Partisan Party Time

Getting them smashed before giving them the clean CR? I say make it roofies!

Comedy News

At Big Hollywood, comedy goes to WAR.
Comedian Evan Sayet doesn't mind preaching to the choir with his unabashedly conservative material.

Sayet, who divides his time between sober political punditry and satire, tells Breitbart News the choir needs all the enthusiasm it can muster these days.

"If this is a culture war, I've gotta be a part of this fight with the weapons I do have. There's no Bill Maher for the right," Sayet says.
Hi. I am Dennis Miller and I am utterly forgettable.
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Mazel Tov, America, on Your Adorable New Program!

Via.
Atrios:
Except for the fact that he beat them twice, conservative really don't have any reason to hate Obama. "Obamacare" is just the Heritage Foundation health care plan, aka Romneycare, and otherwise, uh, what?
With all due respect to the Sweet Sage of the Eschatonic—and that's more respect than you want to be carrying around most of the time—I think we need to rethink that piece of received wisdom: [jump]

  1. The original proposal for exchange markets to make health insurance universally available was the "buying co-ops" of Hillarycare, vintage 1993, of course with an employer mandate, filling conservatives with revulsion and dread.
  2. The only "original" Heritage contribution was to propose making individual consumers responsible for buying health insurance instead of their employers.
  3. Health insurance in Massachusetts was presumably regulated in a civilized way, as in New York and California, before they adopted a universal plan under Romney—so "Romneycare" did not impose serious regulation on masses of communities where it could never have been passed locally, as Obamacare does.
  4. The Massachusetts plan, like Obamacare, includes the employer mandate to which Heritage objected; the individual mandate is only for those who don't work for companies, or companies with more than ten employees. Romney vetoed the provision along with several other progressive planks, but the legislature overrode him. Romney hated the bill, though being Romney he takes credit for it because it's popular; he was being in a Romneyish way honest when he attacked the Obama law. It should be called Teddycare because the late Senator Kennedy is the one whose negotiating genius made it happen.
  5. There's a public option!!! as I began suspecting about a year ago. Actually a kind of public-private option as detailed in today's Times:
scores of new health insurance options to be offered to consumers around the country by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and the United States Office of Personnel Management, the agency that arranges health benefits for federal employees, according to administration officials.
The options are part of a multistate insurance program that Congress authorized in 2010 to increase options for consumers shopping in the online insurance markets scheduled to open on Tuesday.
It is for that small minority of people subject to the individual mandate (and to the subsidies up to 400% of the poverty line that go along with it) and it will help keep premiums relatively low for those who buy private insurance as well. As you'll remember the issue with the public option was not so much SOSHULISM as the providers' fear of competition; they preferred their traditional prix-fixed cartels.
Republicans resisted the idea, as did the American Medical Association and many drug companies, which feared that a government-run insurance program could set prices and drive private insurers from the market.
And guess what: It's starting to work in a really interesting way, as we learn from the tale of Trader Joe's, which has decided to refuse to sponsor health care plans for part time workers for unexpected reasons: because it's better for the workers.
The email offers the example of a single mom making $18 an hour working 25 hours a week who currently pays $166.50 per month for her Trader Joe’s coverage. With the tax credits under the ACA, the message says, she can get nearly identical insurance for roughly half that under an Obamacare health insurance exchange. Add to that the $500 she’ll get in January and the bleak picture of lost benefits starts to change rather dramatically.
One of these days companies are going to start wondering why they can't apply this kind of logic to their full-time employees as well, and before you know it our dear little health care law is going to be a great big bumptious teenager! So please just stop with the Obama-is-basically-a-Republican theme.
    I love, by the way, how the congressional Republicans bragged on the hipster burritos they consumed as they plotted their coup:
    Little do they realize that the Qdoba Mexican Grill chain is the terrific liberal shop that proves fast food companies can provide their employees with health insurance (and 401Ks) without going bankrupt. According to the Heritage Foundation, Qdoba shouldn't even be able to exist.
    Blake Farenthold's order? Sorry, that was really uncalled for. Can't make myself delete it though, somehow. Maybe because of this. Image from foundshit.

    Short Attention Span Theater

    Some time ago I actually cited Talking Points Memo as a potential successor to I.F. Stone's Weekly, in a bloggospheric formula.  The reason was that JMM had just had his little mini coup crowd sourcing information that led to a better national understanding of a huge national scandal: the firing of the US Attorneys under Bush.  But since then he's proved me wrong--he has no interest in putting in the time, energy, or thought to actually reporting anything novel. The entire format of the front page and of his editor's viewpoint is clickbait.  I don't have any quarrel with that. A man's got to make a living and who am I to break his rice bowl?  If he is content to run an endless stream of one sentence clips from speeches, or to repurpose this morning's post with a new picture and a slightly sexier headline in the afternoon, who am I to criticize?  But, at the same time, there is something truly destructive about this approach.  For years we've all criticized the NYT and CNN and other major media players for failing to give their readers enough historic background and context to understand the significance of the events they are covering.  This is even more the case with TPM. The short, clippy, format they have chosen to cover, for example, the shutdown or the debt ceiling fight is trivializing and highly deceptive.

    Take this:


    With a government shutdown appearing imminent Monday, a Republican congressman expressed frustration with the conservative wing of his party.
    "We're pretty much out of options at this point," Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) said, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal."They're all giddy about it," he said in reference to Republicans most unwilling to compromise. "You know who benefits the most here from a shutdown? The Democrats benefit and they know that."
    Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) also admitted that Republicans will be damaged politically in the event of a government shutdown. Meanwhile, a poll released Monday showed that Americans will be more inclined to blame congressional Republicans for a shutdown than President Barack Obama.

    What are we supposed to conclude from this little tidbit? It is actually the current headline piece on the site labeled "GOP Rep Exasperated..."  Think Progress has a similar roundup of startlingly unsympathetic things various Republicans have said about the showdown leading  Jed Lewison at Kos  to moan  "If these guys want to be seen as anything less than complete hypocrites, they need to reverse course and agree to approve a clean funding bill."

    We seem to be having some trouble grasping the central fact of our political system: people say one thing and do another.  What is the point of quoting people saying things for public consumption when we know for a fact that what governs their actual votes in the legislative crucible are entirely different considerations? JMM is just giving his readers what he thinks they want, or will click on at any rate, which is a constantly updated stream of information-like-quotes that are utterly context free.  Is there a cost to this style of reportage? I think there is--when you read down into the comment thread at a place like Kos, where to do them credit people at least care about politics and have their hearts in the right place, you see almost as much confusion and misinformation as at a Fox site.  Because people assume that statements stand for actual thought, or that public positions can give you a clue as to private negotiations.  They can't. All 11 of the GOP reps who are quoted over at Think Progress as thinking that the shut down is bad politics and bad theater voted to send Boehner's amended, dirty CR back to the Senate. Why? Because voting is a team sport and none of these guys has the slightest intention of standing out in a crowd and taking the heat for an individual decision.  You can't understand politics unless you grasp this central fact: none of these guys are willing to stick their head out of the crowd unless, like Ted Cruz, they've made a conscious decision that they may reap more benefit by being an outlier than by following the other lemmings off the cliff.

    --Aimai

    Just Kidding: NMM*NB Lives. Open thread.

    Just kidding.  The blog continues and we will have an open thread for people to discuss their favorite form of national self immolation. Do you prefer to be slaughtered in your beds by corporatist hacks or smothered by rising tides as a result of climate change?

    *Edited to fix major error in headline. Thanks guys!

    GOP INTRANSIGENCE SHUTS DOWN NO MORE MR NICE BLOG

    While the world waits with bated breath to see what happens to Obamacare on October 1st a devoted corner of the blogosphere holds a mountaintop vigil awaiting the return of its Prophet, known only as "SteveM."  Prayers, thoughts, and execrations are welcomed during this period.

    --Aimai

    What did I tell you?

    Chertoff's Gut Terror Alert System. By James Joyner, July 2007.
    What I told you, at the beginning of August, was that if reports of a "conference call" or whatever among senior Al-Qa'eda officials planning some kind of massive strike on an unnamed US embassy were true, it was not necessarily true that they were planning
    a strike, but more likely that they were testing the Snowden revelations to find out if the US really had the power to monitor all their communications. And that the NSA, by going all Chertoff and posting public warnings everywhere, would be falling into their trap, giving them their answer:
    Of course in this case, ironically, the NSA will have done itself considerably more harm than Snowden did. But that's intelligence for you. Wonder why they call it that?
    You can read the whole thing, it's got some good sentences in it.

    So today we find out from the New York Times:
    As the nation’s spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.
    Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack, analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists’ use of a major communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. 
    It now seems entirely clear that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in his anxiety to prove to the world that the NSA surveillance methods really work, has once again compromised them much more effectively than poor Snowden did. I'm not saying he should be arrested for espionage, because I think that's a dumb way to deal with malefactors who are not in fact spies, but he really does need to find a new job, or retire.

    And secrecy begins at home, if you know what I mean. Let's see a little more seriousness about the agencies keeping their own, and a little less about citizens being citizens. I mean stop public relations campaigns designed to prove to the world how important and successful they are; do the damn job and be successful. And free Chelsea Manning!

    1 Year

    I promise you'll get a weekend recap tomorrow- because yesterday was pretty damn epic.

    But today. Well, bear with me today as I get a little bit sappy. And the last Blogtember prompt seems pretty perfect for todays post!

    Share a photo of something old


    My engagement ring was my great grandmothers. I share her middle name. I share her love of peppermint ice cream. I share her stubborn nature. And I love that I wear her ring every day. A ring which has been paired with my gorgeous wedding band for one year. Holy shit. One year!!

    A year ago (yesterday- but who's counting), I married the love of my life. The man that can always make me laugh and cheer me up (seriously- his laugh is my favorite noise in the world). The man who I love going to sleep next to at night and don't even get mad when he snores a little too much or sleeps through his work page for 10 minutes until I finally get up to answer it. The man who cleans up after me when I cook dinner and inevitably destroy the kitchen, and doesn't even get mad that I have managed to take all the dish towels into the living room because I keep forgetting they are over my shoulder.

    They say the first year of marriage is the hardest. And we have had our fair share of ups and downs. But here we are, a year later and a year stronger.


    Here's to many many more years with this guy. Because he is pretty damn awesome. 


    photo signature_zps9507e200.jpg

    Follow the money

    Sergei Svetlitsky. No Police State Campaign. Kiyiv, 2011.
    Well, that explains something.
    I'm that idiot Obot who can't understand why he's supposed to feel terrorized by the revelations of NSA collecting data on the communications of American citizens, I haven't been [jump]
    shy about admitting it. I just don't see how they can use it for the traditional purposes of suppressing dissent and muzzling the press. Indeed, evidence is that they can't, as in the great AP scandal of last spring, when the Department of Justice wanted to put 20 AP reporters under surveillance and instead of going over to NSA to pick up their phone records they had to get a warrant and demand them from the AP itself.*

    Then I saw this really interesting Wall Street Journal article and realized something: there's a cui bono thing going on here that is quite independent of suppressing dissent and muzzling the press, and has more to do with the potential customers of Email Made in Germany:
    Three of Germany's largest email providers, including partly state-owned Deutsche Telekom AG, teamed up to offer a new service, Email Made in Germany. The companies promise that by encrypting email through German servers and hewing to the country's strict privacy laws, U.S. authorities won't easily be able to pry inside. More than a hundred thousand Germans have flocked to the service since it was rolled out in August..... 
    "Countries are competing to be the Cayman Islands of data privacy," says Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank that receives funding from the tech industry. While establishing these islands of privacy might make for good marketing, the initiatives face hurdles. Laws demanding that data be stored in-country can give domestic Internet-service providers a boost but also could raise their customers' costs.
    It was that Cayman Islands reference that gave it away, alongside the fact that it was the Wall Street Journal running the story; in addition to the usual German privacy hysterics**, this service is primarily aimed at people who are anxious to keep their financial transactions private, most particularly from the government—in other words tax cheats and money launderers, also known as some of our most distinguished citizens right here in the United States.

    Because when you are a police state seeking to suppress dissent and muzzle the press you don't exactly keep it a secret.*** You try to keep the identities of your informants under wraps, because you don't want the citizenry to know when they are and when they aren't being watched, but you want them to know they might be watched; to assume they're being watched all the time. And social network analysis makes no sense in that context: when you shake somebody down and start shouting at him, "Who are your friends? Who are your friends?" the point isn't to find out who his friends are but to frighten him and maybe recruit him into the service.

    There are lots of people who have seen something like that happening in the US, and it has nothing to do with the National Security Agency, or even, mostly, with the FBI, but more with the ICE and local police forces and sheriff's departments, from Ray Kelly's Brooklyn to Joe Arpaio's Tucson: it's the experience of young black men, and of people with Arabic names. Believe me, nobody is checking out their metadata.

    But if you are trying to track down an international terrorist network, as our intelligence services are certainly supposed to be doing, and you want to follow the money, secret social network analysis of communications metadata would be a great tool. And since financing terrorist networks, money laundering, and tax evasion fit together nicely in a horizontally integrated portfolio, following the money can easily lead to all three.

    And that, dear friends, is a threat to a wealthy libertarian who feels God, or Aqua Buddha, or Ms. Rand gave him an inherent right to avoid paying taxes; and that, perhaps, is why the whole NSA story has such long libertarian legs.

    *Once upon a time there were 250 officers from FBI, CIA, and National Counterterrorism Center who had illegal access to the NSA collections; it started in 2006 and went on until August 2009. Then they stopped breaking that law, for some reason. Do you recall anything special about 2009? Like a new president or something?

    **Invariably explained in historical terms of the German people's experience of Nazi and Stasi secret-police states, though I'll bet one day we'll learn that the hysteria was mainly among the third of the population that served as informants.

    ***True, Uncle Donald Rumsfeld and his outfit set up a secret probe of Code Pink, the Raging Grannies, and other dire domestic threats in 2004, but that clown show may well have been dumb enough to believe, or at least hope, that they would find a connection between Medea Benjamin and Ayman al-Zawahiri. And in any case even in the Bush presidency they were quickly exposed and forced to stop doing it.
    And on that last gloomy note, I'm going to take a bit of time off. I'll be back on October 10. I'd say I'm going to miss the government shutdown, but I think it'll still be going on when I get back to blogging. (I think very soon we're going to start hearing Republicans talking about extending it to the end of Barack Obama's term, in all seriousness.)

    There'll be guest bloggers while I'm gone, so please stop by. I'm sure they'll have some appropriately nasty things to say.
    WHY REPUBLICANS ARE NOT GOING TO GET THE BLAME THEY DESERVE

    The conventional wisdom is that the Republican Party is going to pay a significant penalty for shutting down the government and/or driving America to the brink of default (or beyond).

    I'd love to think that's true, but I don't believe it.

    The reason is that the mainstream political world is heavily invested in the notion that the GOP is a sane, rational, responsible party. We know this because every time the GOP has utterly failed as a party in the past few decades, it's gotten a do-over almost immediately. Everyone in the political mainstream agrees that the GOP should get a mulligan every time it fails.

    This goes back to Nixon -- two years after he resigned in disgrace, and his successor horrified many Americans by pardoning him, that successor nearly won the presidency. Two years after that, a disgraced right wing came roaring back in California by getting Proposition 13 passed; two years after that, Ronald Reagan was elected in a landslide.

    In 1992, a sitting Republican president was so unpopular that he failed to win even 40% of the popular vote in his reelection bid. Two years later, the GOP was rebranded as the party of Newt Gingrich and swept the midterm elections. A failed effort to drive Bill Clinton from office sent Gingrich to an early retirement, but not to worry: despite peace and prosperity, the Democratic candidate for president in 2000 was subjected to endless mockery and couldn't secure enough votes to win the White House. The GOP was successfully rebranded again.

    George W. Bush disgraced himself in office; his party lost Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008. Again, not to worry: almost instantly, the GOP was rebranded, first as the party of "pizza summit" moderation (led by the digraced ex-president's brother), then as the home of the tea party, which swept congressional, state, and local elections in 2010.

    And after Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, new GOPs were spotted on a regular basis. Marco Rubio is going to lead Republicans to an embrace of immigration reform! Rob Portman will lead them to an embrace of gay marriage! Rand Paul will lead them to a new skepticism about military adventurism! Peter King will lead them away from a dangerous Rand Paul-style isolationism!

    So even if Republicans get all the blame for what's about to happen, and plummet in the polls, it doesn't matter: the political establishment will desperately cast about for some "new" GOP, at least until the stench of the shutdown/default moment has lifted. Mainstream journalists will develop a fascination with Chris Christie (he's not a Washington Republican!) or Jeb Bush (he's so reasonable!) or Peter King (he doesn't like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, and he didn't vote for Bill Clinton's impeachment!) They'll do anything not to admit that that the Republican Party is rotten to the core.

    Infinite Friedman Recursion Syndrome

    Mondoweiss offers a hilarious competition: readers' predictions for Binyamin Netanyahu's appearance at the UN on Tuesday. This one from Jamal Abdi:
    I'M SUPPOSED TO BE REASSURED BECAUSE A GUY FROM GOLDMAN SACHS THINKS GOP RATIONALITY WILL PREVAIL?

    Ezra Klein thinks it's good that House Republicans are throwing a fit now, when the almost certain consequence is a government shutdown, rather than waiting until we're on the verge of a debt default. As evidence that this is good news, Klein brings in ... a guy from Goldman Sachs?
    Moving the one-year delay of Obamacare ... maximizes the chances of a shutdown but makes a default at least somewhat less likely. If a shutdown begins Monday night, Republicans and Democrats will have more than two weeks to resolve it before hitting the debt ceiling.

    As Alec Phillips put it in a research note for Goldman Sachs, "If a shutdown is avoided, it is likely to be because congressional Republicans have opted to wait and push for policy concessions on the debt limit instead. By contrast, if a shutdown occurs, we would be surprised if congressional Republicans would want to risk another difficult situation only a couple of weeks later. The upshot is that while a shutdown would be unnecessarily disruptive, it might actually ease passage of a debt limit increase."
    Yes, Phillips actually wrote that:
    if a shutdown occurs, we would be surprised if congressional Republicans would want to risk another difficult situation only a couple of weeks later.
    What shred of evidence is there that crazy-caucus Republicans are ever motivated by an aversion to bad publicity and plummeting polls and other manifesttions of a "difficult situation"? As Ryan Lizza noted a few days ago, the craziest House Republicans live in overwhelmingly Republican districts, which means, given the nature of modern Fox-crazed Republican voters, that there's no chance whatsoever that the crazy caucusers be punished for any level of extremism. The craziest senators -- led by Ted Cruz and Mike Lee -- are also from overwhelmingly Republican states. What's to prevent them from just holding a gun to America's head all over again when we reach the debt limit? If anything, their crazy voters would be inclined to punish them for shying away from a second hostage crisis in a month.

    Sorry, Ezra -- you're giving us pearls of wisdom from a Goldman analyst as if he's supposed to seem like an unimpeachable authority. I see the source of that prediction and think, This is a guy who's going to make gobs of money for the rest of his life no matter whether he's right or wrong. His company will make gobs of money forever whether it's right or wrong. So, no, this doesn't impress me.

    ****

    Klein goes on to write:
    One way a shutdown makes the passage of a debt limit increase easier is that it can persuade outside actors to come off the sidelines and begin pressuring the Republican Party to cut a deal. One problem in the politics of the fiscal fight so far is that business leaders, Wall Street, voters and even many pundits have been assuming that Republicans and Democrats will argue and carp and complain but work all this out before the government closes down or defaults. A shutdown will prove that comforting notion wrong, and those groups will begin exerting real political pressure to force a resolution before a default happens.
    That makes no sense. Klein's "comforting" scenario is a situation in which Republicans would be saying they were avoiding a shutdown so they could concentrate on a debt limit hostage crisis. They would be shouting from the housetops, We didn't blow up the government now because we've planted explosives under the global economy, set to go off a couple of weeks from now. Why would corporate CEOs find that comforting, or lulling? And even if they thought it was just a bluff, as the debt deadline approached, wouldn't they rally and apply plenty of pressure even if they had been lulled? They're corporate CEOs, for crissake. They're used to getting what they want from government.

    The business community will step in no matter what, whether or not there's a shutdown crisis first. This intervention will be forceful. The question is whether it will work -- crazy caucus Republicans are so crazy they may not respond even to our Galtian overlords. But that won't depend on whether there's a warning shot in the form of a shutdown crisis.

    Plane crazy

    A Japanese view. Japan Self-Defense Forces are going to buy the F35 too, if it ever exists, so Lockheed is manufacturing parts in Japan, enabling the Japanese government to up its own costs for the thing by 50%. Membership has its privileges, and you have to pay for them.
    Pilots on the Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, F35, don't look out the window. Or at their instrument panels. As Adam Ciralsky writes in the current Vanity Fair, their helmets are equipped with something like Google Glass on steroids, giving them a continuous [jump]
    video feed from six cameras mounted under the wings and around the body of the plane, plus a display of all the flight data and such. It's been described as like having X-ray vision, being able to see through the walls and floor, but it sounds to me more like the illusion of being coterminous with the plane, of hurtling naked through the sky, and guess what?
    some test pilots have experienced spatial disorientation in flight serious enough that they have disabled the data and video streams to the helmet and landed using the plane’s conventional flight displays. Spatial disorientation is a potentially lethal condition in which a pilot loses his bearings and confuses perception with reality. A 2002 joint U.S.-U.K. review of Class A mishaps in the U.S. Air Force between 1991 and 2000 found that spatial disorientation was implicated in 20 percent of cases, at a cost of $1.4 billion and 60 lives. (Class A mishaps are defined as incidents that result in a “fatality or permanent total disability,” destruction of an aircraft, or $1 million or more in damage.) The report’s authors worried that, with the advent of helmet-mounted displays, mishaps involving spatial disorientation “will continue to pose a significant threat to aircrew.”
    Who could have expected that?

    They had to design in that way though, because the cockpit design gave pilots a lousy view. Whether they thought of redesigning the windows instead I don't know, but I imagine if they did they decided it would be too expensive. That's the kind of thinking that has made the project seven years late, so far, and run its total costs up to a trillion and a half dollars. I seem to be using a lot of italics here.

    Also, and I've heard this before, you have to schedule your battles pretty carefully, with rain dates, because the F35 can't fly in bad weather.

    And do you know why this monster has not been put out of its misery or controlled in some way? Lockheed's design engineers may be doing a monumentally crappy job, but their political engineering is beyond outstanding:
    The program was designed to spread money so far and so wide—at last count, among some 1,400 separate subcontractors, strategically dispersed among key congressional districts—that no matter how many cost overruns, blown deadlines, or serious design flaws, it would be immune to termination. 
    Unlike feeding and educating the people and taking care of their health. Or even having a government, which some of our members of Congress have concluded we could save some money by doing without (after all, they're working for Lockheed too, so they think the same way). When they couldn't agree on a budget at the beginning of this year and the famous sequester of funds took place, the Defense Department made its savings by putting its employees on furloughs—ripping off its employees and their families the way Walmart might do—and Lockheed never lost a penny. If they succeed in shutting the government down this week, look for Lockheed to come out of it just fine.

    CONGRESSMAN CULBERSON'S ANALOGY: OUTRAGEOUS, BUT NOT COMPLETELY INACCURATE

    Yes, this is appalling:
    During a meeting of the House Republican Caucus, Congressman John Culberson (R-TX) compared the relentless Republican effort to defund Obamacare to the heroic efforts of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who overpowered terrorists who had gained control of the plane.


    Obviously, it's outrageous that he's comparing supporters of Obamacare -- or supporters of enforcing enacted laws, or of keeping the government funded -- to suicide terrorists.

    But the analogy isn't entirely off base.

    Remember what happened on the "Let's roll" flight, United Flight 93? A lot of ordinary people died, and a target in D.C. was spared. The target was apparently the U.S Capitol, where Congress works.

    As a result of what the Republican are doing now, a lot of innocent ordinary citizens will be harmed. You know who probably won't be harmed? Members of Congress. They'll still be paid. And most of them probably won't lose their seats -- only three House Republicans lost seats in 1996, after the last shutdown.

    Ordinary citizens suffering while members of Congress are spared? Yes, there are some similarities between then and now, even if they're not the ones the congressman had in mind.
    WHY SHOULD I SHED ANY TEARS IF JOHN BOEHNER CAN'T SAVE HIS JOB?

    Jonathan Chait writes about Ted Cruz's campaign urging the House Republican caucus to force a government shutdown if the Senate and president won't agree to an Obamacare delay. Crazy House Republicans are on board, and are making Boehner's life miserable -- but, of course, there's this:
    Now, the Cruz House bloc can't exactly force Boehner's hand here. They can simply force him to pass a bill to keep the government open with Democratic votes. That, of course, would be another win for Cruz -- conservatives would be furious at Boehner’s betrayal and looking to potentially depose him:


    You know what? I'm sick of hearing that this is such a painful process for Boehner. I'm sick of being told that I should feel some sympathy for the guy because he's just trying to keep his job.

    I'm 54 years old. If I lose my job, I lose my job. I have no income. (Yes, I can do freelance work in my field, but that pays much less and comes with no benefits.) Because I'm in my fifties, and nobody in America is hiring people in their fifties, if I lose my job I'll probably never have a good job again. And that's true of pretty much every American my age.

    John Boehner? Why does his desire to cling to his speakership supersede the needs of the country? If he genuinely thinks the crazy caucus is leading the country to a cataclysm, why shouldn't he sacrifice his damn speakership and do what's patriotic, suspending the Hastert "rule" (which is just self-imposed and isn't a rule at all) and getting a continuing resolution and debt ceiling increase passed with Democratic and sane Republican votes? What does he lose if he's deposed, besides power -- which, as is obvious by now, is not something he has much of?

    If I'm let go in a wave of "belt-tightening" or "restructuring," I'm unemployed. If Boehner's deposed, he can keep his seat in Congress. And if he retires in disgrace, so what? The world of corporate boards and lobbying and fees per speech that would be a nice annual salary for a normal person will open up to him. Plus, as a congressman with a 22-year career, he'll have a lovely pension and health insurance and retirement account. Hell, he's 63 -- he can start collecting Social Security.

    Sorry, but there's something pathological about the craven, desperate way that members of Congress -- people with so many options -- cling to their seats. The rest of us are regularly told that we simply can't expect to hold the same job for life -- the real world just doesn't work that way anymore. Our elected officials just don't live in our world.
    TED CRUZ IS THE REAL LEADER OF THE HOUSE REPUBLICANS. LET'S MAKE THAT OFFICIAL.

    Wow, this (from National Review's Robert Costa) is amazing:
    Cruz to House Conservatives: Oppose Boehner

    On a Thursday conference call, a group of House conservatives consulted with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas about how to respond to the leadership's fiscal strategy. Sources who were on the call say Cruz strongly advised them to oppose it, and hours later, Speaker John Boehner’s plan fizzled.

    It’s the latest example of Cruz leading the House's right flank.
    First Cruz told House Republicans to focus on the continuing resolution intended to the government open, rather than waiting for the debt ceiling fight. Boehner and the leadership have wanted to shift the focus to the debt ceiling, but Cruz said "Jump!" and the House crazy caucus said "How high?" -- so Boehner and the leadership failed to win over the caucus.

    Then Cruz issued another order:
    Later Thursday, Cruz met again with House conservatives at a venue near the Capitol. According to one House member, the bicameral bloc talked deep into the night about the CR and pressuring Boehner. At the top of the agenda: making a one-year delay of Obamacare a requirement for government funding, and to accept nothing less, should the defunding effort unravel. They fear Boehner is resistant to making that an ultimatum, and they discussed ways to force his hand.

    Leadership sources, for their part, are startled by Cruz's attempt to shape House strategy and work against the speaker. They knew he'd oppose Boehner's playbook, but they didn’t expect him to huddle with conservatives and ask them to ignore it. So, Cruz’s meetings have made him a key House player, but they’ve worsened his already-fraught relationship with the leadership.
    We know Boehner's hold on the Speaker's job is tenuous -- if we didn't know that before, it's pretty obvious now -- so why not make this leadership change official? After all, right-wingers are enthralled by the notion that the Speaker of the House doesn't actually have to be a member of the House -- here, for instance, is Mark Levin in 2012 arguing that Scott Walker should be Speaker, and here's a RedState blogger, also in 2012, urging the election of Newt Gingrich. (A few days after that was posted, Louis Gohmert actually nominated Gingrich. In the January Speaker election, Colin Powell and outgoing congressman Allen West received votes.)

    So, House Republicans, if it's true (though many people have their doubts) that a Speaker doesn't have to be a member of the House, why not pick a member of the Senate?

    Go for it, kids!

    Make Senator Ted Cruz the next Speaker of the House!


    (Story via Memeorandum.)

    ****

    UPDATE: I'm not the only person who's considered this possibility.

    Adventures in marketing

    I do not think "Honey  by Marc Jacobs" is a good name for a perfume, unless it smells like honey, in which case it is a good name, but not a good idea. It will attract ants, and possibly bears and honey badgers. Also, the container makes me think of Hello Kitty.
    An "artisanal egg sandwich" would be one assembled by artisans, a kind of folk sculpture if you know what I mean, in which the ingredients took second place to the totality; or perhaps one made with an artisanal egg, an idea I would prefer not to contemplate. Whereas what they surely meant to focus on was the (bogus) artisanal quality of the bread, "natural" Asiago cheese, and applewood "smoked" bacon. As to calling it an "artisan egg sandwich", I can say only that I had no idea artisans were oviparous.

    UNTWIST YOUR KNICKERS, WINGNUTS

    Really? This is a problem?
    In the latest escalation in the Obama administration's war of words with congressional Republicans, White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer compared the GOP to terrorists in an interview on CNN Thursday. "We are for cutting spending. We are for reforming out tax codes, reforming out entitlements," Pfeiffer told Jake Tapper. "What we're not for is negotiating with people with a bomb strapped to their chest. We’re not going to do that."
    Hugh Hewitt is appalled, as is Mediaite house wingnut Noah Rothman:
    Mediaite's Noah Rothman joined radio host Hugh Hewitt to react to that rather out-there comparison, observing that whereas a few years ago, this would have been shocking, now it’s just yet another outlandish piece of hyperbole that’s just "par for the course now."

    Hewitt asked, "What's next? Boehner is Assad and Ted Cruz is the Nairboi Westgate mall shooters?"
    Hewitt got Congressman Tom Cotton, a former Army Ranger, to tell us he was shocked, shocked, at Pfeiffer's statement.
    HH: ... Now my question is, have any of your colleagues on the Hill said anything about this, yet? Or is it just not widely known, the level to which they’ve stooped?

    TC: I think this is a new low to which they've stooped, Hugh, referring to some of their opponents in a legislative debate as suicide bombers. It was bad enough when they were calling us terrorists or anarchists or arsonists. Right now, most of my colleagues, I don't think, know, because as you say, it just happened a few hours ago. And we just finished up legislative business for the day, and I was actually at dinner with a few colleagues, and shared the remarks that Mr. Pfeiffer made with them. I think they were all, it’s fair to say, astonished....
    That's from the transcript at Hewitt's site, where Hewitt (or his Web crew) also lapsed into incoherence:





    Conservatives, of course, would never make a comparison like this.

    Oh, wait:





    That was from Pulitzer-winning wingnut cartoonist Michael Ramirez, shortly before Obamacare got through Congress. During the fight to pass the Affordable Care Act, a lot of right-wingers thought that was an apt comparison:
    Rush: "Mullah Nancy Bin Pelosi ... is no different" than those who "convince all these people to put bombs on their kids." On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh said: "Here's the way we have to start looking at Nancy Pelosi: Mullah Nancy Bin Pelosi. She's no different than these mullahs and these imams who convince all these people to put bombs on their kids and send them out there to blow up. ... That's exactly what she's doing to the Democrat Party. The only thing she can't do is promise them 73 virgins or whatever it is." [The Rush Limbaugh Show, 3/1/10]...

    Breitbart's Big Journalism calls Obama is the "suicide-bomber-in-chief." In a post on Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism website, Frank Ross wrote: "Mark Steyn is always right, whether he's writing about Andrew Lloyd Webber or, in this case, the suicide-bomber-in-chief, Barack Obama, who doesn't much care how many Democrats get sent to the electoral Elysian Fields -- or even whether he gets a second term -- as long as he can blow up the capitalist system from within." [Big Journalism, 3/6/10]

    Wash. Times' Pruden compares Democrats to suicide bombers. In his Washington Times column, editor emeritus Wesley Pruden wrote: "You have to be a true believer in Barack Obama's radical agenda to be a Democrat in Congress, and believe with the intensity of a suicide bomber. Mr. Obama can't even promise a harem of virgins in paradise." [The Washington Times, 1/19/10]....
    And, of course, this never gets old on the right (or at least it didn't until, um, May 1, 2011):




    I don't recall any harrumphing about this from the likes of Hugh Hewitt. Do you?

    Cheap shots, hot shots, screen shots




    I'm not even going to try to explain what I was doing on the above web page except to say that it was a totally legitimate part of my job, for which I get sort of paid, unlike these Blogspot effusions, to find out something about one of the Xu Xiaoping award winners  (I was actually trying to find out where a particular essay had been published, not whether it got a prize).  But I loved the somehow Russian pathos of that banner ad.

    Mark Halperin below the fold, and much, much more!

    Supernonpartisan love-feaster Mark Halperin in 2011, just after he got suspended from his job at MSNBC for calling President Obama a "dick" on live TV.
    We are all Aaron Alexis

    Yes, Mark. Because guns don't kill people, negativity kills people. If we weren't so partisan those 12 victims would still be alive. Also, both sides do it: those who keep demanding more effective gun control and funding for mental illness treatment, and those who prefer to complain about how bad mentally ill people are. If we take the centrist approach of doing nothing on the one hand and not complaining on the other, at least until midnight, that will definitely make it all better.

    Wall Street trees bear a strange fruit/Snark on the leaves and critical analysis at the root

    AIG CEO Robert Benosche on the company's bonuses after the great disaster, via Ezra Klein:
    The uproar over bonuses "was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses, and all that — sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong."
    Crude mockery of an insurance executive accused of destroying the American economy. There's talk about making bankers take literacy tests before they're allowed to vote, too. Oh, wait, I must be thinking about somebody else. Image via Cynical Times.
    Rectroactionary watch: New York City mayoral race

    Republican candidate Joe Lhota, quoted in Newsday:
    "His policies haven't indicated any change whatsoever," Lhota, 58, said after a Manhattan forum. "Anybody who loves the Sandinistas as much as he does, anybody who wants to support the Sandinistas, who are a pro-Marxist -- it speaks for itself."
    It would not be strictly speaking correct in our normal universe to say that Bill DeBlasio "wants to support the Sandinistas", since he hasn't had anything to do with them since about 1990, according to the Times article "exposing" his past in startlingly Nixonian language ("a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government"). That would be about 23 years. Nor has the Sandinista front seemed especially more Marxist than anybody else in the years since its 2006 return to power, during which its signature policy has been pretty much on the lines of "teach a man to fish", maybe a little Marxist in the sense that the Roman Catholic church is Marxist, but not exactly Stalin:
    "Zero Hunger" with its budget of US$150 million plans to deliver a US$2,000 bond or voucher to 75,000 rural families between 2007 and 2012. The voucher will consist of the delivery of a pregnant cow and a pregnant sow, five chickens and a rooster, seeds, fruit-bearing plants and plants for reforestation.[70] The project's short-term objective is to have each rural family capable of producing enough milk, meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables and cereals to cover its basic needs while its medium range objective is to establish local markets and export certain products.
    The families that benefit from the project will be required to pay back 20 percent of the amount that they receive in order to create a rural fund that will guarantee the continuity of the program. NGOs and representatives from each community will be in charge of managing the project.
    But if you think in retroactionary terms of reverse time, following Bill and the Nicaraguans back to the time when the British Labour Party was an openly pro-Marxist organization (i.e., before 1994), then I guess yes, no doubt. As soon as we get past the election of Bill Clinton and into the 1980s, DeBlasio will be there, helping those Nicaraguans with their basis groups and nuevas canciones, after which he will be ready for college, then high school, and eventually getting born.
    Or for $1895 you can get a week in Revolutionary Nicaragua,  absorbing the terror of the all-day meeting.
    And speaking of Red-baiting in the Times

    There's a weird meme running around the right wing according to which Communists ran the New York Times in the 1950s, and demonstrated it in their coverage of Stalin's death in March 1953:
    It seems to be traceable to the Times itself, and an op-ed for the 50th anniversary of Stalin's death by Serge Schmemann:
    it is worth remembering that ''Uncle Joe'' was not always the same demon in our eyes that he is today. The New York Times of March 6, 1953, in which Stalin's death got a banner headline, made no mention of the purges or the gulag. But it did declare that his death ''brought to an end the career of one of the great figures of modern times -- a man whose name stands second to none as the organizer and builder of the great state structure the world knows as the Soviet Union.'' (March 10, 2003)
    Thus, as sloppily plagiarized in Murray Friedman's The Neoconservative Revolution (2005):



    (Some comical Bad Writing there: it's fun trying to imagine how the Times could have put the purges and gulags in a "banner headline" on the dictator's passing—Purger Perishes?)

    It's actually quite difficult to find the text Schmemann was quoting there. The total access to the archives that the Times promises me as a subscriber does not seem to be quite total, unless it's just a function of their website being possibly the worst-designed website in the history of distinguished online newspapers—maybe they really are Communists. But then again the link offered by my friend Doug, from materials the newspaper offers free for student use, is not actually so very uncritically admiring:
    Stalin took and kept the power in his country through a mixture of character, guile and good luck. He outlasted his country's intellectuals, if indeed, he did not contrive to have them shot, and he wore down the theoreticians and dreamers. He could exercise great charm when he wanted to. President Harry Truman once said in an unguarded moment: "I like old Joe. Joe is a decent fellow, but he is a prisoner of the Politburo." 
    But the Stalin that the world knew best was hard, mysterious, aloof and rude. He had a large element of the Oriental in him; he was once called "Ghengis Khan with a telephone" and he spent much of his life nurturing the conspiracies that brought him to power and kept him there.
    "I don't always read books, but when I do, I prefer to have written them myself." —the most interesting dictator in the world.
    And the reason Schmemann claims the coverage makes no mention of purges or prison camps (the word gulag was unknown in English, I think, until translations of Solzhenitsyn introduced it quite a few years later) is that he looked only at the initial story, filed by Harrison Salisbury from Moscow, found not in the Times archive but at a mystery site and strangely dated "March 7, 1954":
    This correspondent circled the Kremlin several times during the evening and early morning. The great red flag flew as usual over the Supreme Soviet Presidium building behind Lenin’s Tomb. Lights blazed late as they always do in many Kremlin office buildings. Sentry guards paced their posts at the Great Kremlin Gate. The city was quiet and sleeping, and in Red Square all was serene. The guards stood their duty at Lenin's Tomb, but otherwise the great central square was deserted, as it always is in the hours just before daylight.
    Obviously the reason Salisbury did not mention the purges in his article was not that he was in love with Stalin but that he was living in a real police state (as opposed to the one in which Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota are living) and trying to do the best job he could without being expelled from the country.

    And if Schmemann, or Murray Friedman, or my friend Doug, had looked just a tiny bit harder, they would have found that the massive Times coverage of Stalin's death had a full article on the Great Helmsman's personality cult and another on the Great Terror pulling, as they say, no punches:
    In the series of purge trials that began in 1935 and ended in 1937, most of the leaders who had been Lenin's principal lieutenants for decades--the organizers, propagandists, high officials, diplomats and apostles of the revolution--were accused of treason, of collaboration with Nazi Germany and Japan in plans against Soviet Russia, of conspiring to restore capitalism in Russia. The Kirov assassination was pictured as having had a relation to these alleged crimes. From the indictments in the trials and the "confessions" of the accused it appeared that the Bolshevik Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky, who was tried and condemned in absentia as the chief culprit, was carried out and the Soviet regime established with the aid of traitors guilty of the blackest crimes....
    The purges described here were accompanied by a nation-wide shake-up of the party and governmental machine, involving the imprisonment of thousands of army officers and the removal or exile of hundreds of thousands of Government officials and party members. 
    (The focus on government and Party workers—the failure to acknowledge the nonpolitical victims of the Terror—is how it was understood before the real research began.) So no, Doug, you're just wrong.

    UM, OUR HEROIC CAPITALIST DOCTORS STILL USE FAX MACHINES

    I spotted this on Twitter:



    This is on the Drudge homepage now:





    The link goes to a story about a delay in small businesses' ability to enroll in Obamacare's insurance markets online. The story (also available here) says:
    Gary Cohen, the Health and Human Services department official overseeing the rollout, said small business owners in states with federally-run markets will still be able to go online Oct. 1 and compare their health insurance options.

    They can get the process going by filling out a form that will have to be transmitted separately by mail, fax, or as an email attachment. HHS will upload the information into the government's computer systems. The businesses will have to wait until sometime in November to finalize their applications.
    Yeah, isn't that typical of the pathetic government -- expecting people in 2013 to use ... fax machines!

    Well, I don't know how many doctors Matt Drudge has dealt with recently, but I've been dealing with a few, and, here in New York at least, a lot of doctors' offices still operate by fax. Remember, these aren't British doctors enslaved by evil socialism -- this is in the good old USA, where medicine is a capitalist enterprise, dammit. Some of these are literally Park Avenue doctors. You want test results from one doctor to give to another? You have to send the request by fax. The results -- often the handwritten results -- go by fax. Even doctors' offices that have discovered this new gizmo called e-mail (I've encountered one such office here in the city so far) have to keep a working fax machine for this purpose.

    Look, there's some validity to the right's criticism of how government agencies run things. But private enterprise has just as many problems. Capitalism is only a magic cure for all ills in Ayn Rand novels.

    ****

    And, of course, Obamacare offers incentives for medical offices to switch to electronic records -- and right-wingers don't like that, either.
    OBAMA WAS A WUSS IN 2011 -- AND GOT REELECTED. IS HE GOING TO SHOW SOME BACKBONE NOW -- AND DOOM THE DEMS IN 2014?

    Most liberals hate the fact that President Obama allowed the sequester to happen. Matt Yglesias:
    The absolute worst mistake Obama has made as president came back in 2011.... At that time, Obama desperately wanted a bargain over long-term fiscal policy. So he tried a bit of too-clever-by-half political jujitsu in which GOP debt ceiling hostage taking became a pretext to start negotiations over long-term budgeting. All manner of evils have fallen forth from that fateful decisions, including an economic weak patch in 2011[,] the ongoing mess of sequestration, and worst of all the setting of a precedent for future crises.
    Fortunately, says Yglesias, the president has grown a spine:
    The good news is that the White House recognizes they made a mistake, and the last time Republicans tried to pull this they didn't give in. And they can't give in now. Not even a little bit. A terrible monster was let out of the box in 2011 and the best thing Obama can possibly do for the country at this point is to stuff it back in and hopefully kill it.
    Noam Scheiber also admires Obama's intestinal fortitude, and tells us not to worry:
    ... Obama has absolutely refused to negotiate over the debt limit in any way. He's been remarkably consistent on this point, going so far as to call Boehner on Friday night for no other reason than to inform him he still wasn't negotiating. (It was about as close as you get as president to calling up a high office-holder and telling him to go f*** himself. I admired it greatly.) Unlike in the past, Obama has shown no indication of folding on this point.
    But here's the thing. Obama caved in 2011 -- and won reelection in 2012, after we managed to avoid a debt default. Now he's determined not to cave. He's telling the public he won't negotiate. And what does the public think?
    Americans by a 2-to-1 ratio disagree with President Barack Obama's contention that Congress should raise the U.S. debt limit without conditions.

    Instead, 61 percent say that it's "right to require spending cuts when the debt ceiling is raised even if it risks default," because Congress lacks spending discipline, according to a Bloomberg National Poll conducted Sept. 20-23.

    That sentiment is shared by almost three-quarters of Republicans, two-thirds of independents, and a plurality of Democrats. Just 28 percent of respondents backed Obama's call for a clean bill that has no add-on provisions....
    This is the result of decades and decades of propaganda that tells us that all government spending is waste, while elves and fairies actually do all the things we expect government to do, for free. It's also a manifestation of the rage gap in American politics: many Republican voters want Republican politicians to be extreme and intransigent, while the vast majority of Democratic voters (and swing voters) want all politicians to compromise and play nice. The result is that Republicans can dig in their heels and increase base turnout, especially before a midterm election (when it's all about turning out your base), while Democrats will alienate their base by standing up for principle.

    I hate the fact that our politics works this way, but, alas, our politics does work this way.

    Republicans seem to understand what's going on. National Journal says House Republicans now seem inclined to avoid the imminent government shutdown, and intend instead to focus on hostage-taking over the debt ceiling (which is much more dangerous to the economy). What will the House GOP demand in return for a debt ceiling increase? The National Journal story mentions only "a one-year delay in the implementation of Obamacare in exchange for extending the nation's borrowing limit." But elsewhere, I'm reading about much more onerous demands. Matt Yglesias again:
    From Jonathan Strong's report at NRO, what Republicans want in exchange for agreeing to not default on the national debt is a one year delay of Obamacare, Paul Ryan's tax reform, the Keystone XL pipeline, partial repeal of the Clean Air Act, partial repeal of bank regulation legislation, Medicare cuts, cuts in several anti-poverty programs, making it harder to launch medical malpractice lawsuits, more drilling on federal land, blocking net neutrality, and a suite of changes designed to make it harder for regulatory agencies to crack the whip.
    Oh, is that all?

    Yglesias is right about what the GOP is proposing here by tying this sort of blackmail to the debt ceiling:
    ... Republicans are essentially asking for an end to constitutional government in the United States and its replacement by a wholly novel system.

    ... The president should become an elected figurehead (not dissimilar to the elected presidents of Germany, Israel, or Italy) whose role is simply to assent to the policy preferences of the legislative majority.
    That's appalling -- but I'm afraid poorly informed Democratic voters are going to punish Democrats if the president doesn't pay some of this ransom, while Republican voters will just be energized by the fight.

    That's why I'll understand if this ends in an unpalatable compromise. It's not Obama's fault. It's Yeats again: the GOP crazy base is full of passionate intensity. And the people who should be enraged by the GOP agenda lack all conviction.
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