Oops! Willard Inc. (shockingly) tells some (shocking) truth. Not to worry, though -- he quickly takes it back

Plus: A right-wing slug in the Rose
Garden hijacks a presidential statement

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Does Senator DeMint think that spending money is the same as losing money? [In caricature voice, pretending to search his pockets] You know, I had $10 milliion here yesterday, but now, uh, all I see is this fucking highway. I don't understand! I don't understand what it's doing here. Where's my money? We're gonna have to dig this up and find my money. . . .

It must be nice to be a Republican senator sometimes, 'cause you get the fun of breaking shit and the joy of complaining that the shit you just broke doesn't work. . . .

[The first half of the lovely "Bank Yankers" segment is here.]

"Almost everyone following the situation now realizes that Germany's austerity obsession has brought Europe to the edge of catastrophe -- almost everyone, that is, except the Germans themselves and, it turns out, the Romney economic team."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today,
"We Don't Need No Education"

by Ken

Lately I've been riding rather hard the point that every word that comes out of the mouth of the Incorporated Willard -- like, for that matter, every word that comes out of the mouth of every right-winger -- has to be presumed to be a lie. I've incorporated the "has to presumed to be" part because, after all, nobody's perfect, and slugs as intellectually lazy as well as dishonest as the Boy Who Dreamt of Being a Corporation are especially unlikely to have the discipline to manage to maintain perfect discipline.

Which brings us to Paul Krugman's column today:

Hope springs eternal For a few hours I was ready to applaud Mitt Romney for speaking honestly about what his calls for smaller government actually mean.

Never mind. Soon the candidate was being his normal self, denying having said what he said and serving up a bunch of self-contradictory excuses. But let's talk about his accidental truth-telling, and what it reveals.

In the remarks Mr. Romney later tried to deny, he derided President Obama: "He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers." Then he declared, "It's time for us to cut back on government and help the American people."

You can see why I was ready to give points for honesty. For once, he actually admitted what he and his allies mean when they talk about shrinking government. Conservatives love to pretend that there are vast armies of government bureaucrats doing who knows what; in reality, a majority of government workers are employed providing either education (teachers) or public protection (police officers and firefighters).

So would getting rid of teachers, police officers, and firefighters help the American people? Well, some Republicans would prefer to see Americans get less education; remember Rick Santorum's description of colleges as "indoctrination mills"? Still, neither less education nor worse protection are issues the G.O.P. wants to run on.

At this point it would be helpful to review the above clip from last night's Daily Show. Howie already wrote on Wednesday about the shockingly and bizarrely reverential reception Ppmorganchase mastercrook Jamie Dimon got from most of the Republican slugs on the Senate Banking Committee that day. This was Jon Stewart's take last night, with particular reference to Jim "The Dope" DeMint's confusion about government spending.

Now here's Krugman on "our own experience" of government spending:

Conservatives would have you believe that our disappointing economic performance has somehow been caused by excessive government spending, which crowds out private job creation. But the reality is that private-sector job growth has more or less matched the recoveries from the last two recessions; the big difference this time is an unprecedented fall in public employment, which is now about 1.4 million jobs less than it would be if it had grown as fast as it did under President George W. Bush.

And, if we had those extra jobs, the unemployment rate would be much lower than it is -- something like 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent. It sure looks as if cutting government when the economy is deeply depressed hurts rather than helps the American people.

"The really decisive evidence on government cuts, however," says our Paul, "comes from Europe."

Consider the case of Ireland, which has reduced public employment by 28,000 since 2008 -- the equivalent, as a share of population, of laying off 1.9 million workers here. These cuts were hailed by conservatives, who predicted great results. "The Irish economy is showing encouraging signs of recovery," declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute in June 2010.

But recovery never came; Irish unemployment is currently more than 14 percent. Ireland's experience shows that austerity in the face of a depressed economy is a terrible mistake to be avoided if possible.

And the point is that in America it is possible. You can argue that countries like Ireland had and have very limited policy choices. But America -- which unlike Europe has a federal government -- has an easy way to reverse the job cuts that are killing the recovery: have the feds, who can borrow at historically low rates, provide aid that helps state and local governments weather the hard times. That, in essence, is what the president was proposing and Mr. Romney was deriding.

"Actually, it's kind of ironic," says Paul. "While Republicans love to engage in Europe-bashing, they're actually the ones who want us to emulate European-style austerity and experience a European-style depression."

And that's not just an inference. Last week R. Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University, a top Romney adviser, published an article in a German newspaper urging the Germans to ignore advice from Mr. Obama and continue pushing their hard-line policies. In so doing, Mr. Hubbard was deliberately undercutting a sitting president's foreign policy. More important, however, he was throwing his support behind a policy that is collapsing as you read this.

In fact, almost everyone following the situation now realizes that Germany's austerity obsession has brought Europe to the edge of catastrophe -- almost everyone, that is, except the Germans themselves and, it turns out, the Romney economic team.

Not a cheery prospect, says Paul, should Willard make his way into the Oval Office. "For all indications are that his idea of smart policy is to double down on the very spending cuts that have hobbled recovery here and sent Europe into an economic and political tailspin."

Meanwhile "Dimbo" DeMint and his fellow dim-bulb Republican senators like the eerily well-named Crapo and Corker will probably be authorizing billions of dollars to pay private contractors to dig up that highway to find Dimbo's money.


ANOTHER RIGHT-WING FAKE JOURNALIST
GETS TO JUMP UGLY ON THE PRESIDENT

from washingtonpost.com

Brian Stelter reports on the NYT "Media Decoder" blog:

The interruption stunned White House correspondents and television viewers. And it clearly surprised President Obama, too.

As Mr. Obama was making a statement from the Rose Garden about a new immigration policy on Friday afternoon, a reporter from The Daily Caller, a conservative news Web site, repeatedly raised his voice and tried to interrupt. The reporter, Neil Munro, tried to ask whether the policy -- intended to help young illegal immigrants get work -- was good for legal American workers.

"Excuse me, sir," Mr. Obama said when Mr. Munro initially spoke up. He put his hand in the air and raised a finger, as if to say "wait."

"It's not time for questions, sir," Mr. Obama continued. "Not while I'm speaking."

A few minutes later, Mr. Obama referenced the incident by saying, "And the answer to your question, sir, and the next time I'd prefer you let me finish my statements before you ask that question, is this is the right thing to do for the American people."

Mr. Munro then apparently interrupted again.

The make-believe journalist got his story out.

In a statement posted to The Daily Caller’s Web site about an hour after the exchange, Mr. Munro said: "I always go to the White House prepared with questions for our president. I timed the question believing the president was closing his remarks, because naturally I have no intention of interrupting the president of the United States."

Mr. Obama had only been speaking for about five minutes when Mr. Munro first shouted. He continued speaking for another five minutes afterward.

The White House grants credentials to reporters and columnists from a wide range of media outlets, including some that have openly liberal and conservative bents.

Mr. Munro did not specify what he shouted, but other reporters who were present said the initial question was, "Mr. President, why do you favor foreign workers over Americans?"

In certain contexts this might actually be an interesting question, since the administration, like its Democratic as well as Republican predecessors, often supports trade policies designed to shift jobs abroad. But of course that's not what the Dailiy Caller clown-correspondent had in mind. He was just trying to inject propaganda lies downloaded directly from the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine into what's left of the minds of moronicized mainstream Americans.

But the best part of all is yet to come. The clown-correspondent's boss is tiny-brained Tucker Carlson, sometimes known as "the less-rich man's George Will." The fact that the Tinyman hadn't seen or heard any of the exchange didn't stop him from blithering about it.

Earlier, the editor in chief of The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson, defended Mr. Munro’s behavior as an act of journalism. Mr. Carlson, who was on an airplane at the time of the presidential statement, said he had not seen the incident, but "as far as I’m concerned, not having seen it, as a general matter, reporters are there to ask questions."

He added, "No politician wants to answer questions, but that’s not our concern."

Mr. Carlson, a former co-host of a show on CNN, "Crossfire," where the interruption of others was a part of the formula, started The Daily Caller in early 2010 to publish political news and commentary, frequently through a conservative prism. Among Mr. Carlson’s investors is Foster Friess, the financier who has donated millions to Republican
candidates this year.

The Daily Caller has highlighted what it calls liberal media bias, and Mr. Carlson said he expected the "Obama worshipers in the press" to attack Mr. Munro. When told that his reporter was being called a heckler, Mr. Carlson answered, "That’s what it’s called when you try to get the president to answer your question?"

Mr. Carlson said Mr. Munro did not discuss any plan to interrupt Mr. Obama with him in advance.

"Media Decoder" blogger Brian Stelter, who recalled the drowning out of Obama adviser David Axelrod at a recent campaign event by a gang of Willard's thugs and SC Rep. Joe Wilson's crackerthuggery during that 2009 presidential address to Congress, noted: "Of course, it’s common for reporters to shout questions to presidents — but only after they have finished speaking."

Stelter also pointed out: "While there was widespread criticism of Mr. Munro’s behavior, including from some conservatives, there was also some criticism of Mr. Obama for not being willing to formally answer questions from reporters in a news conference setting."

This is also true, of course, and also not at all what the Toy Tucker was getting at. The ironic thing is that it's an effort at the kind of actually balanced reporting -- not to be confused with the fake "balance" championed by the biggest liars in the Western Hemisphere -- frequently practiced by media practitioners routinely decried by pond scum like the Original Tucker as "liberal bias." But then, the Tinyman -- one of the pioneers of the Right-Wing Noise Machine propaganda blanket -- is another creature who probably couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it.

Just imagine if we played our beloved old game of "If the Shoe Was on the Other Foot: If it had been a putatively left-wing blogger who heckled a right-wing president, can you imagine the outcry? We would be hearing about it for months, by which time a handful of Democratic officials and advisers would have resigned from their posts and one or two largely unrelated elections and/or referenda would have been coopted rightward.

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