Been disconnected for the past week, so I'm catching up. Some links that caught my eye follow. Probably many more that I'll save for Sunday -- e.g., haven't even looked at Krugman yet.

• Mark Kleiman: A GOP Gaffe, and the Hack Gap: I don't think this is the first time Graham said something like this, but it bears repeating:

  "The demographics race we're losing badly," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). "We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."

  It ran in the WaPo. It's a gaffe in Kinsley's sense: the inadvertent statement of something true. The Republican Party is the party of angry white guys (and their angry wives): not just angry in general, but angry at people who aren't white (plus atheists, of course). And they are losing the demographic race, both because there are more non-whites and because under-30 whites are, on average, much less racially angry.

  I wish I knew the source of a previous Graham outburst where (as best I recall) he explained that the conservatives have to get their program passed real soon because the long-term tide is against them. This was to my mind one of the first honest admissions that the Republican agenda was not just anti-Democratic but intended to destroy the principle of democracy in this nation.

• Ezra Klein: Mitt Romney's George W. Bush Problem: In the second debate, Romney was asked how he'd differentiate himself from Bush. He didn't offer much of an answer, and indeed his "five point plan" is nearly a carbon copy of the Bush's own plan (also five points). Obama didn't help much by trying to argue that Romney was worse than Bush -- Klein points out that Bush had favored Romney's more extreme proposals, just hadn't pushed them as hard.

  Romney's right about one thing: These are different times than when Bush ran for president. But that's why his five-point plan is so depressing. It's not just that there's nothing in it that Bush wouldn't have endorsed in 2000. It's that most of it actually would have made more sense in 2000.

  Take Romney's tax cuts. When Bush was proposing tax cuts without any offsets, the budget was in surplus, and tax receipts were at record highs. The policy made some sense. Romney's tax cuts come at a time of enormous deficits and record low receipts. It's a different time, but Romney's policy, save for a vague promise to pay for it later, is the same. [ . . . ]

  So let's go to the scoreboard: Romney offered precisely . . . nothing that Bush wouldn't have proposed in 2000. And Romney left out some of his more salient agreements with Bush. For instance, both the Enron debacle and the financial crisis happened on Bush's watch. As a result, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley and, later, Dodd-Frank laws to toughen financial regulation. But Romney has proposed rolling back both. [ . . . ]

  This year, 2012, is not 2000. We have deficits rather than a balanced budget. We have historically high unemployment rather than historically low unemployment. We've seen what the financial system can do when left unchecked. We've watched tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 fail to spark economic growth and seen a rising stock market fail to lift middle-class wages. We do need new thinking. But Romney isn't offering any. His problem isn't that the public is unfairly judging him by Bush's policies. It's that they're fairly judging him by Bush's policies.

  I've said this many times before, but once more: one of Obama's biggest mistakes was his failure to drive home just how much damage Bush's eight years cost. Had he done so, we might have learned a few things, instead of recapitulating mistakes so recent they aren't even safely in the past yet.

• Andrew Leonard: A Debate to Be Ashamed Of: Didn't watch the big foreign policy debate, even indirectly -- I did pick up bits of the second bash blaring in an adjacent room while I tried to piece together a jigsaw puzzle, but this time I was navigating through east Oklahoma. Still, I had predicted it would be hideous, with Obama proudly recounting all the people he's had killed since becoming Free World Führer, and Romney pathetically swearing his intent to kill even more. And that's pretty much the actual debate Leonard reviewed:

  And so on. I'm not sure if there's ever been a debate in which the two candidates expressed so much fundamental agreement on major foreign policy issues. But nothing underscores the dilemma that progressives face on the lack of a meaningful foreign policy choice more than the exchange on drones. Romney's endorsement of drone warfare laid out with perfect clarity why President Obama has been free to pursue policies -- extrajudicial assassination of American citizens, drone warfare, detention without trial -- that appear to clearly violate basic human rights, not to mention the U.S. Constitution.

  He can do so because he is never going to be questioned from the right on such tactics.

  Quite the contrary; the main line of attack is to berate Obama for being too soft. Ponder this: In the same debate in which Romney applauded the president for using "any and all means necessary to take out people who pose a threat to us," he also slammed Obama for his "apology tour" throughout the Arab world. If you're perplexed at how to reconcile Obama's drone war of terror in Waziristan with the idea that he's been wandering the globe saying "I'm sorry" to our enemies, well, join the crowd. It's not easy.

  Actually, the lack of substantive debate on foreign policy goes way back. I did watch the 2000 Bush-Gore debate that the only tiff there was that Bush disapproved of "nation building" in Haiti. In his subsequent administration, Bush did manage to end any semblance of aid fo Haiti, even getting rid of the populist-leaning president Clinton had restored to power. But Bush also did many more things that he didn't forecast in the debate. Surely, one thinks, president Gore would have done some things differently, but he gave no hint he would in the debate, and damn little in subsequent years even when he had the advantages of hindsight.

  I also remember the 1984 debate where Mondale was much more militantly anti-communist than Reagan. Early on, there was the 1960 debate where Kennedy blind-sided Nixon with his fanciful charges of a "missile gap." I don't recall whether Carter and Clinton took such pains to stress how they were the baddest mutherfuckas in the campaign, but they ultimately proved to be: Carter's boycott of the Soviet Olympics and his sponsorship of the Afghan mujahideen kicked off the sabre rattling era Reagan takes much credit for, much as Clinton's reflexive bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq paved the way for Bush. It's not clear that either had a fully formed foreign policy conception when they were elected, nor that they had many options: ever since Truman there's been some sort of unelected foreign policy establishment in Washington that has bent politicians to its will, and Obama's just the most recent example.

  Robert Wright claims to have discerned a significant difference from the debate: Why Romney Is the War Candidate. He makes much of the fact that Obama is running for a lame duck second term, whereas a win would give Romney a first term. He argues that first-term presidents are more likely to pander to their war-loving sponsors -- the keys here are Sheldon Adelson, Israel, and Iran -- whereas second-term presidents look toward history. In itself, that doesn't strike me as convincing -- not that Sheldon Adelson isn't someone to be feared. Looking back at historical comparisons, it's clear that both Bushes regarded getting into wars as good politics. On the other hand, Woodrow Wilson famously campaigned for reëlection as the one who "kept us out of war," then almost as soon as he won his "legacy" term plunged us in. And a big part of Franklin Roosevelt's reasoning for running for a third term was his desire to be remembered as a war president. But those were big wars that had already been started, and they were long ago, back before the US had a strong militarist and imperialist foreign policy establishment.

  The one thing that strikes me as relevant about the first/second term issue is that nowadays all presidents start up strongly hemmed in by their staff choices (and by the more-or-less permanent power bases, like the military and the Fed), but sooner or later they rise to their office and take more direct control. Early on, Clinton was hamstrung by Greenspan and Powell. Bush was so dominated by his VP some pundits insisted on calling his regime the Cheney Admininistration. Obama got scammed by Gates and Petraeus on Afghanistan, and by his own picks of Geithner and Summers on the economy. I doubt that Romney is intrinsically any more belligerent than Obama, but he's had to act like it to snatch the Republican nomination, and he is certain to be surrounded by a plethora of Israel-loving neocons, at a time when blind allegiance to Israel is a sure recipe for a disastrous war. Obama isn't immune to those forces, but he's less likely to be awed and/or shamed into a war with Iran, if for no other reason than he knows that the people who want that war have already overpromised and underperformed in Afghanistan. Add to this Romney's "no apologies" mantra, which translates to "no diplomacy," which means a foreign policy out of control, freed from reason or intent, floudering in a world where sheer military power has become useless, dangerous, and more than a little psychotic. Romney's commitment to that posture may be no deeper than his commitment to anything else, but that offers scant comfort.

  Back on the debate, also see Leonard's No Debate on Climate Change:

  Climate change may end up costing the most in the North America, but it's a problem that can't be solved without the entire world working together. That makes it a foreign policy issue -- perhaps the preeminent foreign policy issue any U.S. president will ever face.

  But for Obama and Romney, the most important fossil fuel issue in the last debate was the question of which man supported the coal industry most fervently. So don't hold your breath waiting for a spirited discussion of the fate of the planet in the final debate.

  I'm a bit less agitated about climate change, at least in part because I figure the people with the most to lose are -- i.e., the people who should be most concerned -- are property owners, whose farms and resorts may lose their appeal, and whose seaside stakes may wind up under water. Still, they haven't come close to standing up to the threat, in large part taking their lead from the oil and coal companies fiddling while the world burns. Four years ago Obama at least raised the issue, but he got little for his concerns, so it's not surprising that he's shelved them. It's not, after all, like he has principles, let alone the courage to defend and advance them.

  Digging back through Leonard's archive, I see he has a piece on Vikram Pandit, Citigroup CEO's Millions. Pandit has raked in $261 million since 2007. For a chart on how well Citigroup's stock has performed under Pandit's leadership, see Brad DeLong; what the hell, let's link it here:

  

• Andrew Leonard: Romney's Magic Economy Plan: Forget the talk about five point plans -- which, as Klein points out above, are no different than the ones Bush and Romney ran on, and even less promising. Romney doesn't need a plan: he's convinced that as soon as he's elected, the Job Creators will instantly snap out of their Obama funk and it'll be boom times for all. However, that raises a few questions, like why should you believe him, and even if he's right -- meaning that the rich have deliberately tanked the economy in a political snit fit -- you have to wonder why we should give in to the extortion?

  Here's something you are unlikely to hear during a Mitt Romney stump speech. Business investment has actually recovered to its pre-recession levels. During the Obama recovery, corporate spending on business equipment and software has grown at a faster rate than during any of the last four economic recoveries. (George Bush's economic recovery, embarrassingly, registered zero net growth in business equipment and software spending.)

  What those companies haven't been doing is hiring. And there's a very good reason for that: the economists who point to the problem of demand are right. At least, they're right if you trust the reports of actual business executives. For three years, the number one complaint cited by small businesses about the current economic climate has been poor sales. Not taxes, not regulation -- sales.

  Also see: Matthew O'Brien: Mitt Romney's Economic Plan: Win, Then Do Nothing: Quotes Romney as claiming that if get elected, the markets will be happy, and "We'll see capital come back and we'll see -- without actually doing anything -- we'll actually get a boost in the economy." Curious, then, that the stock markets are already back to pre-recession levels, but the economy, well, isn't.

  Romney's magical thinking is the consequence of Republican obstruction. From the beginning, Republicans have been quite candid that their number one goal is making sure Obama is a one-term president. From the stimulus to Fed appointments to the abortive American Jobs Act, they have tried to block anything that might help the economy -- while decrying it all as dangerously outside the mainstream. There's a problem. It's not. The Obama administration has just followed textbook economics -- spending more and cutting interest rates amidst a slump -- much as a hypothetical McCain administration likely would have followed textbook economics. After denouncing these policies for years, the Republicans can't very well run on them. So they blame those policies for creating uncertainty, evidence be damned.

  As for doing nothing, that's exactly what we've tried for the past two years. It hasn't worked. Now, eventually it will "work" -- in other words, housing will come back at some point, no matter what we do or do not do. It already might -- with the Fed giving it a kick as well. But believing that our problem is we have the wrong person doing nothing is strange.

  I'll add that the political debate over economic policy has always had less to do with how to restore economic growth than who gets helped and who gets hurt by whatever short- and long-term policies are to be implemented. The banks get bailed out because the banks matter to both parties. The stock market recovers for the same reason. Employment is more contentious, because the Republicans actually like weaking the labor market -- cheap labor, reduced benefits, etc. The balance of political power was different in the New Deal, resulting in a massive unionization movement. Try that now and you'll hear how that leads to even more unemployment, but in history it led to broad middle class economic growth -- something 30 years of conservative politics have done their best to wreck.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• William J Broad: Robert F Christy, Atom Bomb Physicist, Dies at 96:

  Dr. Christy may be best remembered for a bitter encounter that crystallized the resentment that many American scientists felt toward Edward Teller, considered the father of the hydrogen bomb.

  During the height of American cold war fears of Communist influences, Teller, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, had testified against Oppenheimer before the Atomic Energy Commission, questioning his judgment and recommending that the government revoke his security clearance.

  Shortly after the testimony, in the summer of 1954, scientists attending a conference at Los Alamos were preparing for a picnic lunch on a terrace. Teller saw Dr. Christy, an old friend, and hurried over to greet him.

  But Dr. Christy, a former protégé and colleague of Oppenheimer's and known to be a courteous, genial man, threw back an icy glance and walked away.

  "I was so stunned that for a moment I couldn't react," Teller recalled in Memoirs, a 2001 book. "Then I realized that my life as I had known it was over."

  I'm not really familiar with Christy, although I've read enough about the Manhattan Project I must have run into him somewhere. Some other recent obituaries I plan on writing about sooner or later: Eugene D. Genovese, Eric Hobsbawm, Barry Commoner.

• Paul Krugman: Disdain for Workers:

  By now everyone knows how Mitt Romney, speaking to donors in Boca Raton, washed his hands of almost half the country -- the 47 percent who don't pay income taxes -- declaring, "My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." By now, also, many people are aware that the great bulk of the 47 percent are hardly moochers; most are working families who pay payroll taxes, and elderly or disabled Americans make up a majority of the rest.

  But here's the question: Should we imagine that Mr. Romney and his party would think better of the 47 percent on learning that the great majority of them actually are or were hard workers, who very much have taken personal responsibility for their lives? And the answer is no.

  For the fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn't have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party's affection is reserved for "job creators," a k a employers and investors. Leading figures in the party find it hard even to pretend to have any regard for ordinary working families -- who, it goes without saying, make up the vast majority of Americans.

  Am I exaggerating? Consider the Twitter message sent out by Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, on Labor Day -- a holiday that specifically celebrates America's workers. Here's what it said, in its entirety: "Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success." Yes, on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses. [ . . . ]

  The point is that what people are now calling the Boca Moment wasn't some trivial gaffe. It was a window into the true attitudes of what has become a party of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy, a party that considers the rest of us unworthy of even a pretense of respect.

• Andrew Leonard: What the Presidential Candidates Aren't Talking About: Issues they don't have any substantive disagreement on, and issues Obama would rather not talk about for various reasons -- he doesn't see any tangible gain from doing so, he doesn't want to expose himself to attacks (gee, look how well that's worked out), he doesn't care, and/or he doesn't know any better. Leonard's examples: climate change, Afghanistan, poverty, drone wars, gun control. I'm not big on politicking over the latter myself, but I was surprised by how large some of these numbers are:

  In 2010, the last year for which data are available, there were 31,672 gun-related deaths in the United States. The last 18 months have witnessed three high-profile shootings, the Tucson attack on Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., in January 2011; the Aurora, Colo. massacre in July 2012; and the mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in August. In the wake of the Aurora shootings, ABC News reported that "the gun murder rate in the U.S. is almost 20 times higher than the next 22 richest and most populous nations combined."

  But there's a pretty simple answer as to why gun control has not been an issue in the 2012 presidential campaign. Obama' response to the high-profile shooting incidents that have occurred during his term has been to take no action. Romney's response would be the same. With no difference between the two campaigns, there's nothing to cover.

Links for further study:

• Mike Konczal: Is Taxing Capital Income Fair? I wound up writing a long letter about this piece, squirreled away in the notebook, so I won't repeat all that here. Konczal states the idea, then dismisses it, so I'm not arguing. Rather, I'm shocked that anyone -- well, actually we know who those people are -- would be so brazen as to argue on any grounds that income from capital ownership should be exempt from taxes. I'll add one more point here: we already favor capital income in two huge ways. One is that through Keogh and other plans we allow taxes to be deferred on long-term savings. The other is that workers do not get to deduct their expenses before labor income is taxed, business owners and investors do: indeed, much of the advantage of owning a "small" business is the ability to deduct and depreciate some (or in many cases much) of your living expenses, only paying taxes on the profit left over. And now they want to avoid paying taxes on that, too. Go look up the definition of Chutzpah.

• Mattea Kramer: Tough Talk for America: subtitled "A Guide to the Presidential Debates You Won't Hear"; author of A People's Guide to the Federal Budget; looks into debt, recession, taxes, Medicare ("or any other kind of health care"), the military, education; finds we're doing just about everything wrong, which is about right.

• Andy Kroll: The Death of the Golden Dream of Higher Education: The detailed reporting is all about California, but the general idea applies elsewhere. For whatever reasons, it's becoming prohibitively expensive to get a college education, and the economy (not to mention the well being of the populace) suffers for that.

• Michael O'Donnell: A Malevolent Forrest Gump: review of Joseph Crespino's book, Strom Thurmond's America, reminds us "he was there at all the major choke points of modern conservative history."

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Ryan Cooper: Delisting an Islamo-Marxist Terror Cult and Elite Decline: Looks like the big lobby effort behind the MEK is succeeding -- it will be hard to ever forgive Howard Dean, in particular, for this.

  But the fact that Giuliani, Dean and company would choose to associate themselves with this organization in such an obviously corrupt way is indicative of the general decline of elite quality that is afflicting this country. Islamist, terrorist, Marxist, and cult are probably the four most toxic adjectives in American political discourse, and yet we have literally an Islamo-Marxist cult with a history of terrorism, including murdering American soldiers, that has bought its way off the terrorist organization list. And recent history is stuffed with examples of this sort of enemy-of-my-enemy thinking blowing up in our face! Does anyone remember how arming the Afghan mujahideen in the 80s worked out?

  Cooper missed one big thing, which is that the reason MEK has gotten so much support is Israel: much of the bogus "intelligence" that Israel has trumpeted on Iran's "nuclear ambitions" has come from their alliance with the MEK. It's also likely that Israel views the MEK as not just a good way to sabotage Iran but as a prospect for regime change -- which is what many Israeli security gurus see as the ultimate solution to their Iran problem. Another big point is that approval of MEK shows the world that for the US terrorism has more to do with who you target than with the act itself. As long as MEK was listed, the US could argue otherwise (admittedly from shaky grounds -- cf. Cuba, Nicaragua, a lot of cases, including Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda, all of which have tempted the US to cross the line). With this embrace of the MEK, that line is an even more transparent joke.

• Paul Krugman: Notes on the Political Economy of Redistribution: Somewhat wonky, and I'm not sure the model really holds up, partly because there are more to the question of how government redistributes income (e.g., patents redistribute up). But beyond the model:

  In particular, imagine yourself as a hired gun for the right tail of the income distribution. What would you do in an effort to stop the median voter from realizing that she would benefit from a more European-style system? Well, you'd do everything you can to exaggerate the disincentive effects of higher taxes, while trying to convince middle-income voters that the benefits of government programs go to other people. And at the same time, you'd do everything you can to disenfranchise lower-income citizens, so that the median voter has a higher income than the median citizen.

  So far, efforts along these lines have been remarkably successful. But operatives on the right are clearly worried that their three-decade run of success may be coming to an end. Indeed, the whole panic about the lucky duckies and all that can be seen as reflecting a great fear on the part of the right that any day now the median voter will realize where his true interests lie, and start supporting much more redistributionist policies.

• Andrew Leonard: Romney's Ohio Problem: The political problem is globalization, a problem for both candidates, but more so for Romney, especially if you consider his tax returns:

  Consider: 267 out of the 379 pages of Romney's return detail his holdings in 34 offshore foreign corporations and partnerships -- including 15 in the Cayman Islands, as well as Bermuda, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ireland. In 2011, Romney reported $3.5 million in foreign income out of total of $13.7 million. He paid $88,853 in foreign taxes -- an effective tax rate of a minuscule 2.4 percent. He also applied for and received a foreign tax credit in the U.S. -- so he actually lowered his U.S. tax liability by getting a credit for the low taxes he paid on investments parked outside the United States.

  This also underscores a big problem with trickle-down policies like tax cuts and easy credit for the rich: even when they turn around and invest that money, they're more likely to invest it abroad, because that's where the returns are, and the tax breaks are just gravy on top of that.

• Patrick Tyler: Defusing Israel's "Detonator" Strategy: The "detonator" is a Moshe Dayan concept: basically, Israel tries to bully other nations into doing its bidding by threatening to make an even bigger mess if they have to act alone. It is unlikely that an Israeli strike can seriously disrupt Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but attempting to do so is certain to make a region-wide mess, not least for the US.

  "The philosophical underpinning of U.S. policy toward Israel," President Ford said, "had been our conviction -- and certainly my own -- that if we gave Israel an ample supply of economic aid and weapons, she would feel strong and confident, more flexible and more willing to discuss a lasting peace." But after serial wars and a strong aversion within the ruling elite to compromise, Ford lamented, "I began to question the rationale for our policy."

  Israel deserves our attention and protection. But 60 years after its founding, it remains in the thrall of an original martial impulse, the depth of which has given rise to succeeding generations of leaders who seem ever on the hair trigger in dealing with their rivals, and whose contingency planners embrace only worst-case scenarios in a process that magnifies the sense of national peril, encourages military preemption and covert subversion, and undermines any chance for a more engaging diplomacy based on compromise and accommodation.

  By the way, Tyler has a new book out, Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country -- and Why They Can't Make Peace. I've ordered a copy.

• Matthew Yglesias: Plossers "Warns" That QE 3 May Lead to Economic Recovery:

  QE 3 skeptic and Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Charles Plosser gave a very strange speech outlining his opposition to monetary stimulus which I think can best be summarized as starting with concerns that it won't work and ending with dire warnings that it might work. Perhaps the strangest part comes when he warns that aggressive monetary stimulus in today's era might lead to consequences similar to those seen in the mid-1930s, when FDR's stimulative monetary policies broke the back of the Great Depression.

  The sense you get from bankers like Plosser is that we already have the perfect recovery, aside from the lose end of disposing of the Democrat in the White House. The big banks are flush again, more concentrated than ever; profits are back up to pre-recession levels, companies are sitting on piles of cash, and the stock market is higher than ever, so business (and Republicans) are quite content with doing nothing more. After all, the vast increase in unemployment isn't their problem -- if anything, it's their blessing, as it weakens labor markets, allowing businesses to demand more givebacks from labor.

Links for further study:

• Brian Beutler: A History of Mitt Romney and the 47 Percent

• Ryan Cooper: Democrats and Hunters: A Natural Alliance: Actually, hunters have long been concerned about environmental depradations (except, of course, their own, but even there not without exception).

• David Corn: Secret Video: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He Really Thinks of Obama Voters: on the freeloading 47%, the "takers" who are in thrall to Obama's socialist largesse.

• Nicholas Lemann: Transaction Man: Long piece on Romney, but only the abstract is online.

• John Quiggin: The White Working Class: Unraveling confusion about who supports the Republicans: nothing correlates more than money, but there is a bump for non-college-educated white men over college-educated at the same income levels. The former are fortunate to have gained their success without education credentials and connections, and so are eager to believe their success earned, where much of it is arguably luck. Quiggin posted a follow-up, A Quick Update on the White Working Class, where he admitted that most of the Republican trend in this class so defined is concentrated in the South -- no big surprise there.

• John Quiggin: The Golden Age: Major article on whatever happened to all that leisure science, technology, and capitalism had promised to economic thinkers like Keynes.

• Mark Thoma: Nontaxpayers Are Overwhelmingly the Elderly and Students.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Jonathan Bernstein: Paul Ryan Fails -- The Truth: Much one can say about Ryan's mendacity, but this is a pretty good example. Ryan attacked Obama for not doing anything about the Simpson-Bowles commission report:

  He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.

  From this quote, you'd never suspect that Ryan was himself a member of that commission ("they . . . them . . . them"), and that he and the other House Republicans had voted against the report. There was, in short, no bipartisan agreement for Obama to walk away from. More examples follow, but Bernstein is only scratching the surface.

  While you're at it, take a gander at Brad DeLong: Paul Ryan Calls for Fewer Jobs and Higher Unemployment in America. That's not literally what he said. His phrase was, "We want honest money." Which is to say he's against the Fed expanding the monetary base. Whether that means he wants to dispose of the $8 trillion of "fiat currency" the Fed has created since 1950 isn't clear, but at least looking forward he wants an economy that cannot grow, which certainly adds up to DeLong's title. (I am saddened, though, that Paul Sweezy takes a fall in the end.)

• Lawrence Downes: The Man in the Empty Chair: Applauds Clint Eastwood at the GOP Convention ("the perfect distillation of the Republican campaign"):

  The last four years have been an extended exercise in Republican denialism: This cannot be. This isn't happening. If you're really the president, show us your papers.

  Imaginary Barack was invented in Hawaii, sneaked into the Oval Office, and has no legitimate claim on the presidency. As for the real tall black guy posing in Washington, go ahead and treat him any way you want. You can jab your finger in his face, shout him down, call him a Muslim, a Kenyan, an illegal alien, you can invent all kinds of lies about him and then you can tell him -- get out of that chair.

  In reality, the president is a more-or-less mainstream, smarter-than-average pol, left-of-center on some things, to the right on others, like guns, disturbingly hawkish on ordering the killing of American citizens suspected of terrorism, on national security, executive secrecy and immigration. He is, too, an inveterate compromiser who used to bend over backward to make deals -- sometimes in advance! -- with Republicans.

  But that guy is not as scary as Imaginary Barack.

• Matt Stoller: Clinton's No Liberal Hero:

  A few years ago, Clinton said, "I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I've done reasonably well since then." That's $2.9 million, just in 2011, for 15 speeches. Indeed. So while Romney and Clinton are ostensible political opponents, they share more than you'd know just from press reports. The primary difference between them is not a question of fealty to finance, but that Romney made his fortune with Bain Capital before he sought office, whereas Clinton made his afterward. [ . . . ]

  This split is why the 2012 election is so empty of substance, because the concerns of the elites are addressed, and the voices of millions are simply unacknowledged. Bill Clinton offers essentially the same belief system as both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, one in which private industry runs the government through payoffs to ex-officials, and government returns the favor through bailouts. If Americans are ever going to grapple with the power of banks over their lives, they are going to have to come to grips with the real track record of their leaders, including Bill Clinton. And it isn't pretty. And until people like Bill Clinton can be compensated in ways that aren't obviously corrupting, and their track records honestly assessed, elections will continue to be unimportant, simple popular ratification of an increasingly authoritarian creditor state.

• Stephen M Walt: Why Do People Keep Predicting War With Iran?: Cites a number of examples starting with Jeffrey Goldberg's 2010 cover story in The Atlantic -- one could go back further; as Juan Cole notes, back in 1992 Netanyahu predicted that Iran was "3 to 5 years" from having a nuclear weapon -- up to yesterday:

  Last but not least, yesterday's New York Times featured a one-sided story on the "shadow war" between Israel and Iran that placed virtually all the blame for the trouble on Tehran. On the front page, it described a "continuing offensive" by Iran, without mentioning that there has been a long cycle of tit-for-tat between these two countries. Only after the jump came any mention of the assassination of Iranian civilian scientists (almost certainly by the Mossad), or any acknowledgement that Iran might be acting defensively rather than conducting a totally unprovoked campaign of aggression. [ . . . ]

  As I noted a few months back, it's virtually impossible to know how much credence to place in the repeated predictions that Israel is about to attack. It does prove that there is no shortage of journalists or pundits who are willing to serve as sympathetic stenographers for government officials, but it doesn't tell you very much about what is going to happen or what these officials really believe. Why? Because the various officials whose alarming testimony forms the basis for these articles have lots of different reasons for stirring the pot in this fashion.

  It's worth reminding ourselves that there is considerable opposition within Israel's own security illuminati to attacking Iran, which as far as I can tell has more to do with how unlikely an affective attack would be than with any repercussions (which, most likely, would redound on the US far worse than on Israel). One outspoken opponent of a strike is ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who unfortunately has an even worse idea in mind for a solution: subvert and overthrow the Iranian regime.

  Walt also has a piece titled Why Americans Don't Understand the Middle East, which starts with a photo of NBC correspondent Richard Engel.

Links for further study:

• James K Galbraith: No Return to Normal: Written in 2009, subhed: "Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think." Main thing wrong with the piece is the assumption that there would be a solution: in fact, the Republicans have managed to kick the legs out from under nearly everything Obama pushed, and have intimidated Obama to the point that he didn't push much. Then there's important stuff that never occurred to Obama or his team, like:

  Second, we should offset the violent drop in the wealth of the elderly population as a whole. The squeeze on the elderly has been little noted so far, but it hits in three separate ways: through the fall in the stock market; through the collapse of home values; and through the drop in interest rates, which reduces interest income on accumulated cash. For an increasing number of the elderly, Social Security and Medicare wealth are all they have.

  That means that the entitlement reformers have it backward: instead of cutting Social Security benefits, we should increase them, especially for those at the bottom of the benefit scale. Indeed, in this crisis, precisely because it is universal and efficient, Social Security is an economic recovery ace in the hole. Increasing benefits is a simple, direct, progressive, and highly efficient way to prevent poverty and sustain purchasing power for this vulnerable population. I would also argue for lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to (say) fifty-five, to permit workers to retire earlier and to free firms from the burden of managing health plans for older workers.

  Plug at the end of the piece for Galbraith's book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best political book written in the last decade.

• Jeremiah Goulka: Why I Left the GOP: Better late than never, but still.

• John B Judis: Mitt Romney, Latter-Day Neoncon

• Ed Kilgore: World Without Labor Day: Looks like it's become a Republican meme that the people we should celebrate on Labor Day are the entrepreneurs (you know, the "job creators") instead of the people who actually did the work. TPM quotes Eric Cantor: "Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success."

• Andrew Leonard: Apple's Enormous Insult: I've been an Apple-hater since c. 1980, but more evidence why should too:

  Apple shrugs. Instead of joining this one-world utopia of interoperability, Apple is replacing its own unique, incompatible-with-everyone-else dock connector with a new dock connector that is incompatible with itself. [ . . . ] That's the true genius of Steve Jobs. He resurrected a model of old-school tech monopoly that everyone else thought was broken.

• Stephen M Walt: What Terrorist Threat?: Includes a link to an article (PDF only) by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, The Terrorism Delusion: America's Overwrought Response to September 11. Mueller wrote a book in 2006 called Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, in 2009 wrote Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (has a couple pages on Israel and Iran, not nearly enough), and co-wrote with Stewart the 2011 book, Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Ben Jacobs: Further Bad News for Southern Democrats: Points out that the Democrats only bothered to run three candidates for six Louisiana house seats. (The Libertarians managed five.) This is just further evidence of how poorly organized the Democrats are. (Cue Will Rodgers joke here.) Some of the blame here surely goes to Obama's decision to get rid of Democratic Party chair Howard Dean and his "50 state strategy." For another example, Obama's not going to be interested in running any sort of campaign in Kansas, and that's trickled down to the local party. The Democrats didn't bother to file a candidate to run against Kevin Yoder in a house seat that only two years ago was held by a Democrat. In Wichita, the Democrats didn't nominate anyone for District Attorney, an office they've held for more than a decade.

• Ed Kilgore: Telling the Brief Success Story of Mitt Romney:

  Success, success, success. What other option does his campaign have than to paint a brief and heavily edited story of Mitt's life as one unbroken triumph after another? But the editing will have to be heavy: Bain without outsourcing or too much "creative destruction," the Olympics without public subsidies or too many references to London, and of course the Massachusetts governorship with most of his major accomplishments going unmentioned. I suppose they could have gone in a very different direction, telling Mitt's tale as one of sin and redemption whereby he has finally come to the True Faith of a ideology that treats government merely as a help-mate to private-sector "job creators" and moral censors. But such an approach would show defensiveness about "success," and we can't have that in a room full of the smug and self-righteous, can we?

• Paul Krugman: The Ryan Role:

  Mark Kleiman points us to a lamentable but revealing column by William Saletan, which illustrates perfectly how the essentially ludicrous Paul Ryan has gotten so far -- namely, by playing to the gullibility of self-proclaimed centrists, who want to show their "balance" by finding a conservative to praise. [ . . . ]

  Look, Ryan hasn't "crunched the numbers"; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

  So why does Saletan believe otherwise? Has he crunched the numbers himself? Of course not. What he's doing -- and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done -- is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he's a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman's, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.

  Also worth noting is Krugman's first reaction to Romney's pick of Paul Ryan for VP: Galt/Gekko 2012. Clever to put Ryan ahead of Romney there: reminds me of what happened the last time a vacuous but opportunistic headliner (Bush) picked a hardcore ideologist (Cheney) for his ticket mate.

• Paul Krugman: Culture of Fraud: One of many comments on Romney's "white paper on economic policy":

  The big story of the week among the dismal science set is the Romney campaign's white paper on economic policy, which represents a concerted effort by three economists -- Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and John Taylor -- to destroy their own reputations. (Yes, there was a fourth author, Kevin Hassett. But the co-author of Dow 36,000 doesn't exactly have a reputation to destroy).

  And when I talk about destroying reputations, I don't just mean saying things I disagree with. I mean flat-out, undeniable professional malpractice. It's one thing to make shaky or even demonstrably wrong arguments. It's something else to cite the work of other economists, claiming that it supports your position, when it does no such thing -- and don't take my word for it, listen to the protests of the cited economists.

  And by the way, this isn't obscure stuff. To take one example: the work of Mian and Sufi on household debt and the slump has been playing a big role in making the case for a demand-driven depression, which is exactly the kind of situation in which stimulus makes sense -- so you have to be completely out of it and/or unscrupulous to cite some of their work and claim that it refutes the case for stimulus. Or to take another example, which Brad DeLong picks up, anyone following the debate knows that the Baker et al paper claiming to show that uncertainty is holding back recovery clearly identifies the relevant uncertainty as arising from things like the GOP's brinksmanship over the debt ceiling -- not things like Obamacare. [ . . . ]

  Remember, Romney spent months castigating President Obama because he "apologizes for America" -- something Obama has never, in fact, actually done. Then he spent weeks declaring that Obama has denigrated small business by claiming that businessmen didn't actually build their own firms -- all based on a remark that was clearly about infrastructure.

  Meanwhile, Romney's tax plan is now a demonstrated fraud -- big tax cuts for the rich that he claims would be offset by closing loopholes, but the Tax Policy Center has demonstrated that the arithmetic can't possibly work. He turns out to have been dishonest about when he really left Bain. And on and on.

  So this is a campaign that's all about faking it -- fake claims about Obama, fake claims about policy, fake claims about Romney's personal history.

  Is it really surprising, then, that the economists who have decided to lend their names to the campaign have been caught up in this culture of fraud?

  A personal note: my own view of Romney, never high in the first place, was taken down a couple notches several weeks ago when I first saw the talking head credited as Romney's "chief economic advisor" pop up on TV: Glenn Hubbard. The nation has no shortage of conservative economists, so how unimaginative (not to mention lazy and ignorant) was it for Romney to settle on the same guy who advised Bush 12 years ago? Of course, if you're in the 0.1% stratospheric bubble Romney inhabits, you might think of the Bush years as some sort of golden age of prosperity, ane experience that virtually everyone else missed out on. (Mankiw, by the way, was Bush's second chief economist, after Hubbard.)

  Also on Romney's white paper, see: Andrew Leonard: Back to the Bush Future!, and for background, Kevin Hassett, World's Worst Economist, Works for Romney.

  Also, this bit by Brad DeLong (HHMT = Hassett, Hubbard, Mankiw, Taylor):

  HHMT: We are presently in the most anemic economic recovery in the memory of most Americans, with significant joblessness and long-term unemployment, as well as lost income and savings.

  WRONG: We are in the worst downturn, but we are not in the "most anemic" recovery -- the recovery of 2001-2004 was more anemic. HHMT should know: three of them held high federal office in the George W. Bush administration that managed that recovery, and back then all four attempted (uncovincingly, IMHO) to rebut claims from people (like me) that the early 2000s recovery was anemic and that more stimulative policies were then needed.

  Much more from DeLong on Hassett, including this Barry Ritholtz quote: "Call it the audacity of cluelessness." You can also read how Hassett "called for the USAF to attack France and Switzerland to stop CERN's Large hadron Collider from going into action."

• Andrew Leonard: Our Chick-Fil-A Economy:

  I blame Meat Mondays and Chick-Fil-A. Somewhere during the the past 10 to 15 years economic policy positions in the U.S. have become cultural values: Issues like tax cuts or deficits have become as toxic in the public discourse as abortion or gay marriage. Increasingly, people seem to choose their positions not because of what the "evidence" indicates, but because they are seeking ideological markers that fit snugly into a web of tribal partisan allegiances. To pick just one defining example: It doesn't matter whether one can prove that tax cuts are at a historic low, or have a disastrous effect on the deficit, or even how many economists point out that further cuts won't generate revenue to pay for themselves. Opposition to taxes defines what it means to be a conservative today, just as does opposition to abortion. You can't be a conservative who supports higher taxes -- that would make you a liberal. The hardening into concrete of this faith-based economic policy value system is a relatively recent phenomenon that has incurred disastrous fallout: The U.S. is now incapable of debate or compromise. We've chosen sides, and all-out war is all we've got left.

  A full explanation of the Meat Monday (as opposed to the socialist plot behind Meatless Mondays) follows, including a quote from Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA): "This is a reminder to USDA that it's supposed to advocate for American agriculture, not against it." Which makes Leonard's post Congress Hangs Farmers Out to Dry all the more interesting:

  Just how screwed up is the United States? A catastrophic drought has impelled the federal government to designate more than half the nation's counties as disaster areas. Yet even in the face of this historic disaster, Congress has proven itself incapable of passing legislation, large or small, to help the farmers affected by the drought.

  The big failure is Congress' inability to pass a new farm bill. The Senate did manage to rally the votes to get a comprehensive trillion-dollar five-year bill through its chamber, but House Republicans refused to go along because the bill includes too much funding for food stamps. [ . . . ]

  The Senate, however, is unlikely to take up the House's bill because it pays its $383 million price tag by gutting $650 million from two environmental conservation programs. The point is moot, anyway, because the Senate has also closed down for the rest of August. The drought will continue, but Washington can't be bothered.

  The dysfunction doesn't end there. Conservative activist groups also opposed the House bill, on the grounds that farmers and livestock owners should have known better.

  One area where we actually do have an overbloated welfare state is for farmers, but in the past that's been an agreeable compromise. In particular, food stamps help the poor, but they also help absorb the sector's overproduction, so both right and left benefit -- as long as they can get together and compromise. But we've lost not only the ability to tolerate something that is mutually beneficial, we've also lost sight of why it's important to have a government that actively meddles in the farm market: because the market, left to itself, is dysfunctional -- something that had become abundantly obvious in the years before the New Deal.

Links for further study:

• Joel Beinin: The Left, the Jews and Defenders of Israel: Reviews three books, two by US liberals who wish their love of Israel to be returned by something more liberal than the current right-wing junta (Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism, and Jeremy Ben-Ami, A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation), plus a book that sees anti-semitism lurking under every rock (especially the red ones: Robert Wistrich, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews and Israel). Focuses mostly on the latter, but picking over who said what when misses the point: from 1870-1945, every increase in anti-semitism in Europe was the result of the nationalist drive to war, scapegoating Jews as outside the nation, and raising the pitch of violence. (Dreyfus, you should recall, was blamed for sabotaging France in the Franco-Prussian War.) That nationalist drive, in turn, was driven by Europe's imperialist subjugation of the rest of the world -- a culture both for war and for racism. It isn't ironical that when some Jews sought to follow the path of European imperialism and nationalism, they recapitulated the drive to war and racism. The Zionists' most convenient scapegoats, of course, were the Arabs whose land and freedom they took, but Zionists have never lacked for Jews to blame as well: indeed, how is the whole "self-hating" characterization not an especially insidious form of anti-semitism? What is remarkable about Israel isn't its long slide into racism and militarism, but how long it was able to pass itself off as progressive and moral -- an illusion so alluring that Beinart and Ben-Ami are still under its spell.

  By the way, you can read selected quotes from Beinart's book here. Also quotes from Gershom Gorenberg: The Unmaking of Israel, which goes further into the undemocratic nature of Israel.

• Eric Foner: Freedom Deferred: Book review of Stephen Kantrowitz: More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin). I also noticed a 2003 article by Foner, Not All Freedom Is Made in America, which cited Louis Hartz, noting:

  Prevailing ideas of freedom in the United States, he noted, had become so rigid that Americans could no longer appreciate definitions of freedom, common in other countries, related to social justice and economic equality, "and hence are baffled by their use."

• Rosie Gray: How Management Killed "The Village Voice".

• Mark Oppenheimer: The Prodigal Frum: Useful background story, helps explain both why Frum was Bush's most eloquent defender and why he occasionally wanders off the reservation. Quotes Frum's brother Michael: "When you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, it's easy to say poor people don't deserve fuck all."

• William Julius Wilson: The Great Disparity: Review of two books, Timothy Noah's important The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It (Bloomsbury), and Charles Murray's hideous Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum).

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Mike Konczal: Mythological Job Creators:

  I'd argue that instead of self-reliance, the real idea the right is appealing to here is the idea of the "job creator." It goes beyond the person who gets by on his own without any help from the government or the public at large. It's the idea that the rich create all the value of the economy. [ . . . ]

  And, crucially, rather than being a myth or a fairy tale conservatives tell themselves, this idea of the "job creator" is the basis for current policy-making on the right. As Texas Governor Rick Perry put it during the primary, "America is not going to move forward until we remove restrictions of over-taxation, over-regulation and over-litigation on the job creators and free them so the jobs can be created." Charles Krauthammer argues on TV that we have a capital strike that's holding back the economy. John Boehner gives speeches where he argues "private-sector job creators in particular -- are rattled by what they've seen out of this town over the last few years. My worry is that for American job creators, all the uncertainty is turning to fear that this toxic environment for job creation is a permanent state. Job creators in America are essentially on strike."

  Speeches like these diagnose the problem, and then it turns into policy. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's policy plans for job creation operate under the assumption that those at the top of the economic pyramid are being held in check. His Day One proposals include "the elimination of Obama-era regulations that unduly burden the economy or job creation," "revers[ing] the executive orders issued by President Obama that tilt the playing field in favor of organized labor," cutting corporate taxes, eliminating the estate tax, and a variety of other policy designed to give the "job creators" a firmer hand in controlling the economy. His education policy includes putting private actors in charge of everything, especially putting commercial banks back into the sweet spot of collecting government-insured money and expanding how easy it is for for-profit colleges to qualify for federal money. Presumably he does this because the private is always superior to the public, regardless of how much the business model appears to be a vacuum for subsidies. His tax and social safety net policy focus on boosting the earnings of those at the top of the pyramid on the backs of those at the bottom.

  These policies include no hint that the economy is stuck due to inadequate demand or the weak purchasing power of the middle and working classes and the delinking of wages and productivity. There's no mention of the need to expand education and infrastructure to create the economy of the 21st century. There's absolutely no sense that the economy encourages the most innovative or entrepreneurial when there is full employment and a portable social safety net that provides economic security. And it is light-years away from the observation that society is a system of cooperation in which the value in the economy is created together.

  Also see Konczal's follow up: What Policy Agenda Follows From "You Didn't Build That?".

• Andrew Leonard: Dusty, Red-State Bailout: On federal crop insurance, a form of "safety net for climate change."

  Dust bowl, here we come? The worst drought in the United States in 50 years is still looking for more records to break. On Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack declared another 39 counties in eight states disaster areas, bringing the current total to 1,297 counties in 29 states -- or one out of every three counties in the country. According to the Drought Monitor, 61 percent of the continental United States is currently experiencing "moderate to exceptional drought." The situation is most extreme in Iowa and Illinois -- two states responsible for a third of the U.S. corn production.

  With each day that passes, the disaster is getting worse, and there's no imminent help to be expected from the weather gods -- the near-term forecast for much of the grain belt is "hot and dry." Corn and soybean prices are spiking to record heights, even the mighty Mississippi is drying up, and food prices are bound to rise, both in the United States and globally. Most troubling of all: If you are inclined to believe the consensus prediction of climate scientists, this is exactly the kind of extreme weather catastrophe that we can expect to see more of in the years ahead.

  Never mind the wishy-washy dilly-dallying that warns us not to attribute any specific climate event to rising temperatures. The circumstantial evidence alone is broadly compelling. The last 12 months, NOAA tells us, were the warmest in North America since detailed records started being kept in 1895. In June, 2,284 temperature records were broken in the U.S. -- and lo and behold, a historically massive drought hammered the country in July. The most recent climate science suggests that rising temperatures will increase the intensity and frequency of future extreme weather events. With desiccated cornfields sending farmers into fits of gloom across the nation, now might be a good time to wonder if we ought to be doing anything to prepare for even worse climate-induced agricultural mayhem in the future.

  Leonard explains that federal crop insurance was a New Deal invention, even though it's been continued mostly because it suits agribusiness. And he points out that "When Republican constituents need help, Republican senators are suddenly a lot friendlier to the welfare state." And he adds this:

  It's amusing, if a little bit unfair, to compare Roosevelt's comments to Wallace to a statement of profound helplessness made by the current secretary of agriculture to reporters on Wednesday, with respect to what the federal government could do for farmers above and beyond making access to emergency loans cheaper.

  I get on my knees everyday and I'm saying an extra prayer right now. If I had a rain prayer or a rain dance I could do, I would do it.

  As Gov. Rick Perry found out in Texas, prayer doesn't bring rain. Nor is simply hoping for the best or appealing to native spirits likely to decrease the number of extreme weather events in the future.

  What might help, however, is paying the proper attention to what science can tell us about how future risks might be mitigated. Put the political and ideological battle over the earth's temperature aside: For the companies that stand to lose the most from massive weather disasters -- the reinsurance companies that backstop regular insurance companies across the planet -- the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is a very big bottom line deal.

• Andrew Leonard: Romney's Tax Nightmare:

  It's bad enough that the son of a man who set the template for modern presidential candidates by releasing 12 years of his returns can't be persuaded to release more than one year (plus an estimate for 2011). But one would tend to expect that a man who has been doing nothing but run for president since 2006 would take pains not to engage in tax-avoidance strategies guaranteed to make him look bad politically.

  But one would be wrong. Because quite obviously, Romney screwed up. The only thing we can say for sure about his tax strategy is that he didn't manage his affairs as a serious presidential candidate should have. So maybe the question we should be asking instead of, What is he hiding? is, Why didn't he clean up his act years ago?

  And the answer to that question, I would argue, is that Romney is unable to escape who he truly is: a card-carrying member of the 1 percent who believes it is his right, nay, his duty, to minimize his taxes. Because there's certainly nothing unusual about a man in Romney's position (minus the presidential aspirations!) purchasing the best low taxes money can buy. It's standard behavior for Fortune 500 corporations -- just like the outsourcing and offshoring strategies that Bain (with or without Romney technically at the helm) invested in. In this world, an offshore Cayman account isn't the exotic scam that it seems to you and me -- it's a marker of wealth and position, like a membership in an elite country club, or horses in a stable, or a pair of Cadillacs in the garage. It's what you do! It's what's expected.

• Alex Pareene: Aaron Sorkin Versus Reality: One more for the "Hack List," including a critique of Sorkin's HBO series The Newsroom. I've seen two episodes. The second was uproarious for about 60 seconds as Jeff Daniels roasted three idiots on immigration -- I've always been a sucker for Oklahoma jokes -- but otherwise the worst hour of TV I've seen all year. Actually, The Veep isn't much funnier, but at least it tries to be a comedy, and occasionally succeeds. And I walked out after about 15 minutes of Political Animals, so there could be worse shows.

  Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals. He's a smug, condescending know-it-all who isn't as smart as he thinks he is. His feints toward open-mindedness are transparently phony, he mistakes his opinion for common sense, and he's preachy. Sorkin has spent years fueling the delusional self-regard of well-educated liberals. He might be more responsible than anyone else for the anti-democratic "everyone would agree with us if they weren't all so stupid" attitude of the contemporary progressive movement. And age is not improving him.

• Robin Wells: Mitt Romney's Offer of Government of Billionaires, for Billionaires, by Billionaires:

  As a very perceptive article in the ew York Magazine, Lisa Miller describes how new psychological research indicates that wealth erodes empathy with others. In the "Money-Empathy Gap", Miller cites one researcher who says that:

  "The rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes the more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes."

  Researchers found a consistent correlation between higher income, management responsibility and disagreeableness. One researcher interpreted her findings to imply that money makes people disinterested in the welfare of others. "It's not a bad analogy to think of them as a little autistic" says Kathleen Vos, a professor at the University of Minnesota.

  If this research is accurate (as it seems to be, replicated in various ways by several researches), the synergies between it, the increasing concentration of wealth and the Citizens United ruling, have striking implications for the future of the Republican party. As Newt Gingrich, the uber-southern politician, plaintively explained how he lost the Republican primary: "Romney had 16 billionaires. I had only one." The domination by the super-wealthy means that Republicans not only have no interest in the welfare of the rest of the 99.9%, they have no understanding of why this is a problem. The noblesse oblige days of the old money, such as the Bushes, the Kennedys and the Roosevelts are long gone, replaced by the new mega-money of hedge funds, corporate raiders and global industrialists.

  How else can one explain the allegiance of the Republican party to the profoundly unpopular Ryan tax plan, which would eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid while delivering more tax cuts to the rich? What is the future of a party in a democracy when the powers-that-be can no longer even understand, much less address, the welfare of the vast majority of its citizens?

Links for further study:

• Dean Baker: The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive: E-book, available as a big PDF file, or on Kindle or Nook. I've been meaning to get to this for some time now. Looks very important.

• Helena Cobban: West Point Military Historian Denies the Net Value of a Decade of War.

• George Scialabba: 2001 review of Charles Lindblom, The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It, regarded by Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber as must-read.

• Nicholas Shaxson: Where the Money Lives: Long, detailed piece on Romney's tax avoidance schemes. For example:

  One cannot properly understand Wall Street's size and power without appreciating the central role of offshore tax havens. There is absolutely no evidence that Bain has done anything illegal, but private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney's first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company's pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the "14 families" oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador's wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money -- "one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world," as a U.S. Customs official once put it.

  Bain Capital has said it did everything required by the U.S. government to check that the investors were not associated with unsavory interests. U.S. law doesn't require Bain to enforce the tax laws of its investors' home countries, but the presence of Swiss trustees, Bahamas trusts, and Panama corporations would raise red flags with any tax authority.

• Elbert Ventura: Christopher Hayes's Jeremiad Against the Ruling Class: Review of Hayes' new book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012, Crown).

Someone asked yesterday whether I'd be running a Weekend Roundup this week, and I replied "no, probably not." Didn't have anything stashed away, but since then I found a few things. Classification sysem is a little ricketty, as I wound up quoting from some of the links I had intended as future references, while leaving the top section dominated by Romney bashing. There will be a lot more of that before the season's out. And hopefully it will get nastier, because if anything these critics are too kind.

• Robert S Becker: Romney, Perfect Foil for a Republicrat Incumbent?:

  On paper, Obama fans should be ecstatic, taking on a tin-ear, gaffe-prone, flip-flopping, bromide-driven, predatory casino capitalist who fudges, lies, and distorts the destructive downsides to his great business triumphs. Here's a brash politician who shrinks from his single public office -- recoiling from his most celebrated success, the horror of state health reform. Throw in his massive spoils, flush with secret, offshore holdings and tax dodges, capped off with a personal reign of terror against that pet dog on vacation and one fellow student pinned down and victimized for just seeming different. Does this ultimate, fabricated Republican nominee not already pale next to the post-primary John McCain?

• Paul Krugman: Business Is Not Economics:

  Romney is running for president entirely on the basis of his business success. In a better world he could be running on the basis of his successful health reform, but now he's condemning that very achievement. In a better world he could actually be running on the basis of some kind of coherent policy ideas, but instead he's offering nothing but a mix of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the middle class so extreme that focus groups refuse to believe that this is his actual proposal.

  Krugman is wrong that his introductory quote from Obama is "exactly right": the notion that a businessman's one and only obligation is "to make sure you're maximizing returns for your investor" is one of the most pernicious myths to have arisen since 1980. Before, people who ran businesses lived in towns and states and countries that they felt some obligation to respect and protect. Moreover, most felt like they had moral obligations to their workers and customers even beyond what was proscribed by criminal law. When Obama describes the blind rapaciousness of business as "part of the American way" he is being unduly charitable and even ahistorical. He would be much better off defending Americans against the ways of such predators. (Of course, American history is full of predatory businessmen -- a who's who of the 19th century would find little but, notably Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller -- which is why from the Sherman Antitrust Act in the 1880s on numerous laws and regulations were enacted to limit the harm businessmen could do; moreover, steeply progressive taxes took away much of the incentive to larceny.)

• Alex Pareene: Mitt Romney Shakes Off Boos at NAACP:

  Romney also brought up his father, George Romney's, sterling civil rights record -- George Romney was an ardent anti-segregationist -- which, as usual, served to reinforce how cowardly and worthless Romney is compared to his father. George Romney took tough, unpopular stands on issues that sharply divided his party in the 1960s. He walked out on his party's presidential convention and called its nominee, Barry Goldwater, a racist. Goldwater's people won the battle for control of the party and their descendants are still in charge. One of Mitt Romney's first moves as governor of Massachusetts was to eliminate the state's Office of Affirmative Action with an executive order. He's no George Romney, and he has always known that if he wanted to be a Republican president, he couldn't ever try to be.

• Matt Taibbi: Romney's 'Free Stuff' Speech Is a New Low: First, at NAACP:

  He came out with the same half-assed, platitude-filled stump speech he usually doles out at campaign stops, literally the same exact speech, only he added quotes from Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Hooks, and Dr. King. As he told a mostly white audience in Montana the next night: "I gave them the same speech I am giving you." He seemed almost proud of the fact that he didn't put any extra thought into what he was going to say in his first big address to black America. If some speeches feel like a verbal embrace, Romney's felt like a stack of cardboard emptied from the bay of a dump truck. [ . . . ]

  Romney can't even be mean with any honesty. Even when he's pandering to viciousness, ignorance and racism, it comes across like a scaly calculation. A guy who feels like he has to take a dump on the N.A.A.C.P. in Houston in order to connect with frustrated white yahoos everywhere else is a guy who has absolutely no social instincts at all. Someone like Jesse Helms at least had a genuine emotional connection with his crazy-mean-stupid audiences. But Mitt Romney has to think his way to the lowest common denominator, which is somehow so much worse.

  Most of Taibbi's recent blog entries are on the LIBOR scandal, something I'm behind the learning curve on. But I did notice a piece on Thomas Friedman's New State of Grace: even when he's trying to be nice, it's hard to let Friedman totally off the hook.

Links I saved but never did much of anything with:

• Mike Konczal: How LIBOR Impacts Financial Models and Why the Scandal Matters: As I mentioned above, I'm behind the learning curve, but this looks like a good place to start catching up.

• Mike Konczal: 38 Million Missing Quits, the Battle to Quit and Replacing Government with a UBI: Three Points of Workplace Coercion: This links back to some Crooked Timber pieces that came up in my Yglesias post. The argument is that when companies become abusive of workers, the workers can quit, which provides a check on how abusive companies can really be. On the other hand, as Konczal's chart shows, workers have become even more reluctant to quit their jobs during the current depression. That means they're even less likely to push back against abuse by walking, and less pushback against the powerful usually means more abuse. Key quote:

  There are, roughly, 38.4 million quits that should have occurred that didn't since the economy went into recession. I'm assuming nobody believes that employers decided to become very nice all of a sudden in December 2007, but that instead the economy went into a deep recession. As a result of this recession, where the number of unemployed versus job openings has skyrocketed (because both the unemployed have increased and job openings shrunk), it is very difficult to find a job. This translates into declining labor share of income, as workers are left with little bargaining power in the Great Recession. If one assumes that labor management techniques are sticky, or that hysteresis creates the conditions where people who have lived through bad economic times have weaker bargaining power, this coercion is likely to cement and be long-lasting.

• Paul Krugman/Robin Wells: Getting Away With It: A review essay on Noam Scheiber: The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery, Thomas Frank: Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, and Thomas Byrne Edsall: The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics. On the latter's sense that "a brutish future stands before us":

  Yet most of the evidence Edsall advances for this thesis involves pointing to the consequences of the economic crisis -- which isn't at all a crisis of scarcity, but rather a crisis of bad financial and macroeconomic policy. Why, exactly, must there be a "death struggle" over resources when the US economy could, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, be producing an extra $900 billion worth of goods and services right now if it would only put unemployed workers and other unused resources back to work? Why must there be a bitter struggle over the budget when the US government, while admittedly running large deficits, remains able to borrow at the lowest interest rates in history?

  The truth is that the austerity Edsall emphasizes is more the result than the cause of our embittered politics. We have a depressed economy in large part because Republicans have blocked almost every Obama initiative designed to create jobs, even refusing to confirm Obama nominees to the board of the Federal Reserve. (MIT's Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate, was rejected as lacking sufficient qualifications.) We have a huge battle over deficits, not because deficits actually pose an immediate problem, but because conservatives have found deficit hysteria a useful way to attack social programs.

• Ryan Lizza: The Obama Memos: long piece toward an insider history of Obama's political strategy, including the undersized stimulus, the efforts to assuage the powers-that-be on everything from health care to banking reform, the president's cynical centrism and general lack of principles, his opponents' even direr lack of scruples, etc. One quote, just a taste:

  Most of Obama's conservative dinner companions from his evening at George Will's home now describe him and his Administration in the most caricatured terms. Will declared Obama a "floundering naïf" and someone advancing "lemon socialism." Charles Krauthammer called Obama "sanctimonious, demagogic, self-righteous, and arrogant." Lawrence Kudlow described him as presiding over a government of "crony capitalism at its worst." Michael Barone called it "Gangster Government." Rich Lowry said that Obama is "the whiniest president ever." Peggy Noonan, correcting some interpretations of the President by her fellow-conservatives, wrote, "He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist. He is a loser."

  Many of Obama's liberal allies have been disillusioned, too. When Steve Jobs last met the President, in February, 2011, he was most annoyed by Obama's pessimism -- he seemed to dismiss every idea Jobs proffered. "The president is very smart," Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. "But he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done. It infuriates me."

• Ryan Lizza: The Second Term: The most depressing piece of political reporting I've seen in years, partly because it's all hypothetical -- that second term isn't assured, especially with billions of dollars of right-wing media dominance in the way -- but mostly because Obama's ambitions are so lame. Nor does the history of second terms past offer any encouragement. Clinton's second term is remembered for impeachment and banking deregulation. Bush's for Katrina and Lehman Bros. Reagan's for Iran-Contra. Even Eisenhower had a miserable second term. Roosevelt decided to balance the budget and instead restarted the Great Depression. Obama has thus far failed to do anything remotely Rooseveltian, but his fiscal conservatism could well lead to a comparable disaster.

• Diane Ravitch: In Mitt Romney's Classroom: Behind a paywall, but all you really need to know:

  The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican education ideas from the past thirty years, namely, subsidizing parents who want to send their child to a private or religious school; encouraging the private sector to operate schools; putting commercial banks in charge of the federal student loan program; holding teachers and schools accountable for students' test scores; and lowering entrance requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of Romney's advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush administration and several prominent conservative academics, among them former secretary of education Rod Paige, former deputy secretary of education Bill Hansen, and John Chubb and Paul Peterson, both advocates of school choice.

  Unlike George W. Bush, who had to negotiate with a Democratic Congress to pass No Child Left Behind, Romney feels no need to compromise on anything. He needs to prove to the Republican Party's base -- especially evangelicals -- that he really is conservative. With this plan, he succeeds.

  Real conservatives have become so disdainful of liberal ideas -- like science, the arts, democracy -- that they're increasingly willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater. (Come to think of it, that's pretty much their attitude toward government too.) Education used to enjoy conservative support because it was seen as an important tool in socializing the lower classes, but these days all the rich want to do is to escape society, to enjoy their own private enclaves and to hell with everyone else.

• Corey Robin: Justice Scalia: American Nietzsche: Explores the whole "originalism" con. I've always found it amusing that Scalia alone seems to be able to intuit exactly what was running through the minds of a group of politicians as disparate as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and that somehow they always wound up thinking exactly what Scalia thinks at the moment. Article has links to previous installments, and a Part III appeared later. By the way, I think a simpler explanation of Scalia's behavior is that he is just profoundly corrupt. See, e.g., Mike Konczal's discussion of Scalia's Christmas Tree dissent in the ACA case.

And, in non-political news:

• Francis Davis: A Sometime Thing: the history of Porgy and Bess.

• Andrew Leonard: Thank God for Taxes: on having his house burn down. (Not entirely non-political, given that Mitt Romney thinks we can't afford to waste so much money on firefighters.)

• Robert Christgau, Das Racist, and Something About Youth Culture: Robert Christgau goes home to Queens.

I more or less gave up on reading Matthew Yglesias's blog shortly before he moved to Slate, and have rarely looked at him since. Don't know whether I will much in the future, either, but I thought I'd give him another try, and scrolled through a month's posts -- he does produce a lot of material. And I pulled out the most interesting quotes below -- generally (but not always) things I agreed with. Would have pulled out a different set if I tried to critique him: I'm not convinced by his knee-jerk efforts to find market mechanisms (or at least tax manipulations) to solve all problems, and he has an anti-left streak that often slips into mere contrarianism. And I'm not sure what I think of his urbanism -- obviously something that means much more to him than to me.

Reversed the order, so the old stuff is first. Not sure if it's worth digging back deeper, but I was getting diminishing returns -- a lot of his posts have a pretty limited shelf life.

• Private Equity Is Unpopular [06-08]:

  One of the most shocking moments of media out-of-touchness that I've seen in my lifetime was the spasm of pundits acting as if Barack Obama's criticisms of Mitt Romney's business record were likely to prompt some kind of backlash from the public. Obviously a rich man who makes decisions that ruin some families lives in order to get even richer is engaging in behavior that the median voter is going to find disreputable.

• Low-Wage Labor and Its Complements [06-08]:

  Speaking with Fareed Zakaria, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach argues for severe curbs on immigration and in the process ends up revealing a pretty shocking level of ignorance about the agricultural economy for a Kansas politician. Adam Ozimek shows that Kobach seems completely unaware of the extent to which the American farm sector is operating in an international context.

  But I think Kobach's fundamental problem -- as is often the case -- is a failure to recognize that there are different factors of production and they complement each other. A farm is a place where labor, machines, fertilizer, and land all come together to produce some grains, fruit, or vegetables. To simply assume that if you cut off the supply of cheap immigrant labor will raise wages ignores the very real possibility that simply less land will be cultivated. Even if you ignore the international dimensions of the issue, Americans don't have a fixed totally price-insensitive appetite for foodstuffs. If you restrict the supply of agricultural labor you'll have less agricultural output and fewer acres in cultivation. [ . . . ]

  No factor of production is an island, and creating scarcities of one factor damages the others.

• Job-Creation Is the Fed's Job [06-12]:

  My former boss Michael Tomasky has a column up arguing that Obama should offer a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts in exchange for Republicans agreeing to spending-side stimulus. His logic, I think, is fairly impeccable. Republicans will probably turn this down, which would be advantageous to the White House in the politics of taxation. And if they say yes, it's a win for the White House because both sides of the deal will pack some short-term job creation punch.

  Where I think it all breaks down is that once again we have liberals ignoring monetary policy. The big risk that Obama faces with his American Jobs Act is that in the scheme of things even the rosier estimates don't have it massively accelerating the recovery. What's more, as I write in my latest column there's a real risk that anything that did have huge positive impact in the labor market would get crushed by the Federal Reserve:

  Seems to me like a dumb proposal all around. The Bush tax cuts are so weighted to the rich that they offer no practical stimulus. Get rid of them and the long-term balance sheet, which is what has hung over the entire austerity drive, clears up. Ideally you'd like to do more than that, but blowing the 2010 election cost Obama that option. Now all he can do is campaign against the Republicans for blocking every constructive plan he puts forth, and that campaign is weakened by cutting deals with the devil. As for the point about the Fed, Obama screwed himself by reappointing Bush's chairman (Bernanke) instead of getting his own guy on the job (even if it was only Larry Summers): single dumbest mistake he made (unless it was escalating Afghanistan, or failing to repeal and restructure the Bush tax cuts at the start, when he had the numbers; oh well, there are so many).

• Obama on the Economy [06-14]:

  If you wanted a concise version of the speech it's this. Obama thinks there are a lot of worthwhile things the public sector does -- give old people health insurance and pensions, build transportation infrastructure, finance K-12 schools, subsidize college tuition -- and that in order to pay for those things we should raise taxes on high-income people. Romney thinks that higher taxes on high-income people people would be really bad for economic growth and that Obama is overestimating the value of these public sector undertakings so we should cut them instead.

  Unfortunately, far and away the least plausible portions of the speech were the ones where Obama tried to explain how re-electing him would lead to his vision becoming law. He's quite persuasive on the point that an Obama re-election would block Romney from doing various perhaps-objectionable things. But the idea that a second term for Obama will change the fact that 41 Republican Senators can and will filibuster any Obama ideas that they don't like (i.e., basically all of them) doesn't add up.

• The Affordable Care Act and the American Disconnect [06-18]:

  The Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act (aka "ObamaCare") will, for better or for worse, take a large number of Americans who currently can't afford health insurance and either give them insurance or else give them money to buy insurance with. Obviously, if you're a person like that there's a lot to like about this law.

  But Washington, D.C., political and media circles don't involve many people like that. Or even many people who know any people like that. So even though this town contains plenty of folks who perfectly sincerely want to help low-income Americans get health insurance (the law wouldn't have happened otherwise), it's still seen in political journalism as primarily a political story about "winners" and "losers" in various congressional, media, legal, and electoral arenas. But for millions of currently uninsured Americans, it's a real-world story about a potential financial windfall or fiasco depending on how the Supreme Court rules. Alec MacGillis ventured out in the real world to talk to impacted people, and the story is both emotionally touching and politically telling.

  The key punchline is that, basically, the folks with the most to gain from the new law are barely -- if at all -- aware that it even exists.

• The Forgotten Flip-Flop: 2003 Medicare Reform [06-19]:

  The Republican version of a Medicare benefit seemed to me to be a tactical retreat. Democrats had a much more progressive bill to achieve this purpose, so I thought the GOP had ginned up an alternative to muddy the waters but fundamentally had no particular interest in a very expensive addition to Medicare. But they did. It was a hard lift whipping the votes in the House to pass the thing since many conservatives objected, but they got it done.

  And in an odd coda, the bill's passage was integral to the birth of the Affordable Care Act. That's because the deficit-financed subsidies to private insurers inside Medicare became offsetting spending that Democrats could cut in order to make Obamacare deficit-neutral. If the Bush administration had never created that program in the first place, Democrats wouldn't have been able to cut it later on and use those savings to finance their own health care bill. They'd have either had to write a much stingier program or else include substantially more in the way of tax hikes. And yet even though the 2003 Medicare bill was controversial at the time, it seems to have basically been eliminated from memory. Now all good Republicans are against spending money on anything, but nobody proposes to repeal the basic benefit. It's as if the whole thing never happened.

• America's Fiscal Union in Action [06-25]: with map of "Federal taxes minus spending, 1990-2009, as % of 2009 GDP":

  Two key points I would make about this in relation to the eurozone are that these transfers are both really big and extremely persistent. Mississippi and Alabama have lagged behind the rest of the nation in economic development for a very long time, and I see no particular reason to believe they'll ever catch up. Residents of economically backward and politically dysfunctional states can and do exercise their right of exit rather than sticking around and solving problems, and the availability of large and persistent fiscal transfers means that local political elites focus their energies on rent-seeking rather than development. Other places such as Florida and Arizona develop regional economic specialization as low-wage high-temperature retirement zones living off incomes earned in more dynamic economies elsewhere.

• The Affordable Care Act vs. the Dentists' Cartel [06-26]:

  One of the tragedies of the Affordable Care Act debate is that for all the pixels spilled over it, there are still dozens and dozens of provisions that have barely been discussed. I, for example, am more interested than your average person in the issue of how dentists extract regulatory rents from patients and dental hygenists through rules that make it illegal for hygenists to offer teeth-cleaning services to people unless they're employed by a dentist. And yet until Jon Chait reminded me yesterday, I'd completely forgotten that one element of the Affordable Care Act tackles this issue, prompting furious backlash from the dental lobby. [ . . . ]

  One problem with reforming dental regulation to help patients is that the dentists are a concentrated interest that's more able to lobby effectively than are the disparate interests of patients.

• Globalization and Labor Unions [06-27]:

  What's probably true is that not globalization but policy that has the United States running a perpetual trade deficit has been bad for labor unions by depressing manufacturing employment. That speaks not to the level of trade, but to the structure of the American tax code and to the nature of American currency policy.

  I'll add that the US trade deficit is one of the main ways we transfer money to the rich: the dollars that working people pay for foreign-produced products return to the US to bid up the price of assets (with much of that filtering through the banking industry, and sticking to greedy fingers along the way).

• John Roberts Saved America From Socialized Health Insurance [06-29]:

  I'm not a mind reader, but I think I have a more convincing explanation of why John Roberts ultimately voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act than these theories that rely on a bankshot "long game" to alter Commerce Clause jurisprudence. My theory is that he embraced the individual mandate for the same reason that Mitt Romney embraced it as governor of Massachusetts and Bob Dole embraced it as minority leader of the U.S. Senate -- it's a reasonable mechanism for ensuring universal coverage without creating a government-run single purchaser of health care services.

  A lot of attention has been paid recently to the fact that once President Obama came to embrace that position, the conservative movement rapidly abandoned its own alternative to single payer. But the plaintiffs in the health care cases weren't just asking the court to veto the law, they were asking the Supreme Court to declare the middle ground alternative to be now and forever impermissable.

  If that had happened, liberals would have had no choice but to start campaigning for Medicare for all.

  Of course, Roberts got nothing but grief for his efforts. The most striking thing about the right wasn't the hypocrisy -- it was, after all, their plan -- but their rabid sense of entitlement, how convinced they always are that they should be able to dictate whatever policy madness takes over their fevered brains.

• Opening New Patent Offices Won't Fix America's Broken System [07-02]:

  It's hardly the fault of the career staff (as opposed to, say, judges and Congress), but this is incredibly lame. The presumption here is that the problem with the patent system in the United States is that we're somehow not efficient enough at transforming patent applications into patents. The actual problem is that the underlying presupposition that it helps the economy to engage in profligate granting of government-enforced monopolies.

• Power Tools: The Libraries of the Future [07-03]:

  It's in the nature of books that the vast majority of books any given person owns will not be in use at any given time. Under the circumstances, establishing vast municipal stockpiles of books for people to borrow is much more efficient than relying on a series of household stockpiles. But over time digital technology is eroding this rationale (the day has not yet come when every individual is equipped with a smartphone or tablet capable of reading e-books but it's quite foreseeable), and it makes more sense to shift away from stockpiling of books and toward things like the Oakland Public Library's tool lending program. I have a hammer, several scredrivers, a power drill, a hacksaw, and a bunch of other tools that I'm almost never using and households all over DC are in this very same position. The most successful libraries we be the ones who spend less time thinking "how do I extend my traditional reading-and-learning mission into the digital age" and more time thinking "what sort of club goods are being underprovided thanks to transaction costs, enforcement problems, and information issues."

• We Have Too Many Patents, Not Too Few [07-06]: quotes Richard Posner: "It's not clear that we really need patents in most industries."

  I don't think it's clear that we need patents for pharmaceuticals either, but we do need something. Proposals to reform pharma patents typically involve some alternative mechanism for financing innovation. I would tax pills and use the money to finance prizes. But the point is that in many industries you could just scrap the patents and that's your solution right there.

  It's particularly good to see Posner on this bandwagon because to an extent the conventional wisdom on the patent situation in digital industries has been cleaving along a "geeks vs lawyers" axis of polarization. Posner is a very famous legal scholar, and should help get the geek point of view much-needed exposure in law schools.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week (or two):

• Tim Dickinson: Right-Wing Billionaires Behind Mitt Romney: Profiles of: William Koch, Harold Simmons, Bob Perry, Jim Davis, Richard Marriott and Bill Marriott Jr., Edward Conard, Frank VanderSloot, Steven Lund, Julian Robertson Jr., John Paulson, Paul Singer, Robert Mercer, Kenneth Griffin, L. Francis Rooney III, Steven Webster.

  The undisputed master of Super PAC money is Mitt Romney. In the primary season alone, Romney's rich friends invested $52 million in his Super PAC, Restore Our Future -- a number that's expected to more than double in the coming months. This unprecedented infusion of money from America's monied elites underscores the radical transformation of the Republican Party, which has made defending the interests of 0.0001 percent the basis of its entire platform. "Money buys power," the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman observed recently, "and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties." In short, the political polarization and gridlock in Washington are a direct result of the GOP's capitulation to Big Money.

  That capitulation is evident in Romney's campaign. Most of the megadonors backing his candidacy are elderly billionaires: Their median age is 66, and their median wealth is $1 billion. Each is looking for a payoff that will benefit his business interests, and they will all profit from Romney's pledge to eliminate inheritance taxes, extend the Bush tax cuts for the superwealthy -- and then slash the top tax rate by another 20 percent. Romney has firmly joined the ranks of the economic nutcases who spout the lie of trickle-down economics. "Support from billionaires has always been the main thing keeping those charlatans and cranks in business," Krugman noted. "And now the same people effectively own a whole political party."

  Steve Coll's Private Empire has various numbers on how much and to whom ExxonMobil's PAC and managers have contributed. Looking at those numbers, my reaction was, "how quaint." The oil giant has never had problems getting access and getting people to do their bidding, and in the past that's come awfully cheap. In some ways the campaign finance limits worked for them: they could make token contributions, and their size would do all the rest. Now, the bidding to buy politicians is turning into an arms race, where the price of recognition -- and true insider status -- is going up and up.

• Ed Kilgore: The Big Dog Whistle:

  It's worth remembering in this connection that much as conservatives want to blame Obama and "socialism" for economic problems, they haven't displayed very convincing empathy for the actual sufferers. You may recall that in 2008, when complaining about unemployment wasn't a weapon that could be used against Democrats, Mike Huckabee became persona non grata among many on the Right for daring suggest the economy wasn't absolutely ideal. Even after Obama took office, many conservatives had trouble suppressing their grim satisfaction that the housing and financial collapse had punished all those irresponsible homebuyers, and many spoke of the recession as being one of those healthy "corrections" that would wring excessive borrowing out of the system. Even now, when Republicans aren't justifying austerity measures as necessary to economic growth, they're lauding them as a moral tonic for the poor. It's obvious they'd support exactly the same policies no matter what was happening to the economy; after all, they always have.

  Fortunately for Romney, a lot of non-economic itches can be scratched by incessantly claiming that Big Government caused the recession or is impeding the recovery. Maybe you support "entitlement reform" because you are furious at the looters who are living at the expense of the hard-earned tax dollars of the virtuously well-off. Mitt won't often "go there," but he's for "entitlement reform" on ostensibly economic grounds, so you're on his team. Maybe you hate "ObamaCare" because you think it's encouraging the Second Holocaust of legalized abortion, or enabling young women to have sex, or robbing seniors of the Medicare benefits they earned to give health care coverage to shiftless minorities. Mitt won't talk about that, but he's promised to kill ObamaCare as fast as he can, so that's enough. Maybe you are upset about environmentalism because you view it as a front for neo-pagan assaults on the God-given dominion over the earth you are supposed to enjoy. Mitt wouldn't put it that way. But he will argue for scrapping environmental regulations tout court to free up the Great American Job-Creating Machine and bring down gas prices. And maybe you hate public education because you view "government schools" as satanic indoctrination centers for secularism, and colleges as places where elitist professors mock traditional values and let young women have sex. Mitt won't come right out and talk about any of that, either, but he frowns on federal education programs because we just can't afford them. [ . . . ]

  But in a certain sense, the entire Romney campaign is one big dog whistle aimed at appealing to persuadable voters on the single issue of the economy, while letting the restive "base" hear all sorts of other things involving cultural resentments and the desire to return to the good old days before the New Deal and the 60s began to ruin the Founders' design and defy the Creator's moral code.

• Ed Kilgore: The New Mouth of the South: Herman Cain to replace Neal Boortz on the latter's long-running radio show:

  You'd probably have to be from the Atlanta area to understand the long reign of snarky error Boortz has conducted for 42 years on the local, regional and national air waves. He was doing political talk when Rush Limbaugh was still a music DJ and sportscaster, the very prototype of someone who read Ayn Rand as a teenager and never recovered. For decades, I tried to convince my father that listening to Boortz -- who invariably enraged him -- was bad for his health.

• Mike Konczal: A Visual Guide to the Confliting Theories About How to Fix the Economy: one quick comment (I'll probably return to this sometime), is that all three "demand-based solutions" are featured in Paul Krugman's End This Depression Now!, although Krugman favors fiscal policy because it's more direct and less encumbered (as monetary policy is by that pesky zero lower bound); he also all debunks all three "supply-based explanations" -- to put it mildly (they are all pretty ridiculous). Also note that the latter aren't called "solutions": they don't actually propose fixing anything, not that they would work anyway.

  Demand vs. Supply focus is roughly the same as left vs. right. Demand is about whether consumers have enough money (and confidence, which is to say money) to buy things. The most straightforward way to get more demand is to give people more money. Supply is about whether business have enough capacity, or lacking that access to capital to create more capacity. It should be pretty obvious that lack of capacity isn't the current problem, and isn't likely to be a problem for a long, long time. But the right likes supply-side support because it lavishes attention on the rich, and the right hates demand-side stimulus it helps the poor (i.e., the unemployed and everyone working for less than a living wage).

• Paul Krugman: Wisconsin:

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. Obviously I'm not happy with the result; not just out of political sympathies, but because all the recent political trends have been rewarding the side that caused the very crisis from which it is now benefiting, not to mention politicians who have been wrong about everything since the crisis hit.

  I'm even more unhappy with how it happened, with national Democrats basically sitting on their hands while conservatives poured resources into the race.

• Paul Krugman: The Urge to Punish:

  What does make sense, maybe, is a two-part explanation. First, the ECB is unwilling to admit that its past policy, especially its past rate hikes, were a mistake. Second -- and this goes deeper -- I suspect that we're seeing the old Schumpeter "work of depressions" mentality, the notion that all the suffering going on somehow serves a necessary purpose and that it would be wrong to mitigate that suffering even slightly.

  This doctrine has an undeniable emotional appeal to people who are themselves comfortable. It's also completely crazy given everything we've learned about economics these past 80 years. But these are times of madness, dressed in good suits.

• Andrew Leonard: GOP to Modernity: Stop:

  The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can't handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual information-gathering effort that's part of the U.S. Census. Every year, a randomized sample of 3 million Americans is surveyed for data on "demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics." In one form or another, the U.S. government has been carrying out similar surveys since 1850 -- the current version is the fourth major iteration.

  Most sensible people consider the ACS to be extremely useful, the kind of thing that government is really well equipped to carry out. That is not, or at least did not used to be, a partisan statement. [ . . . ]

  Even the Wall Street Journal is appalled -- although the lead sentence of its editorial criticizing the funding cuts required some remarkable calisthenics before reaching the point of disapproval.

  With the contempt of the Washington establishment raining down on House Republicans for voting on principle, every now and then the GOP does something that feeds the otherwise false narrative of political extremism.

  Marvelous! In one sentence, the Journal's editorial writer manages to deny, not once, but twice, the self-evident fact that the current crop of House Republicans occupies the nethermost regions of right-wing extremism, while at the same time admitting that, yeah, well, in this one case they are indeed bonkers. [ . . . ]

  The sponsor of the House measure, the freshman Florida Republican Daniel Webster, claims that ACS questions are too "intrusive" and "the very picture of what's wrong in D.C." He seems to be projecting. The very picture of what's wrong with D.C. is exquisitely captured by daily demonstration that one of our leading political parties is dedicated to the proposition that the less we know about what is going on in our economy or on our planet, the better. If science tells us that one of the consequences of human activity is an overheated planet, then the answer is to defund climate research. If data gathered by the ACS gives us a better understanding of where poverty may be growing as a result of economic policies put into place over the past few decades, best to just to close our eyes and ignore it.

• Bill McKibben: How You Subsidize the Energy Giants to Wreck the Planet: From Tom Engelhardt's introduction (since I've been talking about this sort of thing):

  Just in case you're running for national office, here are a few basic stats to orient you when you hit Washington (thanks to the invaluable Open Secrets website of the Center for Responsive Politics). In 2011, the oil and gas industries ponied up more than $148 million to lobby Congress and federal agencies of various sorts. The top four lobbying firms in the business were ConocoPhillips ($20.5 million), Royal Dutch Shell ($14.7 million), Exxon Mobil ($12.7 million), and Chevron ($9.5 million).

  And note that those figures don't include campaign contributions, although I can't imagine why corporate money flowing to candidates or their PACs isn't considered "lobbying." When it comes to such donations, the industry has given a total of $238.7 million to candidates and parties since 1990, 75% of it to Republicans. In 2011-2012, Exxon ($992,573) and -- I'm sure this won't shock you -- Koch Industries ($872,912) led the oil and gas list.

  This certainly understates what the Kochs do in their role as self-appointed concerned private citizens: through their various front groups, they reportedly spent over a million dollars just in Wisconsin's recall election.

• MJ Rosenberg: Israel's Worst Enemy:

  Minister of Defense Ehud Barak is now calling for unilateral withdrawal from those parts of the West Bank he doesn't feel like occupying forever and is making clear that he opposes negotiating with Iran in favor of unilateral Israeli action.

  By now it should be clear to the entire world: the Netanyahu-Barak government has no interest in what the United Nations rules, what international law says, what its only ally (and the source of billions of dollars of aid each year) wants. The Netanyahu-Barak government behaves like outlaws in the most literal sense of the word.

  It will keep the land it wants and bomb whoever it wants and to hell with everyone else.

  As David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister liked to say, "It doesn't matter what the goyim think. What matters is what the Jews do." It was a dangerous worldview in Ben Gurion's day and it is infinitely more dangerous now.

  The Israeli government's contempt for international opinion, for its only ally and for half of its own population is a recipe for suicide. Even the United States, the world's only superpower, does not live by the law of the jungle (well, not all the time). But for a country of six or seven million surrounded by tens of millions of people who are infuriatedby its behavior to begin with, it's insane.

  Barak tried his "unilateral withdrawal" scheme once before, in 2000, from Lebanon. It was a recipe for another war, which happened in 2006, to everyone's chagrin (although Hezbollah tried their best to put on a happy face). Sharon, who may have been the architect behind Barak, tried it again in Gaza, where the results (so far) have been two more wars, plus near-continual skirmishes.

  Also, you have to wonder why when Israel withdraws from an area, they remain opposed to allow people in that area to get on with their lives. Israel has no settlements in Gaza. Israel is never going to annex Gaza and give its residents Israeli citizenship. So why not allow the UN to organize an independent Palestinian state in Gaza? The usual excuse is that Gaza is one part of a bigger problem that should be negotiated definitively, but there are other parts Israel is nowhere near facing, especially Jerusalem. So why not do Gaza first, and let that start to normalize? At least that would allow Gazans to travel and trade with the rest of the world, to start to build a real economy. It would give them something to do besides blaming Israel for their inability to do anything. And why not do the same for the parts of the West Bank Barak is willing to write off? We should be skeptical that Israel would only let go of tiny isolated parcels that would not be viable economically, but why not take what you can get and try to make that work? Start working like this and even if the conflict is never be properly resolved, it may just fade into insignificance.

• Thomas Schaller: Can Liberals Cure Stupidity? Read the piece for examples of such stupidity, but you can probably think of all those and more yourself.

  Even if misinformation does not uniformly advantage the right, ignorance has a clear ideological tilt. As the American Prospect's Paul Waldman has argued, conservatives not only have a vested interest in creating or at least perpetuating falsehoods about government, but they doubly benefit from the fact that many Americans who at some point in their lives relied upon government programs believe they never did.

  Given that the public believes they are less dependent on a government that is actually less wasteful than they believe it to be, and that what the public doesn't know may or may not hurt them, this much is clear: Their ignorance surely makes political life much harder for liberals.

  Although liberals have lately taken to flattering themselves as being "reality-based," as appreciating science and reason, they have their own blind spots. They also don't communicate well, often on purpose: Obama in particular seems fascinated with the Thaler-Sunstein "nudge" theories, like the one where you lower people's taxes but don't tell them about it, so they'll think they're doing better and spend more money. They don't seem capable of taking credit when they make things work normally, but also they don't get screaming mad when they don't. You get the sense that Obama would like to get reelected, because he rather likes the job, but if he loses he has no sense that it will mean the end of the republic, even though everything the Republicans have proposed, not to mention their actual track records under Reagan and the Bushes, promise just that.

  Maybe the answer has less to do with figuring out how to make Americans smarter, and more to do with dramatically demonstrating who are the enemies of the people are, who their friends are, and how tenaciously the latter intend to fight off the former. Those who do want to understand the wonkish details, of course, should be welcomed. But you don't have to understand macroeconomics to get that the current depression was caused by greedy bankers and their bought political allies, and that at least part of a proper response to what they did is to take back the money they stole and help restore the people they screwed. How hard does this have to be?

Further study: some interesting links I'll just note for future reference:

• Larry Bartels: More on the Politics of the Super-Rich.
• Ellen Cantarow: The New Eco-Devastation in Rural America: or, How Rural America Got Fracked.
• Barbara Ehrenreich: Looting the Lives of the Poor.
• Tom Engelhardt: The Smog of War: or, The Afghan Syndrome, or, A Titleholder for Pure, Long-Term Futility.
• Tom Engelhardt: The Road to Amnesia: or, How to Forget on Memorial Day.
• Tom Engelhardt: Assassin-in-Chief.
• Glenn Greenwald: Federal Court Enjoins NDAA.
• Christopher Hayes: Why Elites Fail.
• Chris Hellman/Mattea Kramer: How Much Does Washington Spend on "Defense"? $931 billion, but defense against what?
• Andrew Leonard: Romney Trashes His Dad: you know, the former HUD Secretary.
• Andrew Leonard: Obama's GI Bill Fight.
• Andrew Leonard: Tuition Is Too Damn High.
• Andrew Leonard: How Bain Capital Made Us Fat: investing in fast food chains, much to chew on here, even if you're likely to spit it out in the end.
• Jill Lepore: The Lost Amendment, and Battleground America: on guns.
• Bill McKibben: Climate-Change Deniers Have Done Their Job Well.
• Paul Pillar: What's Good for Exxon Is Not So Good for America.
• Jacqueline Rose: A Rumbling of Things Unknown: on Marilyn Monroe.
• David Sirota: America's True Tax Rate.
• Matt Taibbi: How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform.
• Jeffrey Toobin: Money Unlimited: How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision. Also see Andrew Leonard.

One thing you will note in the above is that I've started looking at Salon again. That had been impossible since their redesign, which meant nearly instant death for my browser. I've started running a Firefox add-on called NoScript, which grabs each website's Javascript by the throat and keeps it from running, until I say so. Salon, in particular, is much more civil without any at all. Other websites are unusable without Javascript enabled, and I'm slowly going through the adjustments of whitelisting some of them -- only real problem so far has been with Facebook, which got out of hand once I let it run. (So I'm both less likely to post there, and less likely to see other posts.) Haven't tried MSN yet -- been tempted to comment on occasion, but can't and have thus far let that go.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Glenn Greenwald: The American Character: Starts by complimenting a Fareed Zakaria piece (not something one does all that often -- as Greenwald puts it, "a reliable and pleasant purveyor of conventional 'centrist' wisdom").

  What Zakaria is describing here, of course, is a permanent, sprawling Surveillance State, one that has been inexorably built over the course of six decades but which has massively accelerated under two different dministrations in the post-9/11 era and which has no end in sight. Quite the opposite.

  One of the reasons I loathe Election Years -- which actually endures for 18 months -- is because the vast bulk of the most consequential political issues are completely ignored by virtue of enjoying full bipartisan consensus. The transformation of America into a full-scale Surveillance State is, on every level, indescribably significant; as Zakaria put it, it "now touches every aspect of American life." Its never-ending growth results in a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens to the private sector corporations which operate it; it empowers unaccountable public and private sector factions which surveil and store massive amounts of private information about the citizenry; it is conducted entirely in the dark and thus further eliminates notions of transparency and accountability; and it destroys any remnant of personal privacy, the indispensable attribute which fosters and enables creativity, dissent and challenges to orthodoxy and has thus long been viewed as the most central right, the one that anchors all the others.

• Paul Krugman: Win Some, Lose Some:

  Is it possible that I have misjudged Mitt Romney?

  My take has always been that he's a smart guy who also happens to be both ambitious and completely amoral; he decided that his career can best be advanced by pandering to the crazies of the right, and will say anything to that end.

  More and more, however, he has been coming out with statements suggesting that he is, in fact, a dangerous fool. [ . . . .] I'm beginning to suspect that we can -- that outside of whatever he did at Bain, Romney really is ignorant as well as uncaring.

  Case in point was JPMorgan Chase's recent $2 billion trading loss -- "no biggie," according to Romney.

Andrew Leonard: Sabotage: The New GOP Plan: May 4 post (finally catching up), on Paul Ryan's Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act of 2012, designed to avoid the war cuts mandated by last summer's debt ceiling deal:

But a close look at the insidious nature of proposed cuts is stil revealing, even in the midst of all the posturing. Ever since the midterm elections of 2010, House Republicans have been honing a new approach to government. Forget about old school "starve the beast" politics, the simple-minded belief that lowering taxes and depriving the government of revenue will ultimately topple the social welfare state. The new school tactic is sabotage. Break the government. Pour sugar into the gas tank. Steal the spark plugs.

Ryan's new package of cuts takes aim at the heart of the two biggest pieces of legislation Democrats passed during the Obama administration, bank reform and healthcare reform. The details are wonky, but the goal is clear. By defunding crucial mechanisms designed to ensure that the laws actually work as intended, Republicans achieve two goals simultaneously: They avoid the anathema of cuts to defense spending, while rendering the legislation that they hate so much not just toothless, but incapacitated.

Machiavelli would applaud. Republicans may have lost the 2008 presidential election, but their insurgency-style guerrilla tactics ever since have ensured that the war is far from over. In 2012, the politics of sabotage rule Washington.

• Andrew Leonard: Kansas' Nasty New Tax Plan: Rare for someone writing on either of the coasts to notice what's happening in Kansas, but this much is true:

  Kansas is special. In most American states in which Republicans control the state legislature, the GOP busies itself with redistricting efforts designed to minimize the chances of Democratic electoral success. But in Kansas, the fight is over new districts cooked up to get rid of moderate Republicans. Similarly, nearly all Republican-dominated states are working hard to limit the ability of women to get abortions, but only in Kansas will you hear a state legislator compare rape to a flat tire.

  Something is clearly the matter with Kansas, so it may be it's not the wisest idea to go overboard extrapolating from the state's behavior to potential developments on the national scene. On the other hand, if you're wondering what complete Republican control of the U.S. government at the federal level would look like, Kansas does offer some clues.

  Take taxes, for example. Last week, Kansas House and Senate negotiators agreed on a new tax plan that will sharply cut income taxes for wealthy state residents while at the same time raising taxes on the poor. The result, predictably, will be a shortfall in state revenue that will undoubtedly force additional cuts to state services. [ . . . ]

  The details are different, but the basic outline is similar to the ideas codified in Paul Ryan's Mitt Romney-endorsed budget: We'll pay for tax cuts for the wealthy by cutting services that help the poor. Romney might not be as conservative as Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, but when the bills passed by a GOP-controlled Legislature start arriving on his desk, his response will be identical: He'll sign it.

• Andrew Leonard: Corporate Criminals Gone Wild: Interview with Charles Ferguson, who produced the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job (worth seeing, maybe more than once), and who has a new book coming out: Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America (May 22, Crown Business). All worth reading, and he makes sure to spread the blame among Clinton and Obama, but you have to conclude that the Bush administration's nonchallance about regulating anything and enforcing any laws on business is what made the atmosphere so conducive to wrongdoing. Here's a sample quote from Ferguson:

  But you know, when I was in academia and also when I was running a software company I had a fair amount of contact with portions of the financial sector, investment banking industry, and the venture capital sector. And certainly they were already pretty rapacious and pretty politically conservative. But they would never then have said and done the things that they say and do now. I recently was at a dinner in New York City and one of the people there was a very, very successful man who is on the borderline between venture capital and private equity. And this guy went into an extended rant about how he was at a disadvantage because he had to pay 15 percent capital gains taxes. When I was first dealing with venture capitalists in a significant way, the capital gains tax rate was 28 percent, and nobody was complaining. Then they got them reduced to 20 under Clinton, and then later 15 under Bush. Plus, they got a rollover provision so if they took the proceeds of a venture capital investment and rolled it over into a new venture capital investment it was tax-free. At that point, we've reached nirvana, what more could there be?

  But now we're in this environment where this guy was loudly and aggressively complaining that he has to pay 15 percent to the government. And if that's where you're at, then of course you are going to complain about Dodd-Frank. You are going to complain about everything. If you have already got 96 percent of what you want, why not take the remaining 4? That's where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it's really dangerous for the country.

• Andrew Leonard: Romney's Solar Flip-Flop:

  Of course, back in 2007, Romney also believed that climate change was man-made and supported a global cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Now he says "we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet" and "I do not believe in cap-and-trade." So it shouldn't be all that much of a shock that Romney is giving the cold shoulder to solar power. If there's one thing we know about Mitt, he never allows his past positions on an issue to weigh him down.

• Alex Pareene: David Brooks, "Structuralist":

  David Brooks is everything that's wrong with elite opinion in America. The president reads him and takes him seriously. That is why the opinions of venal faux "reasonable" clowns like Brooks matter. Brooks today sums up the new argument for not actually doing anything to alleviate worldwide unnecessary hardship: The problem is "structural," not "cyclical"! [ . . . ]

  This is Brooks' conclusion:

  But you can only mask structural problems for so long. The whole thing has gone kablooey. The current model, in which we try to compensate for structural economic weakness with tax cuts and an unsustainable welfare state, simply cannot last. The old model is broken. The jig is up.

  It's so sad, but everyone will now just have to accept that social democracy is an impossibility. We have learned that "the old economic and welfare state model is unsustainable," so shut up about your unemployment benefits running out and there being no jobs still.

  Actually, if Brooks had just stopped at "it's a structural problem" he'd be right, but he missed what the structural problem is. It isn't that there's some sort of mismatch between jobs and skills -- there always is a little disconnect there but if employers wanted certain skills they could easily train for them. The real problem is that there's no way to reverse the decline of wages except by changing the rules of the labor market -- e.g., by forcing wages up, reducing hours, etc.

• Alex Pareene: America's Idiot Rich: Based on "multiple media accounts of billionaire thought and an entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine, but especially the account of one Thomas Conard, one of Mitt Romney's confreres at Bain Capital. He has a book coming out arguing that massive wealth disparity "is an unalloyed Good Thing," something he'd like to see doubled (and has contributed over a million dollars to Romney's campaign to help bring about):

  Conard also detests charitable giving and has developed a statistical method for finding a spouse, because he is a sociopath. Because he is very wealthy, he is very used to his ideas being taken seriously -- even economists offer him (qualified) praise. He is utterly convinced that his book will convince every serious person that wealthy finance industry titans not only deserve their wealth, but make society a better place for all. He has basically taken what is a gut feeling among his class and turned it into a philosophy and an argument.

• Alex Pareene: The Book of Mitt: Long post, an excerpt from Pareene's e-book The Rude Guide to Mitt, where Pareene is rude to Mitt's Mormonism. A taste:

  The Mormonism of the 19th century bears little resemblance to Mitt Romney's Mormonism. Mitt Romney's Mormonism is the impossibly cheery "Donny and Marie" variety, not the armed apocalyptic homesteading cult member variety. Tolstoy -- referring to the scrappy/crazy 19th century version -- called Mormonism "the American religion," and he decidedly did not mean that as a compliment. But the modern church still deserves the title. It's the Coca-Cola religion, with a brand that denotes a sort of upbeat corporate Americanness, considered cheesy by elites but undeniably popular in pockets of the heartland and abroad. [ . . . ]

  The modern Mormon aesthetic is deeply indebted to Walt Disney, but somehow even more square. Their grand temples look like variations on Cinderella's castle. Their religious music sounds like Oscar-nominated Alan Menken-penned hymns. Their annual pageants -- I highly recommend attending the Hill Cumorah pageant in upstate New York, in which formative stories from the Book of Mormon are acted out for an audience of thousands just beside the actual hill where Smith found the plates -- are spectacular, involving massive casts and lavish costumes and thrilling theatrical effects, paired with the cheesiest imaginable dialogue and storytelling, like a vintage Disneyland animatronic "Ben-Hur." (The sound system was easily the best I've ever heard at a large outdoor performance. Each line of risible King James pastiche narration was crystal clear from a hundred yards out.)

  It's very easy to make fun of a religion that literally takes communion in the form of Wonder bread, but the appeal of all that mandated clean-cut decency is also pretty easy to figure out. It pairs well, for example, with motivational business leadership books. In France, church leaders encouraged a young Mitt Romney to study "Think and Grow Rich," the landmark self-help book written in 1937 by motivational guru Napoleon Hill. Romney had his fellow missionaries read it, and told them to apply the lessons to their mission work. [ . . . ]

  This sort of "think yourself rich" bullshit, with its promise of a foolproof path to success made up of basic lessons in persistence and confidence combined with pseudo-scientific hokum, is a great philosophical fit with Mormonism, which teaches that men are on a spiritual progression toward Godhood. And the fantastic thing about Mormonism is that you can apply the early 20th century version of "The Secret" -- want something very, very badly and you will make it real with thought powers! -- toward the amassing of material riches both here on Earth and after death, because Mormon doctrine says the believer will continue working and procreating in the afterlife. That may sound tedious and frankly hellish to you and me (though you do eventually get your own planet!), but this exaggerated re-conception of the Protestant work ethic is an essential tenet of Mormon culture and dogma. It helps that Mormonism is decidedly less squicky about rich people than traditional Christianity. (Again, Tolstoy really nailed it with that "American religion" thing.)

  Another excerpt is Rich. Weird. Romney. Pareene also has an earlier post the touchy subject of making fun of someone else's religion -- The Coming War on Mormon Jokes. Needless to say, the problem with Romney is not his religion; it's his politics. How nutty (or treacherous even) a religion seems has more to do with your personal distance from it than anything else, and other people are likely to think the same about you -- even if you're an atheist and are convinced you've gotten rid of all that nuttiness and treachery. On the other hand, people with right or left politics can be found attached to virtually every religion (including none) -- I'm inclined to argue that fact shows the irrelevance of religion, especially compared to more predictive traits like class, but I do find -- and G.W. Bush certainly reinforced this point -- the gloss that religion gives to bad politics to be especially toxic.

  It occurs to me that the practice of presidents (and presidential candidates) wearing their piety on their sleeve only dates back to Jimmy Carter. Kennedy actively campaigned against his religion. LBJ was so confused or indifferent he wound up attending Catholic masses on occasion, after starting out in a church which I know (all too well) regarded such as utter nonsense. And he was followed by the war criminal Nixon, nominally a Quaker.

• Charles P Pierce: The Rise of Deb Fischer and the Grifter Conservative: Republican Senate primary in Nebraska, which Fischer wound up winning.

  A Fischer win, of course, would be an act of cannibalism on a par with the nomination of Richard Mourdock in Indiana, and a further indication that there is very little room within the party in which Willard Romney can "pivot to the center." On the state level, the party is a tight, hard crystal of pure crazy. Given the right combination of circumstances, any Republican can fashion any other Republican as being of "the Left" or "the Establishment." If done successfully, this can render the targeted candidate unelectable in a primary. In this case, she would demonstrate that a candidate endorsed by the Club For Growth (Stenberg) and another one backed by both the Tea Party Express and Citizens United (Bruning) can be rendered insufficiently conservative. This leaves the state party on the ideological scale somewhere to the right of an Uzi. It's also a great indication that "conservatism" is more performance than principle, more intellectual style than actual substance, and more dogwhistling than ideology.

One reason I've missed many weaks doing this, and have much more than usual this time, is Salon's redesign. It features some Javascript bugs (or are they features?) that literally kill my browser, so I stopped looking at it. But most of the above links are from Salon: I scraped them up by using a second computer, some newer software, plus I turned Javascript off. I had started using this setup to harvest data for my metacritic file. Although Javascript does some useful things, designers have been grossly abusing it ever since it came out, and that's turned into the rule (plus other nuissances like Flash) for music zines. It's a long, sore slog to collect that data, and turning the baubles off is a first step. (Of course, what I really need are more automated tools, although actually looking at the review pages does provide some useful information gathering.) Anyhow, this proved to be useful for cracking Salon. Reminds me especially how invaluable Andrew Leonard is.

While I'm on a roll, I could expend this considerably, but will hold the rest for next week. Means indeed there will be a next week.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Henry Farrell: Happy Krauthammer Day:

  It's that time of the year again -- it's been five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months since Charles Krauthammer told us

  Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We've had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven't found any, we will have a credibility problem.

  I'll confess that I was a bit disappointed last week, when Charles Krauthammer didn't make the cut for Atrios' shortlist for Wanker of the Decade (he did get a nod-in-his-direction though; Fred Hiatt's nod was intended to honor the Washington Post's editorial page as a whole). But having reflected a bit, I think this was the right call. To be a really first rate wanker, you have to be at least partially oblivious to what you are. I've always had the sense that Krauthammer knows exactly what he is -- nasty and thoroughly mendacious. Not a wanker then, but rather worse than a wanker. He's whatever it is that Karl Rove is (when rugose and squamous entities drag out their tortured forms from under rocks, to caper and desport themselves beneath the gibbous moon, they console themselves at least they're not working for American Crossroads).

  By the way, next year will be the tenth anniversary. Still writing for the Washington Post, still syndicated, still on the talk shows.

• Ed Kilgore: Journey to the Center of Ted Nugent's Mind:

  In a nugget from last weekend's National Rifle Association annual meeting, Ted Nugent offered this warning:

  "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year," Nugent said, according to a video posted on YouTube by the NRA. "If you can't go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil America hated administration, I don't even know what you're made out of."

  Don't know if this means we need to put Ted on suicide watch come November 7 if things don't turn out his way, or just let the police know he's threatening to do a crime so he can get himself incarcerated. But it's a fine reflection of the wingnut mind at its deepest that he seems to think us godless socialists care enough about his ravings to persecute him.

  TPM reports that the NRA has scrubbed Nugent's video from its website, after Romney distanced himself from it. TPM also reports that Bishop of Peoria Compares Obama and Contraception Mandates to Hitler and Stalin. There are plenty of sane reasons one might be unhappy with Obama, but his opponents keep resorting to insane ones -- suggesting they may be insane themselves.

• Paul Krugman: The Drywall Chronicles:

  So Mitt Romney gave a speech at a closed Ohio drywall factory, which he tried to use as a symbol of Obama's economic failure. The symbolism was perfect -- not as an illustration of Obama's failure, but as an illustration of just how stupid Romney thinks we are.

  Even regular reporters noticed that the factory in question closed under, yes, George W. Bush -- a fact Romney failed to mention, although his campaign scrambled to cover for him afterwards.

  What I didn't see mentioned was the point that this was a drywall factory -- that is, a supplier of a product largely used in home construction. It's one thing to say that Obama should have revived the economy as a whole; it's another to say that he should have brought back the housing bubble!

  Krugman also provides a chart comparing job losses during the first 3 years + 3 months of the Bush and Obama administrations:

  

  If you bother doing the math, you'll also notice that Bush's job losses were cushioned by growth in public sector jobs, whereas Obama's total was made much worse by public sector job cuts. Bush started out with a much milder recession, and his main remedies were tax cuts for the superrich and the fiscal stimulus of big post-9/11 military deficits, which, uh, didn't work very well. (From 2004-07 the economy under Bush did grow, but almost exclusively from the unsustainable housing bubble.) Krugman brings this up because Romney's proposed solutions are pretty much the same as Bush's: tax cuts for the rich, and more wars.

  I'm beginning to think that Obama's big mistake wasn't that his stimulus package was too small (although it was) but that he didn't end the Bush tax cuts as soon as he entered office (perhaps keeping some of the bottom end cuts, but not necessarily the "middle class" ones he wanted to keep). Had he done so, he wouldn't have been nearly as vulnerable to complaints about his deficits -- they would pretty much vanish when the economy picked up -- which would have given him more leeway to spend in constructive fashion, or at least more resolve to fight back against debilitating cuts.

• John Quiggin: The Coming Boom in Inherited Wealth: Inequality is up, even more so -- 93% of additional income in the US in 2010 went to the top 1% -- but some argue that "those at the top were more likely to earn than inherit their riches." Depends on what you mean by "earn" but Quiggin adds:

  The fact that currently wealthy Americans have not, in general, inherited their wealth follows logically from the fact that, in their parents' generation, there weren't comparable accumulations of wealth to be bequeathed. More generally, starting from the position of relatively (to earlier periods and to the current one) equal income and wealth that prevailed between about 1950 and 1980, growing inequality of income must precede growing inequality of wealth, since wealth is simply the cumulative excess of income over consumption (and US high-income earners have not been notable for restraint as regards consumption).

  So, given highly unequal incomes, and social immobility, we can expect inheritance to play a much bigger role in explaining inequality for the generations now entering adulthood than for the current recipients of high incomes. That will include direct transfers of wealth as well as the effects of increasingly unequal access to education, early job opportunities and home ownership.

  One more thing to emphasize is that over the last few decades, the right-wing movement was almost exclusively financed by people who were born to wealth -- the Kochs, Olins, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Coors, and so forth. Same for major figures in the movement, from Bill Buckley to Bill Kristol, and for that matter G.W. Bush. Aside from the Kochs, most of these figures are far from the top of the list, but their politics starts from their aristocratic sense of entitlement. Back in the more equitable 1950s, before greed became something to brag about, it seemed more likely that at least some of the fortunates might redirect themselves to public service -- the Kennedys, even the occasional Rockefeller and Harriman. Less so now, as the concentration of wealth occurs alongside a diminished sense of social responsibility.

• Adele Stan: Koch Coughs Up Another $Mil for Pro-Walker Group: The group is called The Republican Governors Association, which has bought up $3 million worth of advertising to defend the recalled Wisconsin governor. One reason this caught my eye is that Koch Industries got a nice headline in the Wichita Eagle last week for their generous donation to help out with tornado recovery in south Wichita: they donated $100,000. Koch's headquarters are in Wichita, but they're on the north side of town and weren't affected by the tornado.

Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Ari Berman: The .000063% Election:

  At a time when it's become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation's political conversation -- drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% -- electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .000063%. Those are the 196 donors who have provided nearly 80% of the individual contributions raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each. [ . . . ]

  Otherwise the super PACs on both sides of the aisle are financed by the 1% of the 1%. Romney's Restore Our Future Super PAC, founded by the general counsel of his 2008 campaign, has led the herd, raising $30 million, 98% from donors who gave $25,000 or more. Ten million dollars came from just 10 donors who gave $1 million each. These included three hedge-fund managers and Houston Republican Bob Perry, the main funder behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, whose scurrilous ads did such an effective job of destroying John Kerry's electoral prospects. Sixty-five percent of the funds that poured into Romney's super PAC in the second half of 2011 came from the finance, insurance and real estate sector, otherwise known as the people who brought you the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. [ . . . ]

  In his book Oligarchy, political scientist Jeffrey Winters refers to the disproportionately wealthy and influential actors in the political system as the "Income Defense Industry." If you want to know how the moneyed class, who prospered during the Bush and Clinton years, found a way to kill or water down nearly everything it objected to in the Obama years, look no further than the grip of the 1% of the 1% on our political system.

  This simple fact explains why hedge-fund managers pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, or why the U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a single-payer universal healthcare system, or why the planet continues to warm at an unprecedented pace while we do nothing to combat global warming. Money usually buys elections and, whoever is elected, it almost always buys influence.

  In the 2010 election, the 1% of the 1% accounted for 25% of all campaign-related donations, totaling $774 million dollars, and 80% of all donations to the Democratic and Republican parties, the highest percentage since 1990. In congressional races in 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the candidate who spent the most money won 85% of House races and 83% of Senate races.

  The media loves an underdog story, but nowadays the underdog is ever less likely to win. Given the cost of running campaigns and the overwhelming premium on outspending your opponent, it's no surprise that nearly half the members of Congress are millionaires, and the median net worth of a U.S. Senator is $2.56 million.

  Paul Krugman, citing Timothy Noah, has a variant post on the above that he calls Crankocracy:

  What I would note, however, is that to a large extent we've been living in Noah's crankocracy for decades. There have been limits on the ability of rich crackpots to intervene directly in elections, but not on their ability to finance think tanks, provide sinecures for deferential politicians, and so on. And the prevalence of crankocracy explains a lot about our current state of affairs.

  For what the money of rich cranks does is ensure that bad ideas never go away -- indeed, they can gain strength even as they fail in practice again and again. The notion that wonderful things happen if you cut taxes on the rich and terrible things happen if you raise them has a stronger hold than ever on the GOP, despite the experience of the Clinton tax hike and the Bush tax cut. Climate denialism gains force even as the planet warms. And so on.

  And this isn't just a matter of self-interest on the part of rich cranks; even they will suffer if the economy remains depressed for decades, or the planet becomes unliveable. But those are fact they'd rather not believe in, and their resources ensure that lots of people share their blinkers.

• Chris Bertram: The new enclosures as a threat to freedom: Britain's Tory/LibDem government wants to privatize parts of the road network. Bertram lists similar examples, and more are in store, as the potential for the private sector to profit by squeezing the public is much greater than anything they could honestly invent:

  No doubt our "libertarian" friends approve of this shift, but those who don't have an ideologically distorted view of liberty should be alarmed. First, the extension of chargeable private space means that the range of actions permitted to individuals who lack money is reduced. Lack of money reduces your purely negative freedom,[1] as anyone who tries to perform actions encroaching on the state-enforced private property of others will quickly discover. Second -- and this point should hold even for those silly enough to reject the view that private property restricts the freedom of those who have less of it -- the increase in privatized public space means that we are increasingly subject to the arbitrary will of private owners concerning what we can and can't do. Rights of assembly? Rights of protest? Rights to do things as innocuous as take a photograph? All of those things are now restricted or prohibited on formerly public land across the United Kingdom or subject to the permission of the new private owner. The interest of those who endorse a republican conception of freedom is thereby engaged, as is those of liberal persuasion who think a list of basic liberties should be protected: less public space, less capacity to exercise those basic liberties. The proposed privatization of the roads is just an extension of this. [ . . . ]

  fn1. For an argument to this effect and a demolition of the idea that lack of money confers lack of ability rather than unfreedom, see G.A. Cohen, Freedom and Money (PDF)

• Ed Kilgore: Trayvon Martin Case: Roost, Meet Chicken: Laura had been talking about this case for several days before I read anything, and this was my first introduction -- now more than a week old, but pace Stalin, I tend to take statistics much more seriously than I do individual cases.

  I hadn't paid much attention to the Trayvon Martin case until yesterday, but I can now understand why it is generating so much outrage. For all that it resembles a hundred old-school "police brutality" cases where a young black male met a bad end in a murky encounters with white men in authority, it's actually something different: a lesson in what might happen when a society decides to deliberately supplement its police forces by heavily arming citizens and hoping they act responsibly.

  Sometimes they don't, and sometimes, moreover, if you pass laws designed to give people the benefit of doubt when they are defending themselves you can give vigilantes a license to hunt and kill. The more we learn about the Martin case, the more it looks like that is exactly what happened, with the injustice compounded by the tendency of the actual authorities in Florida to take the side of a gun-toting neighborhood ethnic cleanser with an attitude and an arrest record against an unarmed black teenager brandishing a bag of Skittles and just trying to get out of harm's way.

  For one thing, I wasn't aware of those "stand your ground" laws (even though Kansas, sure 'nuff, has one). One commenter added, quoting a Tampa Bay editorial:

  Since the law went into effect, reports of justifiable homicides have tripled, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. It has been used to absolve violence resulting from road rage, barroom arguments and even a gang gunfight. In 2008, two gangs in Tallahassee got into a shootout where a 15-year-old boy was killed. The charges were dismissed by a judge citing the "stand your ground" law.

  OK, that starts to sound serious, like statistics.

• Ed Kilgore: The "What Then" Debate: "Now that there is a reasonable possibility that the Supreme Court will strike down as unconstitutional the individual mandate that represents the glue holding the Affordable Care Act together," Kilgore checks up on some opinion-takers: James Carville, Robert Reich, David Frum -- who has the best quote:

  "Repeal" may excite a Republican primary electorate that doesn't need to worry about health insurance because it's overwhelmingly over 65 and happily enjoying its government-mandated and taxpayer-subsidized single-payer Medicare system. But the general-election electorate doesn't have the benefit of government medicine. It relies on the collapsing system of employer-directed care. It's frightened, and it wants answers.

  Kilgore sums up:

  Since conservatives cannot go back to what they were proposing just a few years ago -- you know, a competitive system of private insurance options complemented by an individual purchasing mandate and federal regulation of coverage denials and rates -- they may have problems responding to this scenario.

  Sure, Republicans have their highly misleading pet rock proposals to hold down premiums -- interstate insurance sales and "tort reform" -- and a shriveled booby prize of an approach to extend health insurance to people who are routinely denied coverage -- state-run "high-risk pools" that typically offer crappy coverage at astronomical rates. But all the focus on ObamaCare since 2009 has obscured the fact that most people who are not on Medicare pretty much do hate the health care status quo ante, and will expect both parties to propose new reforms.

Before we get to the usual scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week, two front page items in the Wichita Eagle today:

• Joby Warrick, Carol Morello, Krissah Thompson: Suspect and family were stressed by deployments: Another background piece on Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who massacred 16 Afghans the other day. More heart-warming stuff about what a fine soldier he was, great family guy, etc.; also financial strains: an underwater mortgage, passed up for a promotion; also his wounds, plus seeing a fellow soldier blown up just a few days before. Also this:

  Army comrades described him as a model soldier who was polite, professional and exceptionally cool under fire. A student of Middle Eastern history and customs, he often admonished younger GIs to treat noncombatants with courtesy and respect.

  "Some guys had a pretty negative attitude, but Bales wasn't like that at all," said Capt. Chris Alexander, who served with Bales in Iraq. "He said there was no need to be a jerk. Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet if you need to."

  The first two parts of his formula are advisible for anyone dealing with the public. However, it's hard to overstate how peculiar the third is, but then there's nothing else quite like being an American soldier occupying a foreign land.

• Roy Wenzl: Jobs require technology; video games can help: Starts out:

  Kaitlin Albright likes to kill computerized people in video games. She is a native of Caldwell, Kan., a little town on the Oklahoma state line; she is a 19-year-old freshman at Wichita State University. She has killed people in video games since she was 2 years old.

  She is one of those kids that baffled parents complain about, because she's addicted (her own word) to these video games. She estimates that she has spent more than 10,000 hours of her life killing people or doing other fun things in games like Call of Duty, or the Assassin's Creed, or other games. Ten thousand hours, by the way, translates into 250 work weeks, or 5 years of work.

  "Killing people is fun," she says.

  When I read she's studying to become a neurosurgeon, my gut reaction was that'll give her more opportunities to kill people. Actually, that's better than becoming a drone pilot, which is the most direct application of her skills and mindset. She's pretty much the flipside to Bales: he was trained to be desensitized so he could kill people more efficiently, whereas the issue never arose for her -- the people she learned to kill so routinely never were real, so she could easily joke about it. The argument that video games makes people smarter has been made several times (e.g., Steven Johnson: Everything Bad Is Good for You; Tom Bissell: Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter). I suspect that is precisely wrong as well: I don't doubt that kids who have them can sharpen their smarts playing video games, but I don't believe that one leads to the other. (I am pretty sure that my own vast exposure to television as a child contributed much to what I know, but I don't find much evidence of that in other people.)

And on to the usual links:

• Gail Collins: Dogging Mitt Romney: Background on the story that won't go away (v. also the New Yorker cover stage right):

  I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but Mitt Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter on the roof of the car.

  Seamus, the dog-on-the-roof, has become a kind of political icon. You cannot go anywhere without running into him. There are Seamus T-shirts and endless Web sites. This week, the story was a New Yorker cover, with Rick Santorum playing the role of the Irish setter. [ . . . ]

  At some point -- possibly in response to the excitement about being passed by tractor-trailers while floating like a furry maraschino cherry on top of the car, Seamus developed diarrhea. And Romney, who had designated all the acceptable rest stops before beginning the trip, was forced to make an unscheduled trip to a gas station. Where he kept the family in the car while he hosed down the station wagon and the dog, then returned to the highway.

  "It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management," [Neil] Swidey wrote.

  People, does any of this sound appealing? Elect Mitt Romney and he will take the nation on the road to the future. Some of us will be stuck on the roof. The rest of us will be inside singing camp songs and waiting for the day when the master plan lets us stop to visit the bathroom. Plus, anybody who screws up on the way to the future gets the hose.

• Mike Konczal: The 1% Had a Fantastic 2010: Good chance the 2011 numbers will be even more pronounced.

  Well we finally have the estimated data for 2010 by income percentile, and it turns out that the top 1% had a fantastic year. The data is in the World Top Income Database, as well as Emmanuel Saez's updated Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (as well as the excel spreadsheet on his webpage). Timothy Noah has a first set of responses here. The takeaway quote from Saez should be: "The top 1% captured 93% of the income gains in the first year of recovery."

  This helps explain why the Republicans (and some Democrats) are so happy to do nothing more that might promote recovery: the economy for their favorite constituency has already recovered, and in relative terms was better than ever. Noah's takeaway line: "This is an economy that was in no hurry to share what little prosperity there was with the bottom 99 percent." More from Konczal:

  The Great Recession dropped income for the bottom 99% by 11.6%, completely wiping out the meager gains of the Bush years. And crucially, while 2010 was a year of continued stagnation for the economy as a whole, the 1% began to show strong gains, even when you exclude capital gains.

  As you can image, this has increased the percentage of the economic pie that the top 1% takes home. As Saez notes, "excluding realized capital gains, the top decile share in 2010 is equal to 46.3%, higher than in 2007." [ . . . ]

  It's also worth mentioning that, pre-Recession, inequality hadn't been that high since the Great Depression, and we are looking to rapidly return to that state. It's important to remember that a series of choices were made during the New Deal to react to runaway inequality, including changes to progressive taxation, financial regulation, monetary policy, labor unionization, and the provisioning of public goods and guaranteed social insurance. A battle will be fought over the next decade -- it's been fought for the past three years -- on all these fronts. The subsequent resolution will determine how broadly-shared prosperity is going forward and whether or economy will continue to be as unstable as it has been.

  So far, that battle has almost always gone to the 1%, in large part because Republicans have been able to obstruct virtually all changes (and in lesser part because Democrats especially fond of the 1%, like Obama, haven't challenged the gross inequities of the current system). But unless significant changes are made, there will be no recovery -- much less advance -- for the 99%. There's just not enough opportunity for growth when 93% of it is slurped up by the 1%.

  You might also look at the Dow Jones chart in Paul Krugman: Taking Stock. This would be even more revealing if you plotted jobs alongside it: a number that has remained relatively stagnant while stock prices have nearly doubled.

• Paul Krugman: Ignorance Is Strength:

  One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the "high school movement" made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education. And after World War II, public support, including the G.I. Bill and a huge expansion of public universities, helped large numbers of Americans to get college degrees.

  But now one of our two major political parties has taken a hard right turn against education, or at least against education that working Americans can afford. Remarkably, this new hostility to education is shared by the social conservative and economic conservative wings of the Republican coalition, now embodied in the persons of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. [ . . . ]

  It's not hard to see what's driving Mr. Santorum's wing of the party. His specific claim that college attendance undermines faith is, it turns out, false. But he's right to feel that our higher education system isn't friendly ground for current conservative ideology. And it's not just liberal-arts professors: among scientists, self-identified Democrats outnumber self-identified Republicans nine to one.

  I guess Mr. Santorum would see this as evidence of a liberal conspiracy. Others might suggest that scientists find it hard to support a party in which denial of climate change has become a political litmus test, and denial of the theory of evolution is well on its way to similar status.

  But what about people like Mr. Romney? Don't they have a stake in America's future economic success, which is endangered by the crusade against education? Maybe not as much as you think.

  After all, over the past 30 years, there has been a stunning disconnect between huge income gains at the top and the struggles of ordinary workers. You can make the case that the self-interest of America's elite is best served by making sure that this disconnect continues, which means keeping taxes on high incomes low at all costs, never mind the consequences in terms of poor infrastructure and an undertrained work force.

  And if underfunding public education leaves many children of the less affluent shut out from upward mobility, well, did you really believe that stuff about creating equality of opportunity?

  So whenever you hear Republicans say that they are the party of traditional values, bear in mind that they have actually made a radical break with America's tradition of valuing education. And they have made this break because they believe that what you don't know can't hurt them.

  Probably too low for Krugman's radar, but Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has a signature program to shift funding from college prep classes to vocational training. The disturbing thing about this attack on higher education is that it reflects a significant hardening of the class strata in America. For most of my lifetime college has been touted as the path by which ambitious low- and middle-class progeny can move up in the world, and this was seen as an essential attribute of America (you know, "the land of opportunity"). Now, this Republican shift is saying: forget wasting your time on education, you're doomed to stay within the class you were born into. Meanwhile, the children of the rich go to elite colleges not to study but to be with their own kind, consolidating their class consciousness.

• Rick Perlstein: Why Conservatives Are Still Crazy After All These Years:

  It suddenly feels like conservatism has gotten crazier than ever.

  Republican debate audiences cheer executions and boo an active-duty soldier because he is gay. Politicians pledge allegiance to Rush Limbaugh, a pill-popping lunatic who recently offered "feminazis" a deal: "If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." Thousands of "Oath Keepers" -- "Police & Military Against the New World Order" -- swear to disobey the illegal orders certain to come down the pike once Barack Obama institutes martial law. One major Republican presidential candidate talks up indentured servitude -- and another proposes turning schoolchildren into janitors. Only 12 percent of Mississippi Republicans believe Barack Obama is a Christian. Arizona Republicans push a bill to allow bosses to fire female employees for using birth control.

  And so on and so forth, unto whatever wacky new wingnuttism just flashed over the wires today.

  But are right-wingers scarier now than in the past? They certainly seem stranger and fiercer. I'd argue, however, that they've been this crazy for a long time. Over the last sixty years or so, I see far more continuities than discontinuities in what the rightward twenty or thirty percent of Americans believe about the world. The crazy things they believed and wanted were obscured by their lack of power, but they were always there -- if you knew where to look. What's changed is that loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP.

• David Remnick: Threatened: A few years ago Remnick was a reliable apologist for Israel who could always find a silver lining no matter what Israel did, so this is an interesting turnaround:

  A visitor to Tel Aviv and other freethinking precincts might overlook the reactionary currents in the country, but poll after poll reveals that many younger Israelis are losing touch with the liberal, democratic principles of the state. Many of them did their military duty in the Occupied Territories; some learned to despise the Occupation they saw firsthand, but others learned to accept the official narratives justifying what they were made to do.

  Last year, a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that fifty-one per cent of Israelis believed that people "should be prohibited from harshly criticizing the State of Israel in public." Netanyahu encourages the notion that any such criticism is the work of enemies. Even the country's staunchest ally, the United States, is not above suspicion. The current Administration has coöperated with Israeli intelligence to an unprecedented extent and has led a crippling sanctions effort against Iran, yet Netanyahu, who visits Washington this week, has shown imperious disdain for Barack Obama. In fact, the President is a philo-Semite, whose earliest political supporters were Chicago Jews: Abner Mikva, Newton and Martha Minow, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod. He was close to a rabbi on the South Side, the late Arnold Jacob Wolf. But to Netanyahu these men and women are the wrong kind of Jew. Wolf, for example, had worked for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and other social-justice causes. Wolf brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak in his synagogue, marched in Selma, and, in 1973, helped found Breira (Alternative), one of the first American Jewish groups to endorse a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

  Netanyahu has distaste for such associations; his gestures toward Palestinian statehood are less than halfhearted. (After he spoke of giving Palestinians their own state, his father, the right-wing historian Benzion Netanyahu, shrewdly observed, "He supports it under conditions that they will never accept.") To Netanyahu, the proper kind of ally is exemplified by AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson -- the longtime casino tycoon and recent bankroller of Newt Gingrich -- who owns a newspaper in Israel devoted to supporting him.

• Nate Silver: Live Coverage: Alabama and Mississippi Primaries: A lot of interesting stat-think here, fascinating for someone like me who spent many years thumbing through old almanacs of county by county voting statistics. There are hints but no firm answers why Silver's own estimates gave the victorious Santorum a 12% chance of winning Alabama and a 2% chance in Mississippi. Demographics, maybe: it is clear from the map that the three counties in Alabama with the state's largest cities were the only counties that gave Romney a lead. (Mississippi was a little messier, but Jackson and Biloxi gave Romney leads.) On the other hand, do we really want to know why the dumbest white people in America chose as they did in the nation's most uninteresting political contest?

• Matt Taibbi: Too Crooked to Fail: On Bank of America:

  At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they'll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world's worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt's funeral. They're out of control, yet they'll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

• Gary Trudeau: Doonesbury: First panel in a series on the political obstructions the gentlemen legislators of Texas have placed in the way of a woman trying to get an abortion. You've probably heard about this because the series has set off another round of newspapers rejecting the strip. (A no-brainer here with the Wichita Eagle, which ran it for a while on the opinion pages then dropped it altogether.) Use "next" to flip through. The rape scene occurs four days in.

• Paul Woodward: Did Israel provoke Gaza escalation to test Iron Dome?:

  Four days ago I suggested that the reason Israel assassinated the Popular Resistance Committee leader Zuhair Qaisi in Gaza may have had less to do with foiling an attack and much more to do with testing Iron Dome. Yousef at The Jerusalem Fund agrees, saying that a successful test of the missile defense system could go a long way to assuage the Israeli public's fears about retaliation from Iran following an Israeli attack. [ . . . ]

  In the glow of the test's successful outcome, Israel's defense minister Ehud Barak didn't even seem to think it was worth the effort to perpetuate the narrative that Qaisi had ever posed an imminent threat. After the militant leader's assassination, Barak said: "it is not completely clear what the plan was and where, or if it had been foiled."

  Jerry Haber (cf. Is Israel a Rational Actor?) suspects the same thing, although he holds out the alternative possibility that Netanyahu and Barak are just fucking nuts. The model assumes that if Israel attacks Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah will respond by attacking Israel, because they're just Iranian agents. That's certainly not true of Hamas, and unlikely of Hezbollah. More likely, I think, that they just wanted to stir the pot, including the fear level of their own people -- and that, rather than proof that their anti-missile defense system works, is the cover they need to start a war with Iran.

Some links and comments, trying to get back onto some sort of weekly schedule:

• Tom Engelhardt: The 0% Doctrine: During AIPAC week, Obama said some things that seem intended to derail Israel's drive toward war with Iran, but he also said some things that committed the US to take charge of implementing Israel's war -- a war that, we should remind ourselves, would be unthinkable if Israel would only agree to a fair resolution of its 64-year conflict with the Palestinian people living under its occupation. Obama reiterated the cliché about all options remaining on the table: US options include the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, sufficient to turn every acre of Iran into a long-term nuclear wasteland, as well as the world's largest and most heavily armed invasion force (one that has already been used effectively on two countries bordering Iran), plus all sorts of less extreme options, like the current effort to strangle Iran economically through sanctions. What would trigger more drastic actions is evidence that Iran is actually developing nuclear weapons -- evidence which thus far has been limited to Israeli hallucinations.

  Whether he meant to or not, in his latest version of Iran war policy President Obama has built on the Bush precedent. His represents, however, an even more extreme version, which should perhaps be labeled the 0% Doctrine. In holding off an Israeli strike that may itself be nothing but a bluff, he has defined a future Iranian decision to build a nuclear weapon as a new form of aggression against the United States. We would, as the president explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, be committing our military power against Iran not to prevent an attack on the U.S. itself, but a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

  And by the way, note that he didn't say, "We don't bluff." His formulation was: "I don't bluff." And that "I" should not be ignored. The Bush administration promoted a cult of presidential power, of (as they called it at the time) a "unitary executive." No one in the White House uses such a term these days, any more than they use the term "Global War on Terror," but if both terms have disappeared, the phenomena they named have only intensified.

  The Global War on Terror, with its burgeoning secret military, the elite special operations forces, and its growing drone air force, controlled in part by the CIA, should be thought of as the president's private war. In addition, as legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote recently, when it comes to drone assassinations (or "targeted killings" as they are now more politely known), Attorney General Eric Holder has just claimed for the president the "authority to kill any American if he unilaterally determines them to be a threat to the nation." In doing so, added Turley, "Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a 'trust me' pledge." With terror in its crosshairs, war, in other words, is increasingly becoming the president's private preserve and strikes on the enemy, however defined, a matter of his own private judgment. [ . . . ]

  The irony is that the president has propounded a war-making policy of unprecedented extremity at a moment when there is no evidence that the Iranians are pursuing a bomb -- not yet at least. The "supreme leader" of their theocratic state has termed the possession of nuclear weapons "a grave sin" and U.S. national intelligence estimates have repeatedly concluded that the Iranians are not, in fact, moving to build nuclear weapons. If, however -- and it's a giant if -- Iran actually got the bomb, if a 10th country joined the nuclear club (with others to follow), it would be bad news, and the world would be a worse place for it, but not necessarily that greatly changed.

  What could change the world in a radical way, however, is the 0% doctrine -- and the trend more generally to make war the personal prerogative of an American president, while ceding to the U.S. military what was once the province and power of diplomacy.

  One thing we can be glad of is that Obama's 0% Doctrine only seems to apply to Iran. Had it been in effect when North Korea was on the verge of developing its bomb we would have been obligated to attack, launching a second Korean War. The North Koreans were better prepared to respond to such an attack, with thousands of artillery aimed at nearby Seoul (pop. over 10 million), plus hundreds or thousands of missiles that could hit more distant targets -- notably Japan. Such an attack would probably have resulted in a million or more deaths, yet was avoided by the US not having an insane policy based on political posturing to appease a foreign lobby.

  Fortunately, we've found out that we can live with a nuclear-armed North Korea, and for that matter a number of other nuclear-armed states we may or may not especially like. Despite the obvious danger, no one has actually used nuclear weapons since the US lost its monopoly on them -- and they've never been used against a nuclear-armed foe, like the US or Israel. So why should Iran be any different? I can't think of any serious reason. (If, for instance, you think they're obsessed with killing Jews, wouldn't you expect them to at least discriminate against their own Jewish community? I mean, long before the "Final Solution" became policy the Third Reich had established a horrific record of villifying and attacking German Jews.)

  Paul Pillar explores this question and sensibly concludes We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran. Pillar looks at all the arguments now in circulation as to why a nuclear-armed Iran would be disastrous, and carefully picks them apart. He looks at the arguments for going to war, and at some of the ways Iran could fight back. Even if such a war didn't escalate into a huge disaster for all concerned, "surgical" air strikes are unlikely to do more than marginally slow down Iran, and certain to increase Iran's resolve to develop a deterrent against further attacks:

  In return for all of these harmful effects, an attack on Iran would not even achieve the objective of ensuring a nuclear-weapons-free Iran. Only a ground invasion and occupation could hope to accomplish that, and not even the most fervent anti-Iranian hawks are talking about that kind of enormous undertaking. Panetta's estimate that an aerial assault would set back the Iranian nuclear program by only one or two years is in line with many other assessments. Meanwhile, an attack would provide the strongest possible incentive for Iran to move forward rapidly in developing a nuclear weapon, in the hope of achieving a deterrent to future attacks sooner rather than later. That is how Iraq reacted when Israel bombed its nuclear reactor in 1981. Any prospect of keeping the bomb out of Iranian hands would require still more attacks a couple of years hence. This would mean implementing the Israeli concept of periodically "mowing the lawn" -- a prescription for unending U.S. involvement in warfare in the Middle East. [ . . . ]

  Why would anyone, weighing all the costs and risks on each side of this issue, even consider starting a war with Iran? The short answer is that neocon habits die hard. It might seem that the recent experience of the Iraq War should have entirely discredited such proclivities, or at least dampened policymakers' inclination to listen to those who have them. But the war in Iraq may have instead inured the American public to the extreme measure of an offensive war, at least when it involves weapons of mass destruction and loathsome Middle Eastern regimes.

  Indeed, we see exactly the same fools pushing for war with Iran as led the charge into Iraq. The failure to learn anything from the last decade is as shameful as what the US did during those years.

• Paul Glastris/Ryan Cooper/Siyu Hu: Obama's Top 50 Accomplishments: A laundry list, including some stretches (e.g., 13. Improved America's Image Abroad) and sleight of hand (e.g., 5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan). Someone could take these apart point by point (e.g., top three were: Passed Health Care Reform, Passed the Stimulus, and Passed Wall Street Reform) but most are merely inadequate steps forward -- they showcase Obama's "realism" but also his essential conservatism, lack of understanding, lack of commitment to the people who elected him, and his inability or unwillingness to stick his neck out. And some (e.g., 21. Tightened Sanctions on Iran) mask major failures. Also note that none of the 50 (not even 21) refer to Israel/Palestine, the object of one of two special envoys Obama appointed among his first acts in 2009. Another item not on the list is Obama's signing of a law that helps the government prosecute embarrassing protesters.

• Arthur Goldwag: The Right Wing's Pornography of Resentment: Faced with loss of advertisers, Rush Limbaugh apologized for a couple of words, but more telling than mere name-calling is the quote below:

  The sliming that Sandra Fluke has endured -- from Rush Limbaugh, of course, but also from his rabid cheering section like Atlas Shrugged's Pam Geller ("She is banging it five times a day . . . . Calling this whore a slut was a softball") and the blogger Ace of Spades ("A shiftless rent-a-cooch from East Whoreville") -- is bizarre and over-the-top enough.

  But even weirder was Limbaugh's proposition: If "Miss Fluke and the rest of you Feminazis" expect us to pay you to have sex, "we want something for it," Limbaugh said last week. "We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." (Those words were later erased from Limbaugh's official transcript of the show; Atlantic Wire preserved them.)

• Ann Jones: Playing the Game in Afghanistan: This piece appeared before today's news that a US soldier went house-to-house in Kandahar to murder sixteen Afghan (mostly children). That's just one of many incidents showing how the US occupation in Afghanistan is self-destructing, losing "hearts and minds" not just of Afghans but of the US soldiers as well. It remains politically taboo to say anything critical of the US army and its heroic soldiers, but you have to wonder about an organization that isn't able to impress on its workers the critical importance of not burning korans or pissing on Afghan corpses. Also disconcerting is the tendency of late for Afghan soldiers to turn their guns on their trainers. The idea had been to hand the country off to reliable local troops (although I don't ever recall hearing the term Afghanization, perhaps recognition of how poorly the idea played out in Vietnam and Iraq), but Jones explains in several ways -- through history, economics, and "the Afghan sport of buzkashi" why that was bound to fail.

  Many people who know Afghanistan well, however, have warned from the beginning against this plan to train up an armed force. I'm among the naysayers, and I'll tell you why.

  First, consider what the plan proposes. The number of Afghan soldiers and police to be trained varies widely from one report to the next, but the last estimate I received directly from the Kabul Military Training Center called for 240,000 soldiers and 160,000 police (who, incidentally, are also called "soldiers" and trained in a similar manner). That brings the total proposed Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) to approximately four times the number of current coalition troops in the country.

  It costs the U.S. $12 billion annually to train the army alone and the estimated cost of maintaining it beyond 2014 is $4 billion per year, of which the Afghan government says it can pay no more than 12%. Clearly, Afghanistan does not need and cannot sustain such a security force. [ . . . ]

  Second, take just a moment to do something Washington has long been adverse to -- review a little basic Afghan history as it applies to Plan A. Start with the simplest of all facts: in the country's modern history, no Afghan national army has ever saved a government, or even tried. More often, such an army has either sat on its hands during a coup d'état or actually helped to overthrow the incumbent ruler. [ . . . ]

  Another objection to spending billions on training an Afghan National Army is this: you never know whom they will shoot. The problem is not the odd rogue soldier or Talib infiltrator. The problem is that the Afghan moral code is different from ours, though still apparently invisible to our military and political leaders. [ . . . ]

  In short, for their own safety and advancement, Afghans back a winner, and if he goes into decline, they ditch him for a rising star. To spot that winner is the mark of the intelligent survivor. To stick loyally to a losing cause, as any patriotic American would do, seems to an Afghan downright stupid.

  Now, apply this to the ANA as American and NATO troops draw down in 2014. Any army intended to defend a nation must be loyal to the political leaders governing the country. Estimates among Afghan experts of how long the ANA would be loyal to Afghan President Hamid Karzai start at two weeks, and remember, 2014 is a presidential election year, with Karzai barred by the constitution from seeking another term. In other words, Obama's Plan A calls for urgently building up a national army to defend a government that will not exist before our own combat troops leave the country.

  And if that election is riddled with fraud, as the last one was? Or inconclusive? Or violently contested? Has President Obama or Secretary of Defense Panetta or anyone else given any thought to that?

  These days, as Afghan men, mostly in army and police uniforms, shoot and kill NATO soldiers on a remarkably regular basis, the American military still publicly writes off the deaths as "isolated incidents."

  But the isolation may be an American one. The connections among Afghans are evident to anyone who cares to look. [ . . . ] While some commentators speak of Afghan treachery and others detect a Taliban plot to infiltrate the security forces, I suspect something quite different. Malcolm Gladwell might call it a tipping point. What we are watching unfold in Afghanistan is the desertion of chapandazan who have already found new khans.

• Ed Kilgore: Beyond Mitt's Small Donor Problem: The most striking thing about the Romney campaign is the concentrated money behind it. To some extent I think this is happening because it can happen: with unlimited campaign funding it makes more sense to target bigger donors.

  It's pretty well known that the virtually certain 2012 presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Mitt Romney, has financed his campaign so far with an exceptionally successful corporate fundraising effort and has built the largest, best-financed, and above all most abrasively negative Super-PAC operation ever known. But Mitt's failure to attract small-dollar donors is less well-known, and as Paul Waldman notes at the American Prospect today, the gap between Romney and the other candidates on this score are pretty shocking. The percentage of total money raised from contributions under $200 are as follows: Rick Santorum 49%; Newt Gingrich 48%; Ron Paul 46%; Barack Obama 42% -- and Mitt Romney 10%.

  I suspect that Obama will get less from small donors this time around, partly because his first term has vindicated the idea that big donors are making sound investments, and also because so much big money in the arena makes a mockery of democracy. Rarely has any candidate presented himself so blatantly and exclusively as a tool of the top one percent as Romney (well, Steve Forbes, of course, but he wasn't much of a contender).

• Playboy Interview: Paul Krugman: Some choice quotes:

  To the extent that sacrifices need to be made, shouldn't the people who've made out like bandits this past generation be first in line? The problem with getting out of the slump is that we need to spend more. It's not that somebody needs to spend less. We have idle workers who have the skills and the willingness to work. We have idle factories. Dealing with this is not about saying somebody needs to suffer. It's saying that we need to be prepared to open the taps. We should not be using the language of sacrifice to talk about how we deal with the current slump. It's a little shocking that that shorthand rhetoric about "shared sacrifice," which is what people say when they want to sound serious, infiltrated the rhetoric from the beginning, even with a Democratic president. That's a major part of the reason we're still in this slump. [ . . . ]

  Obama is very much an establishment sort of guy. The whole image of him as a transcendent figure was based on style rather than substance. If you actually looked at what he said, not how he said it, he said very establishment things. He's a moderate, cautious, ameliorative guy. He tends to gravitate toward Beltway conventional wisdom. He's a certain kind of policy wonk, the kind that looks for things that are sort of centrist in how Washington defines centrist. He was talking about Social Security cuts during the 2008 primary. That's how you sound serious in our current political culture. He wasn't sufficiently distanced to step back and say that a lot of our political culture is completely insane. [ . . . ]

  I think the choice we made, really without understanding that we were making the choice, was to make Walmart jobs low paying. They didn't have to be. In a different legal environment, a megacorporation with more than a million employees might well have been a company with a union that resulted in decent wages. We think of Walmart jobs as being low wage with 50 percent turnover every year because that's the way we've allowed it to develop. But it didn't have to be that way. If the rise of big-box stores had not taken place under the Reaganite rules of the game, with employers free to do whatever they wanted to block union organizing, we might have had a different result. Part of the hysterical opposition to the auto-industry bailout was the notion that we were bailing out well-paid workers with union jobs. [ . . . ]

  What we know is that the New Deal era produced a big leveling; it basically turned us into a middle-class country, and it stuck. The question is not why it happened but why it stuck. It was unions. The thing about unions is they don't just negotiate higher wages for their members. They also have an effect on people who are not unionized. It's probably true that the union movement was a big factor in our having a largely middle-class country. The destruction of unions outside the public sector is an important factor in our no longer being a middle-class country. People say, "Oh, we can't maintain unions in the modern globalized economy." But then you see advanced countries where it works -- Canada has had some decline in unionization but nothing like ours. It was a political decision. The best generation of economic growth we've ever had was the 25 years or so after 1947, which was a period of high unionization and high marginal tax rates. This is just an excuse for what amounts to pushing down the standards of U.S. workers.

• Jane Mayer: The Kochs vs. Cato: Background on the Kochs' lawsuit to take over the Cato Institute. They helped found it, put money into it, and figure they should own it. After all, they own everything else they put money into. They even have a technical term for this: freedom.

• Alex Pareene: Sarah Palin's Hollywood Ending: On HBO's adaptation of Game Change, or at least the juicy parts on Sarah Palin.

  The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to "unfair" -- Sarah Palin doesn't know that the head of Great Britain's government is the prime minister, not the queen -- are basically plausible. This isn't Andrew Sullivan's conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It's an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to "the base" because of Palin's heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn -- "if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!" -- after "winning" her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention.

  One brief scene did reflect favorably on Palin: her contemptuous brush-off of putative future son-in-law Levi Johnston before he was paraded before the GOP Convention as a family values icon. The single most hideous trait of that convention was how they tried to spin Bristol Palin's unwed teen pregnancy into a vindication of pro-life principles, as if more unwed teen pregnancies was the movement's entire raison d'être. On the other hand, the candidate who got a free pass was McCain. Every day I'm thankful he got beat, and all the more so this week when he made headlines advocating arming dissidents in Syria.

Most likely I won't be able to post on Sunday, so thought I should kick these out prematurely:

• Adam Gopnik: The Caging of America. Interesting article on how the US became the world's number one jailor state. I've been meaning to write more about this piece, but haven't gotten it done. Much of this is derived from William J. Stuntz: The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, who makes good points about what's wrong and vague ones about what should be done.

• Glenn Greenwald: The Growing Iranian Military Behemoth: Irony alert: Iran still spends less than 1% of what the US spends for its military. If Ahmadinejad doubles that, it's still less than 2%. Includes a chart, and a map of all the US bases surrounding Iran, but it doesn't have enough resolution to pick out the aircraft carriers and such in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. Does not include a corresponding map of Iran's foreign military bases, because, well, there aren't any.

• Jason Gubbels: Barbara Ehrenreich Already Warned Us About the Komen Foundation: Quotes from Ehrenreich's Welcome to Cancerland article, all worth reading, plus this illustration:

  

• Ed Kilgore: Regressively Worse:

  As Kevin Drum notes today, the data on state tax burdens, as illustrated by a new report from the Corporation for Enterprise Development, shows a sea of regressivity, particularly in states that rely disproportionately on consumption taxes and property taxes that are levied at flat rates on assets that are disproportionately limited for those at or near the bottom of the income scale. [ . . . ] But the overall picture is a grim confirmation of the fact that the limited progressivity of federal taxes must be weighed against the unwillingness or inability of most of the states to follow suit.

  The notorious variability of state and local taxes make it hard to come up with any equitable tax plan. There's also a big problem with carve-outs, where businesses get exemptions or other favors -- they've become so common around here that businesses that don't demand them are just being stupid. I've long felt that the solution to this would be to set the federal tax level high enough to cover state and local needs all across the country, then pass the money down to the state and local authorities. If they wind up with more money than they need or want, they can in turn rebate their citizens. Uniform tax rates would eliminate a lot of the practice of businesses auctioning plants off to whoever gives them the sweetest tax deal -- a game that is far worse than zero-sum.

• Andrew Leonard: Why Wall Street Hates a Healthy Labor Market: "It's simple: When workers gain some leverage, it gets a little harder to generate totally obscene profits." Main thing here is a quote from a stock forecaster, warning that lower employment could drive profits, and therefore stock values, down:

  In other words, stock prices could slump because an increase in the demand for labor will put upward pressure on wages. For the vast majority of Americans, this is fantastic news. For the 1 percent, not so much.

  The news inspires memories of the go-go days of the dot-com boom, when the stock market greeted every new monthly release of gangbuster job growth numbers with a sharp sell-off. Wall Street doesn't like it when American workers are in demand.

  This is something to keep in mind when you see Republicans pushing for austerity measures that hurt the economy, especially by throwing people out of work.

  Also see Leonard's Wall Street's Song of Obama Woe. I still think these bankers have it pretty good compared to how much actual value they produce, and I suspect that their histrionics are just for show. But if banking looks less lucrative, maybe smart young college grads will go elsewhere and actually do something useful with their lives.

• Trita Parsi: How Obama Became Vulnerable on Iran:

  Iran was fast expanding its influence in the region during the George W. Bush Presidency. "Iran was on a roll," one Obama Administration official told me. But in the past three years, it has lost its regional momentum. Iran's domestic political situation is much more unstable following the fraudulent 2009 elections, its source of soft power in the region has take a hit following the Arab uprisings, its economy is hurting under the crushing weight of government mismanagement and sanctions, and its ability to play the major powers against each other has been severely limited since Obama took office.

  Yet, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, Americans disapprove of the way Obama has handled the Iran issue by a 48 to 33 percent margin. This result is well below his overall job performance numbers and significantly worse than the approval ratings for his handling of terrorism and international affairs.

  The numbers must have perplexed Democratic operatives. Efforts by the White House to showcase how tough Obama has been on Iran -- including National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon's triumphalist speech at the Brookings Institute in November 2011 -- have failed to impress the public.

  But it is also because of the Obama administration permitted the Right to define the metrics of success on Iran. Obama has completely bought into the idea that a "strong" Iran policy is one that is tough, punishing and confrontational. As on so many other issues, Obama has permitted the debate to take place on the Right's turf. In doing so, he has betrayed his own platform of pursuing "smart" rather than just "tough" policies.

  Also see Jordan Michael Smith: Chastened Liberal Hawk Fears Clash With Iran: The hawk in question is Kenneth Pollack, who wrote an influential book advocating invasion of Iraq, then went to follow it up with one on Iran before he started to get cold feet:

  Pollack was one of the authors of America's "dual-track" policy with Iran, whereby efforts at serious talks are coupled with sanctions. He is now convinced that policy is failing. "The problem is that Iran sees it very differently from the way we see it," Pollack said in an interview. "They put our efforts in terms of human rights and reaching out to the opposition, as well as the sanctions, in the same scheme as what the Israelis are doing, which includes assassinations, acts of sabotage, cyberattacks; and what the Saudis are doing, which is aid to basically every group fighting the Iranian proxies all over the Middle East; and what the British are doing, which is gathering information."

  Cumulatively, he says, these efforts are convincing Iran not that it should relinquish its nuclear efforts but that it is under attack: "To the Iranians, this looks like a concerted Western covert war against them." The current hard-line regime in Iran takes this as the threat of war, and is prepared to fight a war rather than back down, Pollack says. His TNR article points out the ways in which U.S. policies toward Iran, intended as an alternative to war, are leading us directly to that result. [ . . . ]

  Pollack's perspective is informed by his experience with Iraq. He was instrumental at the CIA and NSC in implementing sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, sanctions that he rightly calls "the most draconian sanctions ever in history, probably." Those sanctions ultimately failed, in preventing war, in being a humane policy, and in persuading the court of international opinion.

  "Everyone assumed that Saddam Hussein would have to do what the international community wanted, because he wouldn't dare to starve his people to death. But guess what? He decided to starve his people to death." About Iran today, he says, "Everyone thinks now sanctions are so great, we're putting so much pressure on the Iranians, but I don't think it's going to be enough pressure to get the Iranians to cave, and in one or two years we're going to hear that the Central Bank sanctions are too harsh, and they need to be lifted. That's what happened in Iraq."

  One recurrent problem with sanctions is that I can't recall when the US ever imposed sanctions without tying them to regime change -- a pose that both required demonizing the existing regime and that militated against ever compromising. (Myanmar may be an exception, one that shows how little emotional attachment we have there.) No regime wants to give up power, least of all due to a tantrum by an overweening foreign power. As for what a threatened nation would do to gain the presumed safety of nuclear weapons, I'm reminded that Ali Bhutto of Pakistan swore his country would "eat grass" if that's what it took to build the bomb. (North Korea pretty much did just that.)

• James Surowiecki: Private Inequity: One good thing about Mitt Romney's presidential candidacy is that it provides a "teachable moment" to help people learn about private equity firms:

  The real reason that we should be concerned about private equity's expanding power lies in the way these firms have become increasingly adept at using financial gimmicks to line their pockets, deriving enormous wealth not from management or investing skills but, rather, from the way the U.S. tax system works. Indeed, for an industry that's often held up as an exemplar of free-market capitalism, private equity is surprisingly dependent on government subsidies for its profits. Financial engineering has always been central to leveraged buyouts. In a typical deal, a private-equity firm buys a company, using some of its own money and some borrowed money. It then tries to improve the performance of the acquired company, with an eye toward cashing out by selling it or taking it public. The key to this strategy is debt: the model encourages firms to borrow as much as possible, since, just as with a mortgage, the less money you put down, the bigger your potential return on investment. The rewards can be extraordinary: when Romney was at Bain, it supposedly earned eighty-eight per cent a year for its investors. But piles of debt also increase the risk that companies will go bust. [ . . . ]

  As if this weren't galling enough, taxpayers are left on the hook. Interest payments on all that debt are tax-deductible; when pensions are dumped, a federal agency called the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation picks up the tab; and the money that the dealmakers earn is taxed at a much lower rate than normal income would be, thanks to the so-called "carried interest" loophole. The money that Mitt Romney made when he was at Bain Capital was compensation for his (apparently excellent) work, but, instead of being taxed as income, it was taxed as a capital gain. It's a very cozy arrangement.