text:
Complicit: Trump's Hypnosis of the Republican Party is Complete - And the Fate of America's Democracy Itself is at Stake
The problem isn't that the president is under investigation for serious crimes (other presidents have faced that predicament). It isn't even that Trump is going out of his way to undermine the Justice Department officials whose job it is to hold him accountable (again, other presidents have also been in that situation).

No, the reason our nation faces a serious constitutional crisis is that the Republican Party absolutely refuses to stop the president from undermining the rule of law in order to save his own skin. For a party that drops praise for the United States Constitution in virtually all of their speeches, this failure has exposed them to be craven partisans instead of genuine patriots.

To understand what's happening to the GOP, let's take a look at Trump's most recent actions.

On Monday, the president ordered an inquiry into recent claims that the FBI had sent a so-called "spy" to infiltrate his campaign, according to CNN. While Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein seems to have appeased the president (for now) by having the Justice Department's inspector general look into the matter, the mere fact that the president is using organs of the government to discredit an investigation into alleged misconduct is in itself an extremely troubling precedent.

"Our President is more limited by norms than he is (by the) Constitution or law. It is the traditions of the office that keep the President, I think, in his lane. And one of those norms is the independence of the judiciary," Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency under both Democratic and Republican presidents, told CNN's "The Situation Room."

He added that the president "has stepped so far beyond these norms that... people lose confidence in the independence of the judiciary, which frankly is our only off-ramp from this overhang currently over the entire nation."

Hayden's analysis was echoed by Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, who wrote on Monday:

Trump's power play is a gross misuse of his presidential authority and a dangerous departure from long-standing norms. Strongmen such as Russia's Vladimir Putin use their justice systems to punish enemies and deflect attention from their own crimes. Presidents of the United States do not — or did not, until Sunday's tweet:

"I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!"

Rather than push back and defend the rule of law, Justice tried to mollify the president by at least appearing to give him what he wants. The Republican leadership in Congress has been silent as a mouse. This is how uncrossable lines are crossed.

It is also worth noting that, although Trump claims the FBI used a "spy" on his campaign, the agency actually used an informant — and was completely within its rights to do so.

"The President casting a human intelligence source as a 'spy' is pure politics," former FBI special agent Josh Campbell told CNN's Chris Cillizza on Monday. "Although informants and spies both technically gather information covertly, the word "informant" is generally reserved for someone righteously operating on behalf of law enforcement, whereas 'spy' conjures up a more sinister mental picture of someone skulking in the shadows with questionable intentions."

In other words: The FBI used a legitimate method to acquire information about a presidential campaign that had been potentially compromised by a foreign power, and the president is now trying to discredit the investigation by complaining about it.

Just as he did when he claimed Trump Tower had been wiretapped. And as he did when he cooked up the bogus "unmasking" scandal. And as he did when he argued that the investigation had been entirely based on a dossier that had been partially paid for by the Democratic Party. And as he does when he says that there is a "deep state" conspiracy out to thwart his presidency.

This pattern — of the president saying something, anything at all, to get people to stop investigating alleged crimes involving himself and his cronies — is becoming impossible to ignore.

"There are some examples of this kind of interference and they are quite lamentable episodes of American history," Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor at American University's Department of History, told Salon. "Certainly nothing any president would want to emulate in any way."

Lichtman then provided two examples of situations comparable to the one involving Trump today.

"During the second term of Ulysses S. Grant, the government was embroiled in a host of scandals sometimes known as The Great Barbecue (because in effect government offices of power were being sold for money)," Lichtman told Salon. "One of the scandals of the Grant Administration was the so-called Whiskey Ring scandal, in which officials were being bribed so that whiskey distillers could avoid paying the federal tax. A special prosecutor was appointed to deal with the Whiskey Ring scandal, which apparently implicated a very close associate of President Grant, Orville Babcock (like the president's chief of staff today), and the president interfered in the investigation ostensibly to protect Mr. Babcock. He fired the special prosecutor. He intervened in the investigation to order them not to give immunity to lower level persons in order to get to the higher-ups. And he even gave a deposition in support of Mr. Babcock, who was ultimately acquitted."

Lichtman then described the most infamous of America's scandal-ridden presidents.

"Much more famous, of course, is Richard Nixon, who had an article of impeachment against him voted by the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives with respect to obstruction of justice," Lichtman told Salon. "It was one of the three articles voted against Nixon that led him to resign his office rather than face certain impeachment by the full House and conviction by the Senate. And it directly implicated Nixon in trying to impede the federal investigation of the Watergate break-in and other matters and involved actions very similar to what we see Donald Trump doing: Making false or misleading statements designed to impede the investigation. Counseling witnesses. Interfering with the conduct of the investigation by the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Claiming falsely that the matter had been thoroughly investigated and there was no wrongdoing of any kind."

He added, "And, of course, Bill Clinton had an article of impeachment voted against him on obstruction of justice, which was much less serious than anything that Donald Trump is doing with respect to, I'll call it the scandal of Russian interference, although we know it's much broader than that."

As Lichtman also noted during our interview, however, the scandals involving Trump are much graver than those in which Grant, Nixon and Clinton were swept up for one simple reason — They involve an attempt by a foreign power to influence our democratic process. More importantly, America's intelligence agencies are convinced that that foreign power is going to try to corrupt our elections again, and Trump has made it clear that he doesn't care so long as the investigation into alleged collusion with that power by his campaign doesn't wind up implicating him.

As a result of these things, the fate of America's democracy is itself at stake.

In such a situation, men and women of good will in both parties should unite in protecting our democratic institutions. They should recognize that no one person, no matter how powerful, is anywhere near as important as the structures that allow free government to flourish in our society. For Republicans, anything other than a full denunciation of Trump's tactics, and an effort to protect the law enforcement officials who are responsible for holding him accountable, counts as an abdication of their solemn duties as public servants.

Yet this is where we are today.

Ryan's Obsequious Tribute To Trump On Fox Draws Jeers
Matt Gertz
Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

Toward the end of House Speaker Paul Ryan's (R-WI) interview last night with Fox News' Sean Hannity, after Hannity had swooned over the Republican tax cut plan, the host turned his attention to whether the congressman and his caucus are sufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump.

Some Republican senators "openly trash the president," Hannity said sorrowfully. "What's your relationship with him?" "It's very good," the speaker replied. "It is the opposite. We have a great relationship."

.@SpeakerRyan: "I think @POTUS is giving us the kind of leadership we need to get this country back on the right track." #Hannityat9 pic.twitter.com/hxhIdIJpr2
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 28, 2017

"Are you happy with his presidency?" Hannity asked. "I'm very happy," said Ryan, adding that members of the House Republican caucus do not criticize the president the way GOP senators do. Trump, according to Ryan, "is giving us the leadership we need to get the country back on the right track."

Not satisfied with Ryan's open-ended declaration of loyalty, Hannity sought to determine if there were any issues on which Ryan maintained opinions that differed from the president's. "Is there anything about his agenda that you think is not conservative?" he asked. "Not that I can think of," Ryan replied. Only after Ryan denied having "any big disagreement" with Trump was the Fox host finally reassured enough to move on, having successfully gotten the speaker to repudiate any sense of independence from Trump.

When Fox circulated a clip of the interview on Twitter this morning, Ryan came under withering criticism from across much of the political spectrum for his bootlicking. "I think the great Paul Ryan has learned to love Big Brother," commented National Review Senior Editor Jay Nordlinger. "Ah, politics. Sad."

Ryan's act of public ring-kissing comes as Hannity has begun regularly training his fire on the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Night after night over the past month, Hannity has castigated McConnell — "Mr. 18 percent approval rating," as the Fox host calls him — for being unable to manage his caucus well enough to deliver victories for Trump on health care, among other priorities.

The Republican failures to pass large-scale legislation through the Senate are in no small part due to the Republican failure to develop a coherent agenda and the president's famous lack of attention to details, which makes negotiations arduous.

But Hannity places the blame for such legislative losses squarely on McConnell's inability to "get enough votes." According to Hannity, the Republican Senate leader is "incompetent and incapable" and "has no excuses" for his inability to pass legislation. In fact, according to Hannity, McConnell is deliberately messing up, because he "does not support the president's agenda … and it's obvious."

Hannity has repeatedly suggested that McConnell should resign due to his failures. "So senator, if you don't want to roll up your sleeves, if you don't want to get to work on passing the agenda you promised and the president promised, then maybe it's time to call it a career," Hannity said on September 12. "Get out of the way. Let someone else who actually cares about keeping their promises to the American people — let them step up. Let them start passing legislation."

Hannity's criticism of McConnell has come as Trump has publicly called out the GOP Senate leader and their relationship has reportedly deteriorated.

Throughout his interview with Ryan, Hannity repeatedly raised the issue of the Senate, describing it as "the swamp," asking Ryan why McConnell doesn't eliminate the legislative filibuster and why he has been unable to confirm presidential nominees, and all but asking him to throw his Senate colleagues under the bus.

"In fairness to you, you will talk to me. Mitch McConnell won't even take my call," Hannity complained.

Ryan has largely avoided this sort of criticism in recent days, and he would no doubt like to avoid his own turn in the barrel. Once the golden boy of the right-wing media for his budget proposals that would have devastated the social safety net, he has since seen many of his former champions turn on him for being insufficiently radical.

The rising power of Breitbart.com chief executive Steve Bannon — who spent years attacking Ryan, sought his defeat in the last Republican primary, and is reportedly targeting GOP incumbents insufficiently loyal to the president — is no doubt of concern to Ryan. Indeed, the day before Ryan sat for the interview with Hannity, a Bannon-backed candidate defeated a sitting McConnell-backed senator in a GOP primary.

Hannity, whose loyalty to Trump at least rivals Bannon's, would be a powerful ally if Ryan faces a competitive primary race.

Last year, many conservative commentators warned that Hannity had too much influence over the Republican Party and that his obsequious willingness to throw over ideology and common decency to promote Trump would end in disaster for the GOP. But a year later, with Trump sitting in the Oval Office, Hannity's influence is stronger than ever — so strong that he can compel the speaker of the House to publicly affirm the same brown-nosing level of commitment to the president.

Trump's Interior Nominee Ryan Zinke Doubles Down on Coal
Bobby Magill
During his confirmation hearing Tuesday, Interior secretary nominee Ryan Zinke emphasized the incoming Trump administration's vow to recommit America to fossil fuels development while disregarding renewables and the need to act on climate change.

Zinke said climate change is not the hoax Trump has said it is, but he falsely claimed the science around it is uncertain, and said that federal energy policy, which determines how the Interior Department manages energy and public land, should heavily favor coal.

If confirmed, Zinke, a second-term congressman from Montana and former Navy SEAL, would oversee all the nation's national parks and more than 500 million acres of federal public lands, mostly in the West. He would be responsible for all the coal mining, fracking and oil drilling on public lands and waters off of all U.S. coastlines, and for permitting all new offshore wind power development.

Trump vowed during his campaign to breathe new life into America's coal industry, which he said has been hit too hard by environmental and climate regulations. In reality, coal is in decline mainly because of cheap natural gas, which electric power companies are beginning to use more than coal to generate electricity.

"The war on coal, I believe, is real," Zinke said. "All-of-the-above is the correct (energy) policy. Coal is a great part of that energy mix. I'm also a great believer that we should invest in research and development on coal — because we know we have the asset — to make it cleaner and better. We should lead the world in clean energy technology."

Coal is the world's largest single source of carbon pollution driving climate change. To make it "clean," all the carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants would have to be captured and stored permanently, preventing it from ever reaching the atmosphere. That technology is in its infancy, and it is unnecessary if other energy sources such as wind, solar and natural gas are used to generate electricity.

But given Zinke's statements Tuesday, renewables seem likely to be shunted aside for more fossil fuels. Zinke said he'd revisit the Obama administration policy closing most of the Arctic Ocean off the north coast of Alaska to oil drilling. He said he'd also reexamine an Obama moratorium on coal development on federal lands, which was put in place a year ago while the government studies the climate impacts of coal development.

Throughout the hearing, Zinke questioned the science showing that climate change is driven by burning fossil fuels, that it could bring about water scarcity, influence the spread of catastrophic wildfire, and melt glaciers in the national parks he would oversee.

"The climate is changing," Zinke said, adding that he believes that because he watched Glacier National Park's Grinnell Glacier melt while he ate lunch there one day. "Man has had an influence. That is undisputable as well. Where there is debate is what that influence is and what we can do about it."

Blackfoot Glacier and Jackson Glacier in 1914 and 2009. They used to be joined as a single glacier but are now split in two because global warming has melted the ice away. Credit: E.C. Stebinger/Glacier National Park (left). Lisa McKeon/U.S. Geological Survey (right).

He said the U.S. Geological Survey, a scientific agency in the Interior Department, should do "objective" climate science to help clear up the debate.

"Actually, there is no debate," U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said. The overwhelming majority of the world's scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels for electricity and transportation are the main cause of climate change.

Zinke hesitated several times to mention renewables as part of his "all of the above" energy strategy for public lands — a term often used by politicians to signify that they favor coal, oil, gas and renewables development instead of focusing primarily on renewables to address climate change and other environmental challenges.

"I'm a strong supporter of research and development for different technologies for a complete spectrum of energy — to include traditional sources to make sure we're better at doing that," he said when asked what he means by "all of the above."

Federal public lands are a major source of energy in the U.S., with about 40 percent of America's coal mined from them and about 20 percent of the country's oil and gas drilled on them.

In the Obama administration, the Interior Department has played a major role in implementing the White House's plans to cut greenhouse gases and uphold America's part of the Paris Climate Agreement, which aims to keep global warming from exceeding 2°C (3.6°F) — a level of warming climate scientists consider dangerous for humanity.

Through the Interior Department, the Obama administration blocked oil development off of much the Atlantic and Arctic coastlines, placed a moratorium on new coal leasing, created vast new national monuments that protect land and prevent energy development within their borders, and he designated tracts of public land just for wind and solar energy development.

Zinke suggested his Interior Department would pivot toward allowing states to have more say over what happens on federal land while "restoring" the trust of some Westerners who are disenchanted with federal lands policies that protect the environment. As part of that, Zinke said he would focus on cutting forests for timber and developing land for oil, gas and coal.

Fixing crumbling roads, bridges, trails and other infrastructure in national parks would be another major priority, he said.

Zinke emphasized his love for public lands and the need to keep them open to public access.

But when Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., asked why Zinke voted for a U.S. House rules change that would make it easier for the federal government to sell off public lands, Zinke said he was responding to a sense of anger among some Westerners that the federal government isn't listening to them when it implements restrictive environmental policies.

"It was an indicator of how upset people are about our land policy at the moment," he said. "It's a shot across the bow that you have to do something."

Yet, he said he opposes a movement in some Western states and within the Republican party to reduce the amount of land the federal government manages by transferring it to states willing to take it.

"I want to be clear on this point: I am absolutely against the transfer or sale of public land," he said. "I cannot be more clear."

'Americans Are Terrified': Jake Tapper Makes Paul Ryan Answer for Wave Pro-Trump Hate Crimes
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Sunday said that Donald Trump supporters who bully women and minorities were not welcome in the Republican Party.

During an interview on CNN, host Jake Tapper pointed out to Ryan that there had been countless incidents of harassment against minorities and women since Donald Trump won the presidency.

"There are millions of Americans out there, Tapper explained, "who are, frankly, terrified about what a President Trump will mean for them. Is there anything that you as Speaker of the House, one of the leaders of the nation want to say to them?"

"I hate it that people feel this way," Ryan replied. "And second of all, they should not. I think people should be rest assured, America is a pluralistic inclusive country. It is, it has been and it will continue to be. So, I really think people should put their minds at ease."

"There are these incidents taking place all over the country," Tapper pressed.

"That's terrible," Ryan agreed. "By the way, that's not Republicans. We are the party of Lincoln. People who espouse those views, they're not Republicans. We don't want them in our party even if they're thinking about it."

"And I'm confident Donald Trump feels the same way."

Watch the video below from CNN, broadcast Nov. 13, 2016.

Robert Reich Lists and Smashes Paul Ryan's 7 Terrible Ideas (VIDEO)
RobertReich.org
Yesterday, the new Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, summed up his House Republican agenda – vowing to pursue legislation that would frame a stark choice for voters in 2016.

"Our No. 1 goal for the next year is to put together a complete alternative to the left's agenda," he said.

Despite the speech's sweeping oratory and careful stagecraft, Ryan clings to seven dumb ideas that are also cropping up among Republican presidential candidates.

Here they are, and here's why they're dumb:

1. Reduce the top income-tax rate to 25% from the current 39%. A terrible idea. It's a huge windfall to the rich at a time when the rich already take home a larger share of total income that at any time since the 1920s.

2. Cut corporate taxes to 25% from the current 35%. Another bad idea. A giant sop to corporations, the largest of which are already socking away $2.1 trillion in foreign tax shelters.

3. Slash spending on domestic programs like food stamps and education for poor districts. What?! Already 22% of the nation's children are in poverty; these cuts would only make things worse.

4. Turn Medicaid and other federal programs for the poor into block grants for the states, and let the states decide how to allocate them. In other words, give Republican state legislatures and governors slush funds to do with as they wish.

5. Turn Medicare into vouchers that don't keep up with increases in healthcare costs. In effect cutting Medicare for the elderly. Another awful idea.

6. Deal with rising Social Security costs by raising the retirement age for Social Security. Bad! This would make Social Security even more regressive, since the poor don't live nearly as long as the rich.

7. Finally, let the minimum wage continue to decline as inflation eats it away. Wrong again. Low wage workers need a higher minimum wage.

These 7 ideas will harm most Americans. Ryan is wrong.

Paul Krugman Has Taught Them Nothing: Republicans Would Tank the Economy Again, Given Another Chance
Paul Rosenberg
The idea that George W. Bush "kept us safe" has rightly been exposed to ridicule recently by Donald Trump. But Bush also failed miserably on another front: keeping us safe economically, as he presided over the biggest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression — and his presidency was already an economic disaster before that, per Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

On this second front, the GOP blame-shifting centers on Obama, in order to virtually erase the epic market failure from history. Just as Bush is supposed to get a pass for 9/11, while getting credit for "keeping us safe" afterwards, he's also given a pass for the housing bubble and the financial crisis which gave us the Great Recession, so that all blame can be focused on Obama, who supposedly made things worse with his "job-killing" policies.

In the real world, empirically-based economists know this is ridiculous. In the third quarter of 2010, for example, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the stimulus bill "increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.6 million." This was typical of CBO reporting of the impact the stimulus had, but the totality of policy responses was much broader than that, and a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities by economists Alan Blinder of Princeton and Mark Zandi of Moody Analytics updates their earlier work in 2010 to first provide a comprehensive overview and then draw lessons for the future.

On the first point, Zandi told a conference call briefing, "In its totality it was a resounding success," adding, "That sounds a little odd," because of how bad the recession was. "It was indeed a great recession, a very painful time, we're still not completely free of it," he said. But it could have been so much worse. "If not for the policy response, the recession would have been, as Alan is fond of saying, the Great Depression 2.0."

More specifically, the paper estimates that, without that response:

The peak-to-trough decline in real gross domestic product (GDP), which was barely over 4 percent, would have been close to a stunning 14 percent

The economy would have contracted for more than three years, more than twice as long as it did

More than 17 million jobs would have been lost, about twice the actual number

Unemployment would have peaked at just under 16 percent, rather than the actual 10 percent

The budget deficit would have grown to more than 20 percent of GDP, about double its actual peak of 10 percent, topping off at $2.8 trillion in fiscal 2011

Today's economy might be far weaker than it is — with real GDP in the second quarter of 2015 about $800 billion lower than its actual level, 3.6 million fewer jobs and unemployment at a still-dizzying 7.6 percent.

That alone should be enough to silence right-wing critics of government activism in general, but of course it won't be. "I know there are still denialists who think the economy would have been just great in 2009-2010 if the government just left it alone, but I doubt they will read the Blinder-Zandi paper," economist Dean Baker told Salon. Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research, is one of a handful of economists who warned of the financial crisis before it occurred (none of whom, significantly, relied on standard macro-economic models). "For everyone else," Baker said, "you're left asking, 'What is this really telling us?'"

"Denialist" is an apt description. A 2010 paper by Adam Kessler in the Real-World Economics Review, "Cognitive dissonance, the Global Financial Crisis and the discipline of economics" examined the views of economists opposed to Obama's stimulus at the time, believers in lassez faire (BLF) who signed a letter from the Cato Institute to that effect, as opposed to economists in general. Kessler theorized that BLF responses to the crisis and ensuing recession could be explained in terms of cognitive dissonance, saying that, "Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that when real-world events 'disconfirm' deeply-held beliefs this creates psychological discomfort in persons and they will respond by means of distortion and denial."

BLFs naturally tend to believe that free markets work perfectly well and thus when they don't government must be held to blame, in denial of what has just occurred. Kessler queried this group of BLFs and a sample of economists from the American Economics Association, asking about their views were on 10 possible causes of the Great Recession. One possibility was the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which requires banks to reinvest in communities they serve which have traditionally been redlined (called "assessment areas" under the law). As the paper's abstract explains:

The notion that the CRA is a major cause of the crisis apparently has great resonance among the BLF but is demonstrably false. Among other results, 46 percent of the signers of the letter believe that the CRA was one of three top causes of the crisis compared to 12 percent of the "other" economists. I conclude that the BLF exhibit symptoms to cognitive dissonance.

There are a variety of lines of evidence against the CRA hypothesis, (some in the paper, more here and here) most strikingly the fact that "Only 6 percent of high-priced loans to low-income borrowers or in low-income neighborhoods by lending institutions that fall under the CRA legislation were made in their CRA assessments areas." Far more money was put at risk elsewhere, most of it by institutions not covered by the CRA. "The CRA did it" is an economic denialist narrative, every bit as much as "sunspots did it" is a global warming denialist narrative. Both are easily refuted by data — data which denialists simply choose to ignore.

Still, aside from the denialists who will ignore this new study, there are some who could benefit — journalists, for one, who are constantly exposed to floods of denialist claims about the economy, the torrent of blame that Republicans constantly heap on Democrats, despite the well-established fact that Democrats are overwhelmingly better for the economy. Thus, at the very least, this study provides a very different, and refreshingly fact-oriented, framework for thinking about economic policy.

The paper has two distinct purposes, Zandi explained. First, "to assess the policy response, in its totality, to the great recession," a reprise of their earlier work but with the passage of time, "a lot more data points and better tools, better models." Second "to tease out from our results … what we've learned" both to prevent future crises to the extent possible, and beyond that to ensure "that policymakers take the right lessons from what we've just experienced, so that they can respond to that crisis in a more effective way, and ensure that we don't suffer the same kind of economic pain that we did."

As the paper explains, the policy response had three distinct aspects: financial stabilization (epitomized by TARP), fiscal policy (the stimulus and other programs) and monetary policy (most notably, quantitative easing), but the combination of these policies was much more successful than any of them would have been in isolation. "The policy response is more than the sum of the parts," Zandi said, and in the report, they wrote "Fiscal and monetary policy interactions are large, that is, fiscal stimulus measures enhance the power of monetary/financial stimulus measures substantially — and vice versa."

On the first aspect, Zandi said, "The most important point coming out of this effort is that stabilizing the financial system — in a sense bailing out the banking system and the financial system more broadly — was a necessary condition for stabilizing the economy, and jump-starting an economic recovery. Without that effort, without stabilizing Wall Street, so to speak, it would have taken a lot longer for Main Street to find the bottom and to get up and running."

On the second aspect, fiscal policy, Zandi said, "lots of moving parts here, very controversial, but I think our work clearly shows that the fiscal stimulus efforts, the temporary increase in government spending, cuts in taxes, were very effective." Most notably, "The Recovery Act, the most controversial stimulus, passed in February of '09 was very instrumental in ending the recession, jump-starting a recovery. The recession ended only a few months after the Recovery Act, in June of '09, and the first job increases began a year later, in February 2010, so I don't think that's any accident."

Some of other policy efforts may have been more of a mixed bag, but Zandi said it was a "very important point, that when you're in crises, it's important to try lots of things. Some things will work, some things won't, at least as well. But it is important and vital to be creative in the policy response." Indeed, this is precisely the attitude that FDR took in digging the country out of the Great Depression.

As for the third aspect, monetary policy, most notably zero interest rates, and quantitative easing [QE], it was "also very controversial," Zandi said, "but I think, again, our work shows quite clearly that QE was very much a net positive for the economy." He acknowledged there were "certainly some downsides, and the script on this is still being written," but countered "At least up to this point in time it's clear that it did help to lower long-term interest rates, support asset prices and support economic growth, and we go through that in some detail."

Zandi concluded by noting "There were some efforts that fell short of expectations," including "policy leading up to the crisis," and housing policy in response to it. But considered as a whole, he clearly considered it a remarkable success.

Blinder then took up the second main purpose of their study, the question about lessons learned. He began with a warning: "If you're in a key policy maker's chair when something like this or remotely like this happens, you're faced with titanic levels and varieties of uncertainty. So it's not just like there's a menu you pick up, and chose, this is what you do in circumstance 27."

But if not a menu, he did have advice, starting with "The biggest, biggest lesson," to draw: "It makes sense for policymakers to err on side of too much, rather than too little. So, that's a bigger stimulus rather than a smaller stimulus, that's more QE rather than less QE, and a whole variety of things like that, knowing that you don't know the perfection point, the exact amount that will be just enough to cure the problem, and not too much to create some other problems. The benefits to risks are very asymmetric."

As a corollary, he said, it was "a big mistake … to do a thing today that will make it harder for the next round, the net group of policymakers to cope with the next crisis."

He then went on to "focus on some of wrong lessons people would like us to learn from this and emphasize that they're wrong," noting that "often the correct lesson is just the opposite." He took on five such lessons.

Blinder began with notion that moral hazard — letting people off the hook for bad decisions — is to be avoided at all costs. He began by saying, "Everybody agrees that moral hazard is a potential problem when you bail people out, and would rather not do it. There's no dispute about that. But the question is how big are those costs?" He went on to say, "A really important lesson is not to think of moral hazard as show-stopper — that is, 'Thou shalt not go where moral hazard lurks,' but rather as trade-off — 'Yes, it's a bad thing, we wish we didn't have to do it, but under extreme circumstance there may be good reasons to live with the moral hazard.' I think that's a very important lesson."

The "second wrong lesson" Blinder took on was "the anti-Keynesian message that fiscal stimulus doesn't do any good for the economy," a view that Blinder called "almost impossible for me to understand how people maintain" it.

In particular, he said, "I was never able to understand in real time — this is going back to say 2009 '10, '11 — and I certainly can't understand in retrospect John Boehner's famous in some quarter's phrase of 'job-killing government spending.'" To the contrary, he pointed out, "When the government spends money, as Keynes said in the 1930s, it's doing one of two things, basically. It's hiring people itself, to do work, or it's hiring private contractors, buying things from private firms, who in turn have to hire people to produce whatever it is they produce. How that could kill jobs is beyond me.

"This is not to say you can't argue over specifics — this or that provision of the stimulus package, for example, but the notion that it's a job-killer is just about as wrong as it could be," Blinder said. "Keynes had that more or less right in the 1930s."

The third argument Blinder took up was that "The Federal Reserve … was going beyond its legal authority, pushing the law to and beyond its breaking point and maybe even poaching into the realm of Congress, doing quasi-appropriations … putting public money at risk." In response, he said, "If you read the Federal Reserve Act as it was written then, especially the famed Section 13.3, there's no doubt that the Fed stayed within legal authority. Many people in Congress were shocked to see how much legal authority the Fed actually had, but it stayed within its legal authority, that's for sure."

The fourth lesson that should never be learned, Blinder said, was that super-expansionary policies "such as zero interest rates and the tremendous expansion of the balance sheet via QE" are dangerous and "will eventually be be inflationary." There's nothing new in this charge, he pointed out. "Critics were saying that in 2009, 2010, 2011, dot dot dot, they're still saying it today. There's been no sign of inflation and as all of you know — no sign of higher inflation — and as all of you know the Fed is now trying, actually, actively, to make inflation higher than it is."

Finally, Blinder criticized the belief that "The Fed now faces a massive and perhaps impossible exit problem [from its super-expansionary policies]. How does it get out?" Here, he pointed out, "One of the missing points in this debate is people forgetting that the Fed has as many bites at this apple as it thinks it needs." It doesn't need to "embark on a policy, like one big policy, like the fiscal stimulus that passed in 2009," instead, "The Fed is going to have many, many incremental policy tightenings over a protracted period of time, probably measured in years. And any time it feels it's made a mistake, it can always slow down or even reverse something it's already done." Summing up, Blinder said, "So the false lesson to learn is that the Fed in its haste to avoid a Great Depression 2.0 got us into an even bigger problem, and they have no idea how to get us out of it. I just think that's wrong."

In the question period, I asked if individual criminal prosecutions couldn't have been a much more effective way to deal with the moral hazard issue, and both authors agreed. "It was a big mistake on the part of the Justice Department, mainly, not to do more prosecutions of individuals," Blinder said. "I want to hasten to say doing dumb things is not criminal, but misrepresentations can be criminal, depending on details," he noted, "and the main point — so I very much want to agree with you — is that if you fine a gigantic bank, whatever, a billion dollars, five billion dollars, you're basically punishing the shareholders of that bank, who almost certainly did nothing wrong. You are not punishing the guilty party."

"So I think it was a big mistake," he concluded, "and the next time we shouldn't make that mistake, and to your precise question, yes, I think it would do much more good on the moral hazard front than just fining the bank."

Altogether, they make an impressive case against the sorts of arguments made by Republicans and conservative critics of the activist response to the financial crisis. But of course Baker is right — this isn't going to do a thing to change denialists' minds. Still, it could help to blunt the impact their arguments have on others.

There are, however, two further important points to address, in light of this paper, and the issues it raises. The first is the issue of why facts just don't seem to matter in this case. There are a number of different possible answers to this, depending on the level of analysis and the kind of tradition you come out of. But one of the most interesting ways of approaching the problem comes through the empirical work done by cognitive linguist Anat Shenker Osorio, much of it reflected in her book, Don't Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense About the Economy. The denial Baker points to seems like just another example of this, and I asked Shenker Osorio for some comment.

"We've all heard the terminology of "laissez faire" or, in broad strokes, let the economy do its own magical thing," Shenker Osorio said. "This is more than an economic orientation, it's a whole thought structure — peddled and promoted by a right wing that benefits from it. We're led to believe the economy exists independently out in nature — the weather, the water, the very essence of life. This way of thinking is what leads to unconsciously comparing the economy to a body — saying it's 'unhealthy' or on 'life support.' And naming your plan a 'Recovery' Bill."

Such language can be so pervasive, you don't even notice it's there — like a fish unaware of the water around it. But it's also wildly misleading, she points out.

"So," she continued, "the debate about stimulative measures comes into sharp focus when viewed from the lens of how you perceive the economy. If you consider it an independent, organic, entity — you may favor quick 'life saving' measures — but you'd oppose long term government action. Or, as conservatives would name it, 'intervention.'" Which is enough to cut off any further thought on the subject.

"If, however, you view the economy accurately as the aggregate of the decisions people make and actions we take, then you understand there's a continuous role for outside supervision. Or what we'd call government," she concluded.

There's a certain circularity here: conservatives with a well-established narrative framework have a powerful filter to screen out contradictory evidence. Liberals more grounded in the empirical tradition are cognitively prepared to see the sorts of facts that Zandi and Blinder deal with, and follow the argument they lay out. Each group sees what it's predisposed to see — even though what they're predisposed to see is not at all equivalent.

But there's a second important point to address, one already introduced by Dean Baker — the question of what Zandi and Blinder's work is really telling the rest of us, those who aren't in denial, who aren't caught up in the "thought structure" that Shenker Osorio describes. I've already argued that their study is showing journalists there are very sound reasons to reject conservative denialism, and that still seems like a very good service to preform. But what about getting beyond not learning the wrong lessons? What about the possibility of substantially improving our understanding of how things actually work — and what choices actually exist?

"It is important to understand the nature of the Blinder/Zandi exercise," Baker said. "They are asking the benefit of what we did as compared to doing nothing. (I'm actually surprised, doing nothing comes out better than I would have expected.)" Baker made this same point in response to their first study. "The question asked by the study is what would the world look like if the federal government had done absolutely nothing to counter the economic and financial downturn resulting from collapse of the housing bubble," Baker wrote then, "This counter-factual seems more than a bit unrealistic."

"It would be interesting to compare with a different policy mix," Baker told Salon. "Suppose we let the banks go under, then flood the system with liquidity (banks now under the control of the FDIC, and on their way back to being privately owned) and did an ambitious stimulus (focused on clean energy). This frees us of the albatross of a badly bloated financial sector, while providing the basis for growth in a sustainable way." This is only one possible alternative scenario.

There's been a lot of discussion of the ills besetting macro-economics in the wake of the Great Recession. But expanding the Zandi/Blinder exercise in the way that Baker suggests just might produce results that could get more than just economists talking about how to work our way beyond the cloud that still hangs over the entire field.

As Shenker Osorio said, "If, however, you view the economy accurately as the aggregate of the decisions people make and actions we take, then you understand there's a continuous role for outside supervision. Or what we'd call government," And getting a clearer picture of what fundamentally different alternatives are possible is absolutely crucial for developing more thoughtful, creative, and successful government.

How Right-Wing Radicals -- From Nixon to Paul Ryan -- Have Deceived America
From Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush to Paul Ryan and Chris Christie today, leaders who've shifted America to the right have been aided by moderating misrepresentations. In the case of Reagan, it was not just the man, but conservatism itself that received the flattering reinterpretation. That was a difference that mattered; it goes to the heart of why Reagan is the American right's touchstone. But the more general process of misrepresenting and reinterpreting increasingly radical ideological figures as if they were normal, everyday pragmatic problem-solvers is one that's been a repeated leitmotif in America's political trajectory since Richard Nixon's political resurrection in 1968.

As Elias Isquith wrote here after Christie's reelection, Christie is not the next great moderate hope, he's just very good at executing what Blake Zeff identified as the GOP's blue-state playbook, breaking with red-state conservative orthodoxy on a few secondary issues. But it takes more than a column or two to expose the emperor's new clothes. For the moment, George Washington Bridgegate notwithstanding, Christie remains the GOP's best hope of winning the White House in 2016, largely because he's so good at the game that Isquith pointed out, orchestrating his own misrepresentation as a mainstream political figure. What's more, battling against 2016 GOP rivals will only make it more difficult and more important to see beyond the illusions to what Christie is actually doing. That's why is helps to look backward to similar figures in the past, and how they managed to so successfully deceive. And it's not just Christie. Paul Ryan's role in shaping GOP budget politics — and all the attendant economic fantasizing — provides another key reason why we need a far better grasp of the process of normalizing reactionary radicalism.

In looking backward, we need to keep in mind what a truly radical conservative is: "radical" comes from the Greek "radic," meaning root. What makes for a radical conservative leader is not purity in terms of some litmus test — after all, Reagan himself pursued a sort of "blue-state strategy": He raised taxes multiple times, made arms deals with terrorists, signed a mass amnesty law for the undocumented, etc. Rather, the test of post-New Deal conservative leadership is how much they radically shift the spectrum of debate or transform the basic configurations of political space. Indeed, superficially preserving continuity, even accepting certain liberal gains, can be an integral part of carrying out a much more fundamental transformation.

Key to this progression has been the fact that, rather than building cumulatively on successes, more often than not conservative succession has been built on successive failures — each one sold as a "common sense" way of dealing with the chaos created by previous conservative incarnation. Reagan succeeding Nixon was closest to being the exception to this rule. Nixon exploited and began consolidating the racial divisions that fractured the New Deal majority, a process briefly interrupted by Jimmy Carter, and Reagan finished that process of consolidation. He did so, however, by radically altering the tone, if not the substance. Thereafter, however, the pattern held with remarkable consistency.

Reagan created massive federal deficits, and presided over rapid deindustrialization. Gingrich skillfully tapped into Ross Perot's mobilization of the resentment this fueled, and tried to redirect it toward a massive restructuring of government and dismantling of the welfare state. His aggressive, confrontational, no-holds-barred politics soured the public so profoundly it was necessary to bring in something completely different — the "compassionate conservatism" of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, touting his bipartisan record as "a uniter, not a divider," which, in turn, once tested in the White House, was eventually revealed as a hollow fraud, signaling the need to return to an even more extreme version of Gingrich's politics of government dismantlement and implacable resistance — or if that began running out of steam, another go at a "bipartisan" governor from "outside of Washington."

For conservatives themselves, almost every stage of this process requires massive forgetting, if not rewriting, of what conservatives stood for and supported just a heartbeat previously. All that mattered was that the new incarnation provided easy, self-evident answers to all the most pressing problems. At the same time, the wider political system had to be convinced to see this latest stage of lurching from one spectacular failure to another in much more normalized, humdrum terms, say, as a question of seeking "strong leadership" framed within a personality-based account of politics — an account in which actual material policy consequences all but disappear, except, of course, for those that concern the minuscule class of major political donors. Such is the context in which right-wing radicalism of various different stripes has been repeatedly reinvented as folksy common sense.

It all started with Richard Nixon. Despite his early success as a rabid red-baiter — years before Joe McCarthy first cribbed notes from him — Nixon in power was never pure enough for movement conservatives. They've been notably less forgiving of him than Reagan, which has helped to retroactively obscure his conservatism. This is further compounded by the accelerating rightward shift under Ronald Reagan and afterward, even though that shift was one that Nixon himself made possible, if not virtually inevitable. When Nixon held office, Democrats dominated Congress, and the New Deal era faith in government had yet to be broken; Nixon's criminal conduct in Watergate would, ironically, play a major role in helping to change that. Thus, for purely political reasons, much of Nixon's domestic record looks fairly liberal in retrospect — as liberals today point out from time to time. Nixon himself once famously said, "I've always thought the country could run itself domestically without a president," an indication of how little it normally figured in his own political priorities. But not always, as can be seen in the "war on drugs," the most spectacularly destructive domestic government program of the 20th century.

Nixon's real record, politically, can best be understood in terms of Rick Perlstein's"Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. "As its title suggests, "Nixonland" makes abundantly clear the role that Nixon played in fracturing America along cultural lines that permanently transformed American politics. Nixon had plenty of help, of course. The '60s were a time of explosive social turmoil, which the media regularly sensationalized, emphasizing contrasting extremes far more than it worked to foster dialogue — a perfect setup for the sort of politics Nixon practiced. A different sort of person would have tried to solve the problems he exploited to win the White House in 1968. Instead, Nixon intentionally inflamed them. Reviewing "Nixonland" for the Nation, Thomas J. Sugrue put it well: "But as Perlstein shows, Nixon did not want to restore order. Instead, he stoked the fires of discontent to shape an enduring conservative majority. He needed polarization and disruption, so long as liberals would keep taking the fall." In this context, the very failure of the "war on drugs" was its biggest success — one that continues to this very day.

The "Southern Strategy" — along with a less-publicized "Northern Strategy" to reach out to working-class white ethnics in the Northeast and Midwest — arguably represented the most significant example of the fractures that Nixon helped open up, and, more important, cement into place. No figure did more than Richard Nixon to open up the fundamental cleavage between "them" and "us" and to make that cleavage into a fundamental ontological fact of American politics. The fact that he's not seen as a particularly conservative figure is a testament to just how profound his impact was. Yet, tellingly, we generally cannot even begin to imagine what a liberal alternative to him and his world might have looked like.

In sharp contrast, no one doubts Reagan's conservative credentials, even as his professional affability was key to deflecting attention from the darker side of all that this entailed. In Reagan's case, it's conservatism itself that has been refashioned. As Will Bunch argued in "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" (Salon excerpt here), Reagan's public reputation was in tatters before conservatives launched an unprecedented rehabilitation campaign, "an active, mapped-out, audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan's legacy across America," the purpose of which was not just to burnish Reagan's reputation, but that of conservatism as well. But that after-the-fact mass revisionism, carried out by the Reagan Legacy Project, was not the first time that Reagan and conservatism had been joined together in reinvention. To the contrary, Reagan was intimately involved in two fundamental acts of reinventing American conservatism. The first of these was the embrace of "supply-side" economics, which embodied a fundamental shift away from conservatism's being identified with naysaying and limits. (The radical reinvention aspect of conservatism across the centuries has been brilliantly laid out by Corey Robin in "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.") Spurred on by Jude Wanniski's "Two Santa" theory,Reagan embraced tax cuts as a growth-promoting strategy, which gave Republicans a way to play "tax cut Santa" in contrast to the Democrats "spending Santa," rather than just "playing Scrooge," as Wanniski warned against. Economically, the strategy was a bust. GDP grew just 31.7 percent during Reagan's eight years in office, compared with Clinton's 33.1 percent and JFK/LBJ's 47.1 percent. But it did wonders for the 1 percent, whose income grew 10 times as much as everyone else—61.5 percent vs 6.15 percent — a far cry from JFK/LBJ under whom the 99 percent actually did better than the 1 percent: 30.9 percent vs 26.9 percent.

In short, the vast majority of Reagan-era Americans experienced severe limits in their everyday lives, trapped by then-unprecedented income stagnation, but the new conservative rhetoric was all about limitless growth — which the donor class in the 1 percent got to experience as real. And that was Reagan's second fundamental act of reinventing American conservatism: he made its lies fundamentally and systematically congruent with the lived experience of the 1 percent, who were simultaneously growing richer and richer, more and more politically influential. This "double bubble" effect — a financial bubble encompassing a shared ideological worldview bubble — in turn became the foundation for the resurrection of Reagan's reputation that Bunch wrote about. That bubble also provided a foundation for the Clinton-era Wall Street wing takeover of the Democratic Party, thus further shifting the entire political spectrum decisively to the right.

There were many other fantasy aspects to Reagan conservatism: his "freedom fighter" rhetoric paired with support for death squads in Central America, apartheid in South Africa, and bin Laden and his extremist allies in Afghanistan, for example. Or his cauldron of nuclear fantasies, from the illusion of Soviet superiority fueling a massive arms buildup, to the fantasy of fighting and winning an all-out nuclear war (from which the U.S. would "fully recover … in just two to four years") fueling aggressive posturing, to the Star Wars techno-fantasy, spurned by scientists, which Reagan embraced after multiple states passednuclear freeze initiatives in 1982, frightened by his seemingly unhinged nuclear policies.

The list could go on and on. But because of its pervasive material impact, Reagan's embrace of supply-side ("voodoo") economics remains the central defining act of his radicalizing legacy — apart from his role in energizing, supporting and legitimating the growth of a far-flung self-conscious conservative establishment, all of which was also lavishly supported by the floods of cash his tax cuts generated. Prior to Reagan's embrace of supply-side, every four-year presidential term but one since World War II had seen the federal debt decrease as a percentage of GDP. The only exception (Nixon-Ford) had seen a modest 0.2 percent increase. For all the complaining conservatives might do, there simply was no problem of "government living beyond its means" until Ronald Reagan came to town, and created the very problem that conservatives claimed was most dire. Under Reagan, the debt-to-GDP ratio rose 21 percent, plus another 13 percent under Bush, before Clinton sharply reversed the trend, only to see Bush II begin increasing the debt ratio once again.

This situation of persistent government overspending — due to severely undertaxing the rich and super-rich —has become a dominating force in our politics, a persistent "fact on the ground" predetermining the shape of countless political battles, during "normal times," but especially during crises. Most notably, it helped create multiple preconditions, which gave rise to the birth of the "Tea Party" after the very same "free market" policies it stemmed from and enabled brought the entire global economy to the brink of collapse. In this manner, the Reagan-created conservative practice of supply-side economics made it virtually impossible to conceive of anything beyond its intellectual influence, even in the face of utter failure. Such is power of ideological dominance.

If Reagan established the basic material logic that would subvert the welfare state and the New Deal order, Gingrich played the key role of disabling the last governmental institutional site of critical democratic resistance: the House of Representatives, which Democrats had controlled continuously since 1954, and all but four years since 1930. As explained by Ronald Rapoport and Walter Stone in "Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence," Perot's third party challenge was fueled by contradictions of Reaganomics that Democrats had proven too politically clumsy to take advantage of — skyrocketing deficits, an eroding industrial base, a ballooning trade deficit — but when Clinton first spurned Perot, and then humiliated him via the passage of NAFTA, this created a opening that Gingrich enthusiastically exploited, not least by crafting the "Contract With America" specifically to target the Perot demographic.

Thus, Gingrich fleetingly positioned himself as a relatively non-ideological pragmatist, temporarily downplaying appeals to the Christian right, and making himself — and Republicans generally — a rebound beneficiary of widespread populist disillusion with Reaganomic conservatism. In tandem, Reagan and Gingrich managed to gain increasing political power over a 15-year period, despite a prolonged failure to deliver anything remotely like the widespread security and opportunity of earlier times. They did this by creating short-term hot-button electoral choices that then fed into long-term ideologically determined policy outcomes, which no other political actors could coherently and compellingly describe, much less attack, in advance. With no coherent counternarratives to oppose them, Reagan and Gingrich both found ways to benefit as much from conservatism's failures as from its successes, portraying themselves either as "principled conservatives" or as "common-sense pragmatists," whichever happened to suit their purposes best in the moment.

Once in power, arguably Gingrich's most lasting accomplishment was the destruction of how the House of Representatives had come to function over the previous 60-plus years. This could be seen in three inter-related ways. First, Gingrich consciously styled himself as a parliamentary leader akin to a British prime minister, seeking to position himself as the political co-equal of the president. Most famously, when Clinton failed to join in his fantasy, making Gingrich ride in the back of Air Force One on a trip to Israel for Yitzhak Rabin's funeral, Gingrich famously threw a bit of a fit — later admitting it contributed to his decision to shut down the government. This resulted in the famous New York Post"Crybaby" cover. Second, Gingrich tried to routinely nationalize congressional campaigns, repeating variations on the strategy that helped win the House in 1994. Following disappointing results in 1998, keyed to impeaching Bill Clinton, he was ultimately forced to step down. Third, Gingrich took dramatic steps to undermine the House's capacity to act as a deliberative body. He specifically eliminated internal specialized repositories of expertise, most notably the Office of Technology Assessment, established in 1962, which provided objective evaluations of technological issues for Congress in crafting public policy. But the OTA was only the most prominent example, as explained by Bruce Bartlett, a top economic adviser to Presidents Reagan and Bush I, who wrote a scathing critique of Gingrich's broader conduct, "Gingrich and the Destruction of Congressional Expertise," when Gingrich briefly took the lead in the 2012 presidential primary.

"Because Mr Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress' professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise," Bartlett wrote. "To remove this obstacle, Mr Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it." That's why every harebrained notion that gains traction in the House today owes an unpayable debt to Gingrich's narcissistic destructiveness.

The hyper-partisan, highly polarized atmosphere that Gingrich helped to create proved extraordinarily unpopular with the American people. While the Beltway media were incensed with Bill Clinton and quite angry that he wasn't removed from office, the public largely distinguished between private bad behavior and his performance as president, which they continued to approve of. The resulting extreme unpopularity of D.C. Republicans and the hyper-confrontational style that Gingrich represented made it necessary for Republicans to look outside of D.C. for "fresh blood" untainted by the years of trying to bring Clinton down. This resulted in yet another example of a misleadingly presented conservative ideologue: the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush.

Although Bush presented himself as "a uniter not a divider," his actual record proved so profoundly divisive that he ultimately fractured the GOP, as well as the nation. Yet, his early strong support from all major conservative factions leaves little doubt that he represented conservative aspirations for governing the nation, in contrast to simply opposing the government, which had become the dominant mode of conservatism during the Clinton presidency. For economic conservatives, he offered the most extreme tax cuts ever, and for religious conservatives, he offered an unprecedented expansion of "faith-based initiatives," but before he had time to do much more, the 9/11 attacks shifted him into full-time neocon/Christian crusader mode.

While Bush had been seen as an ideal candidate in 2000, because of what had happened in D.C. in the 1990s, the reality was actually quite different. Texas has a weak governor system, and his actual record of accomplishment was correspondingly modest in reality. While the Beltway media had it in for Gore, repeatedly trying to tar him as a liar, it was actually Bush who had profound problems with the truth during the campaign — problems that only continued throughout his presidency, as depicted early on by David Corn's 2003 book "The Lies of George W. Bush" (excerpt here). But the Beltway press corps' psychological needs blinded them entirely to Bush's flawed character as well as his radical ideology.

Eventually, as the failure of Bush's presidency became an inescapable fact, conservatives were once again forced to create a new narrative in which conservatism wasn't to blame. This ultimately required a newly discovered rejection of Bush's conservative credentials, along with anything else once deemed "conservative" that now seemed embarrassing, or even just inconvenient. And thus almost the entirety of "governing" or so-called big government or national conservatism came into potential disrepute — although still within limits, of course. Otherwise Ron or Rand Paul would have been the GOP candidate in 2008 or 2012.

Nonetheless, it was time once again for a complete makeover. The failure of G.W. Bush's presidency required yet another radical shift in conservative positioning. "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney once famously said. Now, at last, it was suddenly the worst thing in the world! But there was also the imperative to to make this radical reversal seem perfectly normal as well. Enter Paul Ryan.

Ryan's 2010 "Roadmap for America's Future," while still in the minority, was greeted enthusiastically as a "serious person" by the Beltway media — even Ezra Klein. But a July 2010 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "The Ryan Budget's Radical Priorities," identified four radical, unpopular proposals in it: raising middle-class taxes, the largest tax cuts in history for the wealthy, ending guaranteed Medicare, and privatizing Social Security. Any one of these should have been enough to identify Ryan as the right-wing ideologue he is. The next month, Paul Krugman followed up with a devastating critique in a landmark column titled simply "The Flimflam Man." On top of everything else, it turned out that Ryan's deficit-cutting plan actually didn't! The deficit cutting was simplyassumed, not specified.

In the end, all that Ryan's plan actually did over 10 years was slash taxes on the wealthy and take benefits from the poor and the middle class, eventually — over several decades — shrinking government to the size it was in the 1920s. And the same applied to the plans Ryan produced in 2011 and 2012 as well, as CBPP repeatedly showed, here, here, here andhere, for example.

One of the most strikingly radical and unpopular ideas in Ryan's plan was ending Medicare and replacing it with a voucher, which would steadily decline in value relative to the rate of inflation. On this count, Ryan was supported by PolitiFact, which called it the "lie of the year" in 2011 when Democrats said — truthfully — that Ryan wanted to end Medicare. There is arguably no better example of how the so-called liberal media establishment does the conservatives' work for them than this.

Without this sort of ideological cover, there would be no mistaking the extremism, recklessness and heartlessness of conservative leaders from Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush to Ryan, Christie and all the rest today. The U.S. already has the smallest, least effective welfare state of any advanced industrial nation in the West, as conservatives continue mobilizing to dismantle it completely. They have their eye on a Dickensian society, and they think that it looks pretty good. Martin Luther King had his dream, and they've got theirs: separate, and extremely unequal. PolitiFact's well-crafted complicity is but the latest of countless ways in which America's elite institutions have willingly accommodated themselves to making that dream come true. There's bound to be a lot more of that to come in the year ahead, and the 2016 election beyond. We'd all be well-served to get much better at spotting what they're up to.

AlterNet Radio: How We Destroyed Iraqi Society; GOP Rebranding -- Lipstick on a Pig?
This week on the AlterNet Radio Hour, syndicated columnist Tina Dupuy talks to Joshua Holland about efforts to rebrand the GOP after Republicans' fourth popular vote loss in the past five presidential elections.

Then we're joined by Raed Jarrar, who was on the receiving end of the American "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad. Jarrar explains why he won't be returning to Iraq as he had hoped to ten years ago.

Finally, we speak with Isaiah Poole, a fellow at Campaign for America's Future, about the Ryan Roadmap and the Congressional Progressive Caucus' "Back to Work" budget -- two starkly different visions for the country's future.

If you're in Washington, DC, you can tune into the show at 4 pm EST at 1480 AM. If you're anywhere else, you can stream it live at We Act Radio, and if you miss it, check back later for a podcast.

UPDATE: Here it is...

<audio id="auidoplayerhtml5podbean1b9acbdecae8fdcc066b7045439b03fc"><source src="http://alternetradio.podbean.com/mf/play/u8vg2r/032313show.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"/> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio>
Podcast Powered By Podbean

<source src="http://alternetradio.podbean.com/mf/play/u8vg2r/032313show.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"/>

The 5 Worst Things About The House GOP's New Budget
Igor Volsky
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) released the third iteration of the GOP budget on Tuesday morning. The document achieves balance in 10 years by maintaining the high revenue levels and health care savings that Republicans have vociferously opposed and slashing the health and safety net programs that middle and lower income Americans rely on. Top-income earners and corporations, meanwhile, would benefit from huge tax breaks.

Here are the five worst things about Ryan's budget:

1. GIVES HUGE TAX CUTS TO THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS: Ryan's plan would reduce both top income and corporate tax rates to 25 percent, resulting in trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The government would lose roughly $7 trillion in revenues compared to Ryan's projections, and while he plans to close loopholes to pay for the cuts, he has in the past failed to specify which loopholes he would close, and raising enough revenue from the elimination of tax expenditures would prove politically difficult, if not impossible. Ryan would also convert the corporate tax code to an "international" plan, resulting in an even bigger giveaway to American companies that are already paying historically low tax rates.

2. FORCES SENIORS TO PAY MORE FOR HEALTH CARE: Beginning 2024, the guaranteed Medicare benefit would be transformed into a government-financed "premium support" system. Seniors currently under the age of 55 could use their government contribution to purchase insurance from an exchange of private plans or traditional fee-for-service Medicare. But the budget does not take sufficient precautions to prevent insurers from cherry-picking the the healthiest beneficiaries from traditional Medicare and leaving sicker applicants to the government. As a result, traditional Medicare costs could skyrocket, forcing even more seniors out of the government program. The budget also adopts a per capita cost cap of GDP growth plus 0.5 percent, without specifying how it would enforce it. This makes it likely that the cap would limit the government contribution provided to beneficiaries.

3. JEOPARDIZES MEDICAID: The budget would eliminate the exiting matching-grant financing structure of Medicaid and would instead give each state a pre-determined block grant that does not keep up with actual health care spending. This would shift some of the burden of Medicaid's growing costs to the states, forcing them to — in the words of the CBO — make cutbacks that "involve reduced eligibility for Medicaid and CHIP, coverage of fewer services, lower payments to providers, or increased cost sharing by beneficiaries—all of which would reduce access to care."

4. REPEALS HEALTH COVERAGE FROM 30 MILLION AMERICANS: The budget repeals the Affordable Care Act's requirement to purchase health insurance coverage, the establishment of health insurance exchanges, the provision of subsidies for lower-income Americans, the expansion of the Medicaid program, and tax credits for small businesses that provide insurance coverage. As a result, more than 30 million Americans would lose coverage and the budget would eliminate the new law's consumer protections, which have already benefited tens of millions of Americans. States across the country are already implementing the law and a growing number of Republican governors have finally agreed to expand their Medicaid programs.

5. CUTS FOOD STAMPS: The budget seeks to turn most social safety net programs into block grants to the states that are modeled after the 1996 welfare reform law. That would result in devastating cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), women, infant, and children programs, and other parts of the social safety net that keep millions of people out of poverty each year. Since welfare reform occurred 16 years ago, it has failed to reach many families with children in poverty, particularly during the latest economic recession. Ryan's budget would make most safety programs equally as impotent.

Obama's Call for Rise in Minimum Wage Draws Predictable Republican Response
President Obama's proposal in his State of the Union address Tuesday to raise the minimum wage and, for the first time, index it to inflation elicited the bogus response Republicans have been spouting on the subject for 75 years, ever since the Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted in 1938.

House Speaker John Boehner said:

"Listen, when people are asking the question 'Where are the jobs?' why would we want to make it harder for small employers to hire people? I've got 11 brothers and sisters on every rung of the economic ladder. I know about this issue as much as anybody in this town," the speaker told reporters on Wednesday morning.

Six years ago, when Congress last voted to raise the minimum wage to $7.25, Boehner voted against it. That was only the second time the federal minimum wage has been raised in the past three-plus decades. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan called the proposed raise "inflationary" and "counterproductive." And Sen. Marco Rubio chimed in with:

"$9 is not enough. I think we all would want that. The question is is a minimum wage the best way to do it? And history has said the answer is absolutely not. In fact, the impact of minimum wage usually is that businesses hire less people. That's the impact of it. They'll just hire less people to do the same amount of work…We have a lot of history to prove that the minimum wage, raising the minimum wage does not grow the middle class.

Rubio is right about one thing: $9 is not enough. A higher baseline would be better. The rest of Rubio's utterances on the subject are utter nonsense.

A study two years ago by the Review of Economics and Statistics saw "no detectable employment losses from the kind of minimum wage increases we have seen in the United States." A survey of studies last year by the Center for American Progress found "significant evidence that even during hard economic times, raising the minimum wage is likely to have no adverse effect on employment."

As noted, $9 isn't enough. The National Employment Law Project has noted that "if the real value of the minimum wage had just kept pace with the rising cost of living since 1968, it would be over $10.50 today." But an improvement is an improvement, and the indexing is something that should have happened from the outset.

Paul Ryan Wants Spending Cuts That He Said Would "Devastate" the American Economy
During an interview on Meet The Press on Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) predicted that the sequester cuts are "going to happen" and made no concrete proposals for how to avoid the reductions. The tone represents a sharp rhetorical and policy shift for the onetime GOP vice presidential nominee, who warned during the 2012 presidential campaign that the cuts would "devastate" the country and undermine job growth.

"I think the sequester is going to happen," Ryan said, referring to the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts to the Pentagon and other government agencies that will go into effect unless Congress approves offsets. He charged that Democrats rejected the GOP's replacement legislation — the bill cut the food-stamp program, slashed Medicaid, undermined funding for the Affordable Care Act and disaster relief — and failed to produce their own alternatives:

RYAN: If Mitt Romney and I won the election, they would not have happened. You know why? Because we would have gone and worked with Democrats and Republicans in Congress to actually put the budget on a path to balance and would have saved defense. So where are we now? I think the sequester is going to happen because that $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, we can't lose those spending cuts. [...] But we think these sequesters will happen because the Democrats have opposed our efforts to replace those cuts with others and they've offered no alternatives.

In fact, Democrats introduced offsets in the hopes of reaching a grand bargain that could turn off the sequester and avoid the so-called fiscal cliff.

Days before House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) abandoned negotiations with President Obama to advance his failed Plan B, the White House paired a tax increase on the richest Americans with spending cuts of $1.22 trillion over 10 years, including "adopting a new measure of inflation that slows the growth of government benefits, especially Social Security." Despite Ryan's claims, the Democrats' plan contained: $400 billion in savings "from federal health care programs; $200 billion from other so-called mandatory programs, like farm price supports, not subject to Congress's annual spending bills; $100 billion from military spending; and $100 billion from domestic programs under Congress's annual discretion."

Ryan also reiterated that Republicans won't support additional revenues to turn off the sequester, noting that the American Taxpayer Relief Act — the last minute law that averted the fiscal cliff — included an increase in taxes on couples making more than $450,000 annually and singles making more than $400,000. "The point is, though, the president got his additional revenues. So that's behind us," Ryan said on Sunday.

The comments represent another retreat for Ryan, who backed Mitt Romney's proposal to raise revenues by eliminating tax loopholes and deductions for the wealthiest Americans. Those reforms were not included in the American Taxpayer Relief Act and could be part of a package that reforms tax breaks for high-income individuals and corporations, generating "$1 trillion in potential savings over 10 years" — more than enough to replace the sequester.


Aww Happy Birthday Lil Killer!
...as a way to get back into the arts and entertainment scene of the Midcoast. The blog has led to regular contributor magazine work along with freelance opportunities with local businesses--so thanks Killer Convo for helping me get back in the swing.


text:
Racial Healing Requires Seeing the Bigger Picture
Given the troubled state of race relations in America and our ongoing total failure to address this matter in a productive manner, we are at a time that "requires seeing the bigger picture." This column explores the magnitude of our situation and shares some likely causes. Maybe discussion of solutions will come in future columns.
The severity of our failure is all around us. For instance, on 8 July 2016, a black gunman shot and killed five white police officers in Dallas and wounded nine police and civilians. After hours of negotiations with the shooter failed to make progress, a robot was sent to his location with an explosive that was detonated leading to his death. Following are portions of comments made on Facebook by Reverend Curtis Gatewood, a field director for North Carolina Branch of the NAACP. The quote here is from an article titled "You Won't Believe What This NAACP Leader Said About The Dallas Cop Killer. It's Infuriating" by Amanda Prestigiacomo:
"Again, this is an instance where a Black man was murdered at a point where patience (since he had obviously been blocked off from other people) and the deescalation [sic] of the situation could have provided the opportunity to bring him in alive for questioning and his day in court."
"Make no mistake, by taking this Black 'suspect' and demonizing and using a killer robot to blow him up in this unprecedented and barbaric manner and without a trial in a court of law is the truest and most literal example yet of a 'high-tech lynching'"
For a man in position to dramatically influence the thinking of others, the mindset revealed in these comments reflects the depth of the racial divide in America and the questionable if not irrational thinking that feeds it. A man kills five innocent people and wounds nine others. Gatewood and many others would have the lives of additional police officers put at risk while claiming this action was not taken because the killer was black.
Add to this the lawlessness that is allowed and even excused by some in the name of permitting people to protest what they perceive as acts of racism. Protesters block streets, attack police officers, loot businesses, even burn businesses. Then there is the killing of innocent police officers not only in Dallas but in other American cities. On 17 July I walked in from church to hear the report of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana being called for assistance at a location only to have three officers killed and three wounded. It was an assassination.
It is in this context of race-related thoughtlessness and lawlessness that I argue Americans as a whole and individually must see the bigger picture regarding what is going on. If done, we will come face-to-face with some uncomfortable truths.
Among the truths discovered would be abuse of statistics in making the argument that black males are under attack by police officers. An article by Aaron Bandler titled "5 Statistics You Need To Know About Cops Killing Blacks" uses research done by Heather MacDonald to address this often repeated inaccurate claim. Here is an enlightening quote from the article:
"Cops killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks in 2015. According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of these victims had a gun or 'were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force,' according to MacDonald in a speech at Hillsdale College."
"Some may argue that these statistics are evidence of racist treatment toward blacks, since whites consist of 62 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent of the population. But as MacDonald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties."
Couple MacDonald's findings with the high arrest resistance rate among blacks and a picture emerges that is not convenient for those who press the argument of rampant racism among police officers. In the article "African Americans cited for resisting arrest at high rate in S.F.," Emily Green writes, "African Americans in San Francisco are cited for resisting arrest at a rate eight times greater than whites even when serious crimes are not involved, according to statistics drawn from court records." San Francisco is not an abnormality in this regard. The bottom line is cops go where crime is happening and respond to the situations presented. These statistics indicate they spend far more time in black neighborhoods than in others and are faced with conditions that foster greater potential for undesired outcomes. This is not to say police officers are perfect, but it does present a need for dealing with what is really indicated by the statistics. That is, blacks commit more crimes.
Given the picture painted so far, how is it anybody expects a police officer to approach a black person and not have a greater level of fear for his or her personal safety than when approaching a person in the other groups? That is, groups who do not show the attitude of Curtis Gatewood mentioned in opening, are not statistically likely to commit a crime or resist arrest, and have no track record of killing innocent cops? Seeing the bigger picture should cause one to recognize as unreasonable the expectation that police officers should feel equally safe no matter who they approach.
Media bias in favor of liberal policies and ideology must also be recognized as contributing to debilitating racial tension in America. An example of how this condition is manifested shows in CNN's Wolf Blitzer interviewing Anna Garnese, a white female. She is a teacher at the school where Philando Castile worked. Castile, a black male, was shot and killed during a vehicle stop by a white police officer in Minnesota on 6 July 2016. Garnese talks about him positively as a person, but Blitzer leads her to recount being stopped by police for a broken tail light. She reports it was an uneventful exchange between her and the officer. Having told the officer she was getting it fixed, he let her go. Garnese's concluding comment regarding her treatment is, "I know for a fact it's because of the way I look." Blitzer's interview pressed the narrative that here is another innocent male killed by a white cop because the victim is black. Then he leads Garnese to reinforce that narrative by having her rehearse her experience and declaring the difference in treatment was strictly based on race. Please watch the interview at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJMuhoufmMw
My problem with what happens here is Blitzer and Garnese totally disregard all of what justifiably might go on in an officer's head when approaching a black person, especially a male. Liberal media, Garnese and too many others across this nation hold that a police officer should approach a black male with the same sense of safety as approaching a white lady who follows instructions. "Give me a break." This is blatant media bias that contributes mightily to the racial tension in this nation.
I have only scratched the surface of the uncomfortable truths to be faced by "seeing the bigger picture" regarding the sad racial climate in this nation. I did not get to the negative influence of organizations such as Black Lives Matter or the horrific consequences of a president and others of influence who, long before the facts are known, declare shootings of blacks by white police officers the result of racism. On the other hand, there is the hypocrisy of that response when a black man kills five white police officers and states he "wanted to kill white people, especially white officers," but President Obama simply declares the black killer "demented." The listing of uncomfortable truths is almost endless.
The good news is that if we "see the bigger picture" regarding race in America, there is hope. We, individually and as a nation, might then see beyond our restricted views. A Facebook post by a young black lady sheds some light on how this process might look as it plays out. She dared see and feel beyond her restricted view to the bigger picture:
"My mind was already soooo cluttered and I haven't been able to get any order to my thoughts. Then I had the random opportunity to be a fly on the wall in a courthouse breakroom with a group of officers. Hearing them talk about their fears and changes that need to be made to protect them from societal unrest made my already aching heart hurt even more. I just wanted to hug them and thank them for the sacrifices they make on a daily basis and acknowledge that everyone doesn't believe them to all be bad. Instead all I could do was hang my head and walk out because I'm so sad for this country."

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


German Lidded Beer Stein with Lithophane Antique Porcelain Germany Mug ca. This beer stein has been made in Germany around 1900s. In the base of the stein it has lithophane scene.
Absolutely gorgeous piece hand painted and still in good condition. Condition: Mint, out of damage. The item "German Lidded Beer Stein with Lithophane Antique Porcelain Germany Mug 1900s" is in sale since Wednesday, December 6, 2017.
This item is in the category "Collectibles\Breweriana, Beer\Drinkware, Steins\Lidded Steins\Germany". The seller is "24hourshipment" and is located in Sherman Oaks, California. This item can be shipped worldwide.


The first idea was to title this post "Things I Hate About Air Travel," but that seems too limited. Here are a few of my "hates" about the horrors of modern TSA-dominated air travel. Readers are invited to share their own in comments.
Check-in: Theoretically this has gotten easier in the past few years as we're given the option of auto-check-in. But that only applies if you aren't checking any luggage and I find that the machines frequently do not work very well. It's always fun to come in on a tight schedule, head to the machines to beat the half-hour cut-off and have to find some way to muscle back into line quick when they don't work.
Checking baggage: This used to be awful but has gotten much worse. Now they charge you extra for the privilege of manhandling and losing your luggage, and extending your stay in the airport by a good half-hour. Best bet is to find some way, practically any way, to avoid this.
Screening: They always find ingenious ways to make this one worse. X-Rays and metal detectors were not enough. Now we have to take off our shoes and laptops, walk through rapiscans, face patdowns, keep all of our liquids in baggies, etc. It never ends.
Airport announcements: I apologize to whoever it is who was walking by me at Sea-Tac Sunday for the swears when the TSA cut into a beautiful piece of music by (I think) the Gothard Sisters to remind us that if we "see something," we should "say something" or some other routine warning.
Crew-member instructions: Most of these pre-date the modern security state and I have a little, teeny bit of patience for them, because I fly a great deal but many people don't. But, seriously, we have to be told how to fasten our seatbelts by "fitting the metal tip into the buckle" and see that demonstrated? It's just insulting to our intelligence and our freedoms.