Lemkin

The 51%

Bloomberg is reporting that Obama is the first President since Ike to win two elections by a 51%+ popular vote margin. Yes, not even Saint Reagan, he of stayin’ up late and workin’ cross the aisle with ole Tip, managed the feat. And if we hear anything about that era, we hear about Reagan crushing History’s Greatest Monster and Son of History’s Greatest Monster. Steve Benen at the Maddow blog points out that Obama now joins a list of six Presidents with 51% or more in two elections: Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the aforementioned Eisenhower, and now, Barack Obama.

But, of course, the GOP in the House must be allowed to set policy for the country. Obama has achieved no mandate; not in 2008, not in 2012. Whatever in the hell it is that happened in November is certainly not a mandate to govern. Any serious person realizes this implicitly. If anything, he should look for GOP goodwill by moving quickly to eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Then I’m sure they’ll come right around to his way of thinking.

Trickle Down →

Timothy Noah nails it:

You still can’t say [publicly] that Fortune 500 chairmen need to maximize their incomes, but it’s now perfectly OK to say that real estate speculators and day traders who pay taxes as S-Corporations to dodge Social Security and Medicare payments need to maximize their incomes. By God, they built this country!

Yep. Twenty years of message discipline gets you places. The Democrat could learn something from this sort of thing but never does.

"…first a Keynesian observes that fiscal stimulus can increase growth in a depressed economy. Second, as an attempted reductio, a conservative says “if that was true, then you could increase growth by breaking a bunch of windows.” Third, the Keynesian accurately points out that you could, in fact, increase growth by breaking windows. Fourth, the conservative accuses Keynesians of wanting to break windows or believing that window-breaking increases wealth. But nobody ever said that! The point is that we have very good reasons to think smashing windows would be a bad idea—there’s more to life than full employment—and that’s why Keynesians generally want to boost employment by having people do something useful like renovate schools or repair bridges."

— Matt Yglesias, leaving out the next line in the exchange; the one where the conservative screams “that’s socialism,” makes a lot of unfounded claims about runaway spending, and then says government initiated stimulus has never worked, and most especially never worked in the guise of the colossal stimulatory effect of government spending to fight WWII. That recovery was the either “power of the markets” or “the markets anticipating Reagan and ‘morning in America.’” As usual.

"Academic books pack about 600 words to a page. Normal books clock in around 400. Large-print books — you know, the ones for kids or the visually impaired — fit about 250. The House GOP’s jobs plan, however, gets about 200 words to a page. The typeface is fit for giants, and the document’s 10 pages are mostly taken up by pictures. It looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan."

— Ezra Klein reflecting on the GOP “jobs plan.”

"I think every one of these Republican candidates running for the House is going to have a Democratic opponent who’s going to run an ad you can write today. It’s going to start [with] “even conservative Newt Gingrich, the former leader of the Republicans in the House, says ‘It’s radical, it’s social engineering.’”

[…]

Reagan had the 11th commandment, ‘Thou shalt not attack fellow Republicans.’ This is a capital offense against the 11th commandment. He won’t recover."

— Charles Krauthammer, making some sense on disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Broken clock, blind pig, and etc…
Disgraced former Speaker Gingrich never had much of a chance to begin with, but taking at least four positions on the individual mandate and the Ryan plan, many of those positions within one day and all easily available on the television would seem to cap it.
However, I don’t believe for one second that The Democrat would actually use disgraced former Speaker Gingrich in this way for messaging purposes. Shrill. Better to assume that voters know all about the GOP plan to destroy Medicare and but also leave a program in existence called Medicare. Talking about that sort of thing is just rank demagoguery. Any Serious Person will tell you so.

Four Memes that Need to DIE

1:  Just like any family sitting at their kitchen table does...
2:  Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill workin' nights an' evenin's together to find the best...
3:  Tighten our belts...
4:  Social Security will be "broke" in...

CBS almost reported Reagan was mentally unfit in 1986 | Raw Story →

Good Lord:

CBS’ Leslie Stahl recalled in her 2000 book, “Reporting Live,” that she was instructed not to ask then-President Reagan any questions during a 1986 meeting.

“Reagan didn’t seem to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my hand weakly,” she wrote. “Oh, my, he’s gonzo, I thought. I have to go out on the lawn tonight and tell my countrymen that the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet. My heart began to hammer with the import…I was aware of the delicacy with which I would have to write my script. But I was quite sure of my diagnosis.”

[…]

“Because Reagan seemed to ‘recover’ — I decided I could not go out on the White House lawn and tell the public what his behavior meant,” she wrote. “Was it what I had assumed at first: senility? Was it an ‘act’ — a way to avoid answering my questions? Was it some form of dementia (maybe not Alzheimer’s)? I decided I couldn’t report on my observations at all that night.”

Nothing is ever quite as breathtaking as the list of things reporters knew, but then decided on their own that the public at large would be better off just not knowing about. Inevitably they dump it out 20 years after it could have ever mattered and then soberly assess how tough it was to abrogate their entire purpose for being on the basis of some asinine logical fallacy they usually invented ex post facto.
Honestly, Leslie, the President of the United States seems totally disoriented, but recovers enough to talk vaguely about screenwriting and you decide that’s just not interesting or important enough to mention? Even if he was faking, this is major fucking news.

Your Liberal Media. All hail the fourth estate: keeping us safe.

"I think the hug lacked dignity. It did not send a message of American power and forcefulness. So I fret about the reaction around the world to this kind of fraternity-like emotionalism in full public view. Why not just a dignified, stand-up, serious handshake? That’s what Reagan would have done. A strong handshake shows friendship, respect, and even affection. But a big fat hug seems to go over the line."

— Larry Kudlow, reacting to the Obama-Rahm-a hug. No, I am not kidding.

UI issues

thebroadermarket:

by Jordan Eizenga

…research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank has found that the current link between high UI benefits and poor job search efforts is weak. Researchers found that unemployed workers who qualify for UI benefits have been unemployed for only 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits. This suggests that the persistently high level of unemployment is not so much a function of labor supply, but rather labor demand. In other words, workers are willing to work, but employers are not very interested in hiring them.

Read More

Yep, yep, yep, a thousand times: YEP. While it’s always convenient and even mildly masturbatory to blame the victim, the fact is people want to work. And, like the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, the Welfare Queen with Her Cadillac is was and always will have been a figment of Reagan and the right wing’s id-maginations.

Sorry, but it’s true.

Precious Blame

unsolicitedanalysis:

Where was this clarity during the Bush administration? The failure of federal, state, and local regulators/agencies never absolved our previous President.

It was certainly absent if you’re looking for the MSM to provide it. But you’re missing the fact that Bush specifically was in favor of the failure of our federal, state, and local government and regulatory agencies. Need I quote Lord Reagan? I guess I do:

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem

You can’t deny the government a legitimate role in any issue, no matter how large or small, and then expect government to be secretly housing a massive underwater engineering specialty, or to have regulated the offshore drilling industry into essential safety. This is the fundamental disconnect of the current argument, not that that stops the spread of utter nonsense.
Every prior GOP administration has systematically weakened regulations on offshore drilling. These chickens come home to roost and it’s suddenly all Obama’s fault? How? Why? In what universe does that make any rational sense?

And, of course, the anti-government right’s reaction to the crisis? Blame the government. Obama should (apparently) be down there, personally, running the mud shot or at the very least torturing somebody aboard the mud shot injection machine.

Now, of course, were he down there, you get to play the “government meddling is ruining BP’s brilliant plan” card. That’s what I call good policy.