REALITYCHEX.COM - Constant Comments

Judicial review is required, perhaps a closed-door court similar to the  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, before anyone, especially a  citizen, is placed on an assassination list."

Bill Keller of the New York Times: "The decline in Obama’s political fortunes, the Great Disappointment, can be attributed to four main factors: the intractable legacy bequeathed by George W. Bush; Republican resistance amounting to sabotage; the unrealistic expectations and inevitable disenchantment of some of the president’s supporters; and, to be sure, the man himself."

Digby states the obvious: "I would never have thought that Democrats would greet a major economic downturn with promises to cut [social safety-net] programs. It increases people's anxiety about their personal future and takes away the most important rationale for trusting Democrats. It's extremely odd to see this happening."

Prof. Drew Westen, in a New York Times op-ed, on the failed Obama presidency:

... the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks. ...

 Update: the site is back in business but I'm still working on Off Times Square. I have learned the identity of an individual who was responsible for taking down the site last night. He apparently was looking for information about where I live. Because he was aware information available publicly was not up-to-date, I believe he may have stalked my neighborhood and may pose a threat to my safety. I have contacted the local police in the city where he resides.

insisting  that in America, there is no such thing as privilege, money comes only  from merit, wealth is a sign of virtue, and if we raise taxes a smidge  on those at the top of the income ladder, we're only 'punishing  success.' ...

Norm Ornstein in The New Republic: what Barack Obama can learn from Harry Truman. "Truman seized upon [Congressional] conservative over-reaching and openly fought against what he dubbed the 'Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress.' ... But, unlike Truman, Obama has constantly sought common ground with Congress.... The absence of an energized and angry president demanding better of the do-nothings in Congress can only lead to something worse." ...

And if that happens along party lines, with five  Republican-appointed justices supporting the challenge led by 26  Republican governors, the court will mark itself as driven by politics."

So bad ole "judicial activism" (liberal judges overturning conservative-writ laws) has become good new "judicial engagement" (conservatives judges overturning liberal laws).

No, the real structural problem is in our political system, which has  been warped and paralyzed by the power of a small, wealthy minority.

If they’d paid even passing attention to the events of 2011, they’d know that the only tax reforms Republicans back either raise no revenue, or are conditioned on the idea of locking in the Bush tax cuts permanently."

My sense, after 11 years of punditizing, is that people are complicated, but gangs of people less so. Individuals are often mixed in their behavior: incorruptible politicians may cheat on their spouses, political scoundrels may have impeccable personal lives. But groups, like a politician’s inner circle or the management team of a media empire, tend to behave similarly on multiple fronts. If they lie and cheat routinely in one domain, they tend to do it in others as well.

... Krugman adds that this is how he knew the Bush team was making a fake case for war with Iraq; they had routinely made fake cases for their economic policies. ...

The most troubling thing about [Rick] Perry (and Michele Bachmann and so many more),  what’s new and strange and epidemic in mainstream   politics, is the degree to  which people inhabit their own Manichaean   make-believe worlds. They totally  believe their vivid fictions."

Binyamin Appelbaum & Helene Cooper of the New York Times: "As the economy worsens, President Obama and his senior aides are considering whether to adopt a more combative approach on economic issues, seeking to highlight substantive differences with Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail rather than continuing to pursue elusive compromises.... David Plouffe and ... William M. Daley want him to maintain a pragmatic strategy of appealing to independent voters by advocating ideas that can pass Congress.... But others, including Gene Sperling, Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, say public anger over the debt ceiling debate has weakened Republicans and created an opening for bigger ideas...." CW: see it's all about Obama; to hell with us.

New York Times: "... the average salary in the [banking] industry in 2010 was $361,330 — five and a half times the average salary in the rest of the private sector in the city ($66,120).

But so far, not one federal official has deplored, condemned, expressed chagrin, outrage, regret or shock over the epidemic outbreak of police brutality against Occupy protesters this week."

To those who say that our expenditures for Public Works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance.... [W]e must make it a national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of unemployed and that we will arrange our national economy to end our present unemployment as soon as we can and then to take wise measures against its return. -- President Franklin Roosevelt ...

Vince  reacts like a wounded animal … lashing out at all but those who bestow  him with the palliative of rightwing demagogic lies that distort the  source of his suffering by means of directing his rage at a host of  scapegoats i.e., phantom socialists (and, of course, their OWS dirty  hippie dupes) whose, schemes, he insists, have denied him his rightful  place among the serried ranks of capitalism’s legion of winners."

President Obama has not become Hitler and he hasn't become Stalin.... He hasn't even become  FDR.... This isn't what dictatorship looks like: this is what a  president with a tea party Republican House looks like..

a campaign slogan that essentially says 'We’re better than Eric Cantor' won’t cut it in 2012.

Ron Nixon of the New York Times: "Despite a widespread belief that contracting out services to the private sector saves the federal government money, a new study suggests just the opposite — that the government actually pays more when it farms out work. The study found that in 33 of 35 occupations, the government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services. On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers."

"... the former president has been so frustrated at what he sees as the current one’s failure to explain his economic policies that he has literally decided to write his own version of the story.... His private critique...: incredulity that the president and Democratic leaders did not raise the debt ceiling during the 2010 lame-duck session; bafflement that many beneficiaries of Mr. Obama’s policies 'didn’t even know about' his actions; and frustration about the lack of a powerful Democratic message in the midterm elections."

As a result of the Bush economic platform, 'growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,' while 'overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative  for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.' Meanwhile, the deficit and debt exploded."

They can drive out unions, attract low-wage immigrants, and turn a blind eye to businesses that fail to protect worker health and safety. Rick Perry seems to have done exactly this.... Texas has ... been specializing in minimum-wage jobs. From 2007 to 2010, the number of minimum wage workers there rose ... nearly 150 percent. And 9.5 percent of Texas workers earn the minimum wage or below -- compared to about 6 percent for the rest of the nation....

Gene Robinson of the Washington Post: "Three decades of trickle-down economic theory, see-no-evil deregulation and tax-cutting fervor have led to massive [upward] redistribution [of wealth]. Another word for what’s been happening might be theft.... The system is rigged.

And President Nicolas Sarkozy of France stepped forcefully into the void, with a proposal that pointedly repudiated Mr. Obama’s approach. The extraordinary tableau Wednesday at the United Nations underscored a stark new reality: the United States is facing the prospect of having to share, or even cede, its decades-long role as the architect of Middle East peacemaking." CW: in other words, we have willingly let Israel isolate us in the region; not good for us & ultimately not good for Israel.

CW: Who doesn't like the idea of 90-year-old widows paying for corporate tax breaks? Let's hope the AARP has something to say about that.

Bottom line: they both shill for the rich; Romney is just way worse.

I've heard most of Obama's speeches, and I'm not sure he's ever directly said -- "I gave you a tax break. Almost every Republican voted against it."

Somehow, businesses  and consumers seem much more concerned about the  lack of customers and  jobs, respectively, than they are reassured by  the fiscal righteousness  of their governments.

Thomas Jefferson’s 'All men are created equal' is  properly understood as calling for equality of opportunity, not equality  of outcomes. But ... as [economic] polarization increases, mobility declines." ...

Nicholas Kristof: "... while alarmists seem to think that the [OWS] movement is a 'mob' trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability. To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists." ...

Tax Me! Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal: "A new survey from Spectrem Group found that 68% of millionaires (those with investments of $1 million or more) support raising taxes on those with $1 million or more in income. Fully 61% of those with net worths of $5 million or more support the tax on million-plus earners." ...

Patrick Howley, an assistant editor of the right-wing American Spectator admitted boasted "that he had consciously infiltrated the group on Friday with the intent to discredit the movement." Howley describes the actual protesters as "lack[ing] the nerve to confront authority. From estimates within the protest, only ten people were pepper-sprayed, and as far as I could tell I was the only one who got inside.”

And it’s about a church that is obsessed with sex in ways  it shouldn’t be, and not obsessed with sex in ways it should be....

"I'm sure that the Democrats on this prolonged waste of time appreciate how the White House has tossed them into the blame pie with the Republicans. You spend a few months attempting to sell out every bit of progressive government of the past 80 years, and this is the thanks you get from the leader of your party. You get hit in a drive-by swipe about 'Washington' and 'Congress.' I swear to god, sometimes, Barack Obama and the people around him can be the most incredible mixture of insufferable arrogance and obvious political incompetence ever to get elected in this country. Just shut up and at least try to get re-elected. Please."

"I’m sure Daley and Geithner are keenly aware that there’s a nasty political war going on out there and that they’re losing. What I suspect they don’t fully understand is that one reason they’re losing it is that people aren’t sure which side they’re on.

"The Conservative Recovery" Fizzles. Matt Yglesias: "... we had 17,000 thousand new private sector jobs in August, which were 100 percent offset by 17,000 lost jobs in the public sector.... This has been the trend all year. The public sector has been steadily shrinking. According to the conservative theory of the economy, when the public sector shrinks that should super-charge the private sector.... Conservatives complain about the results because the President is a Democrat.... But the policy result is what conservatives say they want." CW: as Paul Krugman & many other economists have written repeatedly, cutting government spending does not create jobs. Period. ...

Paul Ryan claimed that Americans don’t know enough about what a Romney-Ryan presidency would do, which explains the campaign’s current troubles. But when Chris Wallace pressed Ryan to discuss the specifics of the Romney-Ryan tax plan, the mathematics of which have confounded non-partisan experts, he refused even to say how much the tax cuts the ticket has proposed would cost."

PRESIDENT OBAMA needs to go big. Jeffrey R. Immelt, chairman of the  president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, may have suggestions,  but considering that Fortune 100 companies have killed 2.9 million jobs  in America over the past decade while adding 2.4 million abroad, that  may not be the best input. I’m an entrepreneur and I’m creating jobs.  Here are eight suggestions." (Emphasis added.)

"The big new element on Friday was an official outside recognition that U.S. creditworthiness is being undermined by a new factor: political insanity. S&P didn’t base its downgrade on a change in the U.S. fiscal and economic outlook. It based it on the political game of chicken over the debt ceiling, a game that Republicans initiated and pushed to the limit, and on a growing gloom about the partisan deadlock.

n Cole: though you wouldn't know it from listening to or reading American media, the protests movements in the U.S., Europe & the Middle East, including Israel, are all about the same thing: the concentration of wealth in a corrupt, connected elite that deprives ordinary citizens of a decent standard of living. Thanks to a reader for the link.

the richest 400  Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together.

this is Obama once again making his favorite unforced error: we'll call it "The Pre-Game Cave."

The government may lose its case, but it won't be Verrilli's fault -- it will be the fault of Tea Party Justices using childish hypotheticals to claim that if they don't save America from ObamaCare, President Obama & the Democrats will make you eat bran & broccoli & force you to buy exercise equipment.

"Imagine if the Democrats offered Republicans a deficit deal that had more than $3 in tax increases for every $1 in spending cuts, assigned most of those spending cuts to the Pentagon, and didn't take a dime from Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare beneficiaries. Republicans would laugh at them. But without quite realizing it, that's the deal Republicans have now offered to the Democrats." ...

CW: so once again, I ask, "Why doesn't Obama tell it the way opinion writers do?"

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding ... resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas.

Employment data for the 64 years from the beginning of Harry Truman’s presidency to the  end of George W. Bush’s [shows] ... that an average of two million jobs  were created per year when a Democrat was president, compared with one  million annually when a Republican was president. More pointedly, and unfortunately for Romney, business executives have  only a mediocre record when transferring their skills to government...."

Henry Blodgett, the Business Insider: "A former senior analyst at Moody's has gone public with his story of how one of the country's most important rating agencies is corrupted to the core. The analyst, William J. Harrington, ... has made his story public in the form of a 78-page 'comment' to the SEC's proposed rules about rating agency reform, which he submitted to the agency on August 8th. The comment is a scathing indictment of Moody's processes, conflicts of interests, and management."

Juan Cole lists "the top ten Catholic teachings Santorum rejects while obsessing about birth control."

Believers in the military spending fairy say things like "the  government can't create jobs," but also think that military spending  creates jobs...

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an  executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder,  protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the  international laws of war..

Okay, let’s look at a few of Paul’s other ideas:

He opposes any kind of amnesty for undocumented workers. Further, he says mandated hospital emergency treatment for illegal aliens should stop. He’s okay with charities providing medical treatment to undocumented people, but anybody who can’t get it is out of luck. Paul is a medical doctor; evidently he doesn’t think the Hippocratic Oath crosses international borders. He also has called for a Constitutional amendment to revise the Fourteenth Amendment principles and "end automatic birthright citizenship."

He opposes universal health care.

He would completely eliminate the income tax. He supports repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized the income tax. Despite the amendment, for some reason Paul still thinks the income tax is unconstitutional. Nonetheless, he’s expressed support for a regressive flat tax.

He has signed Grover Norquist’s no-new-taxes pledge.

He wants to return to the gold (and silver) standard & eliminate the Federal Reserve, which he believes causes recessions & depressions.

He says prayer in public schools should not be prohibited & opposes “a rigid separation between church and state.” In 2005, he introduced a bill that “would permit state, county, and local governments to decide whether to allow displays of religious text and imagery and whether to ban atheists from public office.”

He is a huge Second Amendment advocate. He has said he thinks it’s fine for individuals to own machine guns.

He opposes any form of campaign finance reform, calling it a free-speech violation.

He opposed affirmative action laws, calling them “special interest laws.” He wrote a treatise against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, calling it unconstitutional.

He wants to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, which brought us direct election of U.S. senators. He wants to return to the day when state legislators chose senators.

He opposes a Constitutional amendment to directly elect the president.

Paul says he’s against all federal laws defining marriage, yet – curiously – he defended DOMA. He opposed the Lawrence v. Texas decision (rendering sodomy laws unconstitutional) because he doesn’t think the federal government should have any say in marriage law.

He is “an unshakeable foe of abortion.” Although he says the Constitution requires that abortion legislation be left to the states, he voted in favor of a federal ban on partial-birth abortion in 2000 and 2003.

He says climate change is “not a major problem.” He believes the federal government has no right to impose clean air standards. He’s says pollution can be best addressed by lawsuits against companies that pollute the air of their neighbors.

He strongly opposes international treaties like the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and also opposes domestic progams like cap and trade. He opposes imposing fuel efficiency standards (too bad on this -- Obama just got the auto industry to agree to signficantly higher standards). Paul is against investment in public transportion, and he voted to repeal the federal gas tax. But he strongly favors public tax breaks for domestic oil drilling (Alaska? Yes! Offshore drilling? Yes!) & voted no on revoking oil & gas subsidies.

Paul would eliminate many federal government agencies & Cabinet positions, such as the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce the Department of Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security. He also wants to get rid of FEMA, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the IRS.

He has repeatedly said he would "never vote for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution." That would include such “unconstitutional” programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Americans with Disabilities, civil rights legislation, etc. etc.

Is this the guy you want to hold the veto pen? Really? Get a grip, liberals.

Greg Ip of the Economist in a Washington Post op-ed: "The economic ideology of the Republican Party has changed in recent years.... Liberals and conservatives in the United States ... have largely agreed that the government should have at least some role in smoothing out the ups and downs of the business cycle — what economists call 'macroeconomic stabilization,' that is, containing inflation in good times and boosting employment in bad. But this is the consensus that many Republicans in effect now reject.... They almost surely have it wrong."

"A conservative journalist has admitted to infiltrating the group of protesters who clashed with security at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Saturday — and he openly claims to have instigated the events that prompted the museum to close." ...

While the administration managed to force changes to last  year's National Defense Authorization Act that make its provisions 'mandating' the military detention of noncitizen terror suspects  apprehended on US soil almost meaningless, there is now a presumption in the law that the military has a domestic role in counterterrorism."

It’s hard to see how we avoid a Tea-Party recession if the president who has  the biggest megaphone in the country is not willing to speak clearly on the  issue,' Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, told The Hill."

For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won."

Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to understand simple declarative sentences.

latest World Energy Outlook report ...  shows that in 2010 the world spent $409 billion on subsidizing the  production and consumption of fossil fuels, dwarfing the word’s $66  billion or so of subsidies for renewable energy.

Economists who have studied the matter say that there is little evidence that regulations cause massive job loss in the economy, and that rolling them back would not lead to a boom in job creation.

Mitt Romney is trying something no one  has ever seen -- he's deemed the truth to be an inconvenient nuisance,  which Romney will ignore, without shame, to advance his ambitions for  vast power.

"If Mr. Romney has done one good thing with his partial disclosure — although it clearly wasn’t his goal — he has reminded Americans of the fundamental unfairness of the current tax code and of how determined Mr. Romney and his party are to keep it that way. Currently, the tax code imposes a top rate of 15 percent on investment income — generally, capital gains and dividends — that flows overwhelmingly to wealthy taxpayers. In comparison, top rates between 25 percent and 35 percent are applied to the wages and salaries for many working Americans.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, who has a singular ability to make financial stories interesting reading (not that his ethically-challenged subjects don't help): "For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG."

Because the legal community  -- analysts, scholars, journalists, attorneys, former clerks -- appear  to have wildly overestimated the extent to which conservative justices  give a damn about precedent, the facts of the case, the court's  traditions and respect for restraint, lower-court rulings, the integrity  of the institution, and the justices' avoidance of activism.

... the stereotyping of black government dependency ... serves the strategic end of discrediting the entire social safety net, which most Americans of all races depend on. Black people are subtly demonized, but whites and blacks alike will suffer."

Perry brings to the campaign, besides great posture and polished good  looks, an economic record that looks like a vindication of Tea Party  dogma, never mind that it was made possible by a quarter of America’s  known oil reserves, a lot of low-wage immigrants, a reluctance to waste  government money on frills like education and health care, and a tax and  regulatory environment out of the Wild West....

Overall, government employees account for  about one-sixth of the workforce in Texas. The significant role of government in Texas’s relative prosperity stands in  stark contrast to the 'go-it-alone' image cultivated by Perry, who credits a  lack of government interference for fostering a business-friendly environment in  Texas."

Conservative Charles Moore of the Telegraph: "The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.... And when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens. It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few."

Clear Channel ... now happens  to be owned by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital.... Clear Channel is the nation’s largest radio network and the vast majority of their talk radio content  — 86 percent, according to liberal talk radio host Bill Press — is conservative."

The government has done immensely more to protect creditors, shareholders, and managers of major banks from the negative consequences of their sins than it’s done to protect bus drivers."

Mayer doesn't emphasize it or really even connect the dots, but what makes my blood boil is that Pope got rich selling cheap Chinese merchandise in a string of shabby discount stores, where he pays his workers the minimum wage. He then turns around & uses the money he made on the poor (while not creating any good jobs & essentially sending many offshore) to back candidates (in outrageous ways) who are commited to making those same poor poeple poorer. And the punidts can't figure out what Occupy Wall Street is all about?

Paul Krugman takes a look at Silver's analysis and observes, "What Obama has offered — and Republicans have refused to accept — is a deal in which less than 20 percent of the deficit reduction comes from new revenues. This puts him slightly to the right of the average Republican voter."

CW: the last of the breed: liberal-ish Southern white Congressmen.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post: "Seventy-two percent — said  they favored the idea of raising taxes on those making $250,000 or more to help shrink the debt.... Eighty-seven percent of Democrats supported such a move, so did 54 percent of self-identified Republicans. And, nearly six in 10 people said  they would support raising taxes on oil and gas companies, including 55 percent of Republicans who agreed with the idea. Those numbers suggest that the notion that any tax increase is anathema to the party base — a belief that seems to be guiding much of House Republicans’ negotiating strategy to date — may be misguided or, at least, overstated.... Making major changes to Medicare,  Medicaid and Social Security for the general population were broadly  unpopular."

The role of the Court, Scalia seems to be saying, is to step in when  members of Congress are scared of being called racist. Scalia does not  seem to be afraid of that."

Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!

Of course the Republicans passing these laws never acknowledge their real  purpose, which is to turn away from the polls people who are more likely to vote  Democratic, particularly the young, the poor, the elderly and minorities.

No Electricity or Charisma in Sight. Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling (CW: a reliable, left-leaning polling firm): "There's been plenty of bad news for Barack Obama this month in the form of his approval numbers, but our polling finds that his problems go deeper than that. Democratic enthusiasm about voting in next year's election has hit a record low this month."

When he left office, however, state debt had increased, the size of government had grown, and over his four years, Massachusetts’ record of job creation was among the worst in the nation."

So it's horrible for the Clintons to take Saudi money for charity, but A-Okay for Trump to take Saudi money for profit.

"... if there’s anything remarkable about the Romney campaign, it’s the extent to which the core arguments for his candidacy are either false or impossible to substantiate.

There is little doubt that the capture, imprisonment, trial and likely execution of bin Laden, all of which would have played out over the course of years, or possibly a decade, would have increased the threat of terrorism against Americans here and elsewhere.

Rick Perry has "accepted more stimulus money than any other state besides California, and used the funds to close 97 percent of Texas’ massive budget deficit. The Houston Chronicle reported that as of July 2010, federal stimulus funds created or saved 47,700 jobs in the Lone Star State.... So far, Texas has used $17.4 billion in federal stimulus money to keep schools open, ensure Medicaid coverage for children, and put more people to work on infrastructure projects.... Ironically, Perry once aggressively pursued the federal aid he now denounces...."

This is presumably part of the wider conservative turn against  knowledge-disseminating institutions whose output is perceived as too  liberal (academia, the mainstream media, Hollywood) in favor of  institutions that produce more reliably conservative narratives  (churches, business-oriented think tanks, Fox News). More and more,  liberals and conservatives are almost literally living in different  worlds with different versions of consensus reality."

The scientific process, he apparently believes, is unreliable, while the state criminal justice system is infallible. Intellectually, morally, and politically, this isn’t just wrong; it’s scary. The fact that Republicans in the audience found this worthy of hearty applause points to a party that’s bankrupt in more ways than one."

Any economic model that does not properly address inequality will eventually face a crisis of legitimacy.

AND now, for something completely different. I never saw John Ford's 1939 film "Stagecoach." I thought it was "just a Western." Well, no, it's a morality play masquerading as a Western. I come to it via Krugman here, who comes to it by Digby here, & blogger Jerry Kutner here.

Only Republicans can  delegitimize the nihilistic madness at the base of their party." ...

indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of  principle, at  least among the G.O.P.’s base. And what this means is that modern  conservatism is actually a deeply radical  movement, one that is hostile  to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that  is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate  some of the 'common hazards of life' through such programs as  Social  Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid."

Let's see. When a Democrat says, in words taken out of context, "Ann Romney never worked a day in her life," everybody from the President on down does backflips distancing himself from her; the media makes it a huge two-day story. When a Republican threatens the life of the POTUS to the point the Secret Service gets involved, Mitt Romney does not condemn him. And the press, so far, pretty much says "Meh." ...

"... the modern doctrine of a compassion-free conservatism that’s using the fog of the fiscal crisis to push a program of perverse wealth inequality as sound economic policy: The only way to jump-start the economy is to slash taxes on the wealthy and on companies; the only way to compensate for the deficits that those tax cuts exacerbate is to slash benefits to the poor and vulnerable. It would be comical if it weren’t so callous."

"Under an economic system that favors state-run banks and companies over wage earners, the government keeps the interest rate on savings accounts so artificially low that it cannot keep pace with China’s rising inflation.... Economists say this nation’s decade of remarkable economic growth ... has to a great extent been underwritten by the household savings — not the spending — of the country’s 1.3 billion people. This system, which some experts refer to as state capitalism, depends on the transfer of wealth from Chinese households to state-run banks, government-backed corporations and the affluent few who are well enough connected to benefit from the arrangement. Meanwhile, striving middle-class families ... are unable to enjoy the full fruits of China’s economic miracle."

It’s  also troubling that some justices are more focused on whether they like  this law than whether this law is constitutional.

Glenn Greenwald: "That this death-cheering comes from a party that relentlessly touts itself as 'pro-life' and derides the other as The Party of Death -- and loves to condemn Islam (in contrast to its war-loving self) as a death-glorifying cult -- only adds a layer of dark irony."

CW: here's a thought: middle-class conservatives are stupid. Some pretty good evidence: Kevin Drum of Mother Jones: "Middle-class conservatives have become completely convinced that 'good' tax policies include a flat tax, lower capital gains rates, and repeal of the estate tax, all of which are designed to benefit the rich almost exclusively."

His embrace of Republican budgets that would benefit the wealthy while  hurting the poor and the middle class shows his priorities haven’t  changed."

perhaps the public has taken a glance at the most untrustworthy presidential nominee in recent history & is seeing -- an untrustworthy candidate: he won't release his taxes, he won't say anything more about his jobs agenda than that he'll create the same number of jobs that would be created anyway, he claims his Bain experience makes him qualified to handle the economy but he won't say how, he wants to cut taxes on the rich, he wants to voucherize everything but his family's horse (which he's incorporated), he's been caught in well-publicized (at long last) lies, he criticizes President Obama on foreign policy but he has no foreign policy of his own other than Russia-Bad/USA-good, China-Bad/USA-good, Israel-good/Obama-bad.

New York Times Editors: "... leaders on both sides of the Atlantic seem determined to handcuff fiscal policies — the main tools that can increase jobs, consumer demand and economic growth — with an unquestioning devotion to rigid austerity.... But Europe’s broad downward trajectory can only be turned around if governments — both those of lenders and debtors — spend more in the near term to put people back to work and get consumers back to spending.... Voters on both sides of the Atlantic need to demand more from their leaders than continued austerity on autopilot." CW: why are the editors of the New York Times smarter than the leaders of the free world? ...

"The discipline of macro-economics was born out of the study of the Great Depression, in an attempt to understand what had happened and avoid a repetition. That’s why it’s so depressing to see the developed world not just sleepwalking towards another recession, but actively embracing policies which make it more likely. Governments can’t all simultaneously cut spending while also continuing to grow their economies: it just defies common sense to think they can."

About 25 percent of millionaires in the U.S. pay federal taxes at lower effective rates than a significant portion of middle-income taxpayers, according to a legislative analysis. Preferential treatment of investment income and the reduced impact of payroll taxes on high earners lets about 94,500 millionaires pay taxes at a lower rate than 10.4 million 'moderate-income taxpayers,' representing about 10 percent of those making less than $100,000 a year...."

said Obama believed in a Washington that  just doesn’t exist – where reasonable people sit down and work out reasonable  solutions to the nation’s problems. I think that guy was right.

In the "Democracy Now" segment I posted yesterday, we learned that because of the 40-year-old "war on drugs," there are more African Americans under correctional control than there were slaves in 1850. Income disparity between the rich & middle class is much greater now than it was in the Eisenhower years & that disparty continues to widen as tax policies encourage the establishment of an aristocracy. Millions of Americans are still living in poverty. American children go to bed hungry. K-12 education is getting worse for everyone but the elite, & higher education has become significantly less affordable. Big banks & large corpoations have more power than ever. Healthcare for middle-class Americans less than age 65 is becoming less & less affordable. The political parties can no longer work together because a good percentage of Republicans are nuts. Instead of the activist progressive Warren Court we have the activist regressive Roberts Court. Government services have been sharply reduced. Much of our infrastructure is half-a-century old and crumbling. Nixon's impeachable war crimes are no longer war crimes. We torture our prisoners. We're arguably engaged in three wars. Climate change is leading to severe weather patterns & all the Florida homes encumbered by underwater mortgages will soon be literally underwater. The United States was a 20th-century nation. The 21st century belongs to somebody else. .

And ... in the early days of the nation, most states had  rules on the books making any political contribution by a corporation a criminal  offence.... Were they around today, our founders would not only be standing on the front  lines of the Occupy Wall Street movement, they would likely be pursuing a far  more strident strategy than playing some bongo drums in Zuccotti Park."

New York Times: "President Obama declared his opposition to the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood through the Security Council on Wednesday, throwing the weight of the United States directly in the path of the Arab democracy movement even as he hailed what he called the democratic aspirations that have taken hold throughout the Middle East and North Africa."

Prof. Cornel West, in a New York Times op-ed, makes some good points about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., before he goes over-the-top, as he almost invariable does, and ends by warning us to be "coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle." (And you can bet the Times editors ratcheted down whatever was in West's first draft.) Here's one of West's more worthy observations:

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the [Obama] administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable. ...

What conservatives really want is to run the country and the world on conservative principles: to control reproduction (no abortion); to control what is taught (no public education); to control religion (conservative Christianity); to control race and language (mass deportation of Hispanic immigrants); to guarantee cheap labor (no unions); to continue white domination (no affirmative action); to continue straight domination (no gay marriage); to control markets (eliminate regulation, taxation, unions, worker rights, and tort cases); to control transportation (privatize freeways); to control elections (institute bars to voting).

It’s wildly under-appreciated how unrestrained is the  Government’s power to do what it wants, and how little effect these  debates over various proposed laws have on that power.... The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer  believes in due process...."

Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "Despite Republican opposition to spending measures or tax cuts to spur job creation and economic growth, the president is under pressure to fight for a significant stimulus program. The demands come not only from Democrats, but also from many economists, financial analysts and executives who fear a relapse into recession. But as administration officials are well aware, another display of partisan gridlock this fall could again provoke a downgrade of the United States’ credit and market upheavals that would further batter consumer confidence."

If the problem is excessive tax  burdens on businesses in general, then the solution is broad tax reform  that also benefits small business owners, who are more likely to stick  around ... and who are unlikely to hopscotch  around the country in search of a bigger tax break."

Winkes points to some critical facts that Obama should have included in his speech -- facts low-information (i.e., most) voters simply don't know. ...

"After they took power in January, the hard-line Republicans who dominate the House reached for a radical overhaul of American government, hoping to unravel the social safety net, cut taxes further for the wealthy and strip away regulation of business. Fortunately, thanks to defensive tactics by Democrats, they failed to achieve most of their agenda. But they still did significant damage in 2011 to many of the most important functions of government, and particularly to investments in education, training and transportation that the country will need for a sound economic recovery."

There’s more money on deposit in the Caymans than in all the banks in New York City combined...

Weekend Reading. Don Peck writes a long essay in The Atlantic that won't cheer you any: In 2005, Citigroup analysts wrote that "America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent [emphasis added]; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts ... had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.... Income inequality usually shrinks during a recession, but in the Great Recession, it didn’t. From 2007 to 2009, the most-recent years for which data are available, it widened a little."

But the larger challenge for liberalism is restoring faith in government and making the case to a skeptical electorate for greater public sector activism.

CW: this should end any lingering doubts you might have that Republicans don't really want the economy to tank. Yes, they do.

Jérôme E. Roos in the New York Times eXaminer: "... when 300 liberals are arrested during an anti-Putin protest in faraway Moscow, the New York Times splashes the news onto its front page. But when 700 radicals are arrested in an anti-Wall Street rally in New York itself, the Times virtually ignores them, pushing the news onto its obscure ‘City Room Blog’"

That means that instead of Medicare as we know it, which pays your medical bills, you’d get a lump sum which you can apply to private insurance — they’ll yell when we call it a voucher, but that’s what it is.... It’s basically a way to deny health care to people while denying that you’re doing so. You don’t say, 'we won’t pay for this care', you just hand people a voucher and let them discover that it won’t buy adequate insurance. It’s health-care rationing...."

I'm trying to figure out how the abstinence thing works with the anti-abortion thing. According to Christian conservatives, God wants us to have sex only under certain strict conditions: with our spouses of the opposite sex when our immediate purpose is to procreate and we don't enjoy ourselves too much.

Otherwise, we must abstain from having sex (and even thinking about sex).

Also according to Christian conservatives, God has a plan for each of us.

So let's say, God forbid (and I mean that literally), a woman has sexual relations under other than those prescribed circumstances. And let's say, God forbid (and I mean that literally), she gets pregnant as a result of said ungodly encounter.

If God did not want the woman to have sex in the first place, then God cannot have wanted her to get pregnant. The pregnancy is not part of God's plan.

If God did not want the woman to get pregnant, then God did not want her to have a child. Ergo, God would want the woman to have an abortion.

In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the  controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that  came before it."

This might be comedy to the Italians but it's tragedy to Americans. But I suppose it depends on what kind of American you are. If you are the kind who hopes and believes in the ideal of the American experiment, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, separation of powers and separation of church and state, and a  balanced concept of the role and limitation of governments, you might find it  tragic. If you're the other kind, a Teabagging Republican, you're convulsed. As Mel Brooks once said, defining comedy "If I cut my finger, that's a tragedy. If you fall into an open manhole and die, THAT's comedy."

David Remnick of the New Yorker: "The death of Vaclav Havel comes in a month in which we mark the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Few voices did more to undermine the foundations of the Berlin Wall and the entire edifice of Soviet-imposed totalitarianism than this shy bourgeois, this sly, reticent, playwright and essayist."

Nixon biographer Rick Pearlstein in Time: Democrats win by defending the social safety net -- calmly -- and (accurately) accusing Republicans of trying to dismantle it. CW: in other words, so far Obama has done all the wrong things. He has threatened to cut Medicare & Social Security & he has refused to accuse Republicans of wanting to gut these programs (he won't even say "Republican").

The inconvenient truth  is that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are mirror images of each  other. Each panders to his supposed base.

Veteran Republican Congressional Staffer Mike Lofgren in TruthOut on why he retired. CW: This is perhaps the most insightful & important bit of prose written by a Republican since Dwight Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. Lofgren doesn't have kind words for Democrats or the both-sides-do-it media phonies, but he uses his insider knowledge to expose the GOP's rotten core. Truly a must-read.

Will Wilkinson of The Economist: "[Steve] Jobs's wealth, like that of other billionaire barons of the information age, was built in no small part upon an intellectual-property regime that I and many others believe to retard progress while concentrating massive rewards upon a privileged few, generating unfair and unproductive inequality." Wilkinson then goes on to "forgive" Jobs his success, and his refusal to share it a la Gates & Buffett because of the "the elegance of the Apple devices ... [which] offered the mass market dazzling technical progress with the sort of tastefully luxurious sheen usually reserved for the seriously well-to-do."

Robert Pear of the New York Times: "The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, in a new report likely to figure prominently in the escalating political fight over how to revive the economy, create jobs and lower the federal debt. In addition, the report said, government policy has become less redistributive since the late 1970s, doing less to reduce the concentration of income." CW: What could possibly be wrong with that? The report is here. ...

Paul Krugman: inquiring minds want to know -- why doesn't Obama just extend the payroll tax cut "which Republicans, who love tax cuts, would support." Because "Republicans have already rejected a payroll tax cut." They had to be negotiated into accepting the cut authorized in December 2010 & they flat out rejected such a cut in the latest negotiations. Why, again? Because Republicans "love tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts for ordinary workers, many of whom will be those hated lucky duckies whose incomes are too low to pay income tax, are if anything something Republicans dislike." CW: this is a stunning fact that every American voter should know, but they don't. Because Democrats -- including the DINO President -- won't tell them. A conspiracy theorist might think Congressional Democrats & Obama are covering for Republicans. ...

There really is a Right Wing World, and it really is a parallel meta-world where the fact-based world is feared and loathed. This is extraordinary, and extraordinarily bad for our democracy. ...

Kevin Carey in The New Republic: "THE STUDENTS IN ZUCCOTTI PARK are right to focus on the injustices of student debt: Many of them are indentured to the very banks that destroyed the economy and along with it the jobs students need to pay their loans back.... But much of the guilt lies with higher education institutions themselves. They have spent billions on vanity building projects, administrative overhead, and money-losing sports programs in order to compete for status and fame. Students and parents have been left with the bill."

... the banks blew themselves up at great cost to the American people, with major negative global implications. Most of the public-debt increase in the US and elsewhere is not due to any kind of discretionary fiscal stimulus; it’s all about the loss of tax revenue that comes with a deep recession. (And the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the wealthiest, unfunded Medicare prescription benefit, and debt-financed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have severely weakened the long-term fiscal outlook.)

Rick Perry, Porn Merchant. Lisa Derrick of La Figa: Rick Perry isn't talking about his past financial interest in, "Movie Gallery, the nation’s second largest video chain, [which] was the largest distributor of pornography in America and the only major retail chain to sell pornography in its flagship stores. The margin of profit on porn allowed the chain to undercut rental prices on mainstream videos, forcing mom-and-pops out of business." Though Perry signed legislation to help Movie Gallery avoid "frivolous" lawsuits, the company went out of business in 2010.

Therefore, I think that if the evidence against Awlaki was accurate – or even if the Administration merely believed the evidence that he was planning terrorist attacks against Americans – then his killing was morally justified. Tying a legal justification to his killing is a nicety, but it doesn’t carry a great deal of weight with me.

NBC News: "United under the banner 'We are the 1 percent: We stand with the 99 percent,' a band of entrepreneurs, trust fund babies, professionals and inheritors has taken to the web to share their abhorrence of corporate greed and support for tax code changes that would see them pay a higher share of their considerable wealth.

This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory -- he has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regrettable-if-sometimes-necessary act into one that finds orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed."

"... we need to measure our growth in prosperity: not by the sheer number of people who inhabit the earth, and not by flawed measurements like G.D.P., but by how well we satisfy basic human needs; by how well we foster dignity, creativity, community and cooperation; by how well we care for our biological and physical environment, our only home." ...

Note that Paul "raised" (i.e., didn't give) $50,000 to help cover his good friend Snyder's bills, which came to $400,000 for his final care. And where were "the churches" Paul said were responsible to take care of the indigent? I guess they're irresponsible, too.

"Conservatives have succeeded in convincing working- and middle-class people not just that they shouldn't feel solidarity with other members of their class, but that they shouldn't feel solidarity with anyone at all. It required a lot of work, particularly when you consider how much they rely on encouraging feelings of tribalism in other realms, like nationhood, religion, and region. But the conservative message on economics has always been brutally individualistic, essentially arguing that in the economic realm, no one is meaningfully connected to anyone in any way."

If Standard & Poor’s had been doing the job it was supposed to be doing  between 2000 and 2008, the federal budget wouldn’t be in a crisis — and Standard  & Poor’s wouldn’t be threatening the United States with a downgrade.... So why has Standard & Poor’s decided now’s the time to crack down on the  federal budget — when it gave free passes to Wall Street’s risky securities and  George W. Bush’s giant tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby contributing to the  very crisis its now demanding be addressed? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the Street pays Standard  & Poor’s bills?"

Chris Matthews talks to Reagan/Bush I economic advisor Bruce Bartlett about the sources of the deficit & other stuff related to the economy. Thanks to reader Bob M.:

Paul Krugman writes: "This is really awful. Politifact, which is supposed to police false claims in politics, has announced its Lie of the Year — and it’s a statement that happens to be true, the claim that Republicans have voted to end Medicare...

Ezra Klein: "The meta-point here is that we’re seeing, in real time, why the 'fact checker' model is probably unsustainable.... [Paul] Ryan actually campaigned to get PolitiFact to name 'end Medicare' their Lie of the Year. And yet Ryan is one of the prime offenders behind the 2010 Lie of the Year — that the Affordable Care Act was a 'government takeover' of the health-care system.

The fact-checkers claim that 'Democrats pounced' on Ryan, that 'the Democrats were turning the  tables' on the spin, and that the lie is 'the Democrats’ claim.' No  mention of how a non-partisan analysis of the bill, by a congressional  reporter, first made the 'ending' claim."

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), evidently realizing that "just because something has failed repeatedly is no reason not to do it again; especially if it protects the interests of the 1 percent," did so for the accolades from the usual suspects. If he weren't such a coward, he would suggest a plan that would actually work to reduce costs & improve healthcare.

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