Pelosi's accurate unemployment benefits comment

Right-wing media freak out over Pelosi's accurate unemployment benefits comment

Right-wing media figures are jumping on Nancy Pelosi's comment today that unemployment benefits are a "job creator" that "creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name." (Representative comment from Doug Powers: Pelosi is "around the bend," "demonstrating lunacy").

They are not, of course, pointing out that she's basically right.

As we've repeatedly noted, economists, including Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf and McCain economic advisor Mark Zandi, have pointed out that increases in unemployment benefits are among the most effective forst of economic stimulus. In congressional testimony, Elmendorf has said:

Transfers to persons (for example, unemployment insurance and nutrition assistance) would also have a significant impact on GDP. Because a large amount of such spending can occur quickly, transfers would have a significant impact on GDP by early 2010. Transfers also include refundable tax credits, which have an impact similar to that of a temporary tax cut.

A dollar's worth of a temporary tax cut would have a smaller effect on GDP than a dollar's worth of direct purchases or transfers, because a significant share of the tax cut would probably be saved. The nonbusiness tax cuts in H.R. 1 would reduce revenues much more in calendar year 2010 than in calendar year 2009 because much of the reduction in taxes would be realized by households when they filed their returns in 2010.

Likewise, Zandi has said that "Extending UI [unemployment insurance] Benefits" would boost GDP by $1.64 for every dollar spent, a greater "Bank for the Buck" than any other provision he analyzed except increasing food stamps ($1.73 per dollar spent).

Not the first time the conservative fringe has freaked out over the truth.

Another day another Republican lie. Conservatism is ironic -morally bankrupt it bills itself as the party of values. GOP's false talking point: Jones Act blocks Gulf help

Nutty is as Nutty Does -The Keep Your hands Off My Medicare Conservatives

Figuring out the psychology of "Keep your government hands off my Medicare"

It's not simply about making the Obama administration look bad. Many Republicans actually love economic recessions. No better means of disciplining the labor force has ever been devised.

That's the real message behind the GOP's Senate filibuster denying extended federal benefits to roughly a million long-term unemployed. The same bill, which failed 57-41, would also have provided $16 billion in Medicaid help to states overburdened by declining tax revenues.

In consequence, several hundred thousand cops, teachers, firefighters and other public employees are sure to be laid off due to state budget cuts. Fat lot of good that will do the economy. But working stiffs will be keeping their heads down, won't they?

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., whose state has the nation's second-highest unemployment rate (13.6 percent), put it forcefully: "The Republicans in the Senate want this economy to fail. In cynical political terms ... they want our country to fail to win an election, and they're willing to take the people of this country with them."

But that's only part of the story. One of the enduring mysteries of American life is how Republicans keep succeeding by failing. The presidency of George W. Bush ought to have inoculated American voters against GOP economic theories for a generation. Tax cuts for the wealthy led not to greater prosperity, but runaway budget deficits, a doubled national debt and the weakest job creation since World War II. See-no-evil financial deregulation damn near destroyed the world banking system.

By the time President Obama was inaugurated last January, the economy was bleeding 750,000 lost jobs a month; the Congressional Budget Office had already projected the FY 2009 deficit at $1.3 trillion -- a budget written by the Bush White House. After taking over in 2001 with a healthy budget surplus and some economists warning against paying down the debt too fast, Bush doubled it to over $10 trillion in eight short years.

Yet there was Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, on CNN, allowing as how he's "waiting for this administration to take responsibility." He accused the Obama administration of "tripling" the annual deficit, as brazen a falsehood as can be imagined. Is it even necessary to say that neither Cornyn nor any Republican who twiddled his thumbs throughout Bush's two terms has condescended to explain what exact combination of revenue increases and spending cuts is needed to reduce the deficit short term?

Alas it's absolutely necessary. According to the Center on Budget and Priorities, "(T)he fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next 10 years."

New spending by the Obama administration -- mainly the economic stimulus and auto industry rescue -- is dwarfed by Bush's spending on the Iraq and Afghan wars and the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit. If Democratic attempts to stimulate the economy have proven less than adequate, that's because they've both been hostage to GOP obstructionism and restrained by the fiscal straitjacket Republicans left behind.

But a lot of voters simply don't know it. Indeed, many people actively refuse to understand anything important about what the federal budget consists of or the role of government in modern economies. Millions remain captive to what Paul Krugman calls "zombie lies": long disproven canards like the one that says cutting tax rates invariably leads to higher revenues. Because it's so counterintuitive, parroting it makes Rush Limbaugh fans feel like intellectuals.

Many Americans are ignorant of the issues and the broadcast media - from which most Americans still get their news - is terrible about education people about the issues and recent history. They seem afraid to report that Bush lied us into a trillion dollar war and conservative policies trashed the economy. We had tea baggers literally on government Medicare protesting against government health care - seemingly completely unaware that Medicare is a government run health program.

Senate candidate Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) is not serious about deficit reduction.

Rubio Argues For Making Bush Tax Cuts For The Wealthy Permanent: We Must Start ‘Doing It Now’

One of the key planks of Senate candidate Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) campaign is scaremongering about the nation’s deficit and debt. “The United States government spends more money than it takes in,” Rubio said. “It’s as simple as that. You can’t do that for long without getting into trouble.” Rubio has repeatedly called on President Obama to “stop spending money we don’t have.”

However, Rubio’s concern with the deficit seems to evaporate when it comes to tax cuts. Democrats in Congress want to allow the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire on schedule at the end of the year, but yesterday on Fox News, Rubio wholeheartedly endorsed making the cuts permanent and “doing it now”:

RUBIO: I would argue in favor of making permanent the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. And I would argue doing it now, before they recess, so that people have some level of certainty. [...]

VARNEY: You’re arguing economics. I put it to you that, if you suggested that we not increase taxes on the rich on January the 1st, you would be demagogued to death. You would be accused of giving money to the rich at a time of a nasty recession.

RUBIO: Well, the bottom line is that we need folks to create jobs in America. And jobs in America are created by people that have money or access to money.



This proves that Rubio is actually not at all serious about addressing deficits, as the Bush tax cuts are one of the main drivers behind the country’s long-term deficits. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, the Bush tax cuts will cause $3.4 trillion in deficits over between 2009 and 2019. The debt-service costs caused by the Bush tax cuts amount to “$1.7 trillion over the 2009-2019 period” and more than $330 billion in 2019 alone.

When is the media going to start holding conservatives accountable for their waffling on economic policy. How hard can it be to ask a conservative for a plan - written down in black and white - that balances the budget and reduces taxes.

There is the Soft Fascism of Conservatism, But No Liberal Fascism

The Scholarly Flaws of Liberal Fascism

Jonah Goldberg tells us he wrote this book to get even. The liberals started it by “insist[ing] that conservatism has connections with fascism” (p. 22). Conservatives “sit dumbfounded by the nastiness of the slander” (p. 1). “The left wields the term fascism like a cudgel” (p. 3). So Jonah Goldberg has decided it is time to turn the tables and show that “the liberal closet has its own skeletons” (p. 22). After years of being “called a fascist and a Nazi by smug, liberal know-nothings” he decides that “responding to this slander is a point of personal privilege” (p. 392).

Feeling oneself a victim is wonderfully liberating. Anything goes. So Jonah Goldberg pulls out all the stops to show that fascism “is not a phenomenon of the right at all. It is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left” (p. 7). The reader perceives at once that Goldberg likes to put things into rigid boxes: right and left, conservative and liberal, fascist and non-fascist. He doesn’t leave room for such complexities as convergences, middle grounds, or evolution over time. Thus Father Coughlin was always a man of the left, and so was Mussolini (Giacomo Matteotti or the Rosselli brothers, leaders of the Italian left whom Mussolini had assassinated, would have been scandalized by this view). The very mention of a “Third Way” puts one instantly into the fascist box.

That’s too bad, because there really is a subject here. Fascism – a political latecomer that adapted anti-socialism to a mass electorate, using means that often owed nothing to conservatism – drew on both right and left, and tried to transcend that bitter division in a purified, invigorated, expansionist national community. A sensitive analysis of what fascism drew from all quarters of the political spectrum would be a valuable project. It is not Jonah Goldberg’s project.

The bottom line is that Goldberg wants to attach a defaming epithet to liberals and the left, to “put the brown shirt on [your] opponents,” as he accuses the liberals of doing (p. 392). He goes about this task with a massive apparatus of scholarly citations and quotations. But Goldberg’s scholarship is not an even-handed search for understanding, following the best evidence fully and open-mindedly wherever it might lead. He chooses his scholarly data selectively and sometimes misleadingly in the service of his demonstration.

Jonah Goldberg knows that making the Progressives, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and FDR the creators of an American fascism – indeed the only American fascism, for George Lincoln Rockwell and other overt American fascist or Nazi sympathizers are totally absent from this book – is a stretch, so he has created a new box: Liberal Fascism. The Progressives and their heirs who wanted to use government to rectify social and economic ills, and who, in Goldberg’s view, thereby created an American Fascism, acted with good intentions, rarely used violence, and had nothing to do with Auschwitz. Even so, they share an intellectual heredity and a set of common goals with the European fascists. So they go into the “Liberal Fascist” box.

Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron, of course. A fascism that means no harm is a contradiction in terms. Authentic fascists intend to harm those whom they define as the nation’s internal and external enemies. Someone who doesn’t intend to harm his or her enemies, and who doesn’t relish doing it violently, isn’t really fascist.

But the problems go much deeper. Pushing Liberalism and Fascism together requires distorting both terms. It doesn’t help that these are two of the most problematical words in the political lexicon. To his credit, Goldberg is aware that the term “liberal” has been corrupted in contemporary American usage. It ought to mean (and still means in the rest of the world) a principled opposition to state interference in the economy, from Adam Smith to Ronald Reagan. Goldberg sometimes refers to “classical liberalism” in this sense, and with approval. Unfortunately he has capitulated to the sloppy current American usage by which “liberal” means, usually pejoratively nowadays, any and all of the various components of the Left, from anarchists and Marxists to moderate Democrats.

Goldberg stereotypes liberals to make them abstract, uniform, robotic. The telltale phrase is “liberals say” or “liberals think” (mostly without anyone quoted or footnoted). For example, “Liberals . . . claim” that free-market economics is fascist (p. 22). Could we please have a few examples of “liberals” who say this? It is a straw man, as is the vast, ghostly “liberal mind” that sounds like a physical reality: “fascism, shorn of the word, endures in the liberal mind” (p. 161). Does this liberal mind have a telephone number, as Henry Kissinger said famously of the European Union?

This “liberal mind” is a very big tent. Goldberg believes that moderate reformists are essentially involved in the same project as radical activists. Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Al Gore, Hilary Clinton are all devoted in one way or another to the allegedly fascist project of taking action to make a better world.

The full essay is at the link. Written by real historian and scholar William Paxton.

Obama is The One. What Conservatives Believe

Fox News is BP oil spill misinformation clearinghouse
Myths and falsehoods on the Gulf oil spill

Media Matters for America has compiled a list of myths and falsehoods about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, all of which have been pushed by Fox News.

Fox News' staunch defense of BP

Myth: Obama waited weeks before responding to the oil spill

Myth: Moratorium is not needed because oil companies are equipped to handle spill

Myth: BP was only drilling "out there" because environmentalists and the federal government "made them" do it

Myth: Obama, unlike Bush, "was off on vacation" during crisis

Myth: "Ridiculous" and "offensive" to blame Bush for spills

Myth: Obama is the "single largest recipient of BP's cash"

Myth: Obama admin turning away foreign aid by refusing to waive union-supported Jones Act

Myth: Obama admin defied Constitution when they "told" BP to create escrow account

Myth: Obama admin unreasonably delayed purchase of Maine company's oil boom

Myth: Obama unnecessarily delayed berm plan

Myth: Coast Guard docked oil-collecting barges for no good reason

This list and the fact checking will matter little to the Obama haters. hate has a tendency to cloud rational thinking.

Dude, Conservatives Are Like, So Honorable and Truthy

Washington Times Features Doctored Photo Of Kagan In A Turban To Claim She’s Subservient To Shariah Law

Six days ago, after Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) absurdly tried to link Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to “oppressive tenets of Shari’a-type law,” The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss jokingly predicted that anti-Islamic bigot Frank Gaffney would “claim[] that Elena Kagan ‘may still be a Muslim.’” Sadly, Duss’ prediction largely came true this week. In a Washington Times op-ed run alongside a doctored photo of Kagan in a turban (pictured to the right), Gaffney ropes Kagan into a bizarre fantasy involving Shariah law, the Muslim Brotherhood, and, somehow, the beleaguered Troubled Assets Relief Progam:

Dean Kagan had an even more direct connection to the Saudis’ Shariah-recruitment efforts at Harvard. She personally officiated in 2003 over the establishment of an Islamic Finance Project at the law school. The project’s purpose is to promote what is better known as Shariah-compliant finance (SCF) by enlisting in its service some of the nation’s most promising law students. [...]

Shariah-compliant finance dates back to the 1940s, when it was invented by leading figures in the Muslim Brotherhood. This international organization has as its stated mission “destroying Western civilization from within … by its own miserable hand.” [...]

Ms. Kagan’s Islamic Finance Project also has played a prominent role in encouraging the U.S. government to endorse Shariah-compliant finance. Notably, a founding adviser to the project, Harvard professor Samuel Hays III, conducted a “seminar for the policy community” in November 2008. It was sponsored by a former Goldman-Sachs-executive-turned-assistant-treasury-secretary, Neel Kashkari, who at the time was responsible for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The signal thus sent could not have been clearer, either to Mr. Kashkari’s colleagues in government or to those in the financial sector: At a moment when the very viability of major banks and investing institutions critically depended on this individual’s favor, it would be advisable to embrace Shariah-compliant finance.

Drawing Glenn Beck-like conspiratorial connections between Obama’s judicial nominees and plots to destroy America appears to be a conservative hobby. Both the Washington Times and Sean Hannity called district court nominee Judge Edward Chen “another Obama nominee who doesn’t appear to love America” because Chen correctly worried that the 9/11 attacks would harm race relations and religious tolerance in the United States. During the confirmation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a right-wing organization with close ties to Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), John McCain (R-AZ) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) launched an ad claiming that Sotomayor “led a group supporting violent Puerto Rican terrorists.”

We have nicotine gum to help people addicted to tobacco. Too bad there isn't something that will help conservatives get off their addiction to conspiracy theories that are never supported by the facts.

Right-wing media push Kyl's flatly denied claim that Obama said he won't "secure the border". The same right-wing media that were happy to echo Kyl's bizarre claim doubled down - Right-wing media vouch for Kyl's honesty despite his history of false claims

Right-wing media have vouched for Sen. Jon Kyl's (R-AZ) "integrity" in the wake of a video in which Kyl accused President Obama of refusing to "secure the border" in order to force the GOP to support immigration reform, a claim the White House has flatly denied. However, these media have ignored Kyl's history of making false claims.

...Kilmeade: "Jon Kyl's integrity is beyond reproach." On the June 22 edition of Fox News Fox & Friends, discussing the video of Kyl making the flatly denied claim that Obama said he won't "secure the border," co-host Brian Kilmeade asserted, "Jon Kyl's integrity is beyond reproach."

...KYL FALSEHOOD: Kyl falsely claimed that he did not say Republicans would filibuster immigration reform. According to an April 12 PolitiFact.com post, on the April 11 edition of ABC's This Week, host Jake Tapper asked Kyl, "You said the other day in Yuma, Ariz., that Republicans will use the opportunity to filibuster. Are you going to help with the filibuster of immigration reform?" Kyl reportedly replied: "I don't think I said that, Jake, but what I did say is that the conditions for immigration reform no longer exist.

FACT: PolitiFact rates Kyl's claim "False." PolitiFact rated Kyl's claim that he didn't say Republicans would filibuster immigration reform "False." From PolitiFact:

Kyl's staff told us he only meant that Republicans would filibuster a purely partisan bill, not the kind of bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform that Kyl put forward with Sen. Edward Kennedy in 2007. That's why Kyl objected to Tapper's premise.

Still, Tapper's question -- "You said the other day in Yuma, Ariz., that Republicans will use the opportunity to filibuster. Are you going to help with the filibuster of immigration reform?" -- remains an fair summary (though not a quotation) of Kyl's town hall remarks. The video showed that Kyl predicted a Republican filibuster. So Kyl's statement -- that he didn't say Republicans will use the opportunity to filibuster -- is False.

KYL FALSEHOOD: Kyl falsely claimed that "most of the jobs created are government jobs" in March jobs report. On the April 4 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, Kyl falsely claimed of the March jobs report, "Most of the jobs created are government jobs."

FACT: Private employers added 123,000 of the 162,000 jobs in March. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that private employers added 123,000 of the 162,000 jobs in March, which was the biggest gain in nearly three years.

KYL FALSEHOOD: Kyl falsely claimed that the Recovery Act had "very little effect." As Media Matters Action Network documented, Kyl claimed on the April 4 edition of Fox News Sunday that "[i]n terms of stimulus, I think what Republicans will do is look very carefully at any more spending plans because, as it turns out, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to very little effect."

FACT: In February, CBO stated that Recovery Act "added between 1.0 million and 2.1 million" jobs in the fourth quarter of 2009. In February -- prior to Kyl's claim -- the Congressional Budget Office stated that "CBO estimates that in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009, ARRA added between 1.0 million and 2.1 million to the number of workers employed in the United States, and it increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by between 1.4 million and 3.0 million." CBO added that the Recovery Act "[l]owered the unemployment rate by between 0.5 percentage points and 1.1 percentage points."

KYL FALSEHOOD: Kyl falsely suggests individuals will see premiums "continue to go up" because of health care reform. Media Matters Action Network noted on March 10 that Kyl claimed "that insurance premiums will continue to go up" as a result of health care reform.

FACT: CBO found law will not raise premiums for majority of Americans. CBO estimated that the large group and small group markets make up 83 percent of the insurance market and that premiums in those markets would essentially remain unchanged and could decrease. Further, a January 27 PolitiFact.com analysis labeled the claim that health care reform would cause premiums for most Americans to increase "pants on fire" false and stated, "The CBO reported that, for most people, premiums would stay about the same, or slightly decrease."

KYL FALSEHOOD: Kyl falsely claimed that health care bill "will add to the deficit." As Media Matters Action Network noted, Kyl claimed on March 10 that the Democrats' health care reform bill "will add to the deficit" and that "it isn't deficit neutral."

Kyl should be removed from office for being mentally unfit, dishonoring the Senate and his country and gross unethical conduct. Write your senator and Congressman today and demand that Kyl resign or be removed from office.

Conservatives Fell it is Deeply Wrong to Kill Terrorists

Is National Reviews Andrew McCarthy Secretly A Genius?

Jonathan Bernstein looks at Andy McCarthy's bizarre conspiracy theory that the president is only attacking al-Qaeda to serve the larger cause of Islamic world domination, and senses brilliance:

This isn't stupid; it's genius. McCarthy's plan is foolproof; it covers not only a lucky shot that hits bin Laden, but a complete victory over al-Qaeda. All part of Barack Obama's treasonous treachery. Notice, by the way, that it's only a "vibrant debate in Islamist circles." Nice touch; if by some chance Obama curtails the drone strikes, or is in any way defeated by bin Laden, then that will presumably prove that the "vibrant debate" was decided in favor of al-Qaeda, and Obama acted accordingly.

To assume that this is genius rather than idiocy, you have to assume that McCarthy is proposing this scenario as political strategy and not as, you know, non-fiction. But since McCarthy is the kind of guy who believes Obama might be an Indonesian citizen and draws parallels between Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Amadinejad because sometimes Obama doesn't wear a tie (cough), and thinks William Ayers wrote Obama's autobiography, the more plausible explanation is that he's a conspiracy theorist laboring to keep pace with the hamster wheel of his own logic.

So conservatives think killing most or all al-Qaeda terrorists is the same as Obama playing right into their clever scheme. Why is it that conservatism is not treated like an inmate who has escaped from an asylum.

Did Barton's brain malfunction? Does Barbour know what "escrow" means? Why does Bachmann hate fishermen? Ask them