Spam, Spam, Spam, John Bolton, Spam, Spam and Spam

I actually find myself partially agreeing with John Bolton about Russia. Not that we should back away from arms control-- Bolton would suggest that on any day ending in -y. But it might be a good idea to push forward on missile defense in Europe so that we have something utterly inconsequential on the table that we can give up so Putin can stop making the situation in Syria and still be able to declare victory when he goes back to the harem of half-tiger dancing girls whom I assume will be waiting for him in Moscow.

I am, of course, suspicious of any time I even superficially agree with someone who sees the UN as legitimate only when it serves his neoconservative agenda. Especially since his proscriptions are being offered in the context of there needing to be a fundamental shift in the strategic realities in the Middle East if we are to see peace there (Ok, what he said was "advance legitimate American interests," and he almost certainly meant something else by that, but seeing as peace is the only legitimate American interest in the Middle East, that's what I'm running with.) Seeing as Russia's sociopathic behavior on the world stage more or less stems from concern about the expansion of American geopolitical capital, it's hard to see how we're going to save any lives in Syria by telling them, for instance, that we have no interest in pursuing agreements aimed at preventing the militarization of space.

Pounding our chest at Russia and saying "come at me, bro," is many things, but it's not strategic. Where there is a whisper of kinda-maybe truth is that Putin, keen political operator that he is, is likely basing his posture via a vis the US on how the President has dealt with bald faced unprincipled intransigence at home. If that's the case, and this is a matter of Putin crowding the plate, as it were, it's because he doesn't think that Obama has it in him to brush him back. If so, it's possible that it might be  tactically sound to give him some chin music. But all that can possibly do is get him to take half a step back. It isn't going to win the ballgame. The only way to win the ballgame is to ultimately find a way to make peace with Russia and Iran without giving away the store. Honestly? I don't remotely have the policy chops to tell you how that's going to happen (working on it). I am, however, keenly aware of what not to do.



On an unrelated note, I would like to ask people who are posting this image on social networks to please fucking stop

Congrats, folks! You've found a way to save less than 1% of the deficit whilst giving members of Congress further incentive to seek outside income! You know, the outside income they get by investing on inside information and taking high-paid gigs from the people who were lobbying them while they were supposedly serving our interests. This is no different than Republicans going after foreign aid or funding for the arts. You can fundamentally believe that the people who are receiving this money don't deserve it, but pretending that cutting it off is going to solve any problem is severely fucking delusional. It's the sort of thing that distracts us from, you know, actually solving our numerous problems as a nation.

I, for one, was rooting for the $4 trillion coin

The Rev. Al Sharpton may have said back in the day that he won't criticize Obama (which ought to disqualify him from his newfound role at MSNBC as much as I love the man), but he was absolutely right about one thing the other night: the blind cowardice in the Democratic caucuses after passing the ACA made this debt ceiling defeat-- or one like it-- inevitable. However you feel about how the President dealt with the first threat of a government shutdown in this Congress, it came because Congressional Democrats were too scared for their seats to pass a budget. In so dodging, they not only forced a showdown over a continuing resolution, but they also lost the ability to use budget reconciliation for FY 2011, which would have made passing wprogressive deficit reduction measures a walk in the park. Raise top rates? Alright! Get rid of corporate tax loopholes? Sure! Stop subsidizing big oil and big corn? Why not? Carbon tax? OK! Plus, any method of economic stimulus that can pass the Byrd test can come along for the ride.

Instead, they went so far as to hand the decision as to whether to take the vote before the 2010 elections to extend only the middle class tax cuts to Senators facing re-election. And when they finally caved and voted to extend them all, nobody (including the President) thought to get a debt ceiling increase along with it. Even though the TPers were telegraphing their punches on pushing that envelope.

As a Spartan might have said, may they live forever.

What I find positively amazing is that while President Obama has taken quite a bit of flak for his capitulations, there is little mention that the untenable positions he's found himself in have been handed to him directly from blue dogs who didn't do their jobs as legislators and the People who voted in candidates eager to use the debt ceiling as a cudgel.

Unfortunately, Beltway media narratives cannot accommodate such truths. Indeed today, the same hacks who chided Austan Goolsbie for decrying the insanity of not raising the debt ceiling (saying that it was irresponsible to speak as if not raising it were something that could plausibly happen) are now saying that Obama didn't properly communicate the risk of default early on. One thing is for certain. The DC press will run ''dog bites man'' on page one before they admit that sometimes its the so-called moderates who fuck it up for everyone.

None of this is to say that Obama has been playing his hand especially well. He should have declared that if he didn't get guaranteed revenues, he'd take one of extraordinary measures afforded him by the powers of the executive branch to raise the debt ceiling himself. But it's not like the reasons his advisors gave him for eschewing those options were invalid. Any action the administration took unilaterally would have spooked the hands holding the levers of our economy. This is especially evident given the markets' response to the evidence of government dysfunction shown in the leadup to this shitty deal. Who knows? Maybe it would have been worse.

What's clear is that as the remnants of the Blue Dog caucus wither away, we're stuck with the consequences of their failures of conscience and intestinal fortitude. I wonder what Evan Bayh would say. Maybe it would be the same as another imposter in the guise of a public servant once said on an episode of the Simpsons:

"The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again."

Fuck You, the Economist

The fact that world news from other countries tends to be better than what we get over here may sometimes lead one to expect that when a foreign publication comments on America, that they'd understand us better than we do them.

The Economist has seen fit to remind me that I ought to jettison that expectation just as soon as I can manage.

You can tell right away that the author(s)' concepts of political science are stuck in the UK. Despite clearly stating that the crisis is entirely a political one, they continue on to state that the House GOP was acting reasonably within its electoral mandate from 2010 in being the first American majority caucus in history to refuse to raise the debt ceiling.

What, pray tell, is this mandate? According to The Economist, it's "to hold the government of Barack Obama to account."

Yeah, we get it. They have Parliament where you live and you don't know how a proper democracy works. Here's a hint-- politicians are supposed to be elected to do the will of the People, not to play Thunderdome with other politicians. We don't have a paradigm where there's a coalition whose job is, officially, to oppose the majority. It has to do with the fact that our system of representative government was designed on purpose, not retro-fitted to a constitutional monarchy. And while we've made plenty of our own mistakes, a lot of what we got right are things that we recognized were horribly wrong with the British system, one of which being the fractious nature of the British Parliament.

Nowadays, the phrase "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" gets floated as a justification for the GOP's chauvinistic obstructionism by American pundits who are too piss-scared of being seen as a part of the Liberal Media to speak honestly about the Republican Party. It's bullshit. That's not how the system was built to work; there are far too many mechanisms built in that grind everything to a halt. Operating our government like it's a Parliamentary system has been nothing short of disastrous for the American People, and the Economist's failure to grasp that basic fact ought to disqualify any commentary it offers on American politics.


When we send politicians to Washington, it's to do the job that the prior incumbents aren't doing well enough. And in 2010, that was create jobs. Which the polls confirm. The electorate is concerned overwhelmingly with jobs and the economy.

You'll notice that "just fuck with Obama a lot" isn't on that list.

The Economist is claiming, essentially, that a populace whose top 6 priories were (in descending order) The Economy, Jobs, Terrorism, Social Security, Education, Medicare, issued a mandate to Republicans to betray five of them in the service of their sixth priority, deficit reduction, while leaving tax cuts--which only 42% rated as a top priority-- alone

It's pretty easy math, The Economist. Isn't math supposed to be a feature of your discipline?

The math gets easier when you consider that those medicare cuts were originally part of a budget plan that also slashed taxes, and only would have significantly reduced the deficit if you assume quite a lot of nonsense. The Ryan plan was quite clearly not about the budget. In order to support the thesis that government is bad, evidence to the contrary must disposed of. It's only natural to target the nation's most popular government program.

The thing is, all of this has been available to anyone with a cheapass computer and the ability to find a WiFi hotspot somewhere. Does part of getting an Economics degree necessitate having the part of your brain capable of parsing this shit get cut out? Did Paul Krugman just not show up that day?

Was it a burning need to break out the "pox on both your houses" that persuaded the Economist to chide Obama for not finding a way out of the deficit crisis in the same breath that it had proclaimed said crisis to be a politically manufactured one?

I didn't even have to get into the utter lack of precedent for the debt ceiling vote being tied to ten-year budget outlooks to demonstrate just how clueless these wankers are.

And yeah, plenty of American outlets have been this fucking idiotic or worse in their coverage of the debt ceiling talks too, and none of them have resulted in me taking to the blogs.. But if the Economist is going to look down over the rims of its glasses at America without actually understanding what's going on, they've opened themselves up to ridicule.

Assange, Liberals and the Reality-Based Community

I had this post in the can when Tuscon happened, and decided not to put it up at the time.  If I'd written all of it today, the focus would be less on Julian Assange, but here we are.

Julian Assange is not a terrorist.

Let's just get that out of the way.  While we're at it, he's also not somebody who we should be trying to lock up in prison as a spy, because he would love nothing better.  He's not a journalist either.

Most importantly, he's not a hero.

Incidentally, nobody should be surprised by this.  There may be real heroes in the world, but they are vanishingly few.  And we progressives are used to being led by false ones.

There is no math that will tell you that a 2000 Presidential election without Ralph Nader would have produced a President Bush.  Not only did he campaign aggressively in pivotal states, he spread the obscene lie that there was no significant difference between Bush and Gore.  Four years later he has the chutzpah to claim that the significant amount of donor cash he was collecting from Republicans had nothing to do with this.  Lately he's been a guttersnipe, who has unrepentantly referred to Obama as an Uncle Tom. which puts into perspective his 1996 refusal to come out against the referendum in California on ending affirmative action

This is the same man who founded PIRG, which in addition to its invaluable advocacy work employed yours truly for... part... of a summer in '04.  If it weren't for Ralph Nader, I would never have been invited into the home of a mostly-dressed middle aged beatnik couple from Wilmington, MA-- who had clearly been fucking when the doorbell rang-- to discuss energy efficiency standards.  It was one of the few days I exceeded my donation quota.

I'm sorry, I got lost there for a moment.

The impact of Ralph Nader's life's work is unquestionable.  Imagine, for a moment, how different your life would be today if cars weren't required to have seatbelts.  It's hard to even contemplate.  But as was said by Harvey Dent in that crowning political work of our time, Batman, the Dark Knight:  You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Some of our country's worst moments are--and mind you not without accomplices-- causally linked to the fact that so many progressives mistook 2000 Ralph Nader for a hero.  We ought to know better by now.

Of course, you probably don't actually support Julian Assange's politics, because he's an anarchist.  He believes that government secrecy in and of itself bespeaks an authoritarian conspiracy.  Apparently this includes not wanting Russian diplomats to know that our diplomats see Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev as a kleptocratic Batman and Robin.

Assange isn't doing what he's doing so that you know what your government is up to and are informed as a voter.  He's doing what he's doing so that people who work in governments no longer trust each other, and become ineffectual to the point of international diplomacy crumbling and governments falling under their own weight.  He sees the world as a series of nails, and himself as the wielder of a hammer that would make John Boehner blush, if bronzefolk are capable of blushing.

Julian Assange is also, apparently, a Rorschach test.  Conservatives have been waiting for some time for an intellectual they could pound their fists about and call a terrorist.  Speaking of which, I'd like to take this time to thank Joe Liebermann for his invaluable support in getting DADT repeal over the goal line, and declare "good riddance" re: the entire rest of his career.  He and others have pounded their fists on the table and called for, among other things, Assange's assassination.  Because what we really need are more people gathering under Assange's banner.

In any case, the response from conservatives is easily predictable.  The last two years in conservative commentary and politics have consisted of lies, damned lies, and a total lack of statistics.  But what of the so-called "reality-based community" that we Progressives participate in?  Why are so many on the left demanding that Julian Assange be thought of as something that he's not?  They say he's for transparency, and if that were true, there wouldn't be an entire Wikileaks splinter group that split off precisely because he isn't. They say that the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden are trumped up, but if that were true, wouldn't he have something more to say about it than "this is all just about a broken condom," which couldn't be true, as that would imply that he was only being accused by one woman.

The extent to which Assange's defenders in the United States have dismissively parroted the phrase "sex by surprise" and the distortion about the condom without once considering that maybe-- just maybe-- his accusers are telling the truth is appalling.  Instead of taking a step back when the police report was leaked, many criticized the Guardian for running it.

This break with reality doesn't stop there.  Many prominent progressives lost their shit when Obama administration officials touted the bill that extended the Bush tax cuts as a second stimulus.  They said that Obama had swallowed the trickle-down economics Kool-Aid, despite the fact that the compromises exacted from Republicans in the Senate have proven stimulative effects. The mantra that tax cuts don't create jobs was more important than the truth.  Similarly, Keith Olbermann and Arianna Huffington recently decried the Obama administration's announcement of a year-long study of government regulations with an eye towards simplifying some and cutting others. They said he'd swallowed the Tea Party Kool-Aid that regulation kills jobs, and in so doing, at least Arianna seemed to imply that regulation could never kill jobs.

I was put off by it at the time, despite being a huge fan of Keith's. (Arianna Huffington has never impressed me, and I think it's telling that her first foray into politics was to call for Bill Clinton to resign over the Lewinsky scandal), but the next day, the CBS Evening News ran with this:

(Available also in HTML flavor)




Redundancy is great for computer systems, networks, and point defense, but it's rubbish for rulewriting.

Does this suggest that there's something to it every time a Republican goes to the House or Senate floor and decries the newest Democratic bill as being 'just more burdensome, job-killing regulation'?  Of course not.  For some time now, Republican politicians have come to town claiming to want to overhaul regulation, and then wind up only focusing on the good ones.  Are we really going to get outraged because Obama might suggest that frozen cheese pizzas and frozen pepperoni pizzas be regulated by the same fucking agency?  Did he not thoroughly demonstrate, in the fights for both Healthcare and Wall Street reform, that he believes that regulation done right is a good thing?  Are we so pissed off that he didn't tilt at windmills over the Public Option that we take every chance to say that he's just the same as the other guys?

We have said that it's time for our political discourse to change. This is undeniable.  But we'd be fools to only focus on the intensity of partisan rhetoric.  I call on anyone of any political inclination about to write a column or a blog post, or appear on cable news to do their research first.  If you can support your argument, declaim it with passion but with restraint.  If you can't, say something else.  It's time for us all to stop being salesmen and start being teachers.