Are Republicans Dumb or Insane - Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) Suggests Return To The Gold Standard

Are Republicans Dumb or Insane - Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) Suggests Return To The Gold Standard

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), a top House Republican and possible 2012 presidential contender, gave a speech at the Detroit Economic Club this afternoon outlining his “prescription for a fresh start for the American economy.” The Detroit Economic Club is a “popular venue for candidates testing the presidential campaign waters,” and Pence is “working hard to cultivate support among the fiscal conservatives that are driving the tea party.”

The first item of Pence’s five-point plan for the economy is a “sound monetary policy.” Pence elaborated that he believes a return to the gold standard could create such a policy:

PENCE: Before I move on, I’d like to note, in the midst of all that’s happened recently — massive borrowing and spending, QE2 — a debate has started anew over an anchor to our global monetary system. My dear friend, the late Jack Kemp, probably would have urged me to adopt the gold standard, right here and now in Detroit. Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, encouraged that we rethink the international currency system including the role of gold, and I agree. I think the time has come to have a debate over gold, and the proper role it should play in our nations monetary affairs. A pro-growth agenda begins with sound monetary policy.

Currently, the global financial system does not assign any value to gold, and the U.S. Federal Reserve is not required to tie the value of the dollar to anything. A return to the gold standard, which would tie the value of the U.S. dollar to the value of gold, is a fringe economic position that could lead to a drastic reduction in prices. “Very few economists think this would be a good idea,” Paul Krugman has noted. It would prohibit the government from adjusting interest rates, which it often does based on the health of the economy — instead everything would be tied to the value of gold.

The U.S. abandoned this policy in 1971, and as Krugman notes: “Since then the price of gold has increased roughly tenfold, while consumer prices have increased about 250 percent. If we had tried to keep the price of gold from rising, this would have required a massive decline in the prices of practically everything else — deflation on a scale not seen since the Depression. This doesn’t sound like a particularly good idea.”

Moreover, as Matthew Yglesias has observed, the idea of the enforcing a gold standard doesn’t exactly fit into the Tea Party’s free-market ethos. As none other than Milton Friedman wrote: “I think those people who say they believe in a gold standard are fundamentally being very anti-libertarian because what they mean by a gold standard is a governmentally fixed price for gold.”

Returning to the gold standard wasn’t the only far-right economic proposal Pence offered in his speech. The Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel details Pence’s call for the elimination of the U.S. tax code in favor of a “flat tax.

CAP economist Adam Hersh explains further why the gold standard would be extremely unwise: "Gold makes for a maddeningly inconvenient means of exchange. Try making change for a bar of gold. Gold as money would severely raise the costs of transacting for goods and services, and that is bad for the economy. Paper money tied to gold side-steps this problem to an extent, however the volatility of gold prices makes unpredictable just how much gold-backed paper currency one would need to carry around to conduct daily transactions. Consider U.S. international trade accounts. In 2009 we had a trade deficit of $375 billion. If gold were our money (or our foundation for paper money), we would have to ship about 8500 tons of gold overseas."

Republicans seem to be on a shrill campaign to return America to some glossy past which never existed. They seem to think if we could only return to the days before electricity, before slavery was banned, before women had the vote - then all would be perfect.

Fox News Pundit a 9-11 Truther

Fox host Napolitano is a 9-11 Truther: "It couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us"

Yesterday, Fox Business host and Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano revealed himself as a believer in the conspiracy theory that the government is lying about the attacks on September 11. Speaking on a leading conspiracy show, Napolitano said that it's "hard for me to believe that" World Trade Center building 7 "came down by itself" -- a central tenet of 9-11 conspiracy theories -- and claimed that "twenty years from now, people will look at 9-11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us."

Many conservatives have tried to suggest it is wild eyed moderates ( they generally call moderates leftists. It is part of trying to dehumanize their opponents rather than dealing with the facts) are the ones spreading the 9-11 Truther conspiracy theories. The Right thinks to entertain such ideas is horrible enough to deserve being fired from your job. If that were not enough if you have a 9-11 Truther as a friend that makes you guilty also, By Fox News' standards, Napolitano "should be fired immediately" for being a 9-11 Truther

Yesterday, Fox Business host and Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' radio show and joined Jones in pushing conspiracy theories about the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. Napolitano announced that "twenty years from now, people will look at 9-11 the way we look at the assassination of JFK today. It couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us."

In the past, we've noted that Napolitano has lent his credibility -- and, by extension, Fox News' -- to Jones' show by helping Jones promote bizarre anti-government conspiracies. Jones is widely recognized as one of the leaders of the "9-11 Truth" movement. He also, among many other outlandish theories, believes a "New World Order" is going to exterminate 80% of the world's population.

While Napolitano's appearances with Jones have been problematic in the past, his foray into pushing 9-11 Truth conspiracies should - but, based on the network's refusal to reprimand on-air talent, likely won't - spell the end of Napolitano's Fox News career.

Back in September, during the five-alarm freak out over the planned Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, Fox News (and many other conservatives) attacked Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf over the fact that one of his "former associates" is a 9-11 Truther. Nevermind that Rauf himself had repeatedly and explicitly stated that the 9-11 attacks were perpetrated by extremist Muslims; Fox News found the mere fact that he used to work with someone who held that belief worth attacking him over.

Attacking Rauf on ABC, Bill O'Reilly exclaimed that it "doesn't matter" if Rauf is a truther, because "his pal" was one. Fox Nation proclaimed that Rauf "Pals Around With Truthers." Glenn Beck called for the government to "investigate" Rauf.

While 9-11 truthers are a misguided bunch lacking hard evidence that does not mean they and anyone that has ever had lunch with them is guilty of some crime and should lose their income. That is unless you're Faux News. When you're a paid of member of the conservative right-wing kool-aid drinkers like Napolitano, Fox gives you a pass. When values are contradictory are they values anymore.

Sarah Palin Nixon with Lipstick

Sarah Palin Nixon with Lipstick

What's the difference between Richard Nixon and Sarah Palin? Lipstick. (Well, that and military service, graduate education, a keen intellect, years of national political experience and a proven grasp of policy foreign and domestic.) But as a fellow "serial collector of resentments", the half-term Alaska governor is Nixon's heir. When it comes to the paranoid style, the politics of payback, the perpetual war on the press and the championing of "real Americans" versus supposed elites, the Mama Grizzly is the second coming of Tricky Dick.

On Thanksgiving of all days, Sarah Palin was her Nixon best in attacking the president and the press. Furious about the understandable media reaction to her gaffe about "our North Korean allies," the pitbull in lipstick took to Facebook to again complain that the media did not show "some consistency on this issue" and "completely makes things up without doing even rudimentary fact-checking."

That online outburst followed her declaration on Fox News earlier in the week that:

"I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism. And I have a communications degree. I studied journalism, who, what, where, when, and why of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy, that expectation that the public has for truth to be reported. And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us."

As it turns out, Sarah Palin is just reading from the Richard Nixon playbook. In 1972, just one month after defeating George McGovern in an epic landslide, Nixon summed up his press bashing Henry Kissinger. As CBS recounted:

"Never forget. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy." Almost shouting he repeated, "professors are the enemy!" He told former Harvard professor Kissinger, "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

And to be sure, those professors are just part of the "elite" supposedly out to get Nixon and Palin alike.

Just days after her nomination by John McCain, Palin set the tone by protesting, "I've learned quickly these past few days that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone." Launching her Going Rogue book tour last year Palin told Rush Limbaugh, "I'm not trying to reach the liberal elites in this country, and it's a good thing I'm not trying to, 'cause I'm not succeeding there." And after Barbara Bush said of Palin, "I think she's very happy in Alaska, and I hope she'll stay there," the average hockey mom punched back:

"I don't want to sort of concede that we have to get used to this kind of thing because I think the majority of Americans don't want to put up with the blue bloods -- and I say it with all due respect because I love the Bushes -- but the blue bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition to pick and choose the winners."

(Ironically, Nixon himself said of Barbara Bush, "she knows how to hate.")

Of course, from the beginning those same blue bloods were the bane of Richard Nixon's existence. As Aaron Astor explained last year in his review of Rick Perlstein's excellent Nixonland:

At Whittier College, Nixon's alma mater, there was the social "in" crowd that formed an elite social club called the Franklins. Only the wealthiest students could deign to join the Franklins. Young Nixon, ever the outcast in this circle joined with his fellow shunned lumpenproletariat and formed a rival group called the Orthogonians. The word implied that the group rejected the elitist assumptions of the Franklins and refused to cede social authority to the well-to-do.

That proud chip on the shoulder, on display at Whittier and later at Duke law school, would be a hallmark of Nixon's politics. But if "Richard Nixon mastered the art of self-pity and resentment," after her journey through five colleges Sarah Palin mastered it as well.

Palin doesn't have to master Nixon's adopted victimhood. She is positive everyone is out to get her and she must respond with her own petty bag of grudges against those "elites" who have done her wrong. Those would be the same elites and media that magnify and sometimes invent every little gaffe of President Obama. Palin would certainly have a hectic presidency, 25% of her day devoted to trying to understand the intricacies of odmestic and foriegn policy and the other 75% devoted to singling out for a vendetta campaign anyone who dares disagree with her.

When conservatives get up in the morning darn sure that Democrats are all socialists that is weird and dead wrong all on its own. Even stranger because it is Republicans and conservative libertarians who most resemble Marx, Stalin and Mao - Deluded Tea Partiers, Ayn Rand and How the U.S. Is Like the Soviet Union

Republicans Celebrate Thanksgiving by Giving America the Shaft

Radical Right-wing Conservatives Gobbling up our blessings

Thanksgiving may be a time to give thanks for our blessings, but in Washington, the resurgent Republican conservatives want needy Americans to have fewer of them. The new Republicans have the same old leaders - and their passion hasn't changed. It isn't about offering a hand up to the afflicted - it's about handouts to the connected.

In the lame-duck session now convened until the end of the year, Republicans have continued their strategy of obstruction - opposing the New START treaty, opposing repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," opposing consideration of immigration reform, opposing even passage of appropriations for the current year. Their passion is focused on getting one thing done. They will run through the wall to extend the extra tax cuts enjoyed by those, largely millionaires, earning more than $250,000 a year.

Forget about deficit reduction. According to Republicans, these tax cuts - costing an estimated $700 billion over the next decade - need not be balanced by spending cuts, or "paid for" in the Washington parlance.

At the same time, Republicans are willing to filibuster to block extension of unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed. They won't sign on, they say, unless there are cuts in domestic spending to offset the extension. The basic support of the families of more than 3 million workers will begin to expire at the end of this month. So much for holiday cheer.

The extra tax cuts for the rich (they collect the same tax cuts as everyone else on their first $250,000 of income) will cost about $68 billion next year alone. Extending unemployment insurance for the long-term unemployed will cost about $65 billion.

The top 1 percent of Americans captured a staggering 66 percent of all income gains over the past decade. America's inequality is now at record extremes. And, as the independent Congressional Budget Office and John McCain's economic adviser, Mark Zandi, agree, providing tax cuts for the rich is the least effective way to boost the economy. The beneficiaries tend to save the money, invest it in growing markets abroad, or worse, throw more into the financial casino now reopened on Wall Street, fueling the computerized hyper-speculation that has nothing to do with productive investment.

At the same, the human toll caused by the economic recession continues to rise. There were 2.9 million job openings in September, but the total number of unemployed workers was 14.8 million, with half of these workers jobless for 21 weeks or more. Long-term unemployment insurance is keeping millions of workers and their families out of poverty. It is, without question, one of the most effective ways of boosting the economy, as the unemployed spend that money to buy food, pay rent or make car payments, while looking for work.

Congress has never cut back on these benefits when unemployment was more than 7.2 percent. Today, official unemployment is at 9.6 percent, with rates reaching more than 16 percent in African American communities. With six workers for every one job opening, this is a human calamity.

Voters have more decency than today's conservative leaders. In a new national survey on unemployment benefits by the National Employment Law Project and Half in Ten, an organization whose goal is to cut poverty in half in 10 years, 67 percent of all voters believe Congress should continue to provide unemployment benefits until unemployment comes down substantially.

Why go to the wall for the wealthy while abandoning those who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own? This isn't hard to fathom. Secret donors spent more than $138 million in the last election, with 80 percent of the money going to Republicans. NBC News reports that a goodly proportion of the secret funds raised by Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS operation came from wealthy hedge fund managers furious at Democratic efforts to repeal the outrageous "carried interest" loophole that allows them to pay a lower rate of taxes than their chauffeurs.

The Chamber of Commerce, Bloomberg reports, pocketed more than $86 million in secret contributions from the health-care industry last year - 40 percent of the chamber's spending. This year, the chamber spent nearly $33 million in secret donations on the elections, virtually all for Republican candidates vowing to repeal health-care reform.

The chamber's priorities - lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations, repealing health care, rolling back Wall Street reform - reflect those of its contributors. They are also totally divorced from the priorities of the American people, who are overwhelmingly focused on jobs and the economy.

It should not surprise anyone that the priorities announced by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, the Republican congressional leaders, reflect those of the chamber and not citizens. McConnell promises to vote again and again on repeal of health reform. Republican committee chairs have promised to roll back bank regulations and to weaken environmental and consumer protections. And they have pledged to cut $100 billion from domestic programs, largely those directed at the vulnerable. Not surprisingly, they are likely to filibuster to block a vote on the Disclose Act, which would shed light on the identity of the secret campaign donors.

"Where are the jobs?" That was House speaker-presumptive John Boehner's mantra during the election campaign. But jobs are as AWOL in the Republican priorities as is compassion for the unemployed.

In between being utter failures and total screw-ups from 2000 to 2008 Republicans managed to crash the economy and make the middle-class pay for it. Two years later many Americans - apparently cursed with a short term memory - gave the same miscreant Republicans another chance to govern. And gee t looks like conservatives have not learned a thing. They're back to being the same old America hating social-darwinists they've always been.

Republicans Celebrate Thanksgiving by Stealing from Middle-class

The GOP: Gobbling up our blessings

Thanksgiving may be a time to give thanks for our blessings, but in Washington, the resurgent Republican conservatives want needy Americans to have fewer of them. The new Republicans have the same old leaders - and their passion hasn't changed. It isn't about offering a hand up to the afflicted - it's about handouts to the connected.

In the lame-duck session now convened until the end of the year, Republicans have continued their strategy of obstruction - opposing the New START treaty, opposing repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," opposing consideration of immigration reform, opposing even passage of appropriations for the current year. Their passion is focused on getting one thing done. They will run through the wall to extend the extra tax cuts enjoyed by those, largely millionaires, earning more than $250,000 a year.

Forget about deficit reduction. According to Republicans, these tax cuts - costing an estimated $700 billion over the next decade - need not be balanced by spending cuts, or "paid for" in the Washington parlance.

At the same time, Republicans are willing to filibuster to block extension of unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed. They won't sign on, they say, unless there are cuts in domestic spending to offset the extension. The basic support of the families of more than 3 million workers will begin to expire at the end of this month. So much for holiday cheer.

The extra tax cuts for the rich (they collect the same tax cuts as everyone else on their first $250,000 of income) will cost about $68 billion next year alone. Extending unemployment insurance for the long-term unemployed will cost about $65 billion.

The top 1 percent of Americans captured a staggering 66 percent of all income gains over the past decade. America's inequality is now at record extremes. And, as the independent Congressional Budget Office and John McCain's economic adviser, Mark Zandi, agree, providing tax cuts for the rich is the least effective way to boost the economy. The beneficiaries tend to save the money, invest it in growing markets abroad, or worse, throw more into the financial casino now reopened on Wall Street, fueling the computerized hyper-speculation that has nothing to do with productive investment.

At the same, the human toll caused by the economic recession continues to rise. There were 2.9 million job openings in September, but the total number of unemployed workers was 14.8 million, with half of these workers jobless for 21 weeks or more. Long-term unemployment insurance is keeping millions of workers and their families out of poverty. It is, without question, one of the most effective ways of boosting the economy, as the unemployed spend that money to buy food, pay rent or make car payments, while looking for work.

Congress has never cut back on these benefits when unemployment was more than 7.2 percent. Today, official unemployment is at 9.6 percent, with rates reaching more than 16 percent in African American communities. With six workers for every one job opening, this is a human calamity.

Voters have more decency than today's conservative leaders. In a new national survey on unemployment benefits by the National Employment Law Project and Half in Ten, an organization whose goal is to cut poverty in half in 10 years, 67 percent of all voters believe Congress should continue to provide unemployment benefits until unemployment comes down substantially.

Why go to the wall for the wealthy while abandoning those who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own? This isn't hard to fathom. Secret donors spent more than $138 million in the last election, with 80 percent of the money going to Republicans. NBC News reports that a goodly proportion of the secret funds raised by Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS operation came from wealthy hedge fund managers furious at Democratic efforts to repeal the outrageous "carried interest" loophole that allows them to pay a lower rate of taxes than their chauffeurs.

The Chamber of Commerce, Bloomberg reports, pocketed more than $86 million in secret contributions from the health-care industry last year - 40 percent of the chamber's spending. This year, the chamber spent nearly $33 million in secret donations on the elections, virtually all for Republican candidates vowing to repeal health-care reform.

The chamber's priorities - lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations, repealing health care, rolling back Wall Street reform - reflect those of its contributors. They are also totally divorced from the priorities of the American people, who are overwhelmingly focused on jobs and the economy.

Republicans campaigned partly on the promise they would create jobs. It must be that secret plan they keep hidden during the Bush years when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House - and had the worse job creation record since Herbert Hoover. What they did do doing the Bush years is look out for fat-cats who would eventually do their part to crash the economy. Now who is going to pay and pay and pay for Republican boneheadeness? That's right the same middle-class and working class that paid during the Bush years. Wouldn't want to inconvenience the conservative millionaire thieves.

The Conservative War on American Democracy

The Conservative War on American Democracy

Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be - after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction.

So here's what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: "I can't wait for the blood bath in April. ... When debt limit time comes, they're going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We've got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give 'em a piece of meat, real meat,' " meaning spending cuts. "And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary," he continued.

Think of Mr. Simpson's blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize.

Some explanation: There's a legal limit to federal debt, which must be raised periodically if the government keeps running deficits; the limit will be reached again this spring. And since nobody, not even the hawkiest of deficit hawks, thinks the budget can be balanced immediately, the debt limit must be raised to avoid a government shutdown. But Republicans will probably try to blackmail the president into policy concessions by, in effect, holding the government hostage; they've done it before.

Now, you might think that the prospect of this kind of standoff, which might deny many Americans essential services, wreak havoc in financial markets and undermine America's role in the world, would worry all men of good will. But no, Mr. Simpson "can't wait." And he's what passes, these days, for a reasonable Republican.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it's doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party's cooperation - cooperation that won't be forthcoming.

Elite opinion has been slow to recognize this reality. Thus on the same day that Mr. Simpson rejoiced in the prospect of chaos, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, appealed for help in confronting mass unemployment. He asked for "a fiscal program that combines near-term measures to enhance growth with strong, confidence-inducing steps to reduce longer-term structural deficits."

My immediate thought was, why not ask for a pony, too? After all, the G.O.P. isn't interested in helping the economy as long as a Democrat is in the White House. Indeed, far from being willing to help Mr. Bernanke's efforts, Republicans are trying to bully the Fed itself into giving up completely on trying to reduce unemployment.

And on matters fiscal, the G.O.P. program is to do almost exactly the opposite of what Mr. Bernanke called for. On one side, Republicans oppose just about everything that might reduce structural deficits: they demand that the Bush tax cuts be made permanent while demagoguing efforts to limit the rise in Medicare costs, which are essential to any attempts to get the budget under control. On the other, the G.O.P. opposes anything that might help sustain demand in a depressed economy - even aid to small businesses, which the party claims to love.

Right now, in particular, Republicans are blocking an extension of unemployment benefits - an action that will both cause immense hardship and drain purchasing power from an already sputtering economy. But there's no point appealing to the better angels of their nature; America just doesn't work that way anymore.

And opposition for the sake of opposition isn't limited to economic policy. Politics, they used to tell us, stops at the water's edge - but that was then.

These days, national security experts are tearing their hair out over the decision of Senate Republicans to block a desperately needed new strategic arms treaty. And everyone knows that these Republicans oppose the treaty, not because of legitimate objections, but simply because it's an Obama administration initiative; if sabotaging the president endangers the nation, so be it.

How does this end? Mr. Obama is still talking about bipartisan outreach, and maybe if he caves in sufficiently he can avoid a federal shutdown this spring. But any respite would be only temporary; again, the G.O.P. is just not interested in helping a Democrat govern.

My sense is that most Americans still don't understand this reality. They still imagine that when push comes to shove, our politicians will come together to do what's necessary. But that was another country.

It's hard to see how this situation is resolved without a major crisis of some kind. Mr. Simpson may or may not get the blood bath he craves this April, but there will be blood sooner or later. And we can only hope that the nation that emerges from that blood bath is still one we recognize.

Why would conservatives maliciously seek the destruction of an operational government - which will have it's worst effects on the poor and working class Americans. Because they have only one true alliance and that is to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. American they hate. The rich they love.

The Republican Myths About Thanksgiving and Early America

The Pilgrims Were ... Socialists?

Ah, Thanksgiving. A celebration regardless of creed; a time for all Americans to come together after a divisive election year.

But why take a holiday from argument? In these fractious times, even the meaning of Thanksgiving is subject to political debate.

Forget what you learned about the first Thanksgiving being a celebration of a bountiful harvest, or an expression of gratitude to the Indians who helped the Pilgrims through those harsh first months in an unfamiliar land. In the Tea Party view of the holiday, the first settlers were actually early socialists. They realized the error of their collectivist ways and embraced capitalism, producing a bumper year, upon which they decided that it was only right to celebrate the glory of the free market and private property.

Historians quibble with this interpretation. But the story, related by libertarians and conservatives for years, has taken on new life over the last year among Tea Party audiences, who revere early American history, and hunger for any argument against what they believe is the big-government takeover of the United States.

It has made Thanksgiving another proxy in the debate over health care and entitlement spending, and placed it alongside the New Deal and the Constitution on the platter of historical items picked apart by competing narratives.

There are other debates about Thanksgiving — whether the first was in Jamestown, Va., or Plymouth, Mass.; whether it was intended as a religious holiday or not. But broadly, the version passed on to generations of American schoolchildren holds that the settlers who had arrived in the New World on the Mayflower in 1620 were celebrating the next year’s good harvest, sharing in the bounty with Squanto and their other Indian friends, who had taught them how to hunt and farm on new terrain.

All very kumbaya, say Tea Party historians, but missing the economics lesson within.

In one common telling, the pilgrims who came to Plymouth established a communal system, where all had to pool whatever they hunted or grew on their lands. Because they could not reap the fruits of their labors, no one had any incentive to work, and the system failed — confusion, thievery and famine ensued.

Finally, the governor of the colony, William Bradford, abolished this system and gave each household a parcel of land. With private property to call their own, the Pilgrims were suddenly very industrious and found themselves with more corn than they knew what to do with. So they invited the Indians over to celebrate. (In some other versions, the first Thanksgiving is not a feast but a brief respite from famine. But the moral is always the same: socialism doesn’t work.) The same commune-to-capitalism, famine-to-feast story is told of Jamestown, the first English settlement, in 1607. Dick Armey, the former House majority leader and Texas congressman who has become a Tea Party promoter, related it as a cautionary tale in a speech to the National Press Club earlier this year.

Rush Limbaugh repeats the Thanksgiving story of Plymouth every year, reading it from a chapter in one of his books titled “Dead White Guys, or What Your History Books Never Told You.” (Some details change; one year, he had the Pilgrims growing organic vegetables.)

The version is also taught in a one-day course called “The Making of America,” which became popular with Tea Party groups across the country after Glenn Beck recommended the work of its author, W. Cleon Skousen, who died in 2006. Tea Party blogs have reposted “The Great Thanksgiving Hoax” from a Web site celebrating the work of the libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, a favorite of Ron Paul devotees. The post concludes: “Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.”

Leave aside the question of whether this country is on the march to socialism (conservatives say yes, and blame the Democrats). What does the record say?

Historians say that the settlers in Plymouth, and their supporters in England, did indeed agree to hold their property in common — William Bradford, the governor, referred to it in his writings as the “common course.” But the plan was in the interest of realizing a profit sooner, and was only intended for the short term; historians say the Pilgrims were more like shareholders in an early corporation than subjects of socialism.

“It was directed ultimately to private profit,” said Richard Pickering, a historian of early America and the deputy director of Plimoth Plantation, a museum devoted to keeping the Pilgrims’ story alive.

The arrangement did not produce famine. If it had, Bradford would not have declared the three days of sport and feasting in 1621 that became known as the first Thanksgiving. “The celebration would never have happened if the harvest was going to be less than enough to get them by,” Mr. Pickering said. “They would have saved it and rationed it to get by.”

The competing versions of the story note Bradford’s writings about “confusion and discontent” and accusations of “laziness” among the colonists. But Mr. Pickering said this grumbling had more to do with the fact that the Plymouth colony was bringing together settlers from all over England, at a time when most people never moved more than 10 miles from home. They spoke different dialects and had different methods of farming, and looked upon each other with great wariness.

“One man’s laziness is another man’s industry, based on the agricultural methods they’ve learned as young people,” he said.

Bradford did get rid of the common course — but it was in 1623, after the first Thanksgiving, and not because the system wasn’t working. The Pilgrims just didn’t like it. In the accounts of colonists, Mr. Pickering said, “there was griping and groaning.”

“Bachelors didn’t want to feed the wives of married men, and women don’t want to do the laundry of the bachelors,” he said.

The real reason agriculture became more profitable over the years, Mr. Pickering said, is that the Pilgrims were getting better at farming crops like corn that had been unknown to them in England.

As for Jamestown, there was famine. But historians dispute the characterization of the colony as a collectivist society. “To call it socialism is wildly inaccurate,” said Karen Ordahl Kupperman, a historian at New York University and the author of “The Jamestown Project.” “It was a contracted company, and everybody worked for the company. I mean, is Halliburton a socialist scheme?”

The widespread deaths resulted mostly from malaria. Tree ring studies suggest that the settlement was also plagued by drought.

But the biggest problem, Professor Kupperman said, was the lack of planning. The Virginia settlers came to the New World thinking that they could find gold or a route to the Pacific Ocean via the Chesapeake Bay, and make a quick buck by setting up a trading station like others were establishing in the East Indies.

“It was just wishful thinking,” she said, “a failure to recognize that these things are really, really difficult.”

The Tea Party’s take on Thanksgiving may have its roots in the cold war.

Samuel Eliot Morison, the admiral and historian who edited Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation,” titled the chapter about Bradford ending the common course “Indian Conspiracy; Communism; Gorges.”

But it is important to note that he was writing in 1952, amid great American suspicion of the Soviets. “The challenges of the cold war and dealing with Russia are reflected in the text,” Mr. Pickering said.

Likewise, Cleon Skousen, the author of the “Making of America” textbook, was an anticommunist crusader in the 1960s. (His term for Jamestown was not socialism but “secular communism.”)

“What’s going on today is a tradition of conservative thought about that early community structure,” Mr. Pickering said.

William Hogeland, the author of “Inventing American History,” agreed. “Across the political spectrum, there’s a tendency to grab a hold of some historical incident and yoke it to a current agenda,” he said. “It doesn’t always mean there’s no connection, but often things are presented as historical first, rather than as part of the agenda first.”

And indeed, many can play this game.

Professor Kupperman, for instance, said the Jamestown story reminded her mostly of the Iraq war.

“It was kind of like the idea that the Iraqis would greet us with flowers,” she said.

Rewriting history to suit their political propaganda is a cottage industry among Republicans.

Are Republicans the Traitors Within

Are Republicans the Traitors Within

NONE DARE CALL IT SABOTAGE.... Consider a thought experiment. Imagine you actively disliked the United States, and wanted to deliberately undermine its economy. What kind of positions would you take to do the most damage?

You might start with rejecting the advice of economists and oppose any kind of stimulus investments. You'd also want to cut spending and take money out of the economy, while blocking funds to states and municipalities, forcing them to lay off more workers. You'd no doubt want to cut off stimulative unemployment benefits, and identify the single most effective jobs program of the last two years (the TANF Emergency Fund) so you could kill it.

You might then take steps to stop the Federal Reserve from trying to lower the unemployment rate. You'd also no doubt want to create massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system, promising to re-write the rules overseeing the financial industry, vowing re-write business regulations in general, considering a government shutdown, and even weighing the possibly of sending the United States into default.

You might want to cover your tracks a bit, and say you have an economic plan that would help -- a tax policy that's already been tried -- but you'd do so knowing that such a plan has already proven not to work.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Matt Yglesias had an item the other day that went largely unnoticed, but which I found pretty important.

...I know that tangible improvements in the economy are key to Obama's re-election chances. And Douglas Hibbs knows that it's key. And senior administration officials know that its key. So is it so unreasonable to think that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner may also know that it's key? That rank and file Republicans know that it's key? McConnell has clarified that his key goal in the Senate is to cause Barack Obama to lose in 2012 which if McConnell understands the situation correctly means doing everything in his power to reduce economic growth. Boehner has distanced himself from this theory, but many members of his caucus may agree with McConnell.

Which is just to say that specifically the White House needs to be prepared not just for rough political tactics from the opposition (what else is new?) but for a true worst case scenario of deliberate economic sabotage.

Budget expert Stan Collender has predicted that Republicans perceive "economic hardship as the path to election glory." Paul Krugman noted in his column yesterday that Republicans "want the economy to stay weak as long as there's a Democrat in the White House."

As best as I can tell, none of this analysis -- all from prominent observers -- generated significant pushback. The notion of GOP officials deliberately damaging the economy didn't, for example, spark widespread outrage or calls for apologies from Matt or anyone else.

And that, in and of itself, strikes me as remarkable. We're talking about a major political party, which will control much of Congress next year, possibly undermining the strength of the country -- on purpose, in public, without apology or shame -- for no other reason than to give themselves a campaign advantage in 2012.

Maybe now would be a good time to pause and ask a straightforward question: are Americans O.K. with this?

For months in 2009, conservatives debated amongst themselves about whether it's acceptable to actively root against President Obama as he dealt with a variety of pressing emergencies. Led by Rush Limbaugh and others, the right generally seemed to agree that there was nothing wrong with rooting against our leaders' success, even in a time of crisis.

But we're talking about a significantly different dynamic now. This general approach has shifted from hoping conditions don't improve to taking steps to ensure conditions don't improve. We've gone from Republicans rooting for failure to Republicans trying to guarantee failure.

Over the summer, this general topic came up briefly, and Jon Chait suggested observers should be cautious about ascribing motives.

Establishing motive is always very hard to prove. What's more, the notion of deliberate sabotage presumes a conscious awareness that doesn't square with human psychology as I understand it. People are extraordinarily deft at making their principles -- not just their stated principles, but their actual principles -- comport with their interests. The old Upton Sinclair quote -- "It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it" -- has a lot of wisdom to it.

I don't think many Republicans are actually trying to stop legislation that might help the economy recover because they know that a slow economy is their best route to regaining power. I think that when they're in power, consequences like an economic slowdown or a collapsing industry seem very dire, and policies to prevent this are going to sound compelling. When you're out of power, arguments against such policies are going to sound more compelling.

That seems largely fair. Under this line of thought, Republicans have simply lied to themselves, convincing one another that worthwhile ideas should be rejected because they're not actually worthwhile anymore.

But Jon's benefit-of-the-doubt approach would be more persuasive if (a) the same Republicans weren't rejecting ideas they used to support; and (b) GOP leaders weren't boasting publicly about prioritizing Obama's destruction above all else, including the health of the country.

Indeed, we can even go a little further with this and note that apparent sabotage isn't limited to economic policy. Why would Republican senators, without reason or explanation, oppose a nuclear arms treaty that advances U.S. national security interests? When the treaty enjoys support from the GOP elder statesmen and the Pentagon, and is only opposed by Iran, North Korea, and Senate Republicans, it leads to questions about the party's intentions that give one pause.

Historically, lawmakers from both parties have resisted any kind of temptations along these lines for one simple reason: they didn't think they'd get away with it. If members of Congress set out to undermine the strength of the country, deliberately, just to weaken an elected president, they risked a brutal backlash -- the media would excoriate them, and the punishment from voters would be severe.

But I get the sense Republicans no longer have any such fears. The media tends to avoid holding congressional parties accountable, and voters aren't really paying attention anyway. The Boehner/McConnell GOP appears willing to gamble: if they can hold the country back, voters will just blame the president in the end. And that's quite possibly a safe assumption.

If that's the case, though, then it's time for a very public, albeit uncomfortable, conversation. If a major, powerful political party is making a conscious decision about sabotage, the political world should probably take the time to consider whether this is acceptable, whether it meets the bare minimum standards for patriotism, and whether it's a healthy development in our system of government.

The problem is right-wingers ( modern politicians who call themselves Republicans) can always claim its all just a matter of politics. Bringing down governments, obstructing government, making average people suffer because of the mistakes of the elite are kind of what some conservative politicians consider fair play. If conservatives have to create a decade or more of no growth, no new jobs - they can just say they did it for our own good.

Why Mitch McConnell(R-KY) is worse than Charles Rangel

Democrats Save Internet Freedom. Republicans Complain

FCC may regulate Internet lines days before Christmas

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has a Christmas gift in store for the phone and cable industry: it may move ahead on its controversial net-neutrality regulations three days before Christmas.

An FCC source confirmed on Friday that the commission plans to push its December meeting back by a week, meaning it will fall on the 22nd of the month. That's the same meeting analysts say the agency may move forward on its controversial net-neutrality proposal.

Though the FCC has not confirmed that it will vote on net neutrality this year, rumors are swirling that it will.

The timing of the meeting is already raising eyebrows. Some see it as a way to move the matter along before the GOP assumes the majority and while Congress is not in session to criticize the effort.

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), ranking member of the telecom subcommittee, questioned the schedule on Friday.

....Republicans are already mounting a campaign to oppose the potential Internet line regulations, which would aim to rein in how cable and phone companies manage Internet traffic. Nineteen Republicans signed a letter to Genachowski on Friday urging him not to move forward with net neutrality.

“Reigniting the network neutrality debate will only distract us from that work and further jeopardize investment, innovation, and jobs. We ask you not to circulate such an order,” they wrote.

Democrats on Capitol Hill may come to the commission's defense, however, as the policy has various supporters in the House. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement on Friday that he wants the agency to act this year.

"Preservation of a free and open Internet is essential to protect consumers, spur investment, foster innovation and promote the free flow of ideas," he said.

An FCC official also remained steadfast on Friday that net-neutrality rules are a sound policy.

"Net Neutrality is about preventing anyone from regulating the Internet. There are some cable and phone companies out there that want to decide which apps you should get on your phone, which Internet sites you should look at, and what online videos you can download. That’s regulating the Internet -- and that’s what the FCC is trying to stop,” the official said.

For conservatives freedom and liberty continue to be empty words they put on their bumper stickers.

Why Do Republicans Admire Dictators

Sharron Angle: 'Sometimes Dictators Have Good Ideas'

Failed Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle -- who fell short in her bid to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) -- is making headlines again, this time for having said "sometimes dictators have good ideas."

Jon Ralston at the Las Vegas Sun reports that Angle made the comments at a private meet and greet late in the campaign season.

She was reportedly referring to former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet and privatizing Social Security, an example she had used during her campaign. Her staff was nervous that the quote would go public. But no media were present at the event, which is likely why the line has been kept under wraps until now.

During her campaign, Angle flip-flopped many times on her position on privatizing social security.

If there is a dictator out there who has a private social security plan that works the least Angle could do is find that system and tell everyone how it works. As it is right-wing Pinochet's privatization scheme for Chile has been around for twenty years and it is a disaster. So much so the government has had to un-privatize it to keep it financially viable. Details here - Reid opponent Sharron Angle stumps for military dictator’s retirement program

Were the Bush Tax Cuts Good for Growth? - In a word NO!

Economists explain why Crazy Loon Glenn Beck's inflation theory doesn't add up

Economists explain why Crazy Loon Glenn Beck's inflation theory doesn't add up

Glenn Beck has cited recent, short-term increases in commodities prices to fearmonger over rising inflation -- an explanation that economists tell Media Matters is "nonsense" because of the extreme volatility of such prices.

Yesterday, Beck opened his Fox News show by claiming that "this morning, I read a report out of China. Walmart, Gap and JC Penney are now worried about, quote, 'terrifying' rise on cotton prices that could skyrocket your clothing prices by as much as 30 percent by spring. That's inflation -- radical inflation."

Beck has also cited the National Inflation Association's estimates of massive increases in food prices in the near future, which the group based on rising commodity prices and attributed to the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policy.

But according to Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, these claims don't add up.

"Commodity prices are very variable -- they soared in 2007-8, probably in large part because of Chinese demand, plunged in 2008-9, thanks to a global slump, and have now recovered most but not all the losses," said Krugman. "They really tell you nothing about underlying inflation, which has been steadily declining."

Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, called Beck's comments "nonsense," saying: "These prices are always volatile." Pointing to a September 2007 price report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics he said he has randomly selected, Baker pointed out that at the time, corn prices had increased 49.8 percent over the previous year, while wheat prices were up 86.6 percent.

A recent New York Times article on rising cotton prices pointed not to inflation, but to a "classic supply and demand imbalance" as the cause. Cotton inventories were low due to "weak demand during the recession" and flooding in Pakistan and bad weather in China and India damaged cotton crops in those countries, even as demand in China and the United States has risen. This, combined with increased speculation on the cotton market, has driven up the price.

What is Beck's problem? He hates America. He hates the idea of government by and for the people. Beck's vision of Utopian America is a plutocracy - where working Americans -plumbers, nurses, fireman, middle-managers and teachers shut up and do as their corporate masters tell them.

Republicans Scramble to Protect Wealthiest 2 Percent of Americans

GOP's Top Tax Guy: Republicans Will Block Permanent Middle-Class Tax Cut

The Republicans' top tax guy in the House threatened in the clearest possible terms today that he and the rest of the GOP would vote to block any tax cut for the middle class during the lame duck session unless tax cuts for the wealthy are extended for the same period of time.

In a policy speech at the business-friendly Tax Council today, incoming Ways and Means Committee chairman David Camp called the Democratic plan for tax cuts -- a permanent tax cut extension for all income up to $200,000, and a temporary extension for income above that level -- "a terrible idea and a total nonstarter."

"We would be foolish to fall for it," Camp said.

Keeping the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent of Americans - billionaires mostly - would add $700 billion dollars to the deficit. If tax cuts for the wealthy boosted the economy than how come Bush had the worse job creation record since Herbert Hoover and left America the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Republican economics has never worked and never will. Meet the $700 Billion Club

For most of the 1990's, the top income earners in the United States paid a 39.6% tax rate during a time which produced a booming economy for them - and pretty much everyone else. Now, after the Bush tax cut windfall for the wealthy produced a decade of falling household incomes, skyrocketing deficits and record income inequality, Republicans are waging an all-out war to prevent a return to the modestly higher upper income tax rates of the Clinton-era. To give another budget-busting payday to the wealthiest 2% of Americans, the GOP will present the other 98% with the $700 billion tab.

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In Racially-Tinged Rant, Limbaugh Calls Obama A ‘Delinquent’ Whose ‘Presidency Is Graffiti’ On History

Venomous shock jock Rush Limbaugh described President Obama as a “juvenile delinquent” in a rant on his radio show yesterday, and then posted the full transcript, which he titled “Obama’s Administration is Graffiti on the Walls of American History,” accompanied by a picture of “Obama graffiti” defacing Mount Rushmore.

– Earlier this week, Limbaugh proposed a new House Democratic leadership position for African-American Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC): “Driving Miss Nancy,” referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Driving Miss Daisy is a film about an African-American chauffeur.

– In September 2009, Limbaugh argued, “We need segregated buses. … This is Obama’s America.”

– In March 2009, Limbaugh said Obama “has a chip on his shoulder, and his wife does too, and they are some angry people.”

– In August 2008, Limbaugh claimed Americans were afraid to “criticize the little black man-child.”

– In May 2008, Limbaugh said Obama was “an affirmative action candidate.”

– In April 2007, Limbaugh played a song for his radio audience called “Barack the Magic Negro.”

– In January 2007, Limbaugh referred to Obama as a “halfrican American.”

Darn straight Limbaugh should love America. What other country would make a racist moron a millionaire for nothing more than running his mouth.

Newly Elected Conservative Tea Partier Demands His Health Care Insurance

New GOP Legislator Incensed by Delay of His Government Health Care Coverage

A newly elected Maryland congressman startled other frosh at a congressional info session on Monday by growing indignant over the fact that his government-funded health care wouldn't be active immediately, reports Politico. Republican Rep. Andy Harris, who triumphed over Democrat Frank Kratovil in his congressional race with promises to vanquish Obamacare, couldn't believe that his policy would take a month to become active after his swearing in on Jan. 3. "He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care," said a congressional staffer present at the benefits information session attended by 250 freshman, staff, and family members. "Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap," said the staffer. Harris, a doctor turned legislator who works at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, also told the audience: "This is the only employer I've ever worked for where you don't get coverage the first day you are employed." During his congressional campaign, Harris vowed to "fight to repeal health-care reform." His spokeswoman said his statements at the meeting were merely intended to highlight the ineptitude of government health coverage.

No matter what new labels they are applying to themselves that same old elitist sense of entitlement will always show itself eventually in conservatives. He has been very lucky the jobs he has held before have health insurance that kick in on the first day of employment. Most employers have a 30 to 90 day waiting period before health benefits kick in. No need to point out what a hypocrite Harris is. Conservatives by definition are society's worse hypocrites. How many of these newly elected conservatives who are determined to repeal health care reform will have the courage of their convictions and refuse government subsidized health care benefits. Probably as many as the conservative Republicans already there. Zero.

Still lapdogs: Media figures host Bush's rehabilitation tour

Numerous media figures have interviewed former President George W. Bush following the November 9 release of his book, Decision Points. Bush and his interviewers used these interviews as an opportunity to rewrite his presidency by promoting false claims and misinformation about Bush's tenure.

Every Republican presidency since Nixon has been an utter disaster. Bush the worse of the lot. His reputation will take a lot of slight of hand by his media friends to be rehabilitated.

Deficit Comission Has Middle-class and Poor Making The Most Sacrifices

What Planet Are Deficit Hawks Living on?

To read the papers and watch TV news during the past week, you would think that the most dire problem afflicting Americans was the federal deficit in 2020 or 2030.

But for most people, the crisis right now is lost income, lost jobs, lost homes.

And the recommendations of the two co-chairs of the fiscal commission would make the prolonged stagnation worse, by commencing belt-tightening less than a year from now, at the beginning is fiscal year 2012 (October 2011) when most economic forecasts say unemployment will still be around ten percent.

The economy is on the brink of a period of prolonged deflation. With the Obama stimulus of February 2009 already starting to peter out, state budgets in free fall, home foreclosures proceeding at the rate of several hundred thousand a month, and job creation too low to cut the unemployment rate, the outlook is for endless slump -- unless we get more public investment, not less.

The Fed's policy of resorting to the printing press and buying up Treasury bonds to keep interest rates low is having only limited effect. Housing prices, after rebounding very slightly, are falling again.

Yet even the mainstream liberal press buys this nonsense. The New York Times, which had been somewhat skeptical, ran an editorial on November 10 mostly buying the deficit hawk story. The report of the commission chairs, according to the Times:

frankly acknowledges what most politicians are too cowardly to admit -- that deficit reduction will require shared sacrifice.

It lays out sensible principles, prominent among them that deficit reduction should start gradually, beginning in 2012, to avoid disrupting the fragile economic recovery. It also affirms the need to protect the most vulnerable Americans and to invest in education, infrastructure and research and development.

Then it does what any successful deficit reduction plan must do: It puts everything on the table, including tax reform to raise revenue and cuts in spending on health care and defense. It even dares to mention the need to find significant savings in Social Security, Medicare and other mandatory programs.

This is mostly nonsense. The sacrifices in the proposed list of measures are not shared. More than two-thirds of the proposed savings are on the spending side. Repealing the Bush tax cuts, costing $4 trillion over a decade, are not on the list at all. And there is no mention of taxing financial speculation, hedge funds, or anything else that would hit the very well to do. Politicians who resist this economic perversity are not cowards. They are heroes.

While the panel may affirm rhetorically the need for social investment, it is domestic spending that takes the biggest hit. Social Security, which is in surplus for the next 27 years, is on the chopping block and does not belong here at all. America needs more retirement security, not less.

Sunday's Times compounded the sin, in front page piece of the News in Review section by economics writer David Leonhardt, inviting the reader to fix the deficit projected in the year 2030!

Why 2030? "That's the year when boomers start to weigh heavily on the budget, and it's the latest year for which experts have estimated budget costs," according to Leonhardt.

Huh? The oldest boomers turn 65 next year -- not in two decades. And the projected budget deficit in 2030 will be far more influenced by whether the economy recovers any time soon than by what cuts are imagined for 20 years in the future.

What's insidious about articles like this is that they take the premise of the deficit hawks for granted -- that the projected deficit rather than the prolonged slump is the top economic challenge.

Instead of that exercise, how about one where readers explore choices on how to get a recovery going. How to resolve the foreclosure mess? What kind of social investment to put into 21st century infrastructure? How to create jobs and get wages growing again?

If you want to get Social Security well into the black for the indefinite future, the easiest way is to restore wage growth -- since Social Security is financed by taxes on wages (which are capped so that the wealthy pay a pittance.)

What pushed Social Security (very slightly) into the red is the fact that all the income gains have gone to the top. The chairmen's draft report, with its rhetoric of equal sacrifice, gets 92% of proposed Social Security savings from cutting benefits, and just 8 percent from increasing the income ceiling on payroll taxes. Some sharing.

These people do live on another planet -- Planet Wall Street. Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chair, has spent most of his life as an investment banker. He began at Morgan Stanley, and now serves on its board, where he collects a fee of $335,000 a year for attending a few annual meetings. That's more than 99 percent of Americans earn for working full time.

No wonder the man is so glib about tightening other people's belts. And that's the Democratic chair.

I recently debated David Walker on CNN.

Walker, who headed Pete Peterson's billion dollar foundation that was created to promote austerity, and is now a Peterson grantee, is very coy about professing concern for the poor. His strategy is to combine devastating cuts in social outlays generally with token increases for the poorest. As I told Walker, just because a policy inflicts pain and is politically unpopular, it isn't necessarily good policy.

In the segment before mine, commentators agreed with each other that the deficit was large because politicians didn't have the courage to set aside partisan differences. But the deficit is large because of the recession itself, the Bush tax cuts, and the costs of two wars. The entire Bowles-Simpson exercise would cut less money from the projected ten-year deficit than the cost of the Bush tax cuts.

The whole austerity crusade is the work of Wall Street and of politicians who want a high-minded excuse to bash government, or who mistakenly think that the Democrats got their clocks cleaned because voters fretted about deficits. The American Prospect recently published a definitive article by two eminent political scientists, Chris Howard and Richard Valelly, titled "Deficit-Attention Disorder," demonstrating that voters are not mainly upset about deficits, but about the continuing economic calamity. The voters are way ahead of the kind of elites that populate this commission.

If the deficit-hawks get their way, that economic calamity will only deepen, and produce a deeper political setback for the Obama administration.

President Obama, who bequeathed this commission, has been encouraging its members to "set aside their partisan differences" and agree on a plan -- as if reducing the deficit had anything to do with the real challenge, namely getting a recovery going.

The best hope, in truth, is that divisions will cripple the commission, that other leaders will start turning to the real issues of economic recovery, and that President Obama will stop listening to the austerity mongers. For more detailed rebuttal to the deficit hawks, see the new website, ourfiscalsecurity.org.

Cutting the deficit has suddenly become the in thing to do. Even though Bush and Republicans ran the biggest deficits in history. They left the economy in a shambles and gosh if it isn't going to take more than a few years to fix the scorched earth economic policies Republicans left us.

Glenn Beck's Dishonest and Hate Filled Crusade Against George Soros

Glenn Beck's Dishonest and Hate Filled Crusade Against George Soros

Of course, as a talk show host I'm very biased on this issue, but I think it helps the national conversation to hear everyone out. That's even if what they're saying is outrageous or not even remotely true. Let there be a battlefield of ideas and I think the truth will win out in the long run (though it loses many battles in the short run).

Now that you know how strongly I feel about that -- I think Glenn Beck should be fired. He has told a lie so grotesque that it goes beyond the pale of even dirty politics. Just when I thought he couldn't shock my conscience anymore, he has done it. Let me explain.

George Soros survived the Holocaust. He is Jewish and when the Nazis caught up with his family his father saved his life by bribing an agricultural official to pretend Soros was his Christian godson. At one point, that man took the fourteen year old Soros to survey and appraise the property that had been confiscated from another Jewish family. Obviously Soros did not have a choice in the matter. Soros eventually survived the Holocaust.

To most this would be an amazing and harrowing story of survival during the Holocaust. To Beck it was an opportunity to paint Soros as an anti-Semite and smear him with one of the worst lies I have ever heard.

First Beck started by horribly warping this story on his Fox News show. He said of Soros:

[When he was] 14 years old, he had to help the government confiscate the land of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors.

That's not what happened at all as you can see from above. He didn't help confiscate people's land. He didn't actively participate in betraying his Jewish neighbors or friends. The implications are horrible. But what Beck did next is much worse. He twisted the story further until he came out with this inexcusable lie on his radio show:

[H]ere's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps.

That lie takes my breath away. That is a lie that cannot be told.

The ADL has now condemned Beck's statements as "horrific."

Michelle Goldberg has a terrific article in The Daily Beast explaining how Beck's two part series on Fox News Channel about George Soros was classic anti-Semitism. He even named the series "Puppet Master." Nazi propaganda used to call Jews the "wire pullers."

The Nazis would say in their propaganda pieces that Jews secretly controlled everything and brought down whatever governments they didn't like. Beck's two part series on Soros talked about how he was the secret force behind the progressive agenda and surreptitiously brought down governments he didn't like (Communist governments by the way, but apparently he doesn't get credit for that). And Beck concludes by saying that we might be next. Soros might destroy our country. This is anti-Semitism 101.

One man has already tried to assassinate people who worked for the Tides Foundation because Beck accused them of being tied to George Soros. That man was caught in a shoot-out with cops before he could kill the people who worked there. Beck undeterred by what he is spurring people to do, has put his foot on the gas pedeal to try to stoke the fires more.

Fox News has told and spread many lies, ranging from the absurd (President Obama is going to spend $200 million a day in his trip to India) to the politically devastating (they invited John Kerry's accusers on-air to smear his Vietnam service repeatedly during the 2004 election). I know that's what they do. But even I didn't know it went this far. If Beck doesn't get fired over this, what else can he say? I literally cannot think of anything more outrageous.

They call themselves a "News Channel." Is this the kind of "news" people want to participate in?

This is the kind of thing people should resign in protest over. This is the kind of thing that guests shouldn't go on the channel over. This is the kind of thing that people shouldn't want their names associated with.

If Fox doesn't fire Beck over this, well then you know exactly where they stand. It certainly isn't as a news channel.

While Beck deserves to be fired from a moral point of view. Maybe it would be better that he stays at Fox. Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity and the majority of Fox guests exemplify the pathological lying and sick twisted morality of modern conservatism.

Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey (GA) Ignores Promise To Reduce Government Waste By Fighting For Defense Program The DoD Doesn’t Want

In the war on Democrats this year, Republicans united behind the pitch for a universal “spending freeze” and “across the board” budget cuts in their promise to reign in the deficit. Falling in line, Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey (GA) assured Americans that he is “committed to finding ways to reduce” government programs that are “bloated” and “riddled with waste.” “With each new appropriations bill Congress considers, I have to ask myself, ‘Is this a good way to spend tax payer dollars,’” he says.

Given his rhetoric, it would be reasonable to assume that Gingrey also opposes unnecessary defense spending. The F-22 stealth fighter jet, for example, is a weapon designed to address threats last faced during the Cold War. It “has not performed a single mission” in Iraq or Afghanistan, and comes with a $120 million price tag per plane. Coupled with the $8 billion it would cost the Pentagon to upgrade the 100 F-22s already in use, the F-22 landed on Defense Secretary Gates’s chopping block last year. After consulting with other Defense officials, Gates concluded, “there is no military requirement” for creating more F-22s.

Yet despite that, and the overwhelming bipartisan agreement that the plane qualifies as taxpayer waste, and in spite of own his commitment to cutting spending, Gingrey now thinks he knows better than the Pentagon and is calling for resuming production of more F-22s. Not only is Gingrey willing to waste taxpayer dollars on an unnecessary and unwanted weapon, he’s willing to fight his own party to do it, because the planes are built in his state...

Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey (GA) gets a nice salary with subsidized health care from the tax payers the least he could do he study up and have an informed opinion before he digs in and swears it is right. Gingrey is yet another conservative hoping to wrap his stark stupidity in patriotism and hope no one notices the facts.