This was classic Obama, and it’s really amazing and fresh.

Please take the time to watch it, or read it.

(more…)

Jonathan Chait has a really great take down of Ayn Rand over at The New Republic.  You all should go read it.

Sample:

For conservatives, the causal connection between virtue and success is not merely ideological, it is also deeply personal. It forms the basis of their admiration of themselves. If you ask a rich person whether he ascribes his success to good fortune or his own merit, the answer will probably tell you whether that person inhabits the economic left or the economic right. Rand held up her own meteoric rise from penniless immigrant to wealthy author as a case study of the individualist ethos. “No one helped me,” she wrote, “nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me.”

But this was false. Rand spent her first months in this country subsisting on loans from relatives in Chicago, which she promised to repay lavishly when she struck it rich. (She reneged, never speaking to her Chicago family again.) She also enjoyed the great fortune of breaking into Hollywood at the moment it was exploding in size, and of bumping into DeMille. Many writers equal to her in their talents never got the chance to develop their abilities. That was not because they were bad or delinquent people. They were merely the victims of the commonplace phenomenon that Bernard Williams described as “moral luck.”

Not surprisingly, the argument that getting rich often entails a great deal of luck tends to drive conservatives to apoplexy. This spring the Cornell economist Robert Frank, writing in The New York Times, made the seemingly banal point that luck, in addition to talent and hard work, usually plays a role in an individual’s success. Frank’s blasphemy earned him an invitation on Fox News, where he would play the role of the loony liberal spitting in the face of middle-class values. The interview offers a remarkable testament to the belligerence with which conservatives cling to the mythology of heroic capitalist individualism. As the Fox host, Stuart Varney, restated Frank’s outrageous claims, a voice in the studio can actually be heard laughing off-camera. Varney treated Frank’s argument with total incredulity, offering up ripostes such as “That’s outrageous! That is outrageous!” and “That’s nonsense! That is nonsense!” Turning the topic to his own inspiring rags-to-riches tale, Varney asked: “Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent?”

For me, the rampant Randism that permeates the Republican Party is the most aggravating aspect.  I can dismiss the tenthers, birthers, and wingnut evangelicals as just people who just don’t get it.  The problem with Randism is that it seduces the rich and powerful by stroking their egos, which can cause much, much bigger problems.

It’s one thing to have 30,000 people show up to wave crazy signs at a tea party protest.  It’s quite another to have nearly every powerful business manager devoted to an ideology that does nothing to advance the causes of the middle class, and does everything to further entrench runaway income inequality.  This is a philosophy that creates a morally triumphant rationale for stepping on the masses, for smacking away the outstretched hand of the less fortunate.  A philosophy that glorifies the massive compilation of wealth as the only way to prove yourself to society.

The thing is, as much as I find most of this morally repugnant, that’s not the reason it’s so dangerous.  It’s so dangerous because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t create more economic growth.  It doesn’t create a more stable society.  It doesn’t lead to more personal freedom.  It leads to booms and busts.  It leads to inequality and crime.  It leads to riots and crackdowns.

These are the reasons that this ideology must be stopped.  Because a better America does not spring from the Blackberry of the CEO, it is born from hard work and prosperity of the middle class.

With “death panel” rumors abound, it far past due to have a simple explanation of what the health care reform proposal on the Hill is all about.  Enter Nick Beaudrot:

When put into this context, we can see that the nefarious public option is relatively minor in scope.  The real big reforms are the added consumer protections, coupled with employer mandates and health care exchanges.  Not to say that the public option should be dropped, because I think it would be a significant upgrade to the system, but I wouldn’t want a bill to get killed simply because it didn’t contain one.

Having said that, it becomes even more clear that all those grannies out there have nothing to fear, because there will be no change to Medicare.  That is, there’s no change anymore, now that expanding Medicare benefits to cover end-of-life counseling has been stricken from the bill, because that was obviously unacceptable.

On a much larger note, it blows my mind that a political party can be continued to be taken seriously after knowingly and maliciously lying to the American people.  In this particular case, lying to little old ladies.

These people cannot be allowed to shape policy in this country.  It’s time to boycott the GOP and completely shut them out of the legislative process.  I have no interest whatsoever in bipartisanship unless both sides are acting in good faith, and it’s clear that the GOP has no intention of that.

Republican Party, you’re dead to me.

Just when you thought Sarah Palin, the shining star of the Republican Party, was slowly fading away, she goes and does this:

In a stunning announcement whose shockwaves will likely reverberate from Alaska’s state capitol to the Beltway politics of Washington, D.C., Gov. Sarah Palin said Friday morning that she will resign her office July 26.

“I really don’t want to disappoint anyone with this announcement,” Palin said during the press conference at her home. “Not with the decision that I have made. All I can ask is that you trust me with this decision and know that it is no more politics as usual.”

The official reason?  She’s not running for re-election so she doesn’t want to be a lame duck governor.  Right…

Obviously, the hastiness of the decision and the lack of substance in the resignation speech, coupled with the fact that she delivered it on a Friday during a holiday weekend (hell, I didn’t even hear about it until the day after), is leading people to believe that something else is afoot.

Sullivan ponders:

What could that shoe be? Some unknown ethics inquiry? Some big official scandal about to break? The free house-construction no-one quite resolved? Trooper Wooten’s revenge? Bristol can’t take the bullshit any more and has sold a tell-all? Levi just got a lot of money from the Enquirer? Sherri Johnston has implicated a Palin in her drug-bust? Did Track get in trouble again? Is there another unplanned pregnancy somewhere? Someone took a hike on the Appalachian trail? Has Lyda Green finally gone nuclear? Has Mercedes got a book contract?  Or has she pushed Levi one step too far? Is Trig really Tina Fey’s child?

The number of potential enemies and victims with an ax to grind and a lucrative story to tell is endless. Who can say? But the abruptness of the withdrawal is so weird one has to wonder.

Fasten your seat belts.  I have a feeling we’re headed for a grand finale in the epic train wreck that is The Sarah Palin Express.

So far, she’s been called an “Identity Politics over Merit” pick, a racist, a reverse racist, Maria, Obama’s Miers, and a spendthrift.  Oh, and pronouncing her name correctly is apparently anti-American as well.

Meanwhile, Yglesias is pretty fired up:

But for all that, I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about “identity politics” is not a fun concept for me to contemplated. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name. Heaven forbid someone were to decide that there ought to be at least one Hispanic columnist at a major American newspaper.

Somehow, when George W. Bush affects a Texas accent, that’s not identity politics. When John Edwards gets a VP nomination, that’s not identity politics. But Sonia Sotomayor! Oh my heavens!

At any rate, Ann Friedman wrote a great piece on the hypocrisy of this back during the Democratic primary. And I think this item from Neil Sinhababu on constructing political identities is insightful. I think conservatives are playing with fire here, and underestimating the number of, say, Mexican-Americans in Texas who didn’t think of themselves as having a great deal in common with Puerto Ricans from New York who are waking up today to find that in the eyes of the conservative movement normal qualifications for office don’t count unless you’re a white Anglo.

Which was followed by his perfect analysis of the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

I was going to say something mean about the minority party members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but then I took a look at the membership and I realized something important:

— Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
— Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
— Charles Grassley (R-IA)
— Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
— Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
— John Cornyn (R-TX)
— Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Those guys are really qualified! Not a woman or minority among them! No identity politics, no weak affirmative action picks, just the straight-up best-qualified white men the country has to offer. An absolutely, positively stellar group. Unadorned meritocracy in action. A thing to behold.

Meanwhile, hilzoy actually looks at the record.  How novel!

The GOP is truely a ridiculously tone-deaf operation.  As if their problems with Hispanics weren’t already big enough.  And, the truly sad part is that most Hispanics would be sympathetic to the GOP’s social conservatism, yet they force them out of the party with all of this thinly veiled racism and blather about “preferential treatment.”

The way this is going, the Democrats will not only take New Mexico in 2012, but Texas and Arizona as well.

John Boehner in an amazingly ridiculous performance on This Week:

What becomes clear after all of this, besides the fact that John Boehner needs some remedial science classes (carcinogen!?!), is that the Republicans have zero policy ideas for climate change.  This really isn’t problem if no one thinks that uncontrolled carbon dioxide emissions are an issue, but a lot of people do.  So the GOP ends up in this weird position of simultaneously proclaiming climate change as a problem, but not doing anything to control carbon emissions.  It’s a strange sort of accommodating approach to two competing interests, and it leads to a completely incoherent policy.

Yet another example of the modern Republican Party:  The Party of No Ideas.

Scott Horton (via hilzoy):

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pull back last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward. [...]

The Justice Department source confirms to me that Brennan has consistently opposed making public the torture memos—and any other details about the operations of the extraordinary renditions program— but this source suggests that concern about the G.O.P.’s roadblock in the confirmation process is the principle reason that the memos were not released. Republican senators have expressed strong reservations about their promised exposure, expressing alarm that a critique of the memos by Justice’s ethics office (Office of Professional Responsibility) will also be released. “There was no ‘direct’ threat,” said the source, “but the message was communicated clearly—if the OLC and OPR memoranda are released to the public, there will be war.” This is understood as a threat to filibuster the nominations of Johnsen and Koh. Not only are they among the most prominent academic critics of the torture memoranda, but are also viewed as the strongest advocates for release of the torture memos on Obama’s legal policy team.

You want a war?  FIne.  We’ll give you war.  If those memos aren’t released, and/or Dawn Johnsen is not confirmed as head of the OLC, JTB will “go nuclear.”  I say this a lot, but I really mean it this time: I will not rest if this stands.  This is a landmark issue for me, and I will scream from the rooftops if I have to.

And damn it, I shouldn’t have to do this.  The Senate Democrats need to grow a pair and stand up to this garbage.  The GOP lost in 2008.  They lost real bad.  They shouldn’t have unilateral authority to blackmail the President into not doing something within his prerogative as Chief Executive.  The want to filibuster?  FIne.  Let’s have a damn filibuster.  I want to see 24/7 debate on the Senae floor, cots and all.  I want CNN to constantly broadcast for hours on end that the Republican Party supports secret legal opinions, and furthermore, is willing to hold up the entire schedule of the Senate to preserve said memos.  You can even squeeze that on a bumper sticker:

GOP ♥ Secret Legal Opinions

GOP ♥ Torture

If the GOP wants war, we’ll give it to them.

Hot off the presses, from “The Republican Road to Recovery”

Democrats assume that the free-market system has failed and that a more robust federal government must now rescue the nation. The American people reject that notion and know, as Republicans do, that government has failed and that this financial crisis is the result of decades of misguided government policies that interfered with the free-market. In addition to a loose monetary policy by the Federal Reserve that fueled a housing boom, government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and federal mandates that weakened lending standards contributed to a perfect storm of government-induced failure.

Unbelievable.

The GOP is now a fringe party, full of fringe ideas, and occupied by fringe zealots.  It’s pure Austrian School garbage.

It should now be the goal of the Democratic party to pass the budget without a single Republican vote.  It certainly would make me feel better.  I don’t want anything in the budget that looks good to this group of out-of-touch, anti-information, market fundamentalists.

[Update]

Nate provides a much lighter post.  Hilarious.

David Frum doesn’t like where the GOP is headed:

In 1988 George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis among college graduates by 25 points. Nothing unusual there: Republicans have owned the college-graduate vote. But in 1992 Ross Perot led an exodus of the college-educated out of the GOP, and they never fully returned. In 2008 Obama beat John McCain among college graduates by 8 points, the first Democratic win among B.A. holders since exit polling began. [...]

In 1984 Reagan won young voters by 20 points; the elder Bush won voters under 30 again in 1988. Since that year, the Democrats have won the under-30 vote in five consecutive presidential elections. Voters who turned 20 between 2000 and 2005 are the most lopsidedly Democratic age cohort in the electorate. If they eat right, exercise and wear seat belts, they will be voting against George W. Bush well into the 2060s.

I certainly will be.

His prescription?

We need to modulate our social conservatism (not jettison—modulate). The GOP will remain a predominantly conservative party and a predominantly pro-life party. But especially on gay-rights issues, the under-30 generation has arrived at a new consensus. Our party seems to be running to govern a country that no longer exists. The rule that both our presidential and vice presidential candidates must always be pro-life has become counterproductive: McCain’s only hope of winning the presidency in 2008 was to carry Pennsylvania, and yet Pennsylvania’s most successful Republican vote winner, former governor Tom Ridge, was barred from the ticket because he’s pro-choice.

We need an environmental message. You don’t have to accept Al Gore’s predictions of imminent gloom to accept that it cannot be healthy to pump gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We are rightly mistrustful of liberal environmentalist disrespect for property rights. But property owners also care about property values, about conservation, and as a party of property owners we should be taking those values more seriously.

Above all, we need to take governing seriously again. Voters have long associated Democrats with corrupt urban machines, Republicans with personal integrity and fiscal responsibility. Even ultraliberal states like Massachusetts would elect Republican governors like Frank Sargent, Leverett Saltonstall, William Weld and Mitt Romney precisely to keep an austere eye on the depredations of Democratic legislators. After Iraq, Katrina and Harriet Miers, Democrats surged to a five-to-three advantage on the competence and ethics questions. And that was before we put Sarah Palin on our national ticket.

The GOP needs a complete makeover.  Unfortunately, there’s no one in elected office willing to lead the charge and fight the civil war.  You didn’t make it anywhere in the past 20 years in the Republican Party if you weren’t loyal, and now, with a severely damaged brand, no one knows how to step outside the box.

It’s really kind of sad, but I doubt I’ll lose sleep over it.

[h/t Sullivan]

Sullivan is still trying to save conservatism.

I’m not sure what the answers to all these questions are. But I am sure that a good faith effort to tackle them is what we need. We have a new president who’s a liberal but open to suggestion and debate. I don’t believe going on and on about what a big liberal he is, and how we’re all about to turn into France, moves this debate constructively along. If the right wants to return as something more than a populist gabfest on radio and cable, we’d better join that debate. And even have a few constructive ideas.

Somehow, I don’t think Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are listening…

Yglesias tackles student lonas and Medicare Advantage:

The interesting thing here is not just the particulars of the policy, but the bizarre view of the role of government that Howard is espousing. Rather than a debate between progressives who want the government to provide a public service and conservatives who want the service to exist just insofar as it can be supported by the private market, we have a debate where both sides agree that the service ought to exist but the right thinks it’s important that it be done in a less efficient more costly manner because doing it that way generates profits for people who in turn give them money in some kind of nutty sense is supposed to preserve the integrity of the private sector. And it’s not just on student loans. You have essentially the same debate over Medicare Advantage between Democrats who want the government to provide seniors with costly medical services and Republicans who want Democrats to provide seniors with an even more costly version of those services by bringing private insurance companies in as middlemen. It’s ludicrous. Now elected officials are going to get mixed up in these kind of scams now and again, much as you see some Democrats siding with campaign contributors in the hedge fund industry over the basics of progressive politics. But when Chuck Schumer pulls that kind of stunt he takes crap about it from liberals while conservatives seem too busy whipping themselves into frenzies over fake pork-barrel schemes to send mice on maglevs to Disneyland to notice what’s happening.

Sullivan’s pissed:

The GOP has passed what amounts to a spending and tax-cutting and borrowing stimulus package every year since George W. Bush came to office. They have added tens of trillions to future liabilities and they turned a surplus into a trillion dollar deficit – all in a time of growth. They then pick the one moment when demand is collapsing in an alarming spiral to argue that fiscal conservatism is non-negotiable. I mean: seriously.

The bad faith and refusal to be accountable for their own conduct for the last eight years is simply inescapable. There is no reason for the GOP to have done what they have done for the last eight years and to say what they are saying now except pure, cynical partisanship, and a desire to wound and damage the new presidency. The rest is transparent cant.

I still don’t understand how Republicans ever got the reputation of being fiscally responsible.  If you look at the record the complete opposite immediately becomes apparent.  The Godfather himself added ~10% of GDP to the national debt each term that he served.  It’s a sham.

Michael Steele on the stimulus:

STEELE: You’ve got to look at what’s going to create sustainable jobs. What this administration is talking about is making work. It is creating work.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s a job.

STEELE: No, it’s not a job. A job is something that — that a business owner creates. It’s going to be long term. What he’s creating…

STEPHANOPOULOS: So a job doesn’t count if it’s a government job?

(CROSSTALK)

STEELE: Hold on. No, let me — let me — let me finish. That is a contract. It ends at a certain point, George. You know that. These road projects that we’re talking about have an end point.

As a small-business owner, I’m looking to grow my business, expand my business. I want to reach further. I want to be international. I want to be national. It’s a whole different perspective on how you create a job versus how you create work. And I’m — either way, the bottom line is…

STEPHANOPOULOS: I guess I don’t really understand that distinction.

STEELE: Well, the difference — the distinction is this. If a government — if you’ve got a government contract that is a fixed period of time, it goes away. The work may go away. That’s — there’s no guarantee that that — that there’s going to be more work when you’re done in that job.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes, but we’ve seen millions and millions of jobs going away in the private sector just in the last year.

STEELE: But they come — yes, they — and they come back, though, George. That’s the point. When they go — they’ve gone away before, and they come back.

This prompted the Yglesias headline: Steele: Cops, Firefighters, Soldiers, Postmen, Teachers All Secretly Unemployed

Seriously though, I can’t seem to keep all this straight.  First it was full of Republican sweeteners.  Then it wasn’t fast enough.  Then it was just a “spending” bill.  Now it’s too temporary.

There’s no real argument here.  It’s just pure unadulterated media cycle blather, and it shows that the GOP is legitimately uninterested in governing.

And guess what?  Americans are sick and tired of it:

The Republicans are right about the wrong bit of information. WWII Unemployment Rates dropped by the largest PERCENTAGE in history. However, New Deal Unemployment Rates dropped by the largest RATE in history (see below). Basically, you can say a decrease in unemployment from 10% to 5% is a 50% drop, but a decrease from 20% to 12% is only a 40% drop. Even though the second case sees a greater increase in the number of jobs, the percent change is lower… hence, Mitch McConnell is an idiot.

Regardless of WWII or the New Deal, FDR’s administration did an incredible job in reducing unemployment. However, in terms of starting a war to lower unemployment, we have to remember that during FDR’s time America was in a WORLD WAR, defending against the Axis of Power; not capturing Middle Eastern oil under the pretense of liberation.

(more…)