Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 percent of those polled said no. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 percent favored spending; 63 percent favored tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.
Today, almost the exact opposite is true. More Americans support spending over deficit-reduction, yet there's very little political will for more spending. Of course polls quickly became irrelevant by 1941 when we began to rack up huge deficits to pay for the war, and the Great Depression ended.
Strange, but not surprising, how war -- World War II then, Iraq and Afghanistan now -- makes huge deficit spending okay, but fixing the economy and creating jobs with deficit spending is all kinds of controversial. Some things never change.
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First, there's no chance in hell the people who made this video actually voted for the "Democrat" president and the "Democrat" Congress.
Plus, TARP was passed by the previous administration.
The stimulus, which was actually $787 billion and not $1.2 trillion, created 3.3 million new jobs and averted a deeper recession.
That bar graph at 2:14 showing the year-by-year deficits ending with the large deficit of 2009? George W. Bush signed the 2009 budget, not President Obama.
And are the Republicans suggesting here that they're not going to negotiate deals with senators in exchange for votes -- a common practice in Congress since the day it first convened? That's rich.
But the wingnuts are angry! ROOOOWWR! Dramatic movie music! Harry Reid! ANGER!
If you're looking for a reason to get enthusiastic about the midterms, try this. Think about how awesome it will be for the Republicans to not "take back" Congress. They're really excited about November 2, and denying them a congressional majority would be so sweet.
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Plans by a tiny Gainesville, Fla. church to burn Qurans on September 11 were condemned by a guy who knows how to act toward Islam. Gen. David Petraeus is pleading with the Christian extremists to tone it down or put American troops at risk.
Note to Mr. Petraeus: it doesn't help that you've invaded their countries and killed their people either.
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This paragraph from Peter Orzag's first column in the Times struck me as typical of the Obama Administration's messaging about Congress, for better or worse:
In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it.
Most of the public communication from the Obama administration treats the obstructionism and irrationality of Congress like a fixed point that's hardly worth discussing. And when some highly compromised piece of legislation finally makes it through Congress, there's little mention of what should have been, just a celebration of the turd that passed.
I understand that this is the attitude that adults should have, and I don't have a really effective alternative, but sometimes the absurdity of the whole situation just jumps off the page. Extending the high-income tax cuts is stupid, but stupidity is such the norm that it doesn't merit more than a passing mention, and that mention characterizes something quite stupid as "worth it".
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John Cole: No Good Options
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Christians must reject "Burn a Quran Day"
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Since 9/11 many American Christians have been asking why Muslims who oppose Islamist radicalism don't do more to counter it. Today I suspect more than a few Muslims are looking at Christians in America wondering why Christians don't try to dissuade the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida, led by Pastor Terry Jones, from hosting Burn a Quran Day.
What is the responsibility of religious believers in a given faith to engage fanatics advocating ideologies of hate while claiming to act in the name of this faith?
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The path back to economic prosperity is as plain as the nose on your face, or so say Republicans like New Gingrich, who claims that only the "ideologically stubborn" would reject it - such as a Democratic Party addicted to "big government solutions" that reward union interests and the undeserving poor.
Writing in my Boston Herald this weekend, Gingrich echoes conventional Republican wisdom when he says we can easily restore economic prosperity just so long as we return to those simple truths and "proven principles" we learned from Ronald Reagan, which are: the only way to create jobs is to give lots of money to people who already have it.
Nothing else will do. Sure, Republicans and the Tea Party complain about federal budget deficits. But deficits are not important in and of themselves. They are only important to the extent that reducing them bucks up "investor confidence." Therefore, deficit reduction - while a great talking point to level against liberal initiatives - should never interfere with Republican political interests, whether it's launching new wars that profit America's arms merchants, or eliminating all taxes on the rich who are, Republicans say, our single engine of economic growth.
And since $700 billion in tax cuts and another $700 billion for the military-industrial complex are now off the table, the only cuts our deficit-conscious Republicans are willing to even entertain are those in "non-defense discretionary" accounts. Which means the needy and the poor are just out of luck.
Gingrich is falsely praised as the GOP's "idea man." But he is nothing of the sort. What he is is a skilled propagandist who knows how to package self-serving nonsense for mass consumption and maximum political gain.
And what reactionaries like Gingrich are selling is the idea that Democrats are a menace to our economy because they spook rich investors by injecting "politics" into what should be an impartial value system that richly rewards ambition, prudence and hard work.
Never mind that most reputable economists, who are not on the Koch Brother's payroll, think Newt Gingrich's recycled Ronald Reagan "common sense solutions" are stuff and nonsense.
As political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson write in their new book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, there is no real mystery to the inner workings of laissez faire capitalism. Just as private property is itself a creature of law -- written by the state and enforceable at public expense -- so too income distribution is not "some sort of natural phenomenon that government sometimes counteracts, but the product of government policies themselves," say the authors.
Despite what Republicans tell us about capitalism being a gift from God, like "freedom," there are no "pre-political" markets, Hacker and Pierson maintain, because politics and economics are inseparable. Markets, like everything else, obey the Golden Rule: He that has the gold writes the rules.
"Markets are inevitably shaped and channeled by political forces, dependent on the rules that are set up and enforced by those who control the coercive power of the state," they say. "The laissez-faire vision of the economy was a political choice, one with distinct, sometimes brutal consequences, and one that required a great deal of government intervention to emerge and survive."
Nevertheless, the right wing is on a roll. And if there has been a single failure since Obama took office following the financial collapse on Republican's watch in 2008 it's been the futile attempt by Democrats to gently push our thoroughly corrupted corporate and financial institutions in a more public spirited direction without first reforming or transforming the self-serving culture that supports these institutions themselves.
This half-way approach has meant that we put public resources at risk to bail out reckless banks, while also providing huge public subsidies to a health care insurance industry that only wants to insure healthy people. It's a middle-of-the-road approach that has not yet produced a detectable windfall for average Americans, nor inspired a progressive grassroots movement to watch the President's back against enemies who want to bring him down. Yet, its very timidity has invited Fox-inspired reactionaries to cynically exploit it as "radical socialism" in their effort to regain power.
And, so, we have the comic tragedy of a radical right populist movement that is able to blame Democrats for protecting Republican constituents on Wall Street who still get their bonuses while national unemployment stubbornly stays at more than 9%.
After the capital markets froze solid following the financial collapse of 2008, both Republicans and Democrats correctly rushed to shore up these failing financial institutions because, however much we might hate big banks, finance is the circulatory system of our capitalist system. And when blood stops flowing, the body dies.
Economists like Simon Johnson (former chief economist of the IMF) thought we should have nationalized the banks and broken them up. I agree. That way we treat finance as just another public utility whose resources are too important to the larger economy to leave entirely in private hands. But instead, we took the path of least political resistance and dug the private banks out at taxpayer expense.
The idea was that if we gave taxpayer money to banks, the banks in turn would give credit to consumers and small businesses to jump start the economy again. But they haven't. Instead, they are sitting on the sidelines with their ill-gotten gain, either earning safe interest on T-bills or speculating in risky investments that don't necessarily add jobs. That's why profits on Wall Street are up but economic activity is not.
The banks say to themselves: why should we risk our capital (even capital that was s gift of the American taxpayer) helping to jump start the economy when we can hoard it and wait for the day when Democrats figure out a way around Republican obstruction and are able to jump start the economy with fiscal stimulus themselves.
That way, say the banks, we can invest in a sure thing. Let the public sector take the risks, as it always has, so that we can swoop in and scoop up the profits. Greed is good, as is the "free" market.
Following up on their best-selling book, Off Center, which describes the recent migration of the GOP to the far right, Hacker and Pierson note that even the modest reform efforts of Democrats have provoked a "fierce reaction" from Republicans as they move even further to the right, thus creating what they call a "powerful momentum for economic policies redolent of the pre-New Deal era."
The authors say that the GOP's manifest failures as a governing party finally caught up with the them in 2006 and 2008, yet this did nothing to moderate the Republican's position and, instead, only made the party more conservative.
"Neither electoral rebuke nor the economic catastrophe fueled by financial deregulation, nor the Democrats passage of health care reform, has done anything to shake the party's commitment to the restoration of the Gilded Age," they say.
And in what is just another dreary example of the growing dysfunction of the country's political discourse, Republicans are able to openly appeal for banker support by touting their opposition to financial reform, while at the same time conservative groups craft sound bites that described Democrats as the tools of Big Business - the political equivalent, say Hacker and Pierson, "of having one's cake and eating it too."
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There. Obama can dismiss the catfood commission now
But we don't deserve what will happen to us.
Sitting home and not voting this year in order to send a message that you're unhappy with the failures of Obama and the Democratic Congress is like a pissed-off teenager committing suicide because that will really show his parents.
And consider this: a repug victory in November will be interpreted by the president and Democratic leaders as proof that they were not conservative enough. No matter how obvious it is to everyone that Democratic voters stayed home because the administration is too conservative, Obama will lunge even further rightward in ever-more-futile and desperate attempts to appease and win over repugs who will never, never, EVER vote for him.
It's an absolute, guaranteed, mortal lock that if Republicans make huge gains in the midterms, as seems likely, Graham's rhetoric will be the accepted conventional wisdom, if it isn't already. Pundits, politicians, and the establishment in general will simply accept as fact that Dems would have fared far better if only they hadn't governed "from the left." Obama, we'll hear, has no choice but to go "to the middle."And every time this nonsense is repeated, an angel will lose its wings.
Look, obviously the GOP has all the momentum, at least for now, going into the midterms. The economy is struggling, and frustrated voters are prepared to punish the party in power, even if the mess was created by the party that's about to reap the rewards. Complicating matters, Democratic voters are feeling disillusioned, and may sit on their hands this fall, even if that means sweeping successes for the most radicalized Republican Party in generations.
But Graham's entire narrative is fundamentally wrong. Obama already is and has been in "the middle." It's what led to a smaller and less effective stimulus; it's what led to a more moderate health care reform bill; it's what produced a less ambitious Wall Street reform package. The president has sought to compromise, over and over again, with a comically right-wing GOP that's not only refused to meet him half-way on literally anything, but at times seems intent on undermining national progress purely for partisan gain.
Lindsey Graham wants Obama to "come back to the middle"? Here's a silly question for Graham: when might your party "come back to the middle"? When was the last time congressional Republicans offered a centrist compromise on literally any policy dispute? When was the last time Graham's Senate caucus allowed the Senate to vote up or down on meaningful legislation without a filibuster, a hold, or both? When was the last time the GOP mainstream responded to White House outreach with a single idea where the parties could work together?
The conventional wisdom will be that liberalism did Democrats in, despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite the fact that liberals were right, especially about the economy. And we'll be reminded again as to why the accepted political truths are often neither conventional nor wise.
Read the whole thing.
If everyone who voted Democratic in 2008 does so again on November 2, that won't turn Obama and Congressional Democrats into liberals overnight.
It will probably convince them that voters rewarded them for their repug-cock-sucking ways.
But it also might scare the repug shit out of them. Because keeping strong Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate gives us leverage.
"You didn't deserve it, but we liberals saved your ass again. You've got the majorities you refused to take advantage of for two years. You piss this chance away again, and your only legacy will be as the idiot whose failures created President Palin.
"No more excuses."
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We fear we will see a lot more of this sort of thing A former soldier entered the ER of the hospital at Ft. Stewart, GA with four guns and took hostages in the pre-dawn hours on Monday. He had been trying to get help for his service-connected mental health issues and was frustrated with the lack of care he had received for those problems. He took a medic hostage upon entry and headed for the behavioral health unit, where he took an Army Psychiatric Nurse and a Mental Health Tech hostage. The standoff lasted about two hours, with the nurse he held hostage doing the initial groundwork to get him to lay down his weapons.
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