Tag: serious person

Ryan’s Unicorns

Krugman on Ryan:

Ryan is claiming that unemployment will plunge right away; that by 2015 it will be down to the levels at the peak of the 1990s boom (and far below anything achieved under the sainted Ronald Reagan); and that by 2021 it will be below 3 percent, a level we haven’t seen in more than half a century.

[…]

According to the CBO analysis, a typical senior would end up spending more than twice as much of his or her own income on health care as under current law. As Dean Baker points out, this means that seniors would end up paying most of their income for health care. Again, right.

[…]

Ryan is assuming that everything aside from health and SS can be squeezed from 12 percent of GDP now to 3 ½ percent of GDP. That’s bigger than the assumed cut in health care spending relative to baseline; it accounts for all of the projected deficit reduction, since the alleged health savings are all used to finance tax cuts. And how is this supposed to be accomplished? Not explained.

Now that’s what I call a truly serious and courageous budget proposal. Obviously it won’t pass, but it’s not meant to. It is meant to move the debate rightward. And it already has. Dread Liberal Mouthpiece the Boston Globe has already run a “Where’s the Democrat Version of Destroy Medicare?” editorial. The implicit expectation is, again, that Serious People know the sensible outcome is, by definition, in-between Ryan’s plan and status quo: thus the GOP moves policy ever rightward while The Democrat simply stays in defensive crouch, hoping to scratch out minor concessions along the way. Forever.

How’s that been working out for you?

Ryan’s Unicorns

It’s Courageous To Go Die in the Streets

David Brooks:

Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes….His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion….This budget tackles just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts….Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

Kevin Drum responds:

Courageous. Serious. Gutsy. I imagine that within a few days this will be the consensus view of the entire Beltway punditocracy. A plan dedicated almost entirely to slashing social spending in a country that’s already the stingiest spender in the developed world, while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich in a country with the lowest tax rates in the developed world — well, what could be more serious than that?

I think I’m going to be sick.

He’s right, but it didn’t take a few days and it’s not just Our Punditocracy; here’s the generic Democrat legislator last night on Hardball (sorry, no transcript yet):

[it was] “courageous” [for Paul Ryan to put up a plan to abolish Medicare and other federal social programs]

This is deadly serious. It’s easy to say we drugged bloggers out here are simply another example of the smelly hippies flying off the handle on something. Rest assured: We are not. You are going to be fighting 100% of the GOP caucus, some non-zero percent of the Democratic caucus (exactly 100% of the Democrat caucus), the entire Beltway elite media, and the do-nothing defensive crouch of the President and his administration heading into 2012. Keep in mind where that “sensible compromise” is going to land when the Overton Window has been set far, far to the right. Every possible outcome other than status quo within the current frame of the debate is going to be a major GOP win, far beyond anything that’s happened in recent political history. And that’s with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President faced with a politically daunting 87% public approval of either continuing or increasing Medicare coverage relative to today’s levels. This is why they fail.

It’s going to be just like the Social Security fight, only worse: once again, Very Serious People will pretend not to notice that the Republican plan is a giant game of bait-and-switch, dismantling a key piece of the social safety net in favor of a privatized system, claiming that this is necessary to save money, but never acknowledging that privatization in itself actually costs money. And we’ll have endless obfuscation, both-sides-have-a-point reporting that misses the key point, which is that the putative savings come entirely from benefit cuts somewhere in the distant future that would, in all likelihood, never actually materialize. (What do you think will happen when retirees in 2025 discover that their Medicare vouchers aren’t enough to buy insurance?)

Paul Krugman, on the coming Medicare privatization fight. Add to that an administration that has shown zero interest in coming out of a defensive crouch on such issues, even when 87% of Americans favor keeping Medicare as is or increasing funding.
And, just to get a sense of where the MSM and its serious people are going to come down on the issue, you might review how that overwhelming majority of Americans favoring the continuation and expansion of Medicare is played. tl;dr: second to last paragraph, after about 17,000 words on how Americans “flunk” the budget test. Newsflash, CNN: your own poll shows they know that Medicare is relatively costly; however, they see the value of not putting folks over 65 out there on a competitive market with a fixed amount of 2010 dollars with which to try and find care. But, by all means, journalistic integrity means playing up that folks overestimate our outlays in foreign aid as a cudgel against their views on (and apparently clear understanding of) Medicare funding. Might those sad rubes out there in the many diners of flyover country be conflating military spending with “foreign aid?” We shall never know.
It aint going to be pretty.

On the budget, by contrast, it’s hard to know what the president’s bottom line is, what deals he would regard as reasonable or when he will even join the fray.

The White House is so determined to keep the president antiseptically distant from the untidy wrangling on the budget that it will not even allow its allies in Congress to cite the administration’s own analyses of how harmful some of the Republican cuts would be. They can use the facts but not let on that the administration put them together. What’s up with this?

E.J. Dionne, remaining blissfully unaware of The Third Thing.
Seriously, I’d enjoy living in the dimension inhabited by Our Beltway Punditocracy. Must be really nice in there.
Newsflash, E.J., if Obama came out to the Rose Garden this PM in favor of cutting the non-military discretionary budget to $0, the GOP would immediately balk and say it’s not enough. Just how is he supposed to get involved in a “debate” on those terms? Furthermore, such a step would still not solve the budgetary issues the GOP claims to be so very concerned about. For that, we’d need the thing of which nobody speaks: revenue.
That the GOP systematically and categorically ignores revenue proves that they are not serious about deficits. Never have been. Never will be. You’d think a serious person would start to pick up on this at some point.
But, far be it from me to talk. I’m shrill and out here on drugs with the rest of the pajama wearing naysayers who know nothing of your dimension and its needs.
Source: Washington Post

There Is No Third Thing

Ezra Klein, on the tepid reaction to the President’s energy policy:

This brings up one of the toughest questions in punditry: What is the right thing for the president to do on an issue that’s 1) morally urgent and 2) absolutely dead on arrival in Congress?

He forgets one thing:

3) and which his political opposition will be allowed to argue both sides of?

Libya is only the latest example, but there are many, many others. As soon as the President is for it, the GOP is categorically and irrevocably against it regardless of where they stood in the millisecond before Obama made a decision. This is how Obama went from “dangerously disengaged” or “timid” on Libya and missing his big chance to remake the region to dangerously over-aggressive and missing his big chance for peace in our time in the course of approximately 36 hours.

This is precisely why Obama needs to start inveighing against the perils of windpower, the tyranny of train-based transportation, and making demands that every US citizen above the age of 14 be required to carry at least one gun with its safety off at all times.
I’m only half-joking here. Any rational policy decision will have to be couched in, at best, seeming disinterest on the part of Obama. And this is why many issues are currently hung with the “why isn’t Obama saying anything about…” rubric. Once he takes up a position, even if it is the GOP position, you’re going to face instant and intransigent opposition to whatever Obama says. Even if they were the ones promoting it yesterday. On really sticky issues like Libya, you’ll have the Serious Person dream situation: categorical GOP opposition coupled with strong attacks “from the President’s left.” And just how it’s possible to be “to the left” of a radical socialist community organizer is left as an exercise for the student, as these are questions that the MSM simply will not ask. Shrill.
Progressives angry that their pet issue isn’t receiving enough facetime from Obama should frankly count their lucky stars. Once he weighs in, your issue is over. It is only in the face of Presidential disinterest that even incremental policy progress can actually be made in this environment.

Until such time as the GOP gets significant push-back on this form of rampant and entirely political flip-floppery, it will remain the only game in town. Since such push-back would require research and preparation on the part of the MSM, I wouldn’t hold my breath. That this cycle happens to be a game that is measurably and inexorably killing the country is yet another of those facts that do not matter.

Amazon Women of the Modo

Holy Lord is Alex Pareene’s Salon piece required reading:

Was President Obama “henpecked” into waging war on Libya by his “Amazon warrior” female advisors? Only if you’re shocked by the thought of women in positions of power actually asserting their power. It also helps if you consider skepticism of military engagement to be inherently “feminine” and think that getting convinced of something by a woman is in and of itself emasculating. And if you’re Maureen Dowd you repeat all that stupid, backward cant, because you’re the hard-charging award-winning New York Times columnist with the most retrograde conception of gender relations this side of Hays Code-era Hollywood.

Dowd’s first paragraph is simply a list of clichéd terms for war-making women. In the rest of the column she purports to be simply compelled by the media attention paid to the role of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton in planning the Libyan campaign, but she is actually just reveling in the opportunity to call a Democratic male politician an effete weakling surrounded, as always, by ball-breaking bitches […]. There is little daylight between her “position” on the matter and Rush Limbaugh’s, except that Rush is at least honest enough not to cloak his chauvinism in the trappings of irony.

All I have to say to that is: more please.

Amazon Women of the Modo

O’Keefe and Journalistic Malpractice

Gee, I’ve never been more surprised by a reveal of misleading editing:

If you watch the entire conversation, it becomes crystal clear that O’Keefe’s provocateurs didn’t get what they were looking for. They were ostensibly offering $5 million to NPR. Their goal is clearly to get Schiller and his colleague Betsy Liley to agree to slant coverage for cash. Again and again, they refuse, saying that NPR just wants to report the facts and be a nonpartisan voice of reason.

And this also falls into the utterly gobsmacking shock of the ages category:

James Poniewozik of TIME’s “Tuned In” blog admits that he reposted O’Keefe’s video without watching the entire two-hour exchange and suggests that many other reporters did the same.

Poniewozik speculates that O’Keefe posted the extended video because he was confident that “by the time anyone took the time to go over the full video, the narrative would be established, the quotes stuck in people’s minds and the ideological battle won.”

No shit. After all, one can’t expect journalists (and especially not millionaire pundits) to spend their time watching the thing they’re going to report on. They can’t even be bothered to force an intern to do it and report back. There’s just no time. People have to be fired. Now. After all, there’s no reason to believe this all might be purely manufactured horseshit. And, of course, one should never forget that we sorry rubes out here in our pajamas just can’t understand what it is to do journalism.
That aside, it’s almost like even serious people should begin to gather that this sort of pattern is their whole operation. They throw out a distorted narrative, claim some scalps, and move on. They haven’t even had to bother to find a new messenger, despite the fact that every one of these things has been utterly disproved as shamefully and willfully misleading. That would be bad enough, but you, the media, still misreport the ACORN business (among many, many other potential examples) as though no newer information ever emerged on that front. To this day and probably right now.

And, it’s worth noting (as the linked article does) exactly who due diligence in this sorry case fell to:

Glenn Beck’s website, “The Blaze,” ran a critique titled, “Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics?” The short answer: Yes.

So it takes Glenn Beck’s folks to do what NPR and any other respectable journalistic outfit should have done immediately and for as long as it took before taking action: study the actual source data because we know this guy has a long, long history of purposefully misleading and creative editing. But do you come out immediately and say that? Eviscerate the messenger? Of course not. You fire people and strengthen their case against you by creating the implicit appearance of guilt.

Truly, truly the Republic is at an end. We have crossed the Rubicon once and for all and there is nothing left worthy of salvage. This is what the intellectual discourse has become. This is the level of intellect running the discourse in our public square…essentially that of a sad rube, caught out playing Three Card Monty. Again and again and again and again. Publicly. But I’m sure the Queen’s in there this time; after all, he keeps showing it to me!

The article concludes:

At this point, any news outlet that runs an uncorroborated James O’Keefe video is committing journalistic malpractice.

At this point?!? Anybody paying any attention to O’Keefe about anything several episodes ago was committing journalistic malpractice. That NPR merrily still fires people over this sort of horseshit is just flat out astonishing. Newsflash, NPR: they want to destroy you. Nothing you do, say, print, broadcast, or color favorably to the Right point of view is ever going to change that. Start acting like it.

Or, better yet, start acting like the responsible news organization you claim to be. As Dear Leader once said, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

O’Keefe and Journalistic Malpractice

Share the Sacrifice

Digby nails it…and gets the result into The Hill, where the intended audience might actually have to face the facts:

Even worse […] is the common assertion by these millionaire pundits that “we all” must sacrifice for the greater good and allow Social Security to be slashed. This is usually spoken with such a tone of lugubrious forbearance that one imagines they would like us to believe that while they might be forced to become Wal-Mart greeters in their elder years, patriotic duty demands we all pitch in. They seem to have no idea that the median wage in this country in 2009 was $26,261 — sadly, lower than it was in the year 2000. (Even when you average in the billionaires, it was only $39,269.) Clearly, the average political TV host takes home many times that wage, so this idea that “we” are all “sharing” in the proposed sacrifices is a bit much, particularly in light of the recent extension of the Bush tax cuts, hailed in the media as the greatest piece of legislation since the founding of the republic.

Read the whole thing.

Share the Sacrifice