Tag: framing

Welcome to the Bullshit Economy

This whole thing needs to be the one and only speech any and all Democratic candidates for President give over the next, oh, five months; but I’d even settle for just a paragraph:

The Iowa disaster is a sign that our economic structures are breaking down, that private enterprise has become a shell game, where who you know matters more than what you can do. The bullshit economy has bled over into politics, with the perfect president but also the perfect amount of grifting and consultant corruption and unbridled tech optimism. This has long been part of politics—anything with that much money sloshing around will invite a little corruption—but the combination of political grift, the ardor for public-private partnerships, and the triumph of ambition over talent has created a fetid stew.

Welcome to the Bullshit Economy

[Assuming] a wildly optimistic scenario in which Dems do about as well as they can be reasonably hope to do in the 2020 Senate elections and a majority decides to eliminate the filibuster, passing any legislation will require at least two Democratic senators who are refusing to even commit to endorsing the Democratic nominee in 2020. Medicare For All is not going to be passed in the next Congress. Joe Biden’s robust public option, for that matter, is not going to be passed by the next Congress. This is true no matter who becomes president. This is about establishing long-term goals and mobilizing voters — that’s it. So Warren’s plan is fine, Bernie’s plan is fine, and to act as if difference in minor details in them will have policy consequences for the next administration or should influence anybody’s primary vote either way is nuts.

Scott Lemieux, writing for Lawers, Guns, and Money. This seems so self evident as to be utterly banal were we living in any reasonable simulacrum of a shared reality, yet here we are. It’s almost as if those fanning the flames of this “disagreement” have motives that aren’t entirely pure.

I don’t care which party has the right ideas — or which party has the wrong ideas. I am very, very, very interested in civility.

The late Cokie Roberts, champion of civility uber alles. So long as the children are going into the cages in a polite, dignified fashion, the policy is, by definition, perfectly fine and above question.

Ms. Clinton is hardly blameless. She treated the public’s interest in sound record-keeping cavalierly. A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. But it was not obviously marked as such, and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed. Ms. Clinton has also admitted that using the personal server was a mistake. The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post. There now, was that so very fucking hard to do? Can we now keep these nearly 70 words on a card that is at the ready in the little filofax that is our journalistic brain? I’m guessing no, but I’m an optimist.

Ryan directed the Congressional Budget Office to score his budget plans back in 2012. The score of his plan showed the non-Social Security, non-Medicare portion of the federal budget shrinking to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2050 (page 16).

This number is roughly equal to current spending on the military. Ryan has indicated that he does not want to see the military budget cut to any substantial degree. That leaves no money for the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, The Justice Department, infrastructure spending or anything else. Following Ryan’s plan, in 35 years we would have nothing left over after paying for the military.

Just to be clear, this was not some offhanded gaffe where Ryan might have misspoke. He supervised the CBO analysis. CBO doesn’t write-down numbers in a dark corner and then throw them up on their website to embarrass powerful members of Congress. As the document makes clear, they consulted with Ryan in writing the analysis to make sure that they were accurately capturing his program.

Dean Baker, writing for the Center for Economic Progress. This is exactly right and cannot be repeated frequently enough. The fact that it isn’t even said, much less repeated ad infinitum is why The Democrat fails and but also is why this nonsense within the GOP led House is allowed to continue. Democrats, when people are showing up outside the doors of the House with pitchforks, torches, and large logs you’ll know you’ve repeated it frequently enough. Please start now. It’s going to take decades.

It is as if the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination was about to fall into the hands of Paul Wolfowitz. What happened?

Jonathan Chait contemplates the seemingly quite favorable strategic position Mitt Romney (suddenly?) finds himself in despite being an occasionally outspoken pro-choice Mormon tightly associated with Taxachusetts and “Romneycare” and yet working to curry favor from an increasingly lunatic “base” that seems quite willing to start Civil War II over any and all of those issues.

Most important MSM/Serious Person fact about Romney: he once strapped a dog, inside its carrier, to the top of the family truckster. So you know.

“We’ve known from the beginning that bombing the moon would be a poison pill to any debt-reduction proposal,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. See? Or: “President Obama needs to decide between his goal of bombing the moon, or a bipartisan plan to address our deficit,” said McConnell and Sen. on Kyl in a joint statement. Or: “First of all, bombing the moon is going to destroy jobs,“ said Speaker John Boehner. "Second, bombing the moon cannot pass the US House of Representatives — it’s not just a bad idea, it doesn’t have the votes and it can’t happen. And third, the American people don’t want us to bomb the moon.”

Ezra Klein replaces mention of taxes with “bombing the moon” and ends up with a more cogent set of statements.
Also: strangely, he wasn’t going for a Mr. Show reference.
Source: Washington Post

The Al Gore Problem

Dana Milbank: Romney has what might be called an Al Gore problem: Even if he’s being genuine, he seems ersatz. He assumed a professorial air by delivering a 25-page PowerPoint presentation in an amphitheater lecture hall – but the university issued a statement saying it had nothing to do with the event, for which the sponsoring college Republicans failed to fill all seats. His very appearance – a suit worn without a necktie – shouted equivocation. His hair was so slick that only a few strands defied the product.
Jon Chait: This is a perfect demonstration of an Al Gore problem, but I’d define the problem differently. An Al Gore problem is what happens when the media forms an impression of your character and decides to cram every irrelevant detail of your appearance and behavior into that frame, regardless of whether or not it means anything. Thus Romney’s hair and lack of tie are now evidence of a character flaw, as is his decision to give a detailed policy lecture in a university town without being officially sponsored by a University. An Al Gore problem results in the media ganging up on a candidate like cool kids mocking a geek, with literally everything he’s doing serving as more evidence for the predetermined narrative.
Lemkin: Indeed. I suppose it’s progress that some handful of journalists now see the pathology inherent in forcing everything into a pre-existing media frame come-what-may…and but also we can’t seem to make the media connection between “Clinton is a murderer, Clinton ran drugs out of the governors office, Gore said he invented the internet and etc…” and their modern-day exponents “Obama is from Kenya, Obama didn’t write his books, Obama’s school was paid for by shadowy Mid East backers, and etc…” It’s all the Lee Atwater style of politics, none of it is anything new, we just are forced to live in it Groundhog Day style, over and over and over again anytime a Democrat wins high office. The MSM, apparently, is not and never will be broadly aware of this.

You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We’ll have that debate. You’re not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we’re stupid?

[…]

Put [measures like defunding Planned Parenthood] in a separate bill. We’ll call it up. And if you think you can overturn my veto, try it. But don’t try to sneak this through.

[…]

When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he’s just being America’s accountant … This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill – but wasn’t paid for. So it’s not on the level.

President Obama in semi-private remarks to “supporters” as reported here.
I, for one, welcome the arrival of feisty candidate mode Obama. Next thing you know he’ll grow a beard. An action beard.
Plain and simple truths. America craves them. This urge to “look forward” is a self defeating one. You should have been and still need to be to opening every speech with the details of GOP-lead bed shitting from 2000-2008. Even use a chart or two. It’s the only way America will ever learn about what happened and why.

Ryan’s Motivations (or: Pie-O-My)

Kevin Drum wonders what drives Ryan to produce such a uniquely partisan budget document:

I don’t know what motivates Ryan, but it’s certainly not a genuine search for plausible grounds for negotiation. Instead, he’s produced a document carefully crafted to produce a universally negative reaction from Democrats, presumably because he thinks that will make Democrats look intransigent while the Beltway press is praising Ryan for his courage.

Sorry, but that’s just wrong. Ryan crafted his document to produce a Beltway press that praises him for his courage and demand that The Democrat must now compromise based on that starting point. This is why the Democratic party needs to come out with its own pie-in-the-sky progressive budget. Then you could compromise in a way that would represent a legitimate compromise of opposing ideas and not just yet another rightward lurch at the hands of the ever-triangulating Democrats.

Instead, what seems likely to happen is the Democrats will counter with the deficit commission document and then compromise to the right of that. Which is precisely the outcome Ryan likely considers “worst but acceptable.” The sad reality, of course, will be that in the absence of a GOP President, a GOP Senate, and with only a fractionally lunatic GOP House they will have delivered the biggest far-right reshaping of American budgetary priorities (and politics) ever achieved in anyone living’s lifetime. And the Democrats will have only themselves to blame.