Who Has A Higher IQ-- Señor T Or Status Quo Joe? Who Cares? Maxine Waters Is Smarter Than Both Of Them Combined

Back in March, when Biden prematurely let the cat out of the bag that he would soon begin his 7th run for the presidency, Trump made fun of him on twitter. "Joe Biden got tongue tied over the weekend when he was unable to properly deliver a very simple line about his decision to run for President. Get used to it, another low I.Q. individual!" And here I thought that Trumpian epithet was reserved for Maxine Waters!

I guess I'd rather see Trump and Biden argue with each other about which one is dumber than actually get into a boxing ring together. Recall when Joe "Handsy" Biden defended the honor of women by boasting he'd like to "beat the hell" out of Trump behind a high school building? Trump responded in kind-- like the braggart-bully and moron he is:

Trump's not the only moron we're dealing with in the toilet of political discourse, though. Biden tried running for president six times before. In 1987 he wanted to talk about how high his IQ is-- and wound up lying about how he had graduated in the "top half of my class"... before someone explained to him that #76 out of 85 is not the top half. He does seem a little touchy about that whole brain power thing though. Watch this video and think about how horrifying and ugly a Trump v Biden campaign is going to look. Nothing could help Trump more than an opponent like Joe Biden:



There's no doubt that even if Trump is "a low-IQ individual"-- as he betrays in his endless protectionism-- he is also cunning and unscrupulous. Would Biden be a match for him? 30 years ago, E.J. Dionne was reporting on Biden's club-footed, ill-fated presidential campaign of that cycle:

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued a formal statement today acknowledging that he had misstated several facts about his past last April in a campaign appearance in New Hampshire.

But the Delaware Democrat insisted today, as he had Sunday night in an interview with the New York Times, that some of the disputed statements were true and that his misstatements were the product of a faulty memory and the fact that he lost his temper.

Mr. Biden, whose Presidential campaign has been shaken by news reports about his unattributed use of speeches from other politicians and a plagiarism incident while he was in law school, said in The Times interview that he was "frustrated" and "angry as hell" over the reports.

Mr. Biden was going through his political agony even as he presided over hearings tonight on the confirmation of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. Exhausted top aides found their attention constantly torn between the crucial hearings and their principal's political future.

Intends to Stay in Race

Late tonight, for example, Mr. Biden called a meeting of his senior staff to discuss the effects of the recent developments on his campaign. But senior aides said they did not know if it would even take place as the Bork hearings dragged into the night. Although a high-level aide denied that Mr. Biden was contemplating withdrawing from the race, several Washington politicians here said they believed he was considering this possibility.

On Sunday night, Mr. Biden said emphatically that he intended to remain a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination. "I think if I can get by the next week, I can pull out of this if I can just get my story across," he said.

Most of Mr. Biden's statement was in response to a report in this week's issue of Newsweek magazine on a tape recording made by the C-SPAN network of an appearance by Mr. Biden at a home in Claremont, N.H., on April 3. It was a typical coffee-klatch style appearance before a small group. The network regularly records and broadcasts such events as part of its coverage of the Presidential campaign.

The tape, which was made available by C-SPAN in response to a reporter's request, showed a testy exchange in response to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as "Frank." Mr. Biden looked at his questioner and said: "I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do."

He then went on to say that he "went to law school on a full academic scholarship-- the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship," Mr. Biden said. He also said that he "ended up in the top half" of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. In college, Mr. Biden said in the appearance, he was "the outstanding student in the political science department" and "graduated with three degrees from college."

Comments on Assertions

In his statement today, Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: "I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate."

As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: "I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors-- I said 'three' and should have said 'two.'" Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science.

"With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department," the statement went on. "My name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware."

In the Sunday interview, Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: "My recollection is-- and I'd have to confirm this-- but I don't recall paying any money to go to law school." Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse "on half scholarship based on financial need." Says He Also Received Grant

In his statement today, Mr. Biden did not directly dispute this, but said he received a scholarship from the Syracuse University College of Law "based in part on academics" as well as a grant from the Higher Education Scholarship Fund of the state of Delaware. He said the law school "arranged for my first year's room and board by placing me as an assistant resident adviser in the undergraduate school."

As for the moot court competition, Mr. Biden said he had won such a competition, with a partner, in Kingston, Ontario, on Dec. 12, 1967.

Mr. Biden acknowledged that in the testy exchange in New Hampshire, he had lost his temper. "I exaggerate when I'm angry," Mr. Biden said, "but I've never gone around telling people things that aren't true about me." Mr. Biden's questioner had made the query in a mild tone, but provoked an explosive response from Mr. Biden.

'Legitimate Questions of Press'

As for the continued, minute probing of his past, Mr. Biden told The Times: "I guess every single word I've ever said is going to be dissected now."

In his statement today Mr. Biden acknowledged that inevitability, saying:

"However trivial, I certainly believe these are legitimate questions of press inquiry. And I will be as responsive to these and other inquiries as I possibly can."

Mr. Biden's campaign staff met this weekend in Wilmington, Del., in an effort to come up with a strategy in face of the building controversy. A senior adviser to the Biden campaign dismissed speculatrion that he would withdraw from the contest. "Of course he's going to stay in," the adviser said, dismissing the recent reports on Mr. Biden as "random press frenzy."

The adviser said the latest troubles might "free" Mr. Biden to "get into being himself" and to campaign as an aggressive "populist, anti-Establishment" candidate and a defender of the interests of the American middle class.

That, apparently, was a bridge too far for a corporate shill who has helped the banksters crush the legitimate aspirations of working families for his entire political career. Instead, he dropped out and went back to the Senate to compete-- often successfully-- for the title of "The Senate's Worst Democrat." And, by the way, if you thought Hillary-- who's obviously a lot smarter than Trump and Biden-- was a bad candidate for the Democrats in 2016... you ain't seen nothing yet.

Bernie Draws The Battle Lines

Yesterday, Bernie penned an OpEd for The Guardian, Let’s Wrench Power Back From The Billionaires. I wonder if he offered it to the NY Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today first. His point: "If we stand together against powerful special interests we can eliminate poverty, increase life expectancy and tackle climate change." OK, scratch the Wall Street Journal. "Here," he began, "we are as a planet in 2018: after all of the wars, revolutions and international summits of the past 100 years, we live in a world where a tiny handful of incredibly wealthy individuals exercise disproportionate levels of control over the economic and political life of the global community."

Presumably, we'll be hearing a lot more of that from the Sanders-Warren ticket as we head towards the very consequential 2020 face-off. Even before that will be the very consequential midterms in November. When one of the Democratic Party's rising young superstars, Iowan Austin Frerick, read Bernie's OpEd he emailed me this: "This is why we need to start using the word 'monopoly' again. I believe that corporate concentration is the issue of our time. We’re living in a 2nd Gilded Age where the middle class is disappearing while the rich get richer. And it’s all caused by this monopoly power and the robber barons it has created." Yep... and back to Bernie for a few moments:

At the same time, all over the world corrupt elites, oligarchs and anachronistic monarchies spend billions on the most absurd extravagances. The Sultan of Brunei owns some 500 Rolls-Royces and lives in one of the world’s largest palaces, a building with 1,788 rooms once valued at $350m. In the Middle East, which boasts five of the world’s 10 richest monarchs, young royals jet-set around the globe while the region suffers from the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, and at least 29 million children are living in poverty without access to decent housing, safe water or nutritious food. Moreover, while hundreds of millions of people live in abysmal conditions, the arms merchants of the world grow increasingly rich as governments spend trillions of dollars on weapons.

In the United States, Jeff Bezos-- founder of Amazon, and currently the world’s wealthiest person-- has a net worth of more than $100bn. He owns at least four mansions, together worth many tens of millions of dollars. As if that weren’t enough, he is spending $42m on the construction of a clock inside a mountain in Texas that will supposedly run for 10,000 years. But, in Amazon warehouses across the country, his employees often work long, gruelling hours and earn wages so low they rely on Medicaid, food stamps and public housing paid for by US taxpayers.

Not only that, but at a time of massive wealth and income inequality, people all over the world are losing their faith in democracy-- government by the people, for the people and of the people. They increasingly recognise that the global economy has been rigged to reward those at the top at the expense of everyone else, and they are angry.

Millions of people are working longer hours for lower wages than they did 40 years ago, in both the United States and many other countries. They look on, feeling helpless in the face of a powerful few who buy elections, and a political and economic elite that grows wealthier, even as their own children’s future grows dimmer.

In the midst of all of this economic disparity, the world is witnessing an alarming rise in authoritarianism and rightwing extremism-- which feeds off, exploits and amplifies the resentments of those left behind, and fans the flames of ethnic and racial hatred.

Now, more than ever, those of us who believe in democracy and progressive government must bring low-income and working people all over the world together behind an agenda that reflects their needs. Instead of hate and divisiveness, we must offer a message of hope and solidarity. We must develop an international movement that takes on the greed and ideology of the billionaire class and leads us to a world of economic, social and environmental justice. Will this be an easy struggle? Certainly not. But it is a fight that we cannot avoid. The stakes are just too high.

As Pope Francis correctly noted in a speech at the Vatican in 2013: “We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.” He continued: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalised: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

A new and international progressive movement must commit itself to tackling structural inequality both between and within nations. Such a movement must overcome “the cult of money” and “survival of the fittest” mentalities that the pope warned against. It must support national and international policies aimed at raising standards of living for poor and working-class people-- from full employment and a living wage to universal higher education, healthcare and fair trade agreements. In addition, we must rein in corporate power and prevent the environmental destruction of our planet as a result of climate change.

Here is just one example of what we have to do. Just a few years ago, the Tax Justice Network estimated that the wealthiest people and largest corporations throughout the world have been stashing at least $21tn-$32tn in offshore tax havens in order to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. If we work together to eliminate offshore tax abuse, the new revenue that would be generated could put an end to global hunger, create hundreds of millions of new jobs, and substantially reduce extreme income and wealth inequality. It could be used to move us aggressively toward sustainable agriculture and to accelerate the transformation of our energy system away from fossil fuels and towards renewable sources of power.

Taking on the greed of Wall Street, the power of gigantic multinational corporations and the influence of the global billionaire class is not only the moral thing to do-- it is a strategic geopolitical imperative. Research by the United Nations development programme has shown that citizens’ perceptions of inequality, corruption and exclusion are among the most consistent predictors of whether communities will support rightwing extremism and violent groups. When people feel that the cards are stacked against them and see no way forward for legitimate recourse, they are more likely to turn to damaging solutions that only exacerbate the problem.

Damaging solutions? Like fascism? And like the solution implied in Kourtney Roy's incredibly powerful photograph (above)-- pure self defense. Also on Sunday, E.J. Dionne, Jr. wrote a column, for The Post, We Could Be A Much Better Country. Trump Makes it Impossible. "There are more important and interesting issues than the psyche of a deeply damaged man," he tweeted to alert people to his column. "We can be a far better nation. But we need leaders who call us to our obligations to each other-- not a president who knows only how to sow division and hatred... His stunts dominate the conversation and diminish our capacity to self-govern... Political leaders in democracies have a few core obligations. They are charged with solving today’s problems and preparing their nations for the future. They are responsible for creating some sense of shared purpose and mutual respect among their citizens-- above all a common commitment to preserving the very freedoms on which democracy depends." This is exactly what Bernie is worried about.

Our current debate is frustrating, and not only because Trump doesn’t understand what “mutual toleration” and “forbearance” even mean. By persistently making himself, his personality, his needs, his prejudices and his stability the central topics of our political conversation, Trump is blocking the public conversation we ought to be having about how to move forward.

And while Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party will do all they can to avoid the issue, there should now be no doubt (even if this was clear long ago) that we have a blatant racist as our president. His reference to immigrants from “sh--hole countries” and his expressed preference for Norwegians over Haitians, Salvadorans and new arrivals from Africa make this abundantly clear. Racist leaders do not help us reach mutual toleration. His semi-denial 15 hours after his comment was first reported lacked credibility, especially because he called around first to see how his original words would play with his base.

But notice also what Trump’s outburst did to our capacity to govern ourselves and make progress. Democrats and Republicans sympathetic to the plight of the “dreamers” worked out an immigration compromise designed carefully to give Trump what he had said he needed.

Stephanie Kelton is one of the most cutting edge economists in the world. She served as the chief Democratic staffer on the Senate Budget Committee and now teaches Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook. Earlier today she told that "As usual, Sen. Sanders is right on the money in terms of identifying the many social, economic and environmental problems plaguing nations across the globe. But how can we afford an agenda that addresses the myriad of challenges he describes? It will take trillions of dollars to deal with climate change, guarantee health care to all Americans, make public colleges and universities tuition-free, get big money out of politics with publicly-funded elections, etc., etc., etc. Where will the money come from? Britain’s Prime Minister, Teresa May, is trying to beat back calls for a similarly progressive agenda by asserting, 'there isn’t a magic money tree that we can shake that suddenly provides for everything that people want.' This is a clear attempt to revive Margaret Thatcher’s dictum-- 'the state has no source money other than the money people earn themselves'-- in order to prevent the use of public money to serve the public good.

"Bernie essentially accepts this framing. For him, money doesn’t grow on trees, it grows on rich people and large, profitable corporations. And while there are plenty of good reasons to clamp down on tax havens and to fight for a more progressive tax code, it would be far better to decouple these fights from any spending proposals and argue each on its own merits. Our government already has the capacity to deploy public money in the public interest. There is no point holding the moral agenda hostage while we wait for success on the tax front. Jeff Spross had this right."

Is He From Mars? Pence Will Have To Try To Make This Sound Normal Tonight

The other day, Keith Olbermann recorded a telling little segment about dogs and Trump. To anyone who's ever been a friend of a dog-- and who, besides Trump, hasn't been?-- it's bad enough on it's own. But when you look at it in a broader context, Trump's psychological unfitness for leadership, it becomes even more interesting. Monday morning, NY Times columnist Charles Blow took a turn psychoanalyzing Trump, dubbing him a terroristic man-toddler.

Donald Trump is a domestic terrorist; only his form of terror doesn’t boil down to blowing things up. He’s the 70-year-old toddler who knows nearly nothing, hurls insults, has simplistic solutions for complex problems and is quick to throw a tantrum. Also, in case you didn’t know it, this toddler is mean to girls and is a bit of a bigot... devoid of fixed principles, willing to do anything and everything to gain fame, fortune and power. He has an endless, consuming need for perpetual affirmation. This is a bully who just wants to be liked, a man-boy nursing a nagging internal emptiness.

He’s fickle and spoiled and rotten.

So, when he loses at something, anything, he lashes out. When someone chastises him for bad behavior, he chafes. This is the kind of silver-spoon scion quick to yell at those he views as less privileged, and therefore less-than, “Do you know who I am?”

We do now, sir.

...This man is a brat whose money has stunted his maturation.

He shouldn’t be ushered into the White House; he should be laughed into hiding. His querulous nature shouldn’t be coddled; it should be crushed.

America is in need of a leader, not a puerile, sophomoric sniveler who is too easily baited and grossly ill-behaved.

Go to your gilded room, Donald. The adults need to pick a president.

Down the coast a ways, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne was having many of the same thoughts at the same time, explain that "he is far too nasty, immature and frighteningly undisciplined to be president" and has now "unleashed the ugly inner Donald-- the man whom the candidate and his handlers have been trying to hide."

This should be a wake-up call to political analysts who have gone out of their way since Trump announced his candidacy to pretend that he was the ingenious creator of a political special sauce who deserved our respect for “speaking his mind.” No, Trump all along has been a clinically self-involved con man who never took the issues, the presidency or the future of our country seriously. Can there be any doubt that his campaign is a branding exercise gone, quite literally, mad?

...Every time Trump has shown us how outlandishly ill-suited he is for the presidency, his outrages have been allowed to fade. Again and again he has been given opportunities to normalize his candidacy. Many can’t believe that a major party nominated someone like him. Their solution is to pretend he’s someone else.

If an onslaught against a Gold Star family didn’t stop him, why should his wee-hours-of-the-morning storm of vicious invective be any different?

The answer is that this episode should finally force everyone to say: enough. Trump is neither normal nor stable. He is manifestly dangerous to our country and erratic in everything except his unrestrained meanness. He should not be given fifth, sixth and seventh chances. He has shown us who he is. We should believe what we see.

These two columns bring up, once again, the mental health of a candidate for president. Is Trump psychologically stable? Fit to serve as president? The American Psychiatric Association told it's members to refrain from diagnosing Trump from afar. (DWT's resident school psychologist, Helen Klein took a swing at it back in early August, asking, pointedly, What is narcissistic personality? What is a sociopath? Take away the bizarre personality traits that Trump can't control and how different, really is Mike Pence from Trump. Sure, Pence is a more doctrinaire and extreme right-winger but on actual policy... they could be the same horrible person-- horrible for America, horrible for working families, horrible for human decency.



And for the moron deplorables who cleave to him-- or them-- they might want to think about their responsibilities as parents and grandparents and what kind of an example Trump is for impressionable children. America's biggest teachers' union, the National Education Association, is kicking off a campaign this week about the example Trump sets as a bully.

Citing a growing number of reports by its membership of Trump-like bullying in classrooms across the country, the National Education Association is planning to make the issue a centerpiece of its argument against Trump in ads and mailings in battleground states.

“We are going to do everything humanly possible to make sure that we have a president who will be a good role model for children,” NEA President Lily Eskelsen García said. “Donald Trump is not on that list, but Hillary Clinton is.”

Beginning on Monday, the union will hold conference calls and press conferences with teachers, principals and psychologists who link Trump’s comments on the national stage to a rise in bullying in the classroom. The union's outreach will also contrast Trump and Clinton's plans for education.

According to Eskelsen García, their members are reporting children threatening classmates that they might be deported by Trump or calling other classmates terrorists.

“Kids feel like they have been given permission, and they are invoking the name of Donald Trump,” she said.

...The push coincides with National Bullying Prevention Month in October, an effort that is normally part of NEA’s annual activities. But with Trump, the issue has gathered more steam.

Eskelsen García said that their concern about Trump’s impact on the younger generation extends beyond the election. “What we’re seeing is not something that will go away after Election Day," she said. “We’re seeing millions of people who seem attracted to this message, and those folks are still going to be here.”

...And NEA’s membership isn’t predominantly Democratic. A third identify as independent and another roughly one-third of its membership identifies as Republican. Critically for Clinton, the union’s membership is composed of about 75 percent women, voters with whom Trump has struggled.

Evoking the image of St. Francis: E. J. Dionne Jr. on Pope Francis's environmental encyclical

"Like his namesake saint, he believes in the transformative power of simplicity and compassion." (E. J. Dionne Jr.)

" 'We are not God,' the pope declares, and should not act as if we are 'usurping the place of God, even to the point of claiming an unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot.' Believers who disagree with the pope will have to grapple with his religious understanding and not simply dismiss his embrace of a thoroughly orthodox view that places the spiritual and the ethical ahead of the material."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column
"The pope, the saint and the climate"

"We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it."

-- Pope Francis, in his environmental encyclical "Laudato Si,
on the care of our common home," as quoted by E.J.

by Ken

It was a strange question posed in the title of Janell Ross's washingtonpost.com "Fix"-blog post yesterday, "Will the pope sway Catholics on climate change? Not if evangelicals are any indication."

We're talking, of course, about the now-released papal encyclical "Laudato sì, on the care of our common home," which our Gaius Publius wrote about Tuesday ("Pope News: Humans Are Causing Climate Change. Have We Crossed a Tipping Point?"), drawing on the leaked draft of the encyclical. But why on earth would the doctrinal beliefs of Roman Catholics be affected by the views of evangelicals?

You'd think that the question only comes about because in so many social areas Catholics and evagelicals, who once had so little in common, have come so much closer as joint cogs in the Religious Right's mad race to the political Far Right -- an even starker coming together if by "Catholics" we understand the U.S. Catholic hierarchy. But Janell isn't thinking about evangelicals' response to the pope's encyclical. She has in mind their grappling with their own leadership.

[I]f the way evangelical Protestants have responded to similar guidance from their own leadership is any guide, the encyclical might not mean much at all.

The National Association of Evangelicals, which describes itself as an organization representing more than 455,000 local congregations, began pushing for climate change-conscious policies during George W. Bush's time in office. And the New York Times reported that The Christian Coalition, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, fought unsuccessfully for a climate change bill in Congress in both 2009 and 2010.

In 2008, 45 members of the Southern Baptist Convention, a network of more than 50,000 churches and missions, signed a letter describing their previous stance on environmental matters as, "too timid." And, that same year the entire convention approved a resolution declaring “it is prudent to address global climate change." However, it later also emphasized the uncertainty of scientific evidence on the cause of global warming.

Nevertheless, interesting as it is to be reminded that once upon a time evangelical leaders took environmental issues seriously, what possible connection could there be between evangelicals' current attitudes and Catholics' attitude toward the word of the pope? Evangelicals can believe any damn thing they want, whereas Catholics don't have any choice, right? Isn't that what they always tell us? They have to obey the teachings of their church, don't they?

Well, it turns out, only if they agree with him. His encyclical on the environment has the shitheadiest elements of American Catholicism in a tizzy. I love Ian Welsh's first response, in an itsy-bitsy post called "Burn In Hell?":

I am amused how many American conservative Catholics are now ignoring the official teachings of the church on the environment.

It is, I suppose, lucky for them that official teachings now define hell as “the absence of God’s love.”

But it’s good to know that they actually do believe that one can pick and choose teachings.  Given that this is the case, can we now just ignore them every time they talk about abortion or birth control?

A commenter wrote: "Today, for the first time, I ran across the term Cafeteria Catholicism. Apt, that."

But of course we already knew this -- that American Catholic muckety-mucks get to pick and choose their doctrinal loyalties. Remember when the sainted Pope John Paul II made it clear that the Church's reverence for life included not just opposition to birth control but opposition to the death penalty? It turned out that if you were a lying-scumbag Catholic muckety-muck, you could just ignore the old coot, reserving your doctrinal fealty to areas that suited your deeply ingrained bigotries and psychoses. And any other area in which a modern pope took issue with the dirty underside of modern capitalism -- fuck him! Let him mind his own beeswax. God gave us this world to despoil, and we still haven't finished the job!

The environmental encyclical is going to be a lot harder for the Catholic shitheads to ignore. But a lot of Catholics, GP suggested Tuesday, are ready for the pope's message.

The welcoming part of the world is, I think, the larger part by far, and the reaction to this encyclical will demonstrate that. The denier and delayer side will offer much fire from a very small number of flame-throwers.

Most of the rest of the world, however, will cheer his leadership. I'll have more to say about the place and benefit of actual leadership in fighting climate change. Bottom line: It's huge and the people are hungry for it.

Pope Francis in St. Peter's Square Wednesday

Which brings me back to E. J. Dionne Jr.'s beautiful column.

The pope says flatly that a “very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system,” that “things are now reaching a breaking point” and that greenhouse gases are “released mainly as a result of human activity.” This can mean only that humanity “is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption.”

There is no ambiguity in what the pope is saying, which is why the critics will descend upon him. Even before Thursday’s formal release of the document (and Monday’s leaked draft), they accused him of meddling in political and scientific questions that are beyond his purview.

This critique is coming especially from conservatives who have welcomed the intervention of the Catholic Church on some political issues but not others, and particularly not this one. Yet progressives and conservatives alike should attend to what motivates Pope Francis here — not the usual left-right politics but a theological concern for our obligation to care for our “common home,” a skepticism of a “throwaway culture,” and an insistence that a belief in God means that human beings cannot put themselves at the center of the universe.

In fact, the first point E.J. makes is about Pope Francis's framing, beginning with a homage to his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi:

He was a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself. He shows us just how inseparable is the bond between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.

"It's worth focusing first," E.J. writes, "on the pope's tribute to the holy man who revered animals and all of nature."

St. Francis’s worldview, the pope insisted, should not be “written off as naive romanticism.” His paean to the saint placed his declaration in a spiritual context even if its content was uncompromising.

"All of the pope’s trademark qualms about modern capitalism and his rejection of 'a magical conception of the market' are sounded here," E.J. writes.

[A]nd there is a biting comment aimed at those who use the word “freedom” to offer blanket defenses of a system that leaves many behind: “To claim economic freedom,” he writes, “while real conditions bar many people from real access to it, and while possibilities for employment continue to shrink, is to practice a doublespeak which brings politics into disrepute.”

E.J. has a ready answer for "any who claim that Francis is ignoring the Catholic past and inventing radical new doctrines."

[They] will have to reckon with the care he takes in paying homage to his predecessors, particularly Pope Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II. He cites them over and over on the limits of markets and the urgency of environmental stewardship. “Laudato Si (Praised Be)” is thus thoroughly consistent with more than a century of modern Catholic social teaching, and if it breaks new ground, it does so within the context of a long tradition — going back to St. Francis himself.

"Pope Francis poses a challenge to those of us in the wealthy nations," E.J. writes, "and he speaks specifically about how 'opinion makers, communications media and centres of power are far removed from the poor.' "

Ouch! He demands payment of an “ecological debt” between “north and south.” Again and again, he returns to the twin ideas that the world’s poor face the largest threat from climate change and that the world’s rich have a special obligation to deal with it. The pope who immersed himself in the most marginalized neighborhoods of Buenos Aires has not forgotten where he came from.

I suspect that this argument from economic predation will drive the conservative Catholics especially crazy. And there's no question that the theme is important to this pope. But E.J. insists that there's more than "a social agenda" behind Francis "making himself the Green Pope."

Like his namesake saint, he believes in the transformative power of simplicity and compassion. “We must,” he writes, “regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it.” This is precisely where the personal and the political must meet.

#

E. J. Dionne Jr. on "The wound Netanyahu left"

Bibi is greeted by members of Congress before his speech Tuesday. "It was disconcerting," E.J. says, "to watch Congress cheer wildly as a foreign leader, the prime minister of one of the United States' closest allies, trashed an American president's foreign policy."

"It fell to Isaac Herzog, Benjamin Netanyahu's leading opponent in Israel’s March 17 election, to make the essential point: that Tuesday's speech was 'a very harsh wound to Israel-U.S. relations' and 'will only widen the rift with Israel's greatest ally and strategic partner.' "

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post
column "The wound Netanyahu left"

by Ken

Well, good luck to Isaac Herzog, because I don't imagine the mass of Israelis are any more interested in hearing this message than the mass of Americans, who know virtually nothing about Iran, or possibly less than nothing when you consider how much of what they think they know is bullshit. From our media, meanwhile, we seem to hear little except the great triumph Bibi's speech was, rather than the great shame it was -- to him; to his U.S. political patrons, notably House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner; and to the American people.

As E. J. Dionne Jr., that perennially fairest and most balanced of political observers, writes in his Washington Post column "The wound Netanyahu left": "The rapturous greeting that Congress bestowed on Netanyahu for his attack on President Obama’s approach to negotiations with Iran no doubt created great footage for television ads back home and won him some votes at the right end of Israel’s electorate."

For E.J., however, "it was disconcerting to watch Congress cheer wildly as a foreign leader, the prime minister of one of the United States' closest allies, trashed an American president's foreign policy." And "it was equally strange that the speaker of our House of Representatives interjected the U.S. Congress into an Israeli political campaign."

And, E.J. says, "Herzog’s observation stands":

John Boehner’s unprecedented act of inviting the leader of another nation to criticize our president, and Netanyahu’s decision to accept, threaten to damage the bipartisan and transideological coalition that has always come together on behalf of Israel’s survival.

Netanyahu may have spoken the words, “We appreciate all that President Obama has done for Israel,” but the rest of his speech painted the president as foolish and on the verge of being duped on a nuclear deal by the mullahs in Tehran.

The Israeli leader reached for the most devastating metaphor available to him, the appeasement of the Nazis that led to the Holocaust. He urged the United States “not to sacrifice the future for the present” and “not to ignore aggression in the hopes of gaining an illusory peace.”

"This is what he was accusing Obama of doing," E.J. says. "No wonder House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) described herself as 'near tears' over Netanyahu's 'condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran.' "

E.J. doesn't put it this way, but the issue here really is that the minds of far-right-wingers, like Bibi in Israel and the American right-wing bloc I usually refer to as Anti-Semites for Israel, apparently can't function without anointing demons who stand at the opposite end of the virtue spectrum from us-the-saintly. None of this has anything to do with the real world.

As E.J. points out, nobody believes that "the Iranian regime in its current form is trustworthy." That's just your typical right-wing straw man, perhaps based on their carefully cultivated mental incapacity to imagine any situation more complex than the choice between vanilla and chocolate -- or, more aptly, between ice cream and toxic sludge. It's inconceivable to them that the Iranians are capable of acting rationally in their own self-interest, perhaps because they themselves are incapable of acting rationally in our self-interest. Acute simple-mindedness doesn't allow it.

"At stake" with Iran, says E.J., "is a balance of risks, a choice between two imperfect outcomes."

On one side is a deal that would buy at least a decade in which Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon and would be subjected to inspections and other limitations. On the other side is a decision to blow up the current negotiations because the guarantees of any likely accord would not be sufficiently airtight.

Yes, the emerging deal does carry the risk that down the road Iran could get nuclear weapons. But failing to reach an agreement will not necessarily stop Tehran from going nuclear, and an end to negotiations would in no way ensure that the rest of the world would return to effective sanctions.

What Bibi really dreaming of, E.J. notes, is regime change. "But how exactly," he asks, "could that happen without armed conflict?"

And, one might add, looking at our recent record of supporting various regime changes, is there any sane reason to hope that we can influence the situation to an outcome that's even happier for us, let alone the people living under whatever regime is in question. It boggles my mind that right-wing foreign-policy delusionals have gotten away with demonizing President Obama for making foreign-policy decisions in the Middle East that may be debatable but are at least recognizably in touch with reality. Press them for alternatives, whether it's on Syria or Iraq or Egypt or Afghanistan or Libya, and you psychotic war-mongering imbecility that ensures a significantly more dangerous and deadly outcome.

Again, E.J. is too confoundedly polite and even-handed to put it this way. He does allow, though, that Bibi did an end run around the reality of the Iranian situation "offering a thoroughly rosy scenario."

“Now, if Iran threatens to walk away from the table — and this often happens in a Persian bazaar — call their bluff,” he said. “They’ll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do.” Really? If the Iranian regime is as horrible as Netanyahu says it is, why does he expect its leaders to be as flexible as if they were haggling over the price of a carpet?

"The crux of the difference between Obama and Netanyahu," he insists, "is about a bet on the future."

The Israeli prime minister argued that “the ideology of Iran’s revolutionary regime is deeply rooted in militant Islam, and that’s why this regime will always be an enemy of America.” He added, “I don’t believe that Iran’s radical regime will change for the better after this deal.”

Obama’s bet, by contrast, is that a deal opening up space and time would provide the best chance of encouraging political evolution in Iran. Of course there is no guarantee of this, but it’s a reasonable assumption that ending the negotiations would set back the forces of change.

Skeptics of an agreement, Netanyahu included, can usefully push Obama to get the longest timeline and the toughest guarantees he can, and U.S. negotiators can try to use the threat of opposition in Congress to strengthen the final terms.

And Bibi, E.J. notes, "never gave a satisfactory answer to the most important question: What is the alternative?"

He concludes by saying of "Netanyahu’s provocative and divisive intervention in U.S. politics" and "Boehner’s meddling in Israel’s election": "The voters of our friend and ally will render a judgment soon."

Yes, they will, but I don't see any reason to believe that that judgment will be any more sensibly based than the one we're hearing in the homeland of the Anti-Semites for Israel.

#

And speaking of "balanced" coverage in the "liberal media," the NYT sticks up for Republicans in 2015 and 1995

Plus: E. J. Dionne Jr. says the president got it right in
not trying to play nice with obstructionist Republicans


Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Perhaps bosom-buddy Sens. "Young Johnny" McCranky and Lindsey "I'm Going to Be the President" Graham, seen here listening (more or less) to the president's SOTU address Tuesday night.

"There is something odd in the notion that Obama is supposed to abandon his convictions because the Republicans won a low-turnout midterm election whose Senate races were fought mostly in territory hostile to Democrats."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column
"Obama ditches his illusions about Republicans"

by Ken

In yesterday's NYT "First Draft" post, Carl Hulse did a fine job portraying Republican outrage followoing "a State of the Union speech that has Republicans shaking their heads and lamenting a lost opportunity for cooperation":

Washington will try to get back to business on Wednesday after a State of the Union address that found a confident and relaxed President Obama delivering a speech that seemed to leave the new Republican majority in Congress genuinely perplexed.

After their resounding election victory just two months ago, Republicans had hoped to hear the president say he had gotten the message and was willing to find common cause. What they got was a sharp reminder that he had twice won the presidency, veto threats and a call to embrace a series of government initiatives that Republicans are not inclined to support (except for new trade deals).

He made no mention of their congressional ascendancy.

“He hasn’t adjusted to the new reality at all,” said Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican who is usually considered a candidate for cooperation with the Democrats.

Republicans did not interpret the president’s jabs at their positions on the minimum wage, climate change and Cuba – interspersed with calls for compromise – as a hopeful sign. “He’s not looking for cooperation,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming.

It would be wrong to say that Carl pays no heed to the other side of the aisle, although his focus shifts back pretty quickly.

Democrats said they found the speech and the president’s attitude refreshing. “It was almost joyful,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

That was not the word Republicans had in mind.

Well, it was nice to hear from Senator Amy!

Now I'm going to argue that there were no Republicans who were "genuinely perplexed" by the president's attitude -- surprised, perhaps, but certainly not perplexed. Because I don't believe that there are any Republicans who believe that there was any actual "opportunity for cooperation" to be lost. Republicans like to forget how far backwards the new president tried to bend in the early years of his presidency to cooperate with congressional Republicans, then in the minority in both houses. A lot of us wondered what it would take for him to understand that there was zero inclination on their part to cooperate in any way -- unless the "way" consisted of being given what they wanted. What was actually in place, as it didn't take all that long for us to find out, was the strategy of then-Senate Minority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell to do everything possible to undermine the president -- and fuck the country in the process -- with a view to ensuring that his administration would be a one-term one.

But that's not the point in time Carl wants to take us back to. Instead, he wants to revisit a legitimately relevant moment in history: 1995, when President Bill Clinton facing a Congress in which both houses were now controlled by Republicans.

President Obama’s decision on Tuesday night to ignore the Republicans’ election victory and the party’s new majority in the Senate was notable. It also raised the question of how former President Bill Clinton handled a similar situation in January 1995 after Democrats were trounced in the midterm elections and Republicans took back the House for the first time in 40 years.

He certainly didn’t avoid it. Mr. Clinton wasted no time in noting that “once again our democracy has spoken.”

“So let me begin,” he said, “by congratulating all of you here in the 104th Congress and congratulating you, Mr. Speaker.” That was, of course, Newt Gingrich.

But, like Mr. Obama, Mr. Clinton also made sure to point out that he’d had his own big election victory in 1992.

“If we agree on nothing else tonight, we must agree that the American people certainly voted for change in 1992 and 1994,” he said. “And as I look out at you, I know how some of you must have felt in 1992.”

Again, there's just a wee bit of history left out -- namely, how did that work out? Remember "triangulation"? Do we really not recall that by the time Bill C ran for reelection in 1996, angry Republicans were denouncing him for having stolen all their positions? And that was a time when Republican positions were conservative, yes, but nothing like the combination of unrestricted economic predation and ideological crackpottery that now constitutes "mainstream" Republicanism.

Let me return now to the sentence I quoted at the top of this post from E. J. Dionne Jr.'s Washington Post column "Obama ditches his illusions about Republicans": "There is something odd in the notion that Obama is supposed to abandon his convictions because the Republicans won a low-turnout midterm election whose Senate races were fought mostly in territory hostile to Democrats." E.J. continues:

Ronald Reagan was never asked to stop being a conservative after Democrats took the Senate in the 1986 elections and emerged in control of both houses of Congress. Republicans praised George W. Bush for his courage in upping his commitment in Iraq through the troop surge, even though the Democratic sweep of 2006 was in large part a repudiation of the war on which he doubled down. Are only progressive presidents expected to trim their sails?

E.J. gets to this point by starting out like so:

“This is good news, people.”

With those five words, President Obama made clear that he thinks it’s far more important to win a long-term argument with his partisan and ideological opponents than to pretend that they are eager to seize opportunities to work with him. He decided to deal with the Republican Party he has, not the Republican Party he wishes he had.

Those ad-libbed words followed what ranks as one of the more polemical passages ever offered in a State of the Union address. “At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious,” he declared, “that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health-care inflation at its lowest rate in 50 years.”

Good news, indeed, and in telling the Republicans that all their predictions turned out to be wrong, he reminded his fellow citizens which side, which policies and which president had brought the country back.

His analysis of the nature of his political opposition, in turn, dictated the approach he took in the rest of the speech. There was no point in hedging on his wishes, constraining his hopes or compromising in advance. Earlier in his administration, he might have begun the negotiations by offering his interlocutors their asking price upfront and then moving backward from there. No more.

Instead, he laid out what he would do if he had a more cooperative Congress. This time around, Obama’s agenda was organized around the interests of middle-class workers, the group his administration acknowledges has not been dealt into the economic recovery.

"There seemed to be a disconnect," E.J. writes, "between Obama's combative opening and his close defending his signature refrain that 'there wasn't a liberal America, or a conservative America.' "

He acknowledged that many saw it as “ironic” that “our politics seems more divided than ever.”

But notice that he used this passage to suggest how the American debate had to change. He proposed that discussions of abortion focus more on the successes we’ve had in reducing teen pregnancies and abortions themselves. Referring to the recent confrontations in Ferguson, Mo., and New York, he urged us to consider the fears of African American young men and police officers alike even as we join in celebrating declining crime and incarceration rates.

Obama clearly still believes that the country is less divided than our politics allows us to be. But he is no longer drawn to the illusion that his adversaries in the other party will beat their swords into plowshares anytime soon. He is battling not just for a personal legacy but also on behalf of a perspective that he hopes the country will someday embrace.

#

E. J. Dionne Jr. urges that "all sides stop fighting and pool their energies to easing the marriage and family crisis that is engulfing working-class Americans"

Says E.J.: "Kenworthy’s argument is that we can 'successfully embrace both flexibility and security, both competition and social justice.' His wish list is a straightforward set of progressive initiatives."


"We now seem to be living in the Age of High C, a period when every fight is Armageddon, every foe is a monster, and every issue is either the key to national survival or the doorway to ruin. . . .

"When I look around, I see a lot of liberals who live quite traditional family lives and even go regularly to churches, synagogues and mosques. I see a lot of conservatives who are feminists when it comes to their daughters' opportunities and who oppose bigotry against gays and lesbians."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post
column "To a healthier democracy"

by Ken

My only problem with E. J. Dionne Jr.'s eminently sensible column urging a tone-down of the rhetorical decibel level is the notion that there's anything remotely symmetrical in the allotment of blame, when there's no doubt in my mind that it is caused, screeched, and blood-sucked-on something like 99 percent by the Right, which uses culture wars as a substitute for thought and for actually dealing with problems -- not to mention all that toxic grunge stored up inside them. In extreme cases like washingtonpost.com's hired right hand Jennifer Rubin, it appears to be the only reason for the vile creature's continuing to draw breath.

Now, it's certainly hard to quarrel with E.J.'s opening:

Meg Greenfield, the late Post editorial page editor, counseled against writing in “High C” all the time. By this she meant that an editorialist or columnist who expressed equally noisy levels of indignation about everything would lack credibility when something truly outrageous came along that merited a well-crafted high-pitched scream.

We now seem to be living in the Age of High C, a period when every fight is Armageddon, every foe is a monster, and every issue is either the key to national survival or the doorway to ruin.

And it's even harder to quarrel with his proposition that "this habit seems especially pronounced in the way President Obama's adversaries treat him." He goes on: "It's odd that so many continue to see Obama as a radical and a socialist even as the Dow hits record levels and the wealthy continue to do very nicely. If he is a socialist, he is surely the most incompetent practitioner in the history of Marxism." And here I guess I do have a little problem. I get the point that E.J. is making, but the first objection to the proposition that Obama is either a radical or a socialist is that you have to be a total ignoramus or a pathological liar to advance the proposition. That matters, doesn't it?

Certainly E.J. has an interesting point when he argues that in reality we are philosophically less divided than the ideological warriors "pretend."

In all of the well-off democracies, even people who call themselves socialists no longer claim to have an alternative to the market as the primary creator and distributor of goods and services. The boundaries on the left end of what’s permissible in the public debate have been pushed well toward the center. This makes the hysteria and hyperbole all the more incomprehensible.

Now he has a book plug, and coming from E.J. it certainly deserves to be taken seriously.

But let’s dream a little and assume that the American left signed on to the proposals put forward by Lane Kenworthy of the University of California-San Diego in his challenging (and, by the way, very pro-market) book “Social Democratic America,” published this year. Kenworthy’s argument is that we can “successfully embrace both flexibility and security, both competition and social justice.”

His wish list is a straightforward set of progressive initiatives. A few of them: universal health insurance and early education, extensive new help on job searches and training, a year of paid parental leave, an increased minimum wage indexed to prices, expansions of efforts that supplement wages such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the government as an employer of last resort.

His program, he says, would cost around 10 percent of our gross domestic product. Now that’s a lot of money, and the debate about whether we should spend it would be anything but phony. Yet would such a level of expenditure signal the death of our constitutional system? Would it make us like, say, Cuba? No and no. It might make us a little more like Germany, the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries. We can argue if we want to do this, but these market democracies happen to share with us an affection for freedom and enterprise.

Returning to his "High C" theme, E.J. says

there’s nothing quite like our culture wars, in which disagreements about social issues are seen as battles between libertines and bigots. When I look around, I see a lot of liberals who live quite traditional family lives and even go regularly to churches, synagogues and mosques. I see a lot of conservatives who are feminists when it comes to their daughters’ opportunities and who oppose bigotry against gays and lesbians.

And he makes a pitch for joint action on behalf of the beleaguered family:

The ideological resolution I’d suggest for the new year is that all sides stop fighting and pool their energies to easing the marriage and family crisis that is engulfing working-class Americans.

This would require liberals to acknowledge what the vast majority of them already practice in their own lives: that, all things being equal, kids are better off with two loving and engaged parents. It would require conservatives to acknowledge that many of the pressures on families are economic and that the decline of well-paying blue-collar work is causing huge disruptions in family formation. I’d make a case that Kenworthy’s ideas for a more social democratic America would be good for families, but let’s argue it out in the spirit of a shared quest for remedies.

Maybe it’s asking too much, but might social conservatives also consider my friend Jonathan Rauch’s idea that they abandon their campaign against gay marriage in favor of a new campaign on behalf of the value of committed relationships for all of us?

Disagreement is one of the joys of freedom, so I am all for boisterous debate and tough political and philosophical competition. It’s how I make my living. But our democratic system would be healthier if it followed the Greenfield rule and reserved the harshest invective for things that are genuinely monstrous.

And again, I have nothing to quarrel with except the notion that this is aleft-right divide, when it's the Right that has created the model of the "family" as a cesspool of sociopathology if not outright psychosis whose principal function is as a breeding ground for future sociopaths. And I don't see how the chasm between this and a belief in basic human decency can be bridged.

Still, who knows?
#

We dunno nuttin bout wut Obama beleevs, just if hes for it its the end of the wurrld

Today's "Daily Cartoon," by David Sipress,
from NewYorker.com

"Remember -- talk about how the President
has done a fantastic job with the economy, but
whatever you do don't mention the President."

“A man in Oklahoma was exposed to Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Fox for over three minutes. We hope we’re not too late."

-- a CDC spokesman quoted in the Borowitz Report
"Man Infected with Ebola Misinformation Through
Casual Contact With Cable News" (see below)

"[H]ere is the conundrum of the 2014 campaign. In 2010, House Speaker John Boehner's battle cry that helped Republicans win their landslide was, 'Where are the jobs?' Obama and the Democrats are now in a position to reply: 'Here are the jobs!'

"But Boehner isn’t asking that question anymore."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column
"Why Democrats aren’t getting credit for the economy"

by Ken

I had been meaning to write about the E. J. Dionne Jr. column I've quote from above, and digging it out again without resorting to a paid click meant slogging through WaPo "Today's Opinions" e-mails. What strikes you when you do that is how commitedly the cadre of right-wing jackasses structure their entire "thought" (for want of a better word) process consists of seeing every phenomenon that crosses their gaze as either proof that everything in the universe is the fault of Barack Obama. Their brains are now so thoroughly degraded that what passes for "thought" in there apparently has no other functioning principle.

By contrast, the Dionne column, which tackles the question of why good job news isn't of help to Democrats, addresses the question not propagandistically but factually, starting with the question itself:

A party controlling the White House could not ask for much more from economic numbers than the Democrats got in Friday’s jobs report, issued a month and a day before the midterm elections. Unemployment fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest it has been since July 2008. The nation added 248,000 jobs, more than the forecasters had projected. What’s not to like?

Facts, of course, are persona non grata on the Right, where actual reality -- not to be confused with the kind they just pull out of their stinky butts -- is now regarded as a left-wing conspiracy. However, until the very end of the column E.J. doesn't even go there, doesn't address the right-wing campaign of all-lies-all-the-time which the president and scared-witless Democratic candidates have to contend with, which I would argue is the first reason why the Democrats can't get any mileage about good jobs news.

Basically, E.J. sees two reasons. First, "the very improvement in the economy means that it is a less central concern to voters than it was when Obama took office — or in 2010. And second, " voters who are still concerned about the economy tend to be focused not on its successes but on what it is failing to do for them." Unemployment is "still not low enough to create rapid and widespread wage growth." He notes, "Many of the forces that have been driving up inequality since the 1980s are still with us," and adds that "this tension is far more difficult for Democrats to deal with than it would be for Republicans, were they presiding over exactly the same recovery."

Democrats, going back to those happy Roosevelt days, have made their living as the party that lifts up the many and not just the privileged few. Republicans have traditionally said that growth is everything and if the rich get richer, their success will eventually work its way down to everyone else.

Democrats can’t (and shouldn’t) echo conservative bromides. They are right to point to all that still needs to be done to end income stagnation in the middle class and among the poor. In his Northwestern speech, Obama advanced his proposals on education, job training, college loans, a minimum wage increase, infrastructure investment, equal pay and work-family balance. All would help matters, if only they could get by Republicans in Congress.

At this point E.J. really can't withhold comment on the Right-Wing Noise Machine.

[W]hen progressives raise the problem of inequality, their conservative opponents turn around and blame that on Obama, too. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which practically invented trickle-down economics, headlined an editorial on Friday “The President of Inequality.” The paper’s sudden solicitude for the downtrodden was rather jarring. Imagine an editorial in the Vatican’s newspaper extolling the virtues of atheism.

E.J. argues that in the month to go to Election Day there's still "enough time to develop a sustained argument that highlights both how much better the economy is and how much we still have to do to spread prosperity more widely." He adds that this is "more challenging than bragging," but "has the virtue of making clear that if today’s obstruction had been the rule in 2009, we’d still be in the soup."


MEANWHILE IN RIGHT-WING SICK-FANTASYLAND

Understanding that the only right-wing "thought" process is "How can we dump on Obama?," it's not surprising that this is the operative principle whether it's what Leon Panetta has to say in his book about Obama and the Middle East or, now, a Gallup poll reporting unfavorable American attitudes toward Obamacare.

So naturally we find the Right's most dedicated screecher of lies and imbecilities about, well, everything poltical, but the president in particular, washingtonpost.com's hired right-wing hatchet creature "Jackass Jenny" Rubin, blithering moronically about health care, a subect about which she clearly knows absolutely nothing, in a column called "The GOP's post-election Obamacare strategy." And when I say she knows absolutely nothing about about health care, I mean not one single thing that apart from the right-wing spin of the politics of health care, which is almost as ignorant about health care as JJ is.

JJ of course is looking forward to an Obamacare field day. It never occurs to her that American attitudes about Obamacare are in any way related to the dragnet campaign of lies she and her fellow hatchet creatures have waged. But even a creature as utterly bereft of brain function as Jackass Jenny knows that Republicans have to exercise a wee bit of caution, and she offers three such cautions. On the whole it's so moronic as to be not worth talking about, exept when it exceeds the bounds of normal right-wing-pundit moronitude. I direct attention to her second caution: that "it is absolutely essential for Republicans to have a vote on an alternative that is better than Obamacare" (the italics are the author's).

"Considering how poorly Americans regard Obamacare," says JJ, "it should not be hard to come up with a non-compulsory option that is cheaper, protects pre-existing conditions, allows a wide range of plans, does a better job of controlling costs and covers just about the same number of people."

Sorry, I had to put that in boldface. [T]his is a life form that has -- and again I mean this literally -- absolutely no knowledge of any kind whatsoever, again excepting right-wing political spin, about any of the things she mentions:

• compulsory or noncompulsory options;

• the cost of insurance;

• what's involved in coverage of preexisting conditions;

• what's involved in controlling costs -- of anything on the planet, probably, but I mean specifically health-care costs;

• what's involved in covering any particular number of people

This is truly staggering. "It should not be hard to come up with" a plan that fits her insanely delusional prescription? It should not be hard? Has she ever read or heard anything, and again I mean anything at all other than the right-wing political fantasies, about health care, health insurance, the U.S. (or any other) health-care delivery system, or the U.S. (or any other) health-care payment system? I really don't believe that with any amount of effort it would be possible to come up with a statement as utterly brainless.

But go back to the beginning of the statement: "Considering how poorly Americans regard Obamacare." Let's forget for a moment the extent to which the way Americans regard Obamacare has been shaped by batallions of pathological liars and degraded imbeciles like Jackass Jenny. What does "the way American regard Obamacare" have to do with any single word that follows? I'll answer that one: absolutely nothing. JJ has taken her own pathological lies and now pretended that they can in some fashion be diddled with reality.

They can't be. When you've committed your being to delusions and lies, you can certainly attempt to apply those delusions and lies to the deluding of large numbers of people who are perfectly happy to be lied to. What you can't do is pretend that any of this has anything to do with reality.


THIS RECENTLY REPORTED BY THE BOROWITZ REPORT

Speaking of the Right-Wing Noise Machine's cultivation of American ignorance --

OCTOBER 7, 2014
MAN INFECTED WITH EBOLA MISINFORMATION
THROUGH CASUAL CONTACT WITH CABLE NEWS
BY ANDY BOROWITZ



CANTON, OH (The Borowitz Report)—An Ohio man has become infected with misinformation about the Ebola virus through casual contact with cable news, the Centers for Disease Control has confirmed.

Tracy Klugian, thirty-one, briefly came into contact with alarmist Ebola hearsay during a visit to the Akron-Canton airport, where a CNN report about Ebola was showing on one of the televisions in the airport bar. “Mr. Klugian is believed to have been exposed to cable news for no more than ten minutes, but long enough to become infected,” a spokesman for the C.D.C. said. “Within an hour, he was showing signs of believing that an Ebola outbreak in the United States was inevitable and unstoppable.”

Once Klugian’s condition was apparent, the Ohio man was rushed to a public library and given a seventh-grade biology textbook, at which point he “started to stabilize,” the spokesman said.

But others exposed to the widening epidemic of Ebola misinformation may not be so lucky. “A man in Oklahoma was exposed to Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Fox for over three minutes,” the C.D.C. spokesman said gravely. “We hope we’re not too late.”

#

Elizabeth Warren, Alan Grayson-- Fierce Advocates For Ordinary Working Families

This morning when I woke up the top story on Salon was Digby's Put Alan Grayson On Benghazi Panel! Why He's Dems' Best Option To Expose This Clown Show. "With the latest Benghazi! ™ extravaganza about to begin," she wrote, "the Democrats are faced with a dilemma. Should they boycott the silly hearings, thus leaving the Republicans to put on their pageant unimpeded, or should they join in with a full panel and add legitimacy to the process? The problem seems to be that whether they like it or not, these hearings are going to be covered. And if the press reaction so far tells us anything, they are looking for a show." For more and more serious people on the left, the solution is to just appoint one member-- Alan Grayson. Trusted Pelosi mouthpiece Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) brought it up at a caucus meeting last week. I can imagine Steny Hoyer must have come close to a coronary.

But, as Digby wrote, "people don’t realize that Alan Grayson isn’t just another lawyer/congressman. He’s an experienced litigator who fought whistle-blower fraud cases aimed at military contractors. The Wall Street Journal characterized him in 2006 as “waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.” And he was very successful at it. As a politician Grayson is usually seen as a pugnacious fighter always at the ready with a pithy put-down on cable news shows. His floor speeches are often fiery indictments of his political opponents and the power elite."

But that’s not why the Democrats should tap him for the job. As notable as all those characteristics are, they are not where Grayson’s true talent lies. He is a master at the task of committee questioning. During his first term as a member of the Financial Services Committee he practically had bankers whimpering on the hot seat and he took on everyone from Ben Bernanke to Timothy Geithner, eliciting important information. Unlike the vaunted prosecutor the GOP has tapped to lead the inquiry, Trey Gowdy (who specializes in browbeating and histrionic questioning), Grayson is never rude and he isn’t dismissive or insulting. He is serious, composed and extremely well prepared. And when he has the floor he is completely in control.

And yes, choosing him would please the Democratic base and infuriate the Republicans. That should be a feature, not a bug. The Republicans want a show. Grayson will definitely give them one-- but it won’t be the kind of show they’re looking for. He’ll elicit the kinds of responses from the Democratic witnesses that are needed to make their case and he’ll skewer the conservative scandal-mongers with the facts.

As E.J. Dionne pointed out in yesterday's Washington Post there's another wildly popular Democrat-- popular, like Grayson, with real people, not necessarily with institutional special interests-- who has many of the same attributes Digby assigned to Grayson: former Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren. And both are under pressure from the progressive base to not allow corporatist Establishment Democrat, Hillary Clinton (surrounded by the very worst the Democratic Party has to offer), skip into the presidential nomination without an intense intellectual battle of ideas. Grayson very well may run if Warren holds fast to her decision not to. Like Grayson, Warren is a successful attorney with a mind like a steel trap. And like him. she stands up to the status quo that conservatives on both sides of the aisle live by.

photo: Tim Pierce

From the time she first came to public attention, Warren has been challenging conservative presumptions embedded so deeply in our discourse that we barely notice them. Where others equivocate, she fights back with common sense.

Since the Reagan era, Democrats have been so determined to show how pro-market and pro-business they are that they’ve shied away from pointing out that markets could not exist without government, that the well-off depend on the state to keep their wealth secure and that participants in the economy rely on government to keep the marketplace on the level and to temper the business cycle’s gyrations.

Warren doesn’t back away from any of these facts. In her new book, “A Fighting Chance,” she recalls the answer she gave to a voter during a living-room gathering in Andover, Mass., that quickly went viral. She was in the early days of her Senate campaign, in the fall of 2011, and had been asked about the deficit. Characteristically, she pushed the boundaries beyond a narrow fiscal discussion to explain how government helped create wealth.

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” she said. “Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” It was all part of “the underlying social contract,” she said, a phrase politicians don’t typically use.

And like Warren, a short speech of Grayson's captured the imaginations of millions of progressives across the country. His was on the floor of the House: "The Republicans’ health care plan for America: 'Don’t get sick.' That’s right-- don’t get sick. If you have insurance, don’t get sick; if you don’t have insurance, don’t get sick; if you’re sick, don’t get sick-- just don’t get sick! That’s what the Republicans have in mind for you, America. That’s the Republicans’ health care plan. But I think that the Republicans understand that that plan isn’t always going to work-- it’s not a foolproof plan. So the Republicans have a backup plan, in case you do get sick. If you get sick in America, this is what the Republicans want you to do. If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: 'Die quickly.' That’s right. The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick."

Blue America has a pretty new, pretty special page dedicated to not settling for the lesser of two evils. It's called Why Settle? and its dedicated to finding a great president, not one that's better than Chris Christie, Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz. I think you know who you'll find on it. Want to help?