Are you satisfied? Please note: what has been "proven" here is that those who've been fixated on this nonsense are morons. This whole episode is a prime piece of evidence for establishing competency tests for citizenship.*
"I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly.Douglas is, in the eyes of his father, indeed one in a million. But that phrase takes on an unhappily ironic cast in the age of bi-partisan political delusion. If it sometimes sounds like my criticisms of Obama and his failure to stand up to the right are personal that is because they are.
And earlier this week, the White House budget director declared: “There is an agreement that we should be reducing spending,” suggesting that his only quarrel with Republicans is over whether we should be cutting taxes, too. No wonder, then, that according to a new Pew Research Center poll, a majority of Americans see “not much difference” between Mr. Obama’s approach to the deficit and that of Republicans.
So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course. And the worst hit will be young workers — a point made in 2009 by Peter Orszag, then the White House budget director. As he noted, young Americans who graduated during the severe recession of the early 1980s suffered permanent damage to their earnings. And if the average duration of unemployment is any indication, it’s even harder for new graduates to find decent jobs now than it was in 1982 or 1983.
So the next time you hear some Republican declaring that he’s concerned about deficits because he cares about his children — or, for that matter, the next time you hear Mr. Obama talk about winning the future — you should remember that the clear and present danger to the prospects of young Americans isn’t the deficit. It’s the absence of jobs.
But . . . these days Washington doesn’t seem to care about any of that. And you have to wonder what it will take to get politicians caring again about America’s forgotten millions."
James O'Keefe - pimper of truth - outside
(1) Compare Loughner to Seung-Hui Cho, the mentally disturbed student who opened fire on students, staff and faculty at Virginia Tech in 2007. The differences are instructive. First, Cho reportedly was diagnosed from an early age with a set of specific mental disorders. Nothing I have read thus far - for instance this report in The Guardian - suggests that the same is true of Loughner. Second, Cho did not seek out a political figure to assassinate; he shot up a college campus, presumably because he felt aggrieved by fellow students or his academic environment. By contrast, Jared Loughner hunted his target down and shot her at a political event. Why did he not shoot up the Community College from which he'd been expelled? Why did he not go to the Army recruitment center where he'd been rejected? Why did he not track down any of the myriad right-wing politicians roaming across Arizona? He did none of those things, even though, in the case of the College and the Recruiters, the potential sources of alienation and resentment were clear and proximate.Those on the right in America love to wax eloquently about the virtues of personal responsibility. In this instance, however, they are running as fast as they might from the notion that they - media types, politicos, street-corner screamers - might have contributed in any way whatsoever to creating an ecology in which violent language has become routinized.
(2) The right typically falls over itself to take credit when its "message" seems to have influenced people to do this or that - say elect Scott Brown over Martha Coakley. But in this instance they insist that there is simply no possible way that quite specific messages - like Sarah Palin's targeting of Gabrielle Giffords - could have any influence on the thinking or actions of anyone. Palin's advertisement was especially prominent and blatant, but not, I suspect, unique in attacking Giffords during the election last fall. Loughner would not have had to expend much effort (if any) to come into contact with the attacks. Indeed, if he were (as news reports suggest) already predisposed to dislike Giffords, he arguably would've been primed to notice them. Again, this is not to say that there was a vast right-wing conspiracy to induce Jard Loughner to do anything. It is simply to say that vicious attacks using violent language or imagery create a cultural ecology of permissiveness in which violence against ones political opponents might seem acceptable. In my view the right in the U.S. has done just that.**
Since apparently, many of the right wing agitators like Palin are scrambling to take down the incriminating evidence regarding how they promote violence, I figure it is important to provide an archive. Here, I've lifted the full graphic created by those lost in Sarah-land. As expected, Sarah sends condolences but takes no responsibility. Indeed, according to her minions she is totally not responsible for the acts of an insane person. Here is the post from The Caucus blog at The Times:I'd characterize this as the obtuse making excuses for the obtuse. The shooter in Tuscon clearly had a screw (or two) loose. But he didn't dream this scenario up on his own. And, the Palin crowd are hardly alone; think of all the nutters wearing their guns to political meetings last year. But here is the question to Palin and others: if there is no connection between the assassination of the federal judge and the attempted assassination of the Congresswoman and the murder of the nine year old girl, then why remove the graphic? If it was OK to run that graphic last fall, why not keep it available now?One of Sarah Palin's top aides responded Sunday to mounting criticism that she had helped to incite the kind of violence that exploded in Arizona at a meet-and-greet by Ms. Giffords, wounding 20 and killing six.
In the wake of the shooting, many people drew attention to a map of the United States that had been part of one of Ms. Palin's Web sites that showed targets on the districts of lawmakers who supported President Obama's health care legislation.
Ms. Giffords was one of the targeted lawmakers, as she noted in an interview on MSNBC last year.
In a radio interview Saturday night, one of Ms. Palin's top aides, Rebecca Mansour, said of the map of lawmakers: "We never, ever, ever intended it to be gun sights." Ms Mansour said attemps to tie Ms. Palin to the violence were "obscene" and "appalling."
"I don't understand how anyone can be held responsible for someone who is completely mentally unstable like this," Ms. Mansour said. "Where I come from the person who is actually shooting is culpable. We had nothing whatsoever to do with this."
She added: "People who knew him said that he is left wing and very liberal. But that is not to say that I am blaming the left for him either."
Ms. Mansour, who helps run SarahPAC, Ms. Palin's political action committee, made the remarks to Tammy Bruce, a radio talk show host, on a podcast made public on the internet. Ms. Bruce is introduced at the beginning of her show as "a chick with a gun and a microphone."
Ms. Bruce complained on her show that liberals were incorrectly politicizing the shooting by blaming conservatives.
"We all know that the liberals, there's something wrong with them," Ms. Bruce said. "The reaction on the left was to start blaming somebody."
Ms. Bruce added that: "Saying that a mass murdering crazy guy is representative somehow of the political dialogue going on, especially with the non violent Tea Party movement....and yet there are attach this to the tea party and other politicians."
Half empty? Half full?
Glenn Beck ~ Both Portraits
Karl Rove, Republican National Convention, NY,ON THE AIR and in person, Beck often goes on long stretches that are warm, conciliatory and even plaintive. He says he yearns for the cohesion in the country after Sept. 11, 2001, and will speak in paragraphs that could fit into Barack Obama’s plea for national unity in his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “There’s a lot we can disagree on, but our values and principles can unite us,” Beck said from the Lincoln Memorial.
But “standing together” can be a tough sell from someone who is so willing to pick at some of the nation’s most tender scabs. Beck’s statement that the president’s legislative agenda is driven by Obama’s desire for “reparations” and his “desire to settle old racial scores” is hardly a uniting message. While public figures tend to eventually learn (some the hard way) that Nazi, Hitler and Holocaust comparisons inevitably offend a lot of people, Beck seems not to care. In a forthcoming book about Beck, “Tears of a Clown,” the Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes that in the first 14 months of Beck’s Fox News show, Beck and his guests mentioned fascism 172 times, Nazis 134 times, Hitler 115 times, the Holocaust 58 times and Joseph Goebbels 8 times.
In his quest to root out progressives, Beck compared himself to Israeli Nazi-hunters. “To the day I die I am going to be a progressive-hunter,” he vowed on his radio show earlier this year. “I’m going to find these people that have done this to our country and expose them. I don’t care if they’re in nursing homes.”
“Raising questions” is Beck’s favorite rhetorical method. Last year during the health care debate, Beck compared Obama’s economic agenda to Nazi Germany — specifically he paralleled the White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s statement that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” with how Hitler used the world economic crisis as a pivot point. Photos of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin then appeared on screen. “Is this where we’re headed?” Beck asked. He allowed that “I am not predicting that we go down that road.”
If you treat people as Nazis, then you hound them like criminals and dismiss (or worse, eliminate) them rather than, say, addressing them as a interlocutors to be taken seriously enough to disagree with. That's Glenn Beck, Nazi hunter.
This graphic appeared at HuffPost this morning. It is not as useful as the very similar graphic I posted on here some months ago. This one is not quite as clear because it requires viewers to start at the upper left hand corner and work downward and outward - a lesson in how not to design an informative graphic. It nonetheless makes an important point.
"When American men talk like this, they are usually giving voice to fantasy. Only in fantasy, after all, are governments overthrown by men trained to do nothing more than shoot long-distance targets in a controlled environment. Some of these men seek out unlikely battlefields, where they can be warriors of the future, warriors of the imagination or reluctant warriors in waiting who are passing their time on the Internet. The power of a gun to take a life is not so much a threat as a talisman connecting these fantasies to the real world."In The New York Times you can find this article on the 'Appleseed Project' which is (despite the preposterous disavowals) a right wing project meant to prepare 'regular Americans' to take up guns in defense of liberty. I find the impulse to own guns pretty inscrutable, sort of like liking Lima Beans. As I've said here several times, I just don't get it. I also have said before that I find the conservative mind pretty much misguided. These folks are not just gun owners, they're paid up subscribers to the rigid, paranoid conservative style [1] [2] [3]. Combine that style with guns and things start to get worrying - even though the reporter from The Times has done his best to persuade us that it's all just magical thinking. Fantasies can be dangerous too.
At the end of last week I posted on a guy called Neil Cavuto at FOX "News" who (as frequently seems to happen there) managed to first simultaneously hector a guest rudely and demonstrate a dim understanding of economics and then whine about the guest's reply. In that instance the guest was Ron Blackwell, chief economist at the AFL-CIO. Cavuto insulted Blackwell, questioning his qualifications in totally adolescent ways. Blackwell rightly got pissed and called Cavuto an "asshole." And, unsurprisingly enough, Cavuto still has Blackwell's 'outburst' posted prominently on his FOX page, complaining that Blackwell had been of so terribly rude. FOX also still has this clip of Blackwell running under the headline: AFL-CIO Wants to Drown Out 'Deficit Hysterics.'We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense. And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending. [. . .] you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.Given his lack of economic acuity, it seems to me that Neil Cavuto ought to be the one looking for a job. Yet, his fight with Ron Blackwell isn't about economic analysis, its about politics. That is what FOX "News" is mostly about - rationalizing policies that screw the poor, the working class and the otherwise vulnerable. So Cavuto will continue to shill for the sort of right wing policies that the FOX folks peddle. Listen, I think I just heard him shout "Hey Paul, where did you get that Nobel Prize?" I know what Krugman's reply should be.As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence. As a practical matter, however, America isn’t doing much better. The Fed seems aware of the deflationary risks — but what it proposes to do about these risks is, well, nothing. The Obama administration understands the dangers of premature fiscal austerity — but because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels.
[. . .] Why the wrong turn in policy? [. . .] I don't think this is really about . . . any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.
"The reasons for the new American austerity are subtler, but not shocking. Our economy remains in rough shape, by any measure. So it’s easy to confuse its condition (bad) with its direction (better) and to lose sight of how much worse it could be. The unyielding criticism from those who opposed stimulus from the get-go — laissez-faire economists, Congressional Republicans, German leaders — plays a role, too. They’re able to shout louder than the data.Some remarks. First, the ability to shout effectively is pretty much reserved for the right these days. It perfectly describes the spectrum from FOX to "Tea Party" types. Second, no one thinks massive deficits are sustainable indefinitely: not Ron Blackwell, not Paul Krugman, not me. Everything rides on the word "eventually." And the right is simply willing to dump risk and hardship on the vulnerable. Finally, here is something the Times piece gets right. This is about politics. If you asked me how to best cut the U.S. deficit (or at least most, yes most, of the growth therein) I'd say (1) get the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan and (2) start repealing the idiotic right wing tax policies that favor the rich. Tomorrow. No one on the right is willing to look at the real sources of our deficit woes. They are too busy shouting to drown out the data.
Finally, the idea that the world’s rich countries need to cut spending and raise taxes has a lot of truth to it. The United States, Europe and Japan have all made promises they cannot afford. Eventually, something needs to change.
In an ideal world, countries would pair more short-term spending and tax cuts with long-term spending cuts and tax increases. But not a single big country has figured out, politically, how to do that."
"Charters have . . . become a pet cause of what one education historian calls a billionaires’ club of philanthropists, including Mr. Gates, Eli Broad of Los Angeles and the Walton family of Wal-Mart.When is an experiment a failure? Even if we accept the conservative criteria for evaluation - student performance on standardized tests - and even if we control for features that would advantage Charters - like longer school days and more engaged families - the "Charters" seem to be a shining example of a failed experiment.
But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”
Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools."
The problem? They look like "us!" This is the face of Christian fundamentalist terrorism in the U.S.; of course you won't hear the 't-word' used by, say, The New York Times. For the putatively liberal media, the "Hutaree" remain "apocalyptic Christian militants" not a terrorist outfit aiming to kill law enforcement officers and, thereby, hopefully, to foment revolution! The folks at The Times tie themselves into knots denying that this is political extremism: although the terrorists "were plotting to kill law enforcement officers in hopes of inciting an antigovernment uprising" they were "motivated by apocalyptic religious scenarios more than any secular political fears." Right. If Islamist fundamentalists were indicted for exactly the same activities the press would be having a field-day. But these salt-of-the-earth white Americans surely couldn't be terrorists could they?