News from a Multicultural Perspective

2011-07-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

Republicans don't care about debtEvery day brings fresh evidence that debt reduction is way down on the GOP’s priority list. If Republicans simply wanted to reduce the debt by as much as possible, they’d agree to large cuts in defense, and agree to raise taxes, both of which would not only reduce the debt in their own right but give Democrats cover to back larger cuts in entitlements. But when House Speaker John Boehner broached something along these lines, Republicans rose up in fury, insisting that he oppose any tax increases, even if the result is a substantially smaller deficit-reduction deal.

So the oft-repeated narrative is wrong: Republicans are not desperate to reduce America’s debt. They are desperate to reduce the debt so long as it doesn’t conflict with their two higher priorities: opposing tax cuts and maintaining defense spending. Those are two rather large caveats.*****

2011-07-11T21:08:00.000-07:00

Cheney: Deficits don't matterStoryline No. 1: Republicans are desperate to balance America’s books. This is, to be sure, what Republicans say. But is there any reason to take them at face value? During the Bush years, after all, the GOP was anything but desperate to put America’s fiscal house in order. The Bush administration launched wars that increased the deficit, pushed tax cuts that increased the deficit, even pushed entitlement expansions—such as the prescription-drug benefit—that increased the deficit.

At times, top White House officials dismissed the idea that debt was a problem at all. When Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, warned that the Bush tax cuts would expand the deficit, Dick Cheney famously replied, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter.” If Barack Obama or Joe Biden said that today, Tea Partiers would begin shooting their muskets at the White House. But when Cheney did, it produced barely any right-wing outcry at all.

*****

2011-07-07T21:02:00.000-07:00

The right-wing's favorite fallaciesOne striking example of this rightward shift came in last weekend’s presidential address, in which Mr. Obama had this to say about the economics of the budget: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”

That’s three of the right’s favorite economic fallacies in just two sentences. No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance the budget in times of economic distress is a recipe for deepening the slump. Spending cuts right now wouldn’t “put the economy on sounder footing.” They would reduce growth and raise unemployment. And last but not least, businesses aren’t holding back because they lack confidence in government policies; they’re holding back because they don’t have enough customers—a problem that would be made worse, not better, by short-term spending cuts.*****

2011-07-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

Republicans take pro-slavery pledgeThe pledge is titled "The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMILY" (emphasis in the original), and what follows is pretty standard-issue Christian conservative rhetoric on the definition of marriage and the sanctity of same, but it comes with a fiscal twist that basically makes it clear that Vander Plaats does not cotton to the notion that social issues can be divorced from economic concerns.

For what it's worth, here's my favorite part:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.*****

2011-07-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

Hatch: Poor should do moreSen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) voted against beginning debate on a measure that would have the Senate declare the rich should share the pain of debt reduction Thursday, a day after arguing that it's the poor and middle class who need to do more.

"I hear how they're so caring for the poor and so forth," Hatch said in remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday, in reference to Democrats. "The poor need jobs! And they also need to share some of the responsibility."*****

2011-07-07T03:02:00.000-07:00

GOP to "blow your brains out"Republicans are playing a dangerous game by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, according to Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

"We raised the debt ceiling seven times during the Bush Administration," Buffett told CNBC on Thursday. Now, the Republican-controlled Congress is "trying to use the incentive now that we're going to blow your brains out, America, in terms of your debt worthiness over time."*****

2011-07-05T23:56:00.000-07:00

White supremacists cite Tea PartyPotok’s group tracked 23 candidates in 2010 with radical right-wing views, nine of whom they described as white supremacists or white nationalists.

Disappointed with Ron and Rand Paul and other leaders who they feel are close, but not close enough, to their views—the A3P has fielded candidates like Harry Bertram, who ran for the West Virginia board of education last fall, pulling down 14 percent of the vote. He’s now angling for governor. “My platform is conservative like the Tea Party but more racialist inclined,” Bertram says.

Stormfront founder and radio host Don Black tells The Daily Beast the strategy is to start from the ground up, “where we have a chance of winning. It’s impossible to get into the Senate or Congress but state legislatures or smaller offices can work.” Black says the Tea Party’s influence spurred hopes among his ideological soulmates—but that the initial excitement has given way to a realpolitik sense that the Stormfront crowd will have to go it alone. “Many of our people are involved in the Tea Party,” says Black. “But much of their leadership is skittish when it comes to talking about racial realities. The Tea Party is a healthy movement but many are too conditioned to run like scared rabbits when called racists.”

*****

2011-07-05T16:43:00.000-07:00

The three fundamentalismsThe increasingly-Southernized American Right has transferred the fundamentalist Protestant mentality from the sphere of religion to the spheres of law and the economy. Protestant fundamentalism is now joined by constitutional fundamentalism and market fundamentalism.

In all three cases, the pattern is the same. There is the eternal Truth that never varies--the will of God, the principles of the Founding Fathers, the so-called laws of the free market. There are the scriptures which explain the eternal truths--the King James Bible, in the case of religious fundamentalism, the Constitution or the Federalist Papers, in the case of constitutional fundamentalism, and Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in the case of market fundamentalism (The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand can be substituted for Hayek, on request).*****

2011-07-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

How Obama mishandled the debt ceilingAs Marc Ambinder of the National Journal suggested at the time, the president could have included an increase in the debt ceiling in the December deal to extend the Bush tax cuts. The Republicans dearly wanted that extension. Obama did not use leverage when he had it--and so he became a victim of leverage when he lacked it.

Then, as Republicans discovered the power of their new tool, the president decided to assume they were bluffing, that they would never actually do anything so reckless. Waking up to the reality of the situation too late, he commenced bargaining by offering what he assumed would be an irresistible deal. Wrong again. The Republicans did resist. So Obama offered an even better deal--which predictably only whetted the GOP appetite for still more.

Obama never publicly branded the debt ceiling as "if the Republicans force this country into bankruptcy." He issued no public call to constituencies like the financial industry to bring pressure to bear on the issue. He did not warn that he would manage any crisis in ways that Republicans would not like. ("If the Republicans in Congress deny me the authority to pay everybody, then I'm going to have to choose some priorities. I don't think it's likely that Texas-based defense contractors will find themselves at the top of my list.")

Instead, he appealed again and again to Republicans' spirit of responsibility. Good luck with that.*****

2011-07-04T21:38:00.000-07:00

Republicans are irrationalThe members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.*****

2011-07-04T04:44:00.000-07:00

GOP = party of debt[A]t the highest levels, the Republican Party cares nothing about the public debt. In fact, it wants more. Americans must understand this.

It is the party of debt. It is the party of deficits. It is the party of recession. It is the party of unemployment. It is the party of inequality. And it is the party of middle-class stagnation and slippage.

It is the party of all these things because it needs these conditions to exist—so that its leaders can scream “Crisis!” But they don’t desire in any meaningful way to fix the crisis. They scream about crisis because what they desire is to use the crisis as an excuse to do things to this country that the hard right has wanted to do for 30 years.*****

2011-06-16T20:07:00.000-07:00

Republicans lose touch with realityConsider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending—then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes—federal and state combined—as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.

Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?

2011-06-09T17:54:00.000-07:00

Bush tax cuts = failureThe massive Bush tax cuts mark their 10th birthday this week. Sadly, despite my best efforts to find something redeeming about them—honest!—there is little to celebrate. By nearly all of the metrics set out by President Bush himself, the cuts were a colossal failure.*****

2011-06-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

7 types of Republican idiotsThe Educated Republicans
Fox News and Conservative Talk Radio Republicans
Christian Republicans
Tea Party Republicans
Birther Republicans
Racist Republicans
Extremely Idiotic Republicans

2011-05-15T20:24:00.000-07:00

Conservatives try to rewrite historyAlthough culture warriors such as Pat Buchanan, and carnival barker pseudo-historians such as Glenn Beck would suggest otherwise, the forces of social and political conservatism have repeatedly been shown to be on the wrong side of American history. The triumphs of the Civil Rights, women's and labor movements were high water marks for the country. While maligned by the New Right as near profanities, the long arc of American history suggests that the forces of progressive and liberal thought have expanded rights and liberties for the country's citizens, as well as provided a more certain future in the pursuit of the common good than those alternatives offered by the Right.

For contemporary conservatives the solution to this dilemma is a simple one. When losing simply rewrite the history. Change the narrative. Then disseminate this alternate version of reality through the right-wing media and the schools.

This is the foundation of the Big Lie. The right-wing echo chamber offers a different version of the facts. In turn, their audience internalizes a partisan and ideologically skewed version of reality. Thus, shared solutions to the challenges facing the American people are almost impossible to reach because we as citizens are proceeding from a different set of priors about the nature of the problem.

*****

2011-05-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

Sorry state of the GOPToday’s Republicans have totally broken with the party’s long commitment to innovative national action: the land-grant colleges, national parks, food and drug regulation, interstate highways and government student loans. The creation of the income tax itself was supported by a good conservative Republican president, William Howard Taft.

Today’s GOP is committed to one proposition above all others: Reducing the size of the federal government. In this, Republicans resemble no group so much as conservative Democrats from the 1850s—minus, it must be said quickly and with gratitude, the shameful position such Democrats took on slavery. Even nullification and secession talk is now in vogue among some Republicans.*****

2011-05-15T06:45:00.000-07:00

10 things conservatives hate1. Our history debunks Religious Right mythology

2. We support science

3. America has a tradition of tolerance

Etc.

2011-05-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

Conservatives are scared spitlessAs highlighted by recent polling data suggesting that the most die-hard Republicans want to split and form a third party, conservatism is in an existential dilemma. The symbolic politics of the age of Obama, when a black man is president of the United States, has triggered all manner of upset and madness on the part of the Tea Party GOP. The Right faces a set of changing demographics where their core constituency is aging and dying off (what social scientists term as "generational replacement"). And looking forward several decades, whites will no longer be the majority racial group in America. In total, the base of the Republican Party is in decline and their electoral coalition is facing obsolescence.

The Tea Party GOP's search for a nominee to challenge Barack Obama has highlighted their bankruptcy of ideas. When not flailing about in the mucky waters of white populism, birtherism, and xenophobia, the positions offered by the GOP frontrunners are a laughable recycling of the failed policies of trickle-down economics, the Laffer curve, and an almost cult-like devotion to a belief that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, in conjunction with draconian cuts on public services for the middle, poor, and working classes, are the only way to balance the budget and reduce the deficit.*****

2011-05-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

America's "right" to kill anyoneThe perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks deserve to be held accountable for those crimes. But it's been a bit difficult listening to a country that continuously commits its own egregious crimes--ones that constantly cause civilian deaths--righteously celebrating the bin Laden killing as though it is applying universal principles of justice grounded in unmitigated contempt for lawless aggression. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that what has provoked such rage at bin Laden as a supreme criminal isn't the unlawful killing of civilians, but rather the killing of Americans on U.S. soil. The way we treat our own war criminals and policies of mass civilian death from around the world--and the way we so brazenly repudiate and even scorn the Nuremberg Principles we said we were establishing for the world--leave little doubt about that.

How can a country which has so passively accepted the complete immunity for George Bush, Dick Cheney and others--and which long tolerated if not actively supported their murderous policies--convincingly pose as stalwart opponents of lawlessly caused civilian deaths? Does anyone doubt the widespread American fury that would have resulted if Iraqis had come to the U.S. and killed Bush or other U.S. political leaders during that war? Recall the intense condemnation of an Iraqi citizen who did not shoot Bush in the head and dump his corpse into the ocean, but rather simply threw a shoe at him to protest the extraordinary amounts of Iraqi blood he has on his hands. Any efforts to harm an American political leader for the civilian deaths they cause would be decried by American consensus as "Terrorism" or worse (and that would be the case despite the fact that we not only tried to kill Saddam but are now quite clearly attempting to kill Gadaffi). "American exceptionalism" in its most odious expression means that we have the right to do things that nobody else in the world has the right to do, and that, as much as anything, is what is driving the reaction here.*****

2011-05-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

Bush deserves Nuremberg trialNo decent human being contests that the 9/11 attack was a grave crime. But there are many grave crimes, including ones sanctioned by (or acquiesced to) those leading the chorus of cheers for bin Laden's killing. To much controversy, Noam Chomsky recently wrote: "uncontroversially, Bush's crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's." That claim prompted widespread objections, including from Andrew Sullivan, who specifically criticized Chomsky's use of the word "uncontroversially" in making that claim. That semantic objection is not invalid: of course that comparative judgment is controversial, especially in the U.S.

Nor do I think such comparisons are ultimately worthwhile: how does one weigh the intentional targeting of civilians that kills several thousand against an illegal, aggressive war that recklessly and foreseeably causes the deaths of at least 100,000 innocent people, and almost certainly far more? Comparisons aside: what is clear is that Bush's crimes are grave, of historic proportion, and it's simply impossible for anyone who believes in the Nuremberg Principles to deny that.

*****

2011-05-14T08:13:00.000-07:00

Nuremberg prosecutor speaksI'm afraid most of the lessons of Nuremberg have passed, unfortunately. The world has accepted them, but the U.S. seems reluctant to do so. The principal lesson we learned from Nuremberg is that a war of aggression--that means, a war in violation of international law, in violation of the UN charter, and not in self-defense--is the supreme international crime, because all the other crimes happen in war. And every leader who is responsible for planning and perpetrating that crime should be held to account in a court of law, and the law applies equally to everyone.

These lessons were hailed throughout the world--I hailed them, I was involved in them--and it saddens me to no end when Americans are asked: why don't you support the Nuremberg principles on aggression? And the response is: Nuremberg? That was then, this is now. Forget it.*****

2011-05-14T01:54:00.000-07:00

McCain: Torture doesn't workI have sought further information from the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they confirm for me that, in fact, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee—information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in Al-Qaeda and his true relationship to Osama bin Laden—was obtained through standard, non-coercive means, not through any ‘enhanced interrogation technique.’

In short, it was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden. I hope former Attorney General Mukasey will correct his misstatement. It’s important that he do so because we are again engaged in this important debate, with much at stake for America’s security and reputation. Each side should make its own case, but do so without making up its own facts.

2011-05-10T18:35:00.000-07:00

Democrats turn Republican on terrorismIn 2004, the Democratic nominee John Kerry famously (and correctly) said--echoing Cole's words above--that Terrorism was comparable to prostitution, gambling, and organized crime: "nuisances" to be dealt with primarily through law enforcement but that will never go away entirely. In a 2008 Atlantic article, Matt Yglesias declared that "Kerry was right" when he " said something about counterterrorism being primarily a question to be dealt with through law enforcement and intelligence rather than something that should be understood as primarily a kind of war," and as proof, Yglesias cited this study from the Rand Corporation, which concluded as follows:Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term "war on terror" and replace it with "counterterrorism."

"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism," said Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist.That view now, of course--once the centerpiece of the Democratic Party's Terrorism arguments--is decreed to be a fringe and radical view. The same is true for Cole's argument that Terrorists should be deemed criminals, not warriors, and treated exactly the same way we treat criminals: with the full range of due process rights under our normal system of justice. Believe me, to make that very same argument now is to prompt accusations of radicalism and even Terrorist sympathies.*****

2011-05-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

"Non-Religious" is fastest-growing categoryCurrently more than one billion people around the world define themselves as agnostic, atheist or nonreligious—including 15 percent of Americans. Perhaps more striking, “nonreligious” is not only the fastest growing religious preference in the U.S., but also the only one to increase its percentage in every state over the past generation.

2011-05-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

Republican war on women worldwideBy United Nations estimates, 215 million women worldwide have an “unmet need” for family planning, meaning they don’t want to become pregnant but are not using effective contraception. The Guttmacher Institute, a widely respected research organization, estimates that if all the unmet need for contraception were met, the result would be 94,000 fewer women dying of pregnancy complications each year, and almost 25 million fewer abortions each year.

Greater access to birth control would also help check the world population, which the United Nations warned a few days ago is rising more quickly than expected. The U.N. now projects the total population in 2100 will be 10.1 billion.

Yet this year, Republicans in Congress have been trying to slash investments in family planning. A budget compromise last month cut international family planning spending by 5 percent, but some Republicans are expected to seek much bigger cuts in future years.

If they succeed, the consequences will be felt in places like this remote Somali town. Women won’t get access to contraceptives, and the parade of unwanted pregnancies, abortions, fistulas, and mothers dying in childbirth will continue.

*****

2011-05-08T16:41:00.000-07:00

Taxes are lowest since 1958Americans are paying the smallest share of their income for taxes since 1958, a reflection of tax cuts and a weak economy, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

The total tax burden—for all federal, state and local taxes—dropped to 23.6% of income in the first quarter, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

By contrast, individuals spent roughly 27% of income on taxes in the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s—a rate that would mean $500 billion of extra taxes annually today, one-third of the estimated $1.5 trillion federal deficit this year.

2011-04-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

Women face jail for abortionIn recent years, women in several states have faced arrest and imprisonment for the crime of ending their pregnancies, or merely attempting to do so. For decades now, feminists have warned about a post-Roe v. Wade world in which women are locked up for having abortions. Antiabortion activists dismiss such fears as propaganda. “The pro-life position has always been that women are victimized by abortion,” says the Priests for Life website, which has a page of sample letters to the editor meant to refute claims that abortion bans could lead to women being prosecuted. “In fact, we have repeatedly rejected the suggestion that women should be put in jail, much less executed.” But as abortion rights weaken and fetuses are endowed with a separate legal identity, women are being put in jail.

2011-04-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

Consumer-based medicine doesn't workNow, what House Republicans propose is that the government simply push the problem of rising health care costs on to seniors; that is, that we replace Medicare with vouchers that can be applied to private insurance, and that we count on seniors and insurance companies to work it out somehow. This, they claim, would be superior to expert review because it would open health care to the wonders of “consumer choice.”

What’s wrong with this idea (aside from the grossly inadequate value of the proposed vouchers)? One answer is that it wouldn’t work. “Consumer-based” medicine has been a bust everywhere it has been tried. To take the most directly relevant example, Medicare Advantage, which was originally called Medicare + Choice, was supposed to save money; it ended up costing substantially more than traditional Medicare. America has the most “consumer-driven” health care system in the advanced world. It also has by far the highest costs yet provides a quality of care no better than far cheaper systems in other countries.

2011-04-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

Americans sour on RepublicansCall it buyer’s remorse, a recall on faulty merchandise. Or call it a demand for a refund due to false advertising. Whatever you call it, Americans are beginning to see that this batch of Republicans in Congress are not what they had bargained for.

A new PPP poll finds that just a few months after handing the control of the House of Representatives over to the Republican party, 43% think John Boehner and company are doing a worse job than Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats did when they were in charge.

2011-04-15T22:02:00.000-07:00

Obama's budget speechPolitical genius? Hardly. All Obama had to do was beat pitiful Paul Ryan, the Tea-GOP’s budget flim flam man. Ryan not only fixed the numbers, he proposed to dismantle Medicare, the very program the GOP ran on saving from the evil Obama last November. How stupid is that? And he did it with a set of arguments and numbers that were so blatantly dishonest and so easily debunked that he left himself and his party exposed. Even better, Party leaders and numerous Tea-GOP Zombies endorsed Ryan’s budget, making it the official Tea-GOP position.

From that point on, Attila the Hun could have found room to run to the left of the radical Ryan Tea-GOP Zombies. My cat could’ve hit this one.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that even the inept political team in this White House realized they’d been handed a gift. All they had to do was to restate the central premise of American politics since FDR: Americans accept that while we honor individual initiative and freedom, we also share a collective responsibility to take care of each other, especially in individual or collective tough times. And the core programs that honor that belief—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—are sacred.

*****

2011-04-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

Cuts won't balance budgetThere is no single reason for today’s budget mess, but it’s worth remembering that the last time our budget was in the black was in the Clinton administration. That’s a broad hint that one sensible way to overcome our difficulties would be to revert to tax rates more or less as they were under President Clinton. That single step would solve three-quarters of the deficit for the next five years or so.

Paradoxically, nothing makes the need for a tax increase more clear than the Republican budget proposal crafted by Representative Paul Ryan. The Republicans propose slashing spending far more than the public would probably accept—even dismantling Medicare—and rely on economic assumptions that are not merely rosy, but preposterous.

Yet even so, the Republican plan shows continuing budget deficits until the 2030s. In short, we can’t plausibly slash our way back to solid fiscal ground. We need more revenue.*****

2011-04-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

Obama is no liberalThat's why I experience such cognitive dissonance when I read all of these laments from liberal pundits that Obama isn't pursuing the right negotiating tactics, that he's not being as shrewd as he should be. He's pursuing exactly the right negotiating tactics and is being extremely shrewd--he just doesn't want the same results that these liberal pundits want and which they like to imagine the President wants, too. He's not trying to prevent budget cuts or entitlement reforms; he wants exactly those things because of how politically beneficial they are to him--to say nothing of whether he agrees with them on the merits.

When I first began blogging five years ago, I used to write posts like that all the time. I'd lament that Democrats weren't more effectively opposing Bush/Cheney National Security State policies or defending civil liberties. I'd attribute those failures to poor strategizing or a lack of political courage and write post after post urging them to adopt better tactics to enable better outcomes or be more politically "strong." But then I realized that they weren't poor tacticians getting stuck with results they hated. They simply weren't interested in generating the same outcomes as the ones I wanted.*****

2011-04-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

Blame the unions!You see, it’s these greedy public employees, pulling down $30,000 to $50,000 a year, who’re sapping the economy and draining government treasuries—NOT billionaire casino dealers in Wall Street hedge funds who pay far lower tax rates than a firefighter and contribute far less to our nation than a teacher.

It has literally been incredible to hear these learned governors lecture us that fixing state budgets is simple: deregulate corporate power, cut taxe on the super-rich (again), fire tens of thousands of middle-class public employees, eliminate state programs even as the need for them rises and—just to boost the morale of teachers, firefighters and others—take away their democratic right to bargain collectively for workplace fairness.

2011-04-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

Ryan's phony Republican budgetWaste, fraud and abuse.

These are old friends—introduced to us by Reagan himself. There is no budget line called "waste, fraud and abuse." No doubt there is plenty of all three in the federal government (just as in the private sector). But Ryan offers no reason to think that there are easy pickings that the five presidents starting with Reagan, most of them Republican, have overlooked.

Caps.

Ryan says there should be a "binding cap on total spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product," along with other caps on smaller pieces of the budget. An order to cut, without any guidance on what to cut or why, is more like an aspiration than a decision. You might as well pass a law saying, "There shall be a balanced budget," and then claim that you've solved the puzzle. A cap is a restatement of the problem. It's not a solution.*****

2011-04-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

Obama caves in on budgetMore broadly, Mr. Obama is conspicuously failing to mount any kind of challenge to the philosophy now dominating Washington discussion—a philosophy that says the poor must accept big cuts in Medicaid and food stamps; the middle class must accept big cuts in Medicare (actually a dismantling of the whole program); and corporations and the rich must accept big cuts in the taxes they have to pay. Shared sacrifice!

I’m not exaggerating. The House budget proposal that was unveiled last week—and was praised as “bold” and “serious” by all of Washington’s Very Serious People—includes savage cuts in Medicaid and other programs that help the neediest, which would among other things deprive 34 million Americans of health insurance. It includes a plan to privatize and defund Medicare that would leave many if not most seniors unable to afford health care. And it includes a plan to sharply cut taxes on corporations and to bring the tax rate on high earners down to its lowest level since 1931. *****

2011-04-11T09:07:00.001-07:00

Republicans follow Nazi modelFrom the example of Scott Walker in Wisconsin, we can see clearly what we’re going to end up with if the Republicans are in charge: a return to the Articles of Confederation’s ineffective federal government and a bunch of petty little banana republic(an) despots owned by corporate interests, ignoring the law, running their states like private enrichment schemes and pretty much doing whatever they want in contravention of morality and decency and all accepted standards of proper conduct for elected officials.

There’s your Republican model of the future.

*****

2011-04-11T06:09:00.000-07:00

Why libertarianism won't workDo you know why Rand’s laissez-faire utopia would fail? It’s the exact same reason a socialist utopia would fail; people are imperfect. We are greedy, envious, petty and selfish. There will always be some among us who will better themselves specifically to the detriment of others because they simply don’t care. There will always be those who, as they gain power and wealth, will want more at any expense. We saw this in action in communist Russia. It was rife with the kind of corruption described so very well in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Everyone was equal, but some were more equal than others.

We see it today in that bastion of capitalism: America and its budding Oligarchy. As wealth and power becomes ever more concentrated, the rest of us suffer. Any attempts to remedy the situation by imposing restrictions on the rich and powerful to keep them from fleecing the country is met with howls of class warfare, Socialism and government overreach. Any attempts to remove any of the sweetheart deals in place allowing those same anti-government rich and powerful to pay less taxes (or no taxes at all) or to reap billions in unnecessary subsidies are also met with howls of unfair treatment.*****

2011-04-11T01:17:00.000-07:00

Conservatives are psychologically immatureA meta-analysis culled from 88 samples in 12 countries, and with an N of 22,818, revealed that “several psychological variables predicted political conservatism.” Which variables exactly? In order of predictive power: Death anxiety, system instability, dogmatism/intolerance of ambiguity, closed-mindedness, low tolerance of uncertainty, high needs for order, structure, and closure, low integrative complexity, fear of threat and loss, and low self-esteem. The researchers conclude, a little chillingly, that “the core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and a justification of inequality.”

The above list of variables is more than a little unsavory. We are talking about someone full of fear, with a poor sense of self, and a lack of mental dexterity. I always tell my students that tolerance of ambiguity is one especially excellent mark of psychological maturity. It isn’t a black and white world. According to the research, conservatives possess precisely the opposite: an intolerance of ambiguity and an inability to deal with complexity. Maybe that’s one reason why Obama seems so distasteful to them: he is a nuanced, multi-faceted thinker who can see things from several different perspectives simultaneously. And he isn’t preaching fear, either.

2011-04-09T17:04:00.000-07:00

Ryan robs from poor, gives to richEconomists already are picking over the plan's dubious statistics, but—as The Times reported Friday—the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has outlined what adoption of this proposal to supplant Medicare with vouchers and private insurance exchanges would mean. The overall cost of healthcare would go up, and retirees' out-of-pocket medical expenses would double—an increase that would push tens of millions of people living on fixed incomes over the financial brink.

The Wall Street Journal tellingly—and correctly—hailed Ryan's proposal for being "as important an advance as the shift from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k)s."

We all know how well that's worked out, but it does fix this plan firmly in the line of initiatives that, over the past 30 years, have dramatically increased social and economic inequality.*****

2011-04-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

Budget hypocrites don't mention war If a politician in Washington is discussing the popular topic of how to cut the budget (we all know that politicians hate spending our hard earned tax dollars), that politician will offer ways and means of cutting costs (praise his soul). If he does not start by noting that the only significant source of potential savings lies in the war budget, then you, dear citizen, have just discovered a hypocrite. This is the dirty little secret that everyone knows and that everyone (who is anyone in the ruling elite) has agreed not to mention ("vatever you do, don't mention the war!!").

My point here is simpler: the ruling elite (composed of the Republican and Democratic wings of the American Conservative Party, Wall Street executives, Big Pharma, Big Oil, and of course those who preside over the manufacture of all those weapons) will to a man refuse to admit that significant budget savings are only possible by cutting the war budget because the war budget is their personal priority. Not the wars per se, the war budget...the massive mercenary armies, the assumed need for more weapons than are possessed by all the rest of the world put together, the endless construction of city-sized overseas bases to defend against threats that did not exist until the bases provoked opposition.

*****

2011-04-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

Complex liberals, fearful conservativesEveryone knows that liberals and conservatives butt heads when it comes to world views, but scientists have now shown that their brains are actually built differently.

Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.*****

2011-04-09T05:02:00.000-07:00

Behind the budget warTo the extent that the United States does have an immediate fiscal problem, it can be traced to three causes--two systemic, one acute, and none Obama's fault: Bush tax cuts, unfunded Bush administration spending policies (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Medicare Part D) and plummetting tax revenue following the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing recession.

These problems helped Obama get elected. They also required him and Democrats, politically, not to let the public forget where the problems came from. When they failed at that, Republicans took an albatross that rested rightly with them and hung it around the Democrats' necks.*****

2011-04-09T04:43:00.000-07:00

Miss. Republicans against interracial marriageAmericans nationwide are evenly divided over the issue of same sex marriage. But Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

In a PPP poll released Thursday, a 46% plurality of registered Republican voters said they thought interracial marriage was not just wrong, but that it should be illegal. 40% said interracial marriage should be legal.

2011-04-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

Ryan's plan = voodoo economicsIn the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. And by repealing last year’s health reform, without any replacement, the plan would also deprive an estimated 34 million nonelderly Americans of health insurance.

So the pundits who praised this proposal when it was released were punked. The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness.*****

2011-04-07T04:57:00.000-07:00

What the budget war is aboutAbortion. Environmental protection. Health care. Nothing to do with jobs or the economy; instead, all the hoary greatest hits of the Republican Party, only this time it has the power to wreak national havoc: furloughing 800,000 federal workers, suspending paychecks for soldiers and punishing millions of Americans who will have to wait for tax refunds, Social Security applications, small-business loans, and even most city services in Washington. *****

2011-04-03T14:22:00.000-07:00

The Republican solution to everythingIn 2003, the [tax] cuts were expanded, and the federal government was plunged into a long-term debt crisis the likes of which it had never seen. With no surplus in good times, the government was then fiscally unprepared for the desperate needs of hard times, when the entire banking sector, and the countries biggest industrial corporations, were suddenly at risk of total collapse.

The Republican solution? Once again, to give unprecedented sums of taxpayer wealth to the richest of the rich. Between his tax cuts, his unfunded wars and the TARP bailout, George W. Bush oversaw the single most massive deliberate transfer of wealth in the history of humanity. And every time, it was free money for those who don’t need it.*****

2011-04-03T08:24:00.000-07:00

America's return to feudalismThe Norquist-Bush axis of nakedly ideological capitalism holds that government is for the supply side, which they define according to feudal prejudice: only the top 1% is really fit to lead, and so they must provide the levers of economic growth and prosperity, and they while benefit from them more than anyone else. Any schoolchild studying basic arithmetic can see that over time, that will concentrate wealth and undermine democracy, but they hold to the lie anyway.

In fact, among the first responses to the resulting shortfall in government revenues is the aggressive, even depraved, slashing of funds for public education. Why, after all, should children of the non-wealthy be educated if they cannot drive economic growth and prosperity? Again, the common logic is that of feudalism and aristocracy, not of democracy.

2011-04-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

Christian assault on ConstitutionIn the House of Representatives, Republicans have been on a rampage to make laws regarding establishment of Christianity as the law of the land, and in the process, are prohibiting the free exercise of beliefs or religion that is not Christianity. The illegal, unconstitutional establishment of religion is not unique to the House of Representatives or the Senate for that matter. Republican governors and state legislators are following the lead of House Republicans in passing laws establishing Christianity as the source of law that all residents must follow in spite of the Constitution’s prohibition.

Instead of working on legislation that helps improve the economy and creates jobs, House Republicans are attacking women’s reproductive rights and using Christian dogmata to dictate spending cuts and defunding strategies in an effort to ban abortions. The issue has gone beyond the argument that government funds shall not be used to pay for abortion; Republicans have worked to make it impossible for women to enroll in health policies that cover abortion whether the coverage is used or not, and regardless that a woman pays for the coverage with her own funds. Regardless of the reason an individual is against abortion, the Republicans are using the bible as the basis for the law and not the Constitution.*****

2011-04-01T16:46:00.000-07:00

US had to bomb LibyaIntervening in Libya, the president said, became part of America's national interest once it was clear that Kadafi's forces were poised to attack the rebel-held city of Benghazi, which he likened to an American city.

"The United States and the world faced a choice. Kadafi declared that he would show 'no mercy' to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we had seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over 1,000 people in a single day," Obama said. "Now, we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city. We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi--a city nearly the size of Charlotte--could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

"It was not in our national interest to let that happen," he said. "I refused to let that happen."*****

2011-04-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

GOP goes for the smearRecently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.

If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right—which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party—has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.*****

2011-04-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

How the '50s stomped the '60sFor teenagers, The Fifties(tm) were used to vandalize The Sixties(tm) through a competition between the Beatnik and the Greaser for the mantle of eighties cool. As historian Daniel Marcus recounts, the former became defined as "middle-class, left-wing, intellectual and centered in New York City and San Francisco"--that is, defined as the generic picture of weak, effete, snobbish coffeehouse liberalism first linked to names such as Hart and Dukakis, and now synonymous with Kerry, Streisand, and Soros. Meanwhile, the Greaser came to be known as an urbanized cowboy--a tough guy who "liked cars and girls and rock and roll, was working class, usually non-Jewish 'white ethnic' and decidedly unintellectual."

This hero, whose spirit we still worship in the form of Joe the Plumber and "Bring it on" foreign policy, first stomped the Beatnik through the youth-oriented iconography of the 1980s-think idols such as the Fonz, Bruce Springsteen, and Patrick Swayze; movies like Staying Alive, Rocky, and The Lords of Flatbush; bands such as Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses, and Poison; and, not to be forgotten, the chintzy clothing fad of ripped jeans and tight white T-shirts.

2011-03-26T21:11:00.000-07:00

America's billionaire crybabiesSome of these trends pre-date Obama, but few have been retarded during his presidency, while many have accelerated. Whether one finds this state of affairs desirable or not, no rational person can describe them as the by-product of a Marxist, business-hating egalitarian. Quite the opposite. The political power of America's richest has never been greater, and the level of their responsibility and collective burden has never been less. Meanwhile, for ordinary Americans, the remaining remnants of their financial security and middle class comforts rapidly erodes. It's true that the U.S. Government has little regard for the free market: they intervene constantly in the free market on behalf of the nation's wealthiest and most powerful business interests; it's crony capitalism, corporatism: government run by corporations (or, as Dick Durbin said of the Congress in which he serves: "the banks own the place").

For billionaires to see themselves as the True Victims, to complain that the President and the Government are waging some sort of war against them in the name of radical egalitarianism, is so removed from reality--universes away--that's it's hard to put into words. And the fiscal recklessness that the Kochs and their comrades tirelessly point to was a direct by-product of the last decade's rule by the Republican Party which they fund: from unfunded, endless wars to a never-ending expansion of the privatized National Security and Surveillance States to the financial crisis that exploded during the Bush presidency. But whatever else is true, there are many victims of fiscal policy in America: the wealthiest business interests and billionaires like the Koch Brothers are the few who are not among them.

*****

2011-03-26T13:04:00.000-07:00

Wars cost moneyLet’s get one thing straight: Wars cost money. Even the small ones. Already, the United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars firing Tomahawk missiles into Libya. Analysts say that the total price tag for the operation, if everything goes well and there’s no escalation, could easily exceed $1 billion. That’s peanuts compared with our $3.8 trillion budget. But it’s not nothing.

A billion dollars, for instance, is more than 40 times the total NPR subsidies that inspired House Republicans to convene an emergency session of the Rules Committee to speed cuts along to the floor of Congress. That’s not to say saving the lives of Libyans isn’t a better investment than supporting “All Things Considered,” but it’s real money, and because it’s going to Tomahawk missiles in Libya, it can’t go to something else.

But for more than a decade now, we’ve waged war as if it were free, keeping our wars off the budget and, rather than paying for them as they were fought, slapping them on the national credit card. Paying as you go, after all, is hard. It forces you to make decisions about competing priorities. When you don’t pay up front, those decisions become easy. And war should never be easy.*****

2011-03-26T01:09:00.000-07:00

Why Republicans hate WarrenGiven Ms. Warren’s prescience and her role in shaping financial reform legislation—not to mention her effective performance running the Congressional panel exercising oversight over federal financial bailouts—it was only natural that she be appointed to get the new consumer protection agency up and running. And it’s hard to think of anyone better qualified to head the agency once it goes into action.

The fact that she’s so well qualified is, of course, the reason she’s being attacked so fiercely. Nothing could be worse, from the point of view of bankers and the politicians who serve them, than to have consumers protected by someone who knows what she’s doing and has the personal credibility to stand up to pressure.

2011-03-24T02:49:00.000-07:00

Our war of whimAt a time when President Obama and Republican congressional leaders are both peddling different versions of the fantasy that America is broke, an when Republican governors are claiming that states are facing such hard times that only busting unions will balance budgets, Kucinich and his colleagues have found the missing money. It’s being wasted on a war of whim in Afghanistan.

As Kucinich explains, “There is simply no rationale for continuing American involvement with no end in sight, rising deaths for civilians and our brave soldiers, declining public sentiment, and serious economic pain at home. Continuing our involvement in Afghanistan is not affordable, it's not just, and it hurts American foreign policy interests. It's time to go.”

“While Congress pulls unemployment benefits from suffering Ohio families and proposes slashing health care benefits, vital children's programs, and veterans' services all because we're "broke," it continues to fund a war that has cost us more than $455 billion. We are told we should cut funding for assistance to low-income families with one hand, while with the other hand tens of billions of dollars are approved for a war that does nothing to further our national security."*****

2011-03-24T02:47:00.000-07:00

No winners in AfghanistanNeither side of the conflict can hope to vanquish the other through force. Meanwhile, public support in Western countries for keeping troops in Afghanistan has fallen. The Afghan people are weary of a long and debilitating war.

For their part, the Taliban have encountered resistance from Afghans who are not part of their dedicated base when they have tried to impose their stern moral code. International aid has improved living standards among Afghans in areas not under Taliban control. That has placed new pressure on the Taliban, as has an increasing ambivalence toward the Taliban in Pakistan.

The stalemate can be resolved only with a negotiated political settlement involving President Hamid Karzai’s government and its allies, the Taliban and its supporters in Pakistan, and other regional and international parties. The United States has been holding back from direct negotiations, hoping the ground war will shift decisively in its favor. But we believe the best moment to start the process toward reconciliation is now, while force levels are near their peak.*****

2011-03-24T02:44:00.000-07:00

Americans vs. oligarchsLook at the outrage in Madison, Wisconsin. Look at the crowds in Des Moines, Iowa. Look at the demonstrations in Indiana and Ohio and elsewhere around America.

Hear what they're saying: Stop attacking unions. Stop making scapegoats out of public employees. Stop protecting the super-rich from paying their fair share of the taxes needed to keep our schools running.

Stop gutting the working middle class.*****

2011-03-24T02:42:00.000-07:00

US kills Afghan childrenTwo US helicopter gunships, allegedly responding to a report of “insurgent” activity on a hillside in Kunar Province, came upon the scene of 10 young Afghan boys who were collecting brush for fuel for their families. The gunships, according to the account of a lone 11-year-old surviver who was hidden by a tree, systematically hunted down the other nine boys, hitting them with machine gun and rocket fire and killing them all--their bodies so badly damaged that their families had to hunt for the pieces in order to bury them.

This atrocity is being described as a “mistake,” but it was no mistake, clearly. The crews of the helicopters were shooting at fleeing human beings who made no attempt to return fire (obviously, because all the boys had were sticks, which they surely dropped when the first shots were fired).*****

2011-03-24T00:51:00.000-07:00

Progressive countries abandon religionOrganized religion will all but vanish eventually from nine Western-style democracies, a team of mathematicians predict in a new paper based on census data stretching back 100 years.

It won't die out completely, but "religion will be driven toward extinction" in countries including Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, they say.

It will also wither away in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and Switzerland, they anticipate.

2011-03-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

Why climate change threatens right-wingersNAOMI KLEIN: Well, some people believe in climate change, but the main thing is they don’t believe that humans have anything to do with climate change. And it isn’t about the science, because when you delve deeper into it and ask why people don’t believe in it, they say that it’s because they think it’s a socialist plot to redistribute wealth. It’s easy to make fun of, you know, and there’s all this language, like "watermelons," that they say the green groups are watermelons: they’re green on the outside, but they’re red on the inside. Or George Will once said it’s a green tree with red roots. And the idea is that it’s some sort of a communist plot. And this is actually not at all true. And in fact, most of the big green groups are loath to talk about economics and often don’t want to see themselves as being part of a left at all, see climate change as an issue that transcends politics entirely.

But something very different is going on on the right, and I think we need to understand what that is. Why is climate change seen as such a threat? I don’t believe it’s an unreasonable fear. I think it’s unreasonable to believe that scientists are making up the science. They’re not. It’s not a hoax. But actually, climate change really is a profound threat to a great many things that right-wing ideologues believe in. So, in fact, if you really wrestle with the implications of the science and what real climate action would mean, here’s just a few examples what it would mean.

It would mean upending the whole free trade agenda, because it would mean that we would have to localize our economies, because we have the most energy-inefficient trade system that you could imagine. And this is the legacy of the free trade era. So, this has been a signature policy of the right, pushing globalization and free trade. That would have to be reversed.

You would have to deal with inequality. You would have to redistribute wealth, because this is a crisis that was created in the North, and the effects are being felt in the South. So, on the most basic, basic, "you broke it, you bought it," polluter pays, you would have to redistribute wealth, which is also against their ideology.*****

2011-03-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

Why corporations are psychoticBut, you say, corporations are owned and managed by real people, so surely immoral corporate actions might be inhibited by them? Well, not really. First of all, the officers and directors who run corporations are actually duty-bound to act in the corporation's best financial interest, and that means they are obliged to do whatever they can within the law to make money. Thus, this fiduciary duty requires corporate management to set aside ethical niceties when they get in the way of corporate profits. This is why tobacco companies market their products to kids when they can--only laws prohibiting such conduct will keep them from doing so.

Thus, the entity is a "person" with a totally self-absorbed psyche, a narcissistic "person" that has enormous resources to advertise and market itself to the public, to hire professionals of all types to influence public opinion, to litigate and lobby as needed, to ruthlessly pursue its goal of revenue and profit, and to join other corporations and industry associations in crushing any opposition posed by mere individuals or public interest groups.*****

2011-03-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

In denial about nuclear powerConcern over global warming has increased the appeal of nuclear power, which does not produce the high levels of greenhouse gases that come from fossil fuels. But there has been a persistent tendency to ignore the toughest questions posed by nuclear power: What should be done with the waste? What are the consequences of a catastrophic accident in a populated area? How safe are the plants, really? Why would taxpayers have to shoulder so much of the financial risk of expanding the nation’s nuclear power capacity, an effort that would be wildly expensive?

A big part of the problem at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power station are the highly radioactive spent fuel rods kept in storage pools at the plant. What to do, ultimately, with such dangerous waste material is the nuclear power question without an answer. Nuclear advocates and public officials don’t talk about it much. Denial is the default position when it comes to nuclear waste.*****

2011-03-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

Maher slams RepublicansMaher's main beef with the right wing tonight: a perceived lack of focus on real issues. He rattled off a list of what he called the "useless distractions that make up the Republican Party agenda"--they included public unions, Sharia law, anchor babies, the "Ground Zero mosque," NPR, and the "war on Christmas," among others. So bad is this problem, Maher said, that trying to govern with Republicans "is like rooming with a meth addict" who, instead of rent, is worrying that police bugged the air conditioner.

Maher ridiculed Oklahoma for voting to ban Sharia when the Muslim population there is "rapidly approaching zero." He ridiculed the ACORN crackdown: "Republicans are obsessed with people cooking up wild, nonexistent schemes to vote, ignoring one important truth: this is America. No one wants to vote." And he ridiculed the New Black Panthers furor thusly: "Every black person scares you." (What would a Bill Maher riff on Republicans be without a joke about them all being racist, after all?)*****

2011-03-20T03:58:00.000-07:00

Founding Fathers disliked corporationsBut hasn't it always been this way? Isn't that what capitalism is all about--corporate interests driving the economy?

Actually, no. Corporate libertarians would have you believe that somehow corporate dominance is entirely consistent with the values and vision of the Founding Fathers, but this is pure myth. The framers believed in limited government and free markets, but corporations were almost non-existent in the early days of the Republic. Unlike today, one could not form a corporation simply by filing a few papers with a government office; instead, permission from the government was needed (usually via an act of the Legislature) and was granted only upon a showing that the proposed corporation would be in the public interest. When corporate formation was allowed, strict terms and limitations were demanded.

Corporate formation was viewed skeptically in those days because corporations were correctly recognized as dangerous. Unlike sole proprietorships or partnerships, corporations allow investors to pool huge sums of capital and pursue profits while remaining immune from personal liability. Thus, if I own shares of XYZ Corporation and the company breaches a $10 million contract obligation, there is no chance that I will be personally liable on the contract. If I own a sole proprietorship or partnership that breaches such a contract, my personal assets are at risk.

2011-03-18T22:53:00.000-07:00

Romney dodges Republican idiotsWho'd want to be lumped with these folks and all this nonsense? If Romney were in the race officially--rather than proceeding with a low-flying operation--he'd be grouped together with these other candidates and have to respond to their antics. Gov. Romney, do you think President Obama is a covert Kenyan? Gov. Romney, is Obama a gangster president? Gov. Romney, would you reinstate 'Don't ask, don't tell'? Gov. Romney, who's right--Sarah Palin or Chris Christie? Sarah Palin or Kathy Griffin?

There's no way Romney could answer these sort of queries without either risking coming across as a wing-nut to independent voters or potentially ticking off right-wing voters who will make up much of the GOP primary electorate. (Romney already will have plenty of trouble explaining the mandates-imposing health care system he created in Massachusetts and his previous flip-flops on critical social issues.) As conservative columnist George Will noted the other day, Romney and other serious candidates are in jeopardy of nuttiness by association: "the [GOP] nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons."

2011-03-11T22:57:00.000-08:00

Republicans are that stupid[T]here are still moments when I find myself saying, “They can’t really be that stupid,” or maybe, “They can’t really think the rest of us are that stupid.” And I had one of those moments reading about a recent conference on national health policy, which featured a bipartisan dialogue among Congressional staffers.

According to a column in Kaiser Health News, Republican staffers jeered at any and all proposals to use Medicare and Medicaid funds better. Spending money on prevention was no more than a “slush fund.” Research on innovation was “an oxymoron.” And there was no reason to pay for “so-called effectiveness research.”

*****

2011-03-11T22:56:00.000-08:00

GOP isn't into rationalityBut today’s Republicans just aren’t into rationality. They claim to care deeply about deficits—but they’ve spent the past two years putting cynical, demagogic attacks on any attempt to actually deal with long-run deficits at the heart of their campaign strategy.

Here’s a recent example. In his new book, Mike Huckabee—the current leader in polls asking Republicans whom they want to nominate in 2012—attacks the Obama stimulus because it included funds for, yes, comparative effectiveness research: “The stimulus didn’t just waste your money; it planted the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.” Will others in the G.O.P. stand up and say that Mr. Huckabee is wrong, that Medicare needs to know which medical procedures actually work? Don’t hold your breath. *****

2011-03-11T22:52:00.000-08:00

Huckabee joins Republican idiotsWhat Huckabee had been doing on that radio show was spreading Fox News-ish swill: the loony thesis, first peddled by conservative author Dinesh D'Souza in Forbes magazine last September and then seconded by Newt Gingrich, that because Obama's father was apparently an anti-colonialist in Kenya, the president was now acting out the anti-Western and anti-capitalism rage he had inherited from his father. This is a ludicrous. Given that Obama did not grow up with his father, how did he come by such anti-Western (and what these guys really mean is anti-American) anger? Is there a Kenyans-hate-white-capitalists gene? But on Malzberg's show, it was as if Huckabee, who hosts a show on Fox News, had somehow absorbed this stupid idea--perhaps via Green Room osmosis. He was parroting a shorthand version of D'Souza's premise. This is how the right-wing's transmission belt of trash operates.

There's more. One portion of that radio show appearance has not received much attention. In the middle of the exchange about Obama's birth certificate and Kenya, Malzberg said of Obama, "He despises the West, he despises the Brits, and I think he could take it all out on Israel and that's why he despises Israel." How did Huckabee respond to the charge that Obama detests the West, England, and Israel? He didn't. The former preacher said nothing. And in this sort of situation, silence can be read as at least quasi-assent. I doubt Huckabee truly believes Obama hates the West and Israel. But he's playing footsie with the yahoos who do--because he will want their votes, should he run for the GOP presidential nomination. By not challenging Malzberg on this point, Huckabee was, in a way, granting legitimacy to his view.*****

2011-03-11T10:20:00.000-08:00

Tax cuts = US declineThe tax cuts will also ensure the decline of the United States. Republicans insisted that all those poor starving people with seven figure annual incomes and above could not possibly be asked to pay more. Given the generous provisions of the estate tax, apparently not even dead multimillionaires can be expected to ante up. To ensure tax cuts for such people, the Republicans held hostage the long-term unemployed and their favorite props for photo ops—9/11 first responders.

The cuts that resulted will not only balloon the deficit, but will also require dismantling a good bit of government at the state and federal level. Education will be hollowed out and infrastructure left to decay as the United States becomes increasingly indebted to other countries and unable to compete in the global marketplace. Future debates on public policy will be forced to focus on how much to gut Social Security and Medicare.

2011-02-26T23:37:00.000-08:00

The GOP's real goalThe 2011 rebels are to the right of their 1995 antecedents in any case. That’s why this battle, ostensibly over the deficit, is so much larger than the sum of its line-item parts. The highest priority of America’s current political radicals is not to balance government budgets but to wage ideological warfare in Washington and state capitals alike. The relatively few dollars that would be saved by the proposed slashing of federal spending on Planned Parenthood and Head Start don’t dent the deficit; the cuts merely savage programs the right abhors. In Wisconsin, where state workers capitulated to Gov. Scott Walker’s demands for financial concessions, the radical Republicans’ only remaining task is to destroy labor’s right to collective bargaining.

That’s not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right’s agenda, both nationally and locally—only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era—that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars—is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.*****

2011-02-26T11:02:00.000-08:00

Revolutions usually work outThe record is that after some missteps, countries usually pull through. Education, wealth, international connections and civil society institutions help. And, on balance, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain are better positioned today for democracy than Mongolia or Indonesia seemed in the 1990s—and Mongolia and Indonesia today are successes. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain visited the Middle East a few days ago (arms dealers in tow), and he forthrightly acknowledged that for too long Britain had backed authoritarian regimes to achieve stability. He acknowledged that his country had bought into the bigoted notion “that Arabs or Muslims can’t do democracy.” And he added: “For me, that’s a prejudice that borders on racism. It’s offensive and wrong, and it’s simply not true.”

It’s still a view peddled by Arab dictatorships, particularly Saudi Arabia—and, of course, by China’s leaders and just about any African despot. It’s unfortunate when Westerners are bigoted in this way, but it’s even sadder when leaders in the developing world voice such prejudices about their own people.*****

2011-02-26T09:42:00.000-08:00

Budget debate is a shamHouse Republicans talk big about spending cuts—but focus solely on that same small budget sliver.

And by proposing sharp spending cuts right away, Republicans aren’t just going where the money isn’t, they’re also going when the money isn’t. Slashing spending while the economy is still deeply depressed is a recipe for slower economic growth, which means lower tax receipts—so any deficit reduction from G.O.P. cuts would be at least partly offset by lower revenue.

The whole budget debate, then, is a sham. House Republicans, in particular, are literally stealing food from the mouths of babes—nutritional aid to pregnant women and very young children is one of the items on their cutting block—so they can pose, falsely, as deficit hawks.*****

2011-02-26T06:29:00.000-08:00

Madison = Baghdad 2003Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad—specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.

As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular—in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises”—Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s—and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

2011-02-25T11:31:00.000-08:00

Plutocrats want no governmentDo Republicans Really Favor Small Government? Nope. Republicans and their corporate overlords were never really concerned with making government small. In fact, the size of government exploded under Reagan and Bush II, and we didn’t hear a peep out of Republicans. In the last thirty years, only Clinton reduced the size of government significantly, and he did so while declaring “the era of big government” to be over.

What they really wanted was a weak government.

Government is one of the only forces capable of preventing the excesses of unconstrained markets, so step one of the Plutocrat’s coup had to be to thoroughly discredit it. It began with Reagan’s famous quote, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” and despite massive and growing evidence to the contrary, it’s been repeated so often, that it is now accepted as revealed truth.

*****

2011-02-25T05:29:00.000-08:00

Free markets cause crashesHow About the Notion that Unconstrained Markets Create Prosperity and Jobs? Again, not so much. The fact is, laissez-faire, free market policies have failed miserably every time they’ve been tried. It turns out they have a nasty habit of consistently causing grotesque income inequalities, huge market volatility and severe financial collapses. In fact, the Great Recession we are now climbing out of should have been strike 3 for the Free Marketeers. Strike one was the Panic of 1893 and the depression which followed it. Strike two was the Great Depression of the 30’s. In all three cases, these collapses were preceded by conservative, laissez-faire policies featuring deregulation, low taxes and weak governments.

Three tries--each resulting in a catastrophic economic meltdown. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this strategy doesn’t work. But it does help the Plutocrats continue their policy of plundering the nation’s wealth.

2011-02-22T11:39:00.000-08:00

Our Faustian deal with oil statesFor the last 50 years, America (and Europe and Asia) have treated the Middle East as if it were just a collection of big gas stations: Saudi station, Iran station, Kuwait station, Bahrain station, Egypt station, Libya station, Iraq station, United Arab Emirates station, etc. Our message to the region has been very consistent: “Guys (it was only guys we spoke with), here’s the deal. Keep your pumps open, your oil prices low, don’t bother the Israelis too much and, as far as we’re concerned, you can do whatever you want out back. You can deprive your people of whatever civil rights you like. You can engage in however much corruption you like. You can preach whatever intolerance from your mosques that you like. You can print whatever conspiracy theories about us in your newspapers that you like. You can keep your women as illiterate as you like. You can create whatever vast welfare-state economies, without any innovative capacity, that you like. You can undereducate your youth as much as you like. Just keep your pumps open, your oil prices low, don’t hassle the Jews too much—and you can do whatever you want out back.”

It was that attitude that enabled the Arab world to be insulated from history for the last 50 years—to be ruled for decades by the same kings and dictators. Well, history is back. The combination of rising food prices, huge bulges of unemployed youth and social networks that are enabling those youths to organize against their leaders is breaking down all the barriers of fear that kept these kleptocracies in power.

*****

2011-02-22T05:26:00.000-08:00

Anti-choice = anti-womenAnti-choicers realize that if they make their arguments about sex and female liberation, and especially if they attack contraception overtly, they lose. Contraception is just too mainstream and too popular, and 95 percent of Americans have premarital sex, making the anti-choice view (roughly, strictly controlled sex within heterosexual marriage should be the only legally sanctioned sex) a form of crankery that surpasses even theories that the moon landing was faked or that 9/11 was an inside job. But by fronting on fetuses, anti-choicers get taken seriously in the mainstream media, and have been able to get to a point where they basically control the conservative movement. And lately, with victories on both state and federal levels, they’ve been feeling invincible. Which led where hubris often does, to overplaying your hand and exposing your true self to the public.

The House using the continuing resolution as an opportunity to defund Planned Parenthood is a classic example of overreach that exposes someone’s true motivations. The cuts to Planned Parenthood are an attack strictly on contraception, cancer and STD screening, and other non-abortion services. But it was clear that anti-choice Republicans thought they could still play the game of calling everything they don’t like “abortion,” and figuring they could get away with it. Even though the cuts had nothing to do with abortion, supporters of the cuts kept yammering on about abortion in the hopes that people wouldn’t notice that they were giving a big kiss to the radical and tiny minority of Americans that oppose contraception.

2011-02-21T03:00:00.000-08:00

Wisconsin is the new EgyptLast week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker—demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday—Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did—after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.

In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin—and eventually, America—less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

2011-02-19T15:03:00.000-08:00

US backs Israeli settlementsThe US has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have condemned Israeli settlements as "illegal" and called for an immediate halt to all settlement building.

All 14 other Security Council members voted in favour of the resolution, which was backed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), on Friday.

Mark Lyall Grant, the British ambassador to the UN, speaking on behalf of his country, France and Germany, condemned Israeli settlements in the West Bank. "They are illegal under international law," he said.*****

2011-02-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

How conservatives "think"In conservative family life, the strict father rules. Fathers and husbands should have control over reproduction; hence, parental and spousal notification laws and opposition to abortion. In conservative religion, God is seen as the strict father, the Lord, who rewards and punishes according to individual responsibility in following his Biblical word.

Above all, the authority of conservatism itself must be maintained. The country should be ruled by conservative values, and progressive values are seen as evil. Science should not have authority over the market, and so the science of global warming and evolution must be denied. Facts that are inconsistent with the authority of conservatism must be ignored or denied or explained away. To protect and extend conservative values themselves, the devil's own means can be used again conservatism's immoral enemies, whether lies, intimidation, torture, or even death, say, for women's doctors.*****

2011-02-19T08:05:00.000-08:00

Supreme Court makes up lawOne of the great works of American political literature is Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, first published in 1906. From A-Z, Bierce offered about a thousand irreverent definitions of political, legal, and cultural terms, getting much closer to the truth of what the words really mean than the formal definitions you'll find in Webster's. For example, consider this stinger: "LAWFUL, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction."

A century later, Bierce's elucidation of the term pretty well nails the Roberts Court, the five-man junta of Chief Justice John Roberts and his fellow black-robed corporados on the Supreme Court: Sam Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. For these extremist judicial activists, 'lawful' is whatever they will it to mean, even if their rulings defy logic, reality, the will of the people, the Founders' clear intentions, legal precedent, common sense, and any sane measure of justice.*****

2011-02-19T03:07:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin's tailspinTickets to see Palin, announced at $185 on Jan. 16, eight days after Tucson, were slashed to half-price in early February. Then the speech was canceled altogether, with the organizers blaming “safety concerns resulting from an onslaught of negative feedback.” But when The Denver Post sought out the Glendale police chief, he reported there had been no threats or other causes for alarm. The real “negative feedback” may have been anemic ticket sales, particularly if they were to cover Palin’s standard $100,000 fee.

What may at long last be dawning on some Republican grandees is that a provocateur who puts her political adversaries in the cross hairs and then instructs her acolytes to “RELOAD” frightens most voters.

2011-02-18T20:15:00.000-08:00

Government free to violate ConstitutionYesterday, in South Carolina, an Obama-appointed federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Padilla against former Bush officials Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and others. That suit alleges that those officials knowingly violated Padilla's Constitutional rights by ordering his due-process-free detention and torture. In dismissing Padilla's lawsuit, the court's opinion relied on the same now-depressingly-familiar weapons routinely used by our political class to immunize itself from judicial scrutiny: national security would be undermined by allowing Padilla to sue; "government officials could be distracted from their vital duties to attend depositions or respond to other discovery requests"; "a trial on the merits would be an international spectacle with Padilla, a convicted terrorist, summoning America's present and former leaders to a federal courthouse to answer his charges"; the litigation would risk disclosure of vital state secrets; and "discovery procedures could be used by our enemies to obtain valuable intelligence."

In other words, our political officials are Too Important, and engaged in far Too Weighty Matters in Keeping Us Safe, to subject them to the annoyance of the rule of law. It's much more important to allow them to Fight The Terrorists without restraints than to bother them with claims that they broke the law and violated the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. That's the mentality that has resulted in full-scale immunity for both political and now private-sector elites in a whole slew of lawbreaking scandals--from Obama's refusal to investigate Bush-era crimes or high-level Wall Street criminality to retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecoms and legal protection for defrauding mortgage banks. With very few exceptions--yesterday's ruling, for instance, brushed aside a contrary decision from a Bush-43-appointed federal judge in California last year that refused to dismiss Padilla's lawsuit against John Yoo for having authorized his torture (that decision is on appeal)--Executive Branch officials and the federal judiciary have conspired to ensure that the former are shielded from judicial scrutiny even for the most blatant and horrifying crimes.

*****

2011-02-18T09:39:00.000-08:00

GOP hypocrisy on NASCAR fundingLet’s give Speaker John Boehner credit for keeping his promise to give members more chance to debate and offer amendments. Really, if things get any more open, the members will start throwing themselves off the balcony. But not such high marks on consistency. The newly ascendant Republicans have been howling that the deficit is so big, so threatening, that no target for cutting is sacred. “Everything is on the table. We’re broke,” said Boehner.

But the table is mainly crowded with stuff the Republicans didn’t like to begin with. Family-planning money and environmental protection, but not oil tax breaks or Nascar sponsorships. “Sesame Street” is fair game, but the Daytona 500 is untouchable.

2011-02-17T21:44:00.000-08:00

Stop the Republican War on WomenRedefining rape. Attacking the right to choose. Belittling victims of violence. The Republicans are on a rampage attacking women's health and rights this year. And if we don't speak up, they'll keep going. That's why we need to raise a ruckus, and get the word out about the GOP war on women.Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women

*****

2011-02-17T19:35:00.000-08:00

Solution to Afghanistan: Get outWhat are we giving up to maintain the status quo? Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz told the House Veterans Affairs Committee in September that the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, including interest payments on the money borrowed for these wars and care for our wounded soldiers and veterans, is likely to total $4 trillion to $6 trillion.

Simply put, we believe the human and financial costs of the war are unacceptable and unsustainable. It is bankrupting us. The United States should devise an exit plan to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan, not a plan to stay there four more years and "then we'll see." This doesn't mean that we abandon the Afghan people--rather, we should abandon this war strategy. It is a failure that has not brought stability to Afghanistan and has not enhanced our own security. As the retired career Army officer Andrew J. Bacevich has written, to die for a mystique is the wrong policy.

*****

2011-02-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

Church admits Bible is fictionThe hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

2011-02-16T20:09:00.000-08:00

Republicans aren't serious about deficitsThe way to reduce the deficit is to cut entitlement spending by phasing it out at higher incomes; cut a Pentagon budget that's more than doubled during the past decade without providing the United States the means or the will to locate Osama Bin Laden; restore taxes on incomes above $250,000 to where they were when Bill Clinton left office (an option Obama agreed to defer until 2013); and raise tax rates on incomes well above $250,000, in recognition of the fact that incomes at the tippy top of income distribution have enjoyed a stratospheric climb for the past 30 years. To pretend that there's much money to save by squeezing the same 15 percent that's already been squeezed time and again neither achieves much in budget savings nor demonstrates much concern for what gets lost and who gets hurt. It's a stupid political game, invented by Republicans but now played by both parties. The president shouldn't play it.*****

2011-02-16T18:04:00.000-08:00

Conservative Christian learns about warHow did you think about war as you were growing up?

The high school I went to was supervised by the church that my family attended, and one of the books we read in government class was called The Faith of George W. Bush. Bush was presented as an example of what a strong Christian man should look like, and the global war on terror was presented as an opportunity to rescue an oppressed people and spread democracy through the Middle East, along with Christian and Western values.

What was your experience like after you enlisted?

Pretty quickly after I got in, I started to see inconsistencies between how the military was talked about in such glorified ways [when I was] growing up, and then how it was acted out in training. Training was very desensitizing. We screamed slogans like, "Kill them all, let God sort them out." We watched videos with bombs being dropped on Middle Eastern villages with rock and roll music in the background. People really started to celebrate death and destruction, and that definitely didn't match up to what I'd expected. I'd told myself that I was willing to kill if necessary, but that wasn't the same as celebrating it.

*****

2011-02-16T15:12:00.000-08:00

Americans ignorant about politics“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare—the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct—but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)*****

2011-02-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

Rumsfeld is still cluelessHe is still oblivious about how wrong it was to shunt aside Afghanistan and goose up reasons to go careering into Iraq, which he felt had easier-to-hit targets and easier-to-find villains. He doesn’t agree with the “If you break it, you own it” theory. He thinks you can break it and just leave and not get bogged down in trying to build democratic dream countries.

Rummy’s memoir, “Known and Unknown,” is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed “anticipatory self-defense.”*****

2011-02-16T06:15:00.000-08:00

10 Historical 'Facts' Only a Right-Winger Could Believe

Facts, including historical ones, are 'biased' against the right's worldview.

2011-02-14T20:47:00.000-08:00

Help Muslims to halt terrorismWe’ve tried invasions of Muslim lands. We’ve tried imposing new systems of government on them. We’ve tried wars on terror. We’ve tried spending billions of dollars. What we haven’t tried is tackling what’s been rotten in the Arab world by helping a homegrown, bottom-up movement for change turn a U.S.-backed police state into a stable democracy.

This is the critical opportunity Egypt now presents. Islamist radicalism has thrived on the American double standards evident in strong support for the likes of Mubarak’s regime. It has prospered from the very brutal repression that was supposedly essential to stop the jihadists. And it has benefited from the reduction of tens of millions of Arab citizens to mere objects, shorn of dignity, and so more inclined to seek meaning in absolutist movements of violence.*****

2011-02-14T16:51:00.000-08:00

Americans clueless about government benefitsAccording to new data crunched by Cornell University's Suzanne Mettler, large numbers of Americans who receive benefits from government social programs nonetheless tell pollsters they "have not used a government social program." And when I mean large, I mean large. For example, a majority of those who have received federally subsidized student loans, 44 percent of Social Security beneficiaries and 40 percent of G.I. bill recipients say they have not used a government social program.

These numbers go a long way to explaining why the economic debate in our country is so insane. Indeed, at a moment when taxes have hit a historic low, most politicians--from presidents to governors to state legislators--insist we must further cut taxes and shrink allegedly "Big Government." And they are finding a receptive audience in the general public because, as the numbers show, so many Americans wrongly believe they don't receive direct financial benefits from government.

Obviously, this aggressive stupidity politically props up the arguments of the anti-government right. With so many Americans evidently not knowing they receive benefits from the government, it's easy for opportunistic politicians to seize on our "me-first, screw everybody else" culture and misleadingly deride the government as some distant entity that exclusively benefits the "other." And if you don't know that, in fact, you are "the other," then you are more likely to conclude that that opportunistic politician is correct, and more likely to cheer on that opportunistic politician as he/she slashes the programs you directly rely on.*****

2011-02-14T12:43:00.000-08:00

Rumsfeld dodges Iraqi deathsConservatives often hail cost-benefit analysis when it comes to government actions, such as regulations. They praise market forces. They promote the value of responsibility. At least, in the abstract. Rumsfeld's book--and Bush's too--is a fine example of an abandonment of such principles. The Iraq war cannot be judged without weighing these consequent deaths. But Rumsfeld and Bush duck the issue. Iraqis and citizens in other nations can be forgiven for regarding the Bushites' inability--or unwillingness--to recognize such a tremendous loss of life as an indication that they do not much value Iraqi lives.

It's easy for Rumsfeld, Bush, and others to proclaim that Iraqis have benefited from the war, now that the murderous Saddam and his repressive regime are gone. But Bush and Rumsfeld did not have to pay the ultimate sacrifice. They imposed it on others--without asking their consent. They were the deciders. In Iran and Egypt, the world has seen that citizens can rise up against autocrats--when they believe the time is right and when they are willing to accept the consequences of their defiance. The 100,000 or so dead Iraqi civilians were given no such choice.*****

2011-02-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

Republicans make future generations payOnce you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs—a population damaged by childhood malnutrition, an increased chance of terrorist attacks, a revenue system undermined by widespread tax evasion—well, tomorrow is another day.

In a better world, politicians would talk to voters as if they were adults. They would explain that discretionary spending has little to do with the long-run imbalance between spending and revenues. They would then explain that solving that long-run problem requires two main things: reining in health-care costs and, realistically, increasing taxes to pay for the programs that Americans really want.

But Republican leaders can’t do that, of course: they refuse to admit that taxes ever need to rise, and they spent much of the last two years screaming “death panels!” in response to even the most modest, sensible efforts to ensure that Medicare dollars are well spent.*****

2011-02-14T03:00:00.000-08:00

Beck is going crazyThe Egypt uprising has raised the stakes for Beck--and Fox. In the past two weeks, Beck has viewed events in Egypt through his own rather warped filter. He claims that the rebellion is not about the people, not about democracy. Instead, he says, it's a move by radical Islamists to take over Egypt, as part of a larger plan to install a caliphate that stretches from the Middle East through Europe and toward the United States. And he contends that "uber-leftists" and Islamic extremists are "plotting together" toward this end. Last week on his radio show, he declared, "Groups from the hard-core socialist and communist left and extreme Islam will work together because they are both a common enemy of Israel and the Jew. . . . Islam wants a caliphate. Communists want a communist new world order. They'll work together, and they'll destabilize. Because they both want chaos."

Austin Powers, anyone? But it gets better. This grand cabal also includes . . . the Establishment. Beck points out that Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush refrained from bombing "ancient Babylon" during their respective wars against Iraq. "Why?" he asks. "Because the Bible tells us that that is the seat right there of power of a global evil empire," meaning that Islamic caliphate. Bush father and son each wanted to preserve the heart of a radical Islam caliphate? That seems to be what Beck is saying.

2011-02-06T20:19:00.000-08:00

Addicted to dictatorsThe U.S. supported Mubarak for the same reasons it has funded and abetted other authoritarian allies in the Middle East—in the name of regional stability. After the Sept. 11 attacks, stability also included thwarting Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism.

Successive American administrations paid lip service to human rights issues while underwriting half of Egypt's military budget and most of its intelligence service, which works closely with the CIA. And it wasn't only the White House: Just last fall, the Senate quashed a resolution calling for freedom and democracy in Egypt.

"We have an addiction to dictators," said Brian Katulis, a Middle East expert at the Center for American Progress who was among those advising White House officials on Egypt last week. "We know that it's bad for us, but because this is the way we've done business for so long, we don't know any other way."*****

2011-02-06T09:43:00.000-08:00

Healthcare reform is constitutionalAs every first-year law student learns, lower court judges must heed Supreme Court precedents. The central issue in the Obamacare case is how much power the Constitution gives Congress, and the landmark Supreme Court opinion on this topic is the 1819 classic, McCulloch vs. Maryland.

In McCulloch, when states' rights attorneys claimed that Congress lacked authority to create a federal bank, Chief Justice John Marshall famously countered that the Constitution gives Congress implied as well as express powers. Marshall said that unelected judges should generally defer to elected members of Congress so long as a law plausibly falls within Congress' basic mission. Though the words "federal bank" nowhere appear in the Constitution's text, Marshall explained that Congress nevertheless had the power to create such a bank to facilitate national security and interstate commerce. Other words not in the Constitution include "air force," "NASA," "Social Security," "Peace Corps" and "paper money," but all these things are constitutional under the logic of McCulloch. Obamacare is no different.*****

2011-02-06T08:16:00.000-08:00

Egypt isn't IranEgybama isn't Carter. In some respects, Obama has steered a very different course from Carter's a generation ago. Carter stood by Iran's doomed shah for months before scrambling to look for alternatives; Obama bluntly told Mubarak his time was up after only a week of demonstrations in Tahrir Square. And unlike Carter, Obama has a strategy; he's placing his bets on Egypt's military command to oversee a peaceful change of power.

For all these reasons, Obama has a far better chance of seeing a benign outcome in Cairo than Carter did in Tehran.

*****