On top of the terrible politics, they even admit that [Ryan/Wyden] dismantles Medicare but achieves no budgetary savings while doing so – the worst of all worlds. Thanks for nothing.

A “Very Senior” Democratic Aide weighs in on the Ryan/Wyden “plan” to save Medicare by dismantling and replacing it with a system already shown to be at least 25% more costly. The problem here is that Serious People know that Medicare must be destroyed. The only thing they are more certain of is Social Security’s imminent end. Therefore, anyone favoring Medicare as it stands (or, gods save us, the atheistic but sharia-mandated nightmare that would be Medicare for All) is going to be fighting the GOP, some non-trivial number of Democrats, and the always totally objective, non-partisan MSM “referees” running this rotten discourse of ours.
So get ready. They’re coming for this. This is who they are. All the deficit whinging is merely prologue for a pitched fight to end every part of the already dwindling social safety net.
I’d also advise anyone who thinks voting doesn’t matter to go ahead and take the long position on stock in whatever company is going to clear the dead from the streets. Halliburton, presumably. Once your vote didn’t really matter because there’s no difference anyway, there’s going to be a lot of business in that particular sector.

“I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular, atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

— Newt Gingrich. Because if anything says secular atheism, it’s radical Islam.

h/t: Cheatsheet

Goes without saying: Gingrich did not scream this from atop a milk crate on some anonymous corner. He said it to someone. Many someones, many of whom control some portion of a major media outlet. None of them said a thing. Or wrote a thing. Or noted this brazenly obvious non-sequitur in any way whatsoever through thought, word, act, or deed. Nor will they ever. That would be “taking sides.” And but also they manage to note, uncritically that he claimed to be there (at the Cornerstone megachurch) as a historian. Wonder if that church paid historians as well as Fannie and Freddie? Probably not. Even the Lord has His Limits.

And so the Republic crumbles.

A Vision of America

Matt Yglesias:

Loser liberalism, by implying that all fortunes are created equal, alternately goes too easy on scoundrels and comes down too hard on people who are merely prosperous. [Even “low” paid] folks working on Wall Street are making a living in an industry that’s systematically dependent on implicit and explicit government guarantees. Making a living as a patent troll is totally different from making a living as a genuine innovator. Dentists enriching themselves by blocking competition from independent dental hygenists and tooth whiteners aren’t the richest people around, but their income represents a healthy share of ill-gotten gains. A viable egalitarian politics needs to find a way to distinguish between “malefactors of great wealth” whose revenue streams need to be systematically reappropriated, and people who are just paying higher tax rates because of the declining marginal utility of income.

Reasonable people are going to disagree, of course, as to who exactly the malefactors are and what policy levers can and should be used against them. […] But there’s something deeply unimaginative, cramped, narrow, and – I think – fundamentally incorrect about this vision of America where everything is on the level, but people need to pay a top marginal income tax rate of 39.5% rather than 35%.

I’d say Yglesias has provided us with a rather trenchant distillation of just how warped our national political discourse has become.
Extending his example, the Republicans more or less universally call this potential 4.5% rise in top marginal rates on the richest of the rich “pure socialism,” or, at best, anti-American, anti-jobs, anti-whomever they’re talking to at that moment. That approach tends to be a conversation ender and the point at which the MSM says something along the lines of “we’ll leave it there.” And but also it’s unclear to me how you even address the broader issues in the economy that Yglesias rightly lays out without at least being able to have a semi-sane discussion about tax rates and revenues. If that 4.5% rise can be effectively dismissed using “socialism!” just how is a national candidate supposed to make the more nuanced and complex point?

I’d say it can’t be done in the current media environment. It is not possible. The slow motion implosion that is the GOP’s series of primary debates is a symptom, not a cause. The underlying rot is fundamental to the discourse itself; the growing and brazen willingness to use that rot for personal gain (e.g. by lying your ass off to score temporary political points even within your own party) is simply the work of our old friend the invisible hand. Fix the discourse and you’ll functionally eliminate the lying and its various outgrowths, such as but not limited to uniform one party partisan intransigence that the predominant national discourse inevitably blames on both political houses in Congress. A truly honest assessment could never reach such a illogical conclusion as that. Obviously one party is more to blame in any gridlock situation. Say so. You’ll put the Daily Show right out of business.

Considered relative to our long-term national health, the truly successful national candidate needs to disrupt the discourse itself. On the surface, this would seem a relatively straightforward thing for a President to do (despite the ineffective nature of Presidential speeches)…Obama did make some early feints in the direction of cutting off their air supply but ultimately (and predictably) chickened out. And, frankly, a frontal attack that simply refuses to speak to FOXnews (or similar organizations) will never work; journalists love nothing better than circling the wagons over perceived slights. You’ve got to destroy their memes by making them functionally irrelevant and you cannot do that by simply not talking to anyone but your chosen scribes.
If Obama really wants to be the modern TR, I’d say that’s where to start: with the discourse. Be smart. Explain, but not in novel form. Short, declarative sentences and concise paragraphs. Pick one thing; this cycle it’s going to be an outgrowth of what Yglesias is distilling above. Explain that. Repeatedly and in simple language. People already understand it in a deep sense, but they need you to give those feelings voice (Elizabeth Warren is proving the true power of such an approach; the application of the traditional GOP meme(s) actually increased her popularity). Explain. Say nothing else. If they want to show the President, some of this stuff will have to be included. Never leave that message behind, even for a second. Also provide it to your Congressional allies. Anyone who goes off script loses financial support, chairmanships, or whatever idiotic perks matters most to them. It’s our rotted discourse or the country. Choose one.

Upstairs/Downstairs

John Kyl (R, AZ), Saturday: [tax increases are] the wrong medicine for our ailing economy, […] [any possibility of a potential future increase only serves to] put a wet blanket over job creation and economic recovery.
John Kyl (R, AZ), Sunday: The payroll tax holiday has not stimulated job creation. We don’t think that is a good way to do it. [Thus we want to raise taxes on every American that currently receives a paycheck]. The best way to hurt economic growth is to impose more taxes on the people who do the hiring. As a result, the Republicans have said, ‘Don’t raise the existing tax rates on those who do the hiring.’ [That is to say, the 1%. Who aren’t, uh, actually hiring. But still. Don’t raise THEIR taxes. Raise the 99%’s taxes. Only that will get the old economy going again!]
Lemkin: Again, the MSM will see no dissonance whatsoever in these positions. Of course raising taxes on most everyone in the country to avoid a tiny tax increase on a tiny fraction of the country makes the best economic sense in an aggregate demand-based economic downturn. What other conclusion is even possible given this data? Surely both sides are at fault for low aggregate demand in the 99%; this is only fixable if both sides agree to lower taxes on the 1%. Again: what other conclusion is even possible?

The Rub

In all the rush to cast a pox on both houses, most Serious People seem to be missing the underlying point here.

The Republicans want tax rates to remain at current (i.e. Bush/Obama tax cut) levels or to be lowered. To do that without collapsing the Federal Government, they have to end Medicare. Period, the end, no other way to do it. Zero the non-military discretionary budget and you still aren’t getting particularly close. Thus, this:

…committee Republicans offered to negotiate a plan on the other two health-care entitlements–Medicare and Medicaid–based upon the reforms included in the budget the House passed earlier this year [this is what is commonly referred to as the “Ryan plan”; it ends Medicare but leaves in place a voucher system which seniors would use to try to buy coverage on the open market. Good luck with that, seniors. Anyone paying attention will recall that this is the issue Medicare was created to solve. At any rate, under Ryan’s plan everyone that fails to find coverage they can afford with regard to the differential between voucher and actual cost: go die in the streets.]

Republicans on the committee also offered to negotiate a plan based on the bipartisan “Protect Medicare Act” authored by Alice Rivlin, [which would allow seniors to] choose from a list of Medicare-guaranteed coverage options, similar to the House budget’s approach–except that Rivlin-Domenici would continue to include a traditional Medicare fee-for-service plan among the options.

So, the GOP “choices” here are: completely voucherize and functionally end Medicare under the Ryan plan, or vastly extend Medicare Advantage and get to Ryan’s plan stepwise. After all, Medicare Advantage has bee such a smashing success; it’s the plan that delivered a ~14% more costly version of Medicare, the program it sought to “revolutionize.”

Democrats, on the other hand, believe that a return to Clinton era tax rates fundamentally solves the near- to mid-term budget issues. This is widely known to be true; it is also known to be true by Republicans, who are simply using the current “crisis” (which, not coincidentally was invented by them during the run-up and denouement of the debt ceiling “crisis”) as an excuse to attempt various long-held policy goals, most notably: ending Medicare.

Long term issues in our budget do indeed exist, these can only be handled by bringing health care costs under control; Democrats wish to work towards that goal, Republicans choose to address the issue by simply ending that program entirely. This is the point at which it’s worth noting that, if we paid for medical care the per-capita rates that our next-nearest “competitor” pays, we’d be facing surpluses as far as the eye can see. Right now.
But, a massive step in that “solvency” direction would, in fact, be Medicare for all. Instead, the GOP demands Medicare for none or they blow up the country. Those are your two GOP-approved choices. They simply don’t want to talk about it in public, because eliminating Medicare is a wildly unpopular position to hold. You’d think someone in the media would mention something as explosive as this from time to time. Doesn’t ever seem to come up.

Clearly, though, both parties are equally at fault here. Truly a triumph of 21st Century Journamalism.

Here’s how it works- Obama says something, Republicans completely lie about it, the media notes the lie is catching on without ever actually calling it a lie, the Democrats have to waste resources and respond to the lie, Republicans double down, this sucks the life out of everything else for a couple week, and in ten years this will be conventional wisdom that Obama called Americans lazy, just like Al Gore claimed to invent the internet and the rest of the bullshit that wingnuts have adopted as received truths (snow in November refutes climate change, the more you cut taxes the more government revenue you raise, if a bombing campaign does not make people like you it means you didn’t bomb hard enough or your targeting was off, liberals lost Viet Nam, waterboarding isn’t torture, etc).

We’re so fucked as a nation.

John Cole, to whom I’d only add that, should Obama fail to win reelection in 2012, his decision to nationally televise the “Lazy Speech” from the Oval Office while wearing an overly earth-toned, almost certainly focus group chosen sweater will be held out as a prime reason American opinion crystallized against him.
That these are easily proven to be lies and utter fabrications does not matter. Recall Cokie’s Law: if it’s out there, it must be treated as fact, uncritically and forever. Anything else smacks of journalistic bias.
And yes, we are so fucked as a nation.

Source: balloon-juice.com

the current hand wringing about the administration’s pledge [not to raise sub-$250k tax rates] feels like a distraction…especially given that we could achieve medium term sustainability without going there.

Jared Bernstein agrees that we can achieve neutral debt/GDP ratios without savaging middle class rates. Serious People sure love to wring hands. It’s as though they have a vested interest in the tax rates of the trans-$250k class. Oh, right.

The question of whether the Herman Cain sexual harassment story will hurt his presidential campaign sort of misses the point that there is no Herman Cain presidential campaign. There are certain things you do when you run for president. You try to raise a lot of money. Cain is not doing that. If you can’t raise a lot of money, you campaign heavily in early primary states, trying to get some early success that can snowball into later primaries. Cain isn’t doing that, either. You hire a staff of political operatives. You at least pretend to know something about world affairs. You try to attract as many people as possible to your events. Cain, by contrast, frequently charges admission.

Cain is executing a business plan. It’s an excellent plan. The plan involves Cain raising his profile as a conservative personality, which he can monetize through motivational speaking, book sales, talk shows, and other media. Cain’s selling point is that he’s a black conservative who can capitalize on the sense of white racial victimization that has mushroomed during the Obama era. Accordingly, Cain assures conservatives that they are not racist, as proven by their support for him. Indeed, it is the liberals who are racist, as evidenced by their opposition to Cain.

If Cain were campaigning to be president, the scandal would hurt him. Since he is instead campaigning to boost his profile, it will help him.

Jonathan Chait clearly and succinctly tells you everything you need to know about the Cain Train.

On the domestic side, both Democrats and Republicans have really made it very difficult for the president to be anything like a chief executive. This has led to a kind of frustration.

Bill Daley, White House Chief of Staff. This is why they fail.
Anyone, and I mean anyone who holds this opinion, much less speaks of it to a journalist of any stripe, should resign immediately or have been fired long ago. You think this is frustrating Bill? You think “your” side is equally to blame? Then go the fuck home. You are part of the problem and we’ll get nothing truly worthwhile done until everyone who thinks like you has long since left the scene.

Source: tnr.com

Wash it Off

CNN’s Piers MORGAN: let’s talk about homosexuality because — and is that wrong? Do you think it’s a sin?
GOP Presidential Hopeful Herman CAIN: I think it’s a sin because of my biblical beliefs and although people don’t agree with me, I happen to think that it is a choice.
MORGAN: You believe that?
CAIN: I believe that.
MORGAN: You believe people — seriously, you think people get to a certain age and go, I think I want to be homosexual?
CAIN: Let me turn it around to you. What does science show? You show me evidence other than opinion and you might cause me to reconsider that. […Crosstalk…] Where is the — where is evidence?
MORGAN: Just common — you’re a commonsense guy.
CAIN: Are you a common sense kind of guy? […]
MORGAN: Wait a minute, let me ask you. You genuinely believe millions of Americans wake up in their late teens normally and go, you know what, I quite fancy being a homosexual? You don’t believe that.
CAIN: Piers.
MORGAN: Do you?
CAIN: You haven’t given me any evidence to convince me otherwise nor has anyone else. […]
MORGAN: It would be like a gay person saying, Herman, you made a choice to be black.
CAIN: We know that’s not the case. I was born black.
MORGAN: Yes, maybe if they said that, you would find it offensive.
CAIN: Piers, this doesn’t wash off. I hate to burst your bubble.
Lemkin: The MSM eternally believes that the GOP field doesn’t actually believe any of this stuff. Inevitably, when they bother to probe what they assume is just bluster and/or red meat for the far right, they are shocked, SHOCKED to find that, yep, they all actually believe and plan to act on all this stuff and more. You’d think that on the 4 millionth occasion of this sort Serious People would start to see a pattern and begin to report on it accordingly. Herman Cain believes the gays should just wash it off and join “proper,” Herman Cain’s Christian God-fearing society. Perhaps this sort of incredibly unpopular, far right opinion both imparts important information about his dedication to personal liberty (that the GOP spends so very much time talking about but zero time actually implementing for anyone in the 99%) and furthermore speaks to how he’d govern on a host of similar wedge issues. A version of this country with a functioning media would be a very different place indeed.