Day: September 13, 2010

People who talk about our “materialistic society” and about getting back to “spiritual values” strike me as having a right sense of indignation and a poor sense of analysis. The delusion of our society is not so much its materialism as its faux spiritualism, its desire to make a heaven on earth, not as a place free of needless suffering and full of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls “collective joy,” but as one in which the elect live everlastingly and communicate telepathically while flying in disembodied splendor above the heads of the Mexicans mowing the lawn.

Garret Keizer in Harper’s

Stunning Development

A spokesman for Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that every Senate Republican has pledged to oppose President Barack Obama’s tax-cutting plan.

I am shocked beyond words. It’s almost as if the GOP is planning to oppose every measure or action before the Senate, no matter how popular, trivial, or necessary to basic function of government said measure or action may be. But we know that can’t be so. At any rate: Bad for the Democrat.

All of which to say is there’s no need to parse the ethnic origins or political philosophies of Obama’s parents to understand the ideology of Barack Obama. He is a center-left Democrat who supports mainstream Democratic policies. But some conservatives don’t want to talk about policy. They are unable to engage in an argument with liberalism on substantive terms; they know only argument by epithet. They want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black.

Adam Serwer Archive | The American Prospect (via Balloon Juice)
Agreed, except this isn’t an “argument with liberalism.” It’s an argument with center-rightism.
Source: prospect.org

This is why | Exhibit 4,251

“The Bush tax cuts are sunsetting by design, due to legislation that almost the entire Republican leadership supported,” one senior House Dem leadership aide says. “President Obama and the Democrats want to implement the `Obama tax cuts for the middle class.’ It provides a nice contrast between what the current administration is proposing and what Republicans did in the past.”

“We’re kicking it around,” adds one senior Senate Democratic aide.

You should have been “kicking it around” in January of 2009. Or earlier. What the fuck do you think a legislative majority is for?

This is why they fail.

Honestly, nobody deserves to lose as much as this lot does. Just completely beyond belief.

Maybe they should take a meeting on it and form an exploratory commission to establish the Blue Ribbon Panel of 2012 sometime in early December. Nothing but time, after all.

(h/t The Plum Line)

‘U.S. Trade Deficit Startles Markets.’ Now, we’ve understood the U.S. trade deficit for a while. Are the markets small children that are easily startled? The next day, they’ll get an unemployment number and go, ‘Oh, I don’t know why we were startled and lost 200 points yesterday; today, we realized the shirt on the chair wasn’t a monster, so we’re going to put 300 points back on the Dow because we’re fucking 5 years old.’

Jon Stewart, scanning the front page of the Washington Post. This simple insight is more than I’ve ever seen mustered from, say, NPR’s Marketplace, a program ostensibly entirely directed at helping people grasp this stuff. If only there were more Mountaintops around.

Jasen Comstock: S is for Senate

jasencomstock:

I want the Bush tax cuts to expire, totally. They were passed through reconciliation and designed to be temporary. If you are some butthurt citizen moaning about your missing $75* a year and a half from now in your tax return, you can blame the Republicans for designing a tax cut that was designed to last ten years.

Same here. Though the real play it seems to me would have been to come to the press conference the other day and say:

“The Bush tax cuts are and were a failed policy. Those days are over. Here are the Obama tax cuts, tied to expire as economic growth and recovery takes place over time (such that the deficit and debt impact will be minimized and limited to this period of crisis for the nation), and valued at the exact same amount as the entire Bush tax cuts, but pointed entirely at small business, start-ups, and those individuals and families earning below $250k/yr.”

You then torment the GOP every day between now and then about why they’re against tax cuts. What could be wrong with tax cuts?
Whether or not they pass: the GOP loses. Instead, and as usual, the administration and the Democratic party at large engages the GOP on their turf, and using the GOP’s own framing. Even if something gets done, the credit (such as it is) goes to Bush. When they expire, the blame goes to Obama. Yet these are the ground-rules “our side” chooses again and again.
Jasen Comstock: S is for Senate

S is for Senate

Steve Benen hears Boehner say this:

If the only option I have is to vote for some of those tax reductions, I’ll vote for them.

and, like seemingly everyone with a mountaintop large or small, inexplicably takes this away:

Boehner, in other words, appears to be on board with the Obama proposal

Can we just not think in this country anymore?

  1. Is Boehner in the Senate?

There is no second thing. If the answer to Question 1 is “No,” then his opinion matters fuck-all. He said this to put a patina of reasonableness on the GOP’s entirely unreasonable and indefensible position that billionaires desperately need an extra $100k come tax-time. They know this meaningless statement will get wide play, much wider (read: vastly wider) than their ultimate actions to bottle this thing up in the Senate (and even that’s assuming the feckless Democrat bothers to bring it to the floor, itself a gigantic and likely foolhardy assumption).
If and when that all happens, the GOP will simply point to (meaningless) statements like this one as examples of their genteel nature and broad willingness to “work across the aisle.” The MSM will report the whole thing as “a Democrat failure to achieve 60 votes needed in the Senate” and Broder will pronounce himself suitably delighted that the GOP tried so very hard. Truly, they are the serious adults up to DC.

Is this so very hard to understand? Apparently it is.

Brian Williams, Fucktard

“Jon [Stewart] has chronicled the death of shame in politics and journalism,” says Brian Williams, the NBC Nightly News anchor who is a frequent Daily Show guest. “Many of us on this side of the journalism tracks often wish we were on Jon’s side. I envy his platform to shout from the mountaintop. He’s a necessary branch of government.

I see, so being the Nightly News anchor for a major network, which recently drew 8,040,000 viewers and regularly leads the "National Nightly News” pack, doesn’t actually constitute a “platform” to “shout from the mountaintop.” Then what the fuck is it for? I’d seriously like to know.

Stewart, on the other hand, gets “about 1.8 million viewers each night.” What a mountaintop he has. Truly the envy of someone with more than 8 times as many viewers; more than Stewart, CNN, FOXnews, msnbc, and probably a few other notables combined in that time slot. Every night. But that doesn’t constitute a “mountaintop” from which to do silly things like inform people with rigor and insight. Oh my no. That sort of thing only happens over on Comedy Central where the corporate overlords apparently aren’t quite so twitchy about letting a little actual information seep into the nightly colorcast. Which is fine by Williams, if these quotes are to be believed.

This attitude, this ceaseless and unstoppable form of pseudo-intellectual nihilism is killing the country. Measurably. It’s what Krugman calls “Invincible Ignorance.” Oh, and that kooky rube Stewart knows about it and has long recognized it:

The pettiness of it, the strange lack of passion for any kind of moral or editorial authority [from the MSM], always struck me as weird. We felt like, we’re serious people doing an unserious thing, and they’re unserious people doing a very serious thing.

Brian Williams, case in point. Pettiness and lack of passion of any kind incarnate. Tonight on NBC Nightly News!

[All quotes from this excellent profile]