to Bush-era policies and repeat the same mistakes they already made. Why anyone who hasn't suffered trauma would find this credible remains a mystery.

Benen: A 'HIGH POINT' IN GOVERNMENT DISASTER RESPONSE

As of about a decade ago, there was an assumption among much of the public that the government was pretty good at disaster response. By 2000, the Clinton administration's FEMA was considered a model government agency, able to act quickly and effectively to almost any scenario.

A decade later, the public's confidence has been badly rattled, and for good reason -- among its many problems, the Bush administration's mismanagement on this front became a national embarrassment. It wasn't long before it became a template for those hoping to discredit the efficacy of government itself -- if the government can't even respond ably to a hurricane in New Orleans, how can we expect it to [fill in the blank]?

With that in mind, Marc Ambinder raised an important yesterday that often goes overlooked: the government's disaster response efforts have already vastly improved over the last 16 months.

An eternal fact of Washington is that government gets much more attention when it performs badly than when it performs well. As an illustration of the former, recall the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. To illustrate the latter, consider how the media is covering government right now. By my count at least three major natural disasters have occurred in recent weeks: the Nashville flooding, the deadly Oklahoma tornadoes, and the BP oil spill (admittedly not "natural" but threatening to be a major environmental disaster). Let's throw in an attempted terrorist attack in Times Square, too. On every front, government has performed ably -- and often better than ably. And yet it's understating things considerably to say this success has not been widely recognized.

It should be recognized, though, because when it comes to government disaster response, the Bush years marked a low point and right now we're experiencing a high point.

That may seem like cold comfort to those along the Gulf Coast -- there's only so much the government can do about the BP oil spill disaster, and at this point, the crisis is getting considerably worse -- but Ambinder's observation is nevertheless an accurate one. Obama was intent on quickly improving the federal government's ability to respond to these kinds of disasters, and those efforts have been successful.

Ambinder noted several recent examples from the last month, but let's not overlook at the administration won (and deserved) plaudits for his handling of the H1N1 epidemic, and the administration's response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti has not only been exemplary, but it's even exceeded expectations.

Paul Waldman noted recently, "[I]t seems that the better job the Obama administration does with this [BP oil spill] and future disasters, the less it will matter in the public's perception of what government is capable of."

I hope that's right, because the debate in recent years has gone in a ridiculous direction. At issue has never been whether the government can effectively respond to disasters, but rather, the difference between an administration that guts response agencies and promotes incompetent lackeys, and one that takes these issues seriously.

Saturday Morning: Adults & Children

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Benen: WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, BRING IN THE SCIENTISTS

It sounds a bit like the script of a Hollywood blockbuster, but I'm pretty sure Bruce Willis will not be joining this team.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu signaled his lack of confidence in the industry experts trying to control BP Plc's leaking oil well by hand-picking a team of scientists with reputations for creative problem solving.

Dispatched to Houston by President Barack Obama to deal with the crisis, Chu said Wednesday that five "extraordinarily intelligent" scientists from around the country will help BP and industry experts think of back-up plans to cut off oil from the well, leaking 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below sea-level.

Members of the Chu team are credited with accomplishments including designing the first hydrogen bomb, inventing techniques for mining on Mars and finding a way to precisely position biomedical needles.

In the wake of the unsuccessful "dome" effort, Chu has tasked this team to develop "plan B, C, D, E and F," while looking for solutions to stop the oil from gushing into the Gulf.

Looking over these scientists' backgrounds, they look like a pretty creative bunch. Here's hoping for the best.

On a related note, Chu has also crafted a plan to use gamma rays to better understand the geologic nature of this specific leak. The Energy Secretary was asked yesterday how in the world he knew about gamma rays. He replied:

"Because I'm a physicist. And I dabble in many areas of physics. I did experiments when I was a graduate student on weak interactions, which are the forces of nuclear decay. And so I kept in my brain certain nuclear sources and what their energies were and I knew what the ranges were for how penetrating gamma rays could be. Very high-energy gamma rays can penetrate several inches of steel."

This is the latest installment in the "This Isn't The Bush Administration" chronicles.

The politics of corporate loopholes May 14: Senator Bernie Sanders talks with Rachel Maddow about how to rein in energy corporations that will go so far as to register in the Marshall Islands, the Cayman Islands and Zug Switzerland to exploit loopholes to avoid taxes and regulation and maximize profits.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Can MMS restructuring save regulation? May 14: Rachel Maddow talks with Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, about efforts to clean up the disasterously corrupt Minerals Management Service by restructuring the whole agency.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Benen: CAN'T BRING THESE FOLKS ANYWHERE

The Maine Republican Party raised a few eyebrows this week when it endorsed a right-wing party platform combining "fringe policies, libertarian buzzwords and outright conspiracy theories." Almost as interesting was the Maine GOP's behavior at the meeting where the platform was adopted.

Republican activists held their annual gathering at the Portland Exposition Building, near a local middle school. GOP members used an eighth-grade classroom for a caucus meeting, and took it upon themselves to start making some changes. (thanks to several alert readers for the tip)

"We allowed them to use the space and I'm appalled that they would go through a teacher's things, let alone remove something from a classroom," [School Committee member Sarah Thompson] said Wednesday. "We want the public to use school spaces, but they need to respect that it's a school and understand that they should leave it the way they find it." [...]

When [studies teacher Paul Clifford] returned to school on Monday, he found that a favorite poster about the U.S. labor movement had been taken and replaced with a bumper sticker that read, "Working People Vote Republican."

Later, Clifford learned that his classroom had been searched. Republicans who had attended the convention called Principal Mike McCarthy to complain about "anti-American" things they saw there, including a closed box containing copies of the U.S. Constitution that were published by the American Civil Liberties Union.

There's just something oddly spectacular about Republican activists describing a copy of the U.S. Constitution as "anti-American" because they didn't approve of the group that distributed the copy.

Party officials later apologized for the members' misconduct.

Lunchtime Potpourri

Jay Ackroyd: Freedom

The GOP purity trolls who have taken out Bennett and Crist have some rhetorical elements that are, charitably, sometimes difficult to understand in policy terms. For me one of these is equating carrying handguns in public places as an expression of freedom.

I noticed this recently on a trip to northern Florida and southern Georgia, just in time, as it has turned out, to see the indigenous wildlife. (There was a surprising number of bald eagles, and some spectacular swallow-tailed kites, not to mention the local bison population.)

In any case, there was a teenager wearing an anti-Obama t-shirt. I forget the precise cleverness of phrasing, but a central element was that Obama wanted to take away his guns, and therefore limit his freedom. Aside from the not being true part, and the implied treason, it was hard to under stand what he was trying to say.

And now I see this notion of freedom includes carrying guns into bars. Both Virginia and Tennessee have passed bills allowing people to carry a concealed handgun into establishments that serve alcohol. (It turns out that Plaxico Burress was a freedom fighter with a bad sense of timing and place. Who knew?)

The James Brady lobbying effort has found the open carry movement unpopular, but as always, the NRA carries the day over merely popular legislative positions.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Ezra Klein: Galbraith: The danger posed by the deficit ‘is zero’

James Galbraith is an economist and the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. chair in government and business relations at the University of Texas at Austin. He's also a skeptic of the prevailing concern over America's long-term deficit. With many people now comparing America's fiscal condition to Greece, I spoke with Galbraith to get the other side of the argument. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

EK: You think the danger posed by the long-term deficit is overstated by most economists and economic commentators.

JG: No, I think the danger is zero. It's not overstated. It's completely misstated.

EK: Why?

JG: What is the nature of the danger? The only possible answer is that this larger deficit would cause a rise in the interest rate. Well, if the markets thought that was a serious risk, the rate on 20-year treasury bonds wouldn't be 4 percent and change now. If the markets thought that the interest rate would be forced up by funding difficulties 10 year from now, it would show up in the 20-year rate. That rate has actually been coming down in the wake of the European crisis.

So there are two possibilities here. One is the theory is wrong. The other is that the market isn't rational. And if the market isn't rational, there's no point in designing policy to accommodate the markets because you can't accommodate an irrational entity.

EK: Then why are the bulk of your colleagues so worried about this?

JG: Let's push a bit deeper on the CBO forecasts. They publish a baseline set of projections. One of those projections holds the economy will return to a normal high-employment level with low inflation over the next 10 years. If true, that would be wonderful news. Go down a few lines and they also have the short-term interest rate going up to 5 percent. It's that short-term interest rate combined with that low inflation rate that allows them to generate, quite mechanically, these enormous future deficit forecasts. And those forecasts are driven partially by the assumption that health-care costs will rise forever at a faster rate than everything else and by interest payments on the debt will hit 20 or 25 percent of GDP.

At this point, the whole thing is completely incoherent. You cannot write checks to 20 percent to anybody without that money entering the economy and increasing employment and inflation. And if it does that, then debt-to-GDP has to be lower, because inflation figures into how much debt we have. These numbers need to come together in a coherent story, and the CBO's forecast does not give us a coherent story. So everything that is said that is based on the CBO's baseline is, strictly speaking, nonsense.

EK: But couldn't there be a space between the CBO being totally correct and the debt not being a problem? It seems certain, for instance, that health-care costs will continue to rise faster than other sectors of the economy.

JG: No, it's not reasonable. Share of health-care cost would rise as part of total GDP and the inflation would rise to be nearer to what the rate of health-care inflation is. And if health care does get that expensive, and we're paying 30 percent of GDP while everyone else is paying 12 percent, we could buy Paris and all the doctors and just move our elderly there.

EK: But putting inflation aside, the gap between spending and revenues won't have other ill effects?

JG: Is there any terrible consequence because we haven't prefunded the defense budget? No. There's only one budget and one borrowing authority and all that matters is what that authority pays. Say I'm the federal government and I wish to pay you, Ezra Klein, a billion dollars to build an aircraft carrier. I put money in your bank account for that. Did the Federal Reserve look into that? Did the IRS sign off on it? Government does not need money to spend just as a bowling alley does not run out of points.

What people worry about is that the federal government won't be able to sell bonds. But there can never be a problem for the federal government selling bonds. It goes the other way. The government's spending creates the bank's demand for bonds, because they want a higher return on the money that the government is putting into the economy. My father said this process is so simple that the mind recoils from it.

EK: What are the policy implications of this view?

JG: It says that we should be focusing on real problems and not fake ones. We have serious problems. Unemployment is at 10 percent. if we got busy and worked out things for the unemployed to do, we'd be much better off. And we can certainly afford it. We have an impending energy crisis and a climate crisis. We could spend a generation fixing those problems in a way that would rebuild our country, too. On the tax side, what you want to do is reverse the burden on working people. Since the beginning of the crisis, I've supported a payroll tax holiday so everyone gets an increase in their after-tax earnings so they can pay down their mortgages, which would be a good thing. You also want to encourage rich people to recycle their money, which is why I support the estate tax, which has accounted for an enormous number of our great universities and nonprofits and philanthropic organizations. That's one difference between us and Europe.

EK: That does it for my questions, I think.

JG: I have one more answer, though! Since the 1790s, how often has the federal government not run a deficit? Six short periods, all leading to recession. Why? Because the government needs to run a deficit, it's the only way to inject financial resources into the economy. If you're not running a deficit, it's draining the pockets of the private sector. I was at a meeting in Cambridge last month where the managing director of the IMF said he was against deficits but in favor of saving, but they're exactly the same thing! A government deficit means more money in private pockets.

The way people suggest they can cut spending without cutting activity is completely fallacious. This is appalling in Europe right now. The Greeks are being asked to cut 10 percent from spending in a few years. And the assumption is that this won't affect GDP. But of course it will! It will cut at least 10 percent! And so they won't have the tax collections to fund the new lower level of spending. Spain was forced to make the same announcement yesterday. So the Eurozone is going down the tubes.

On the other hand, look at Japan. They've had enormous deficits ever since the crash in 1988. What's been the interest rate on government bonds ever since? It's zero! They've had no problem funding themselves. The best asset to own in Japan is cash, because the price level is falling. It gets you 4 percent return. The idea that funding difficulties are driven by deficits is an argument backed by a very powerful metaphor, but not much in the way of fact, theory or current experience.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

What digby & Ed said ...

digby: Lock And Load

Such funny guys, especially with the death threats and all:

Congressional District 11 GOP candidate Brad Goehring is drawing fire for his confrontational Facebook statement today:

“If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to “thin” the herd.”

He later said he meant to "thin the herd" with votes, not bullets and that he just hit the send button to early and then just left it there because he didn't think anyone would take it seriously. That's nice.

But the truth is that this is a very old joke, which I'm sure this numbskull has seen:




Here is the story of some of these adorable jokes, but the first "Liberal Hunting Permit" shown above has been around for years. These are the kind of things they sell CPAC every year. It's perfectly common right wing rhetoric.

C&L: Bay Buchanan Says Obama has 'Dummied-Down' Supreme Court After Calling Palin Qualified to be President

By Heather Wednesday May 12, 2010 6:00am

Ed Schultz takes a well-deserved whack at Bay Buchanan for saying that President Obama has "dummied-down" the Supreme Court with his pick of the former dean of Harvard Law School Elena Kagan -- especially after she said this about her brother Pat's girlfriend Sarah McQuitter, right after McCain selected her to be his choice for Vice President.

Buchanan: John McCain has made a remarkable decision. It was quite... look... in fact it's brilliant. She has one accomplishment after another, all of which are very much on a president...

King: So you have no concerns about her being president.

Buchanan: Not only am I not concerned. She is extraordinarily qualified.

There are plenty of reasonable objections one might have to Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. Implying she's dumb isn't one of them. Ed, when you guys get her hack brother to take his cot out of the MSNBC studios (where I suspect he lives other, than his weekly hike over to the PBS studio to scream at Eleanor Clift), you'll have some room to talk about CNN.