Dana Milbank’s column in today’s Washington Post is impressively incoherent:

The federal debt has exploded to an incomprehensible $12.1 trillion, and the nation continues on its path to becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the People’s Republic of China. Yet lawmakers can’t even agree on a modest proposal to form an independent debt commission and then vote on its recommendations.

The debt commission is expected to be voted down Tuesday morning, as foes on the far left and the far right unite to form a status quo supermajority. Prospects have become so bleak that a couple of retired congressional leaders got together Monday morning in hopes of shaming their former colleagues into action.

Assuming words haven’t suddenly lost all meaning, it is literally impossible for an extremist fringe to constitute a supermajority. For that to happen, any given fringe would have to come in striking distance of a plurality, in which case, it wouldn’t actually be a fringe.

That bit of logical incoherence notwithstanding, Milbank’s column is a pitch perfect example of how Beltway elites are utterly incapable of correctly identifying or explaining problems, especially ones for which they are intimately responsible. Our bleak fiscal outlook is mostly due to the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the financial collapse. Put another way, each of the policies responsible for the deficit were supported, sometimes enthusiastically, by the “center” of American politics. Beltway elites — Democrats and Republicans — gleefully signed on to massive tax cuts, senseless “projection” of American power, and deregulation of the financial sector.

If anything, the “fringe” that Milbank (and other Beltway elites) deride was responsible for putting up what little resistance there was to the most egregiously “centrist” policies. Paleo-cons and progressives were, and are, deeply skeptical of the wars, the tax cuts, and the frenzy of deregulation that characterized the late-Clinton and Bush eras. And now, in this era of massive deficits, it’s the “fringe” advocating policies and approaches that actually have a chance of solving the problem. Progressives and reform-minded conservatives (which in the conservative movement, is a fringe view) recognize the need for tax increases, reduced military spending, and a restructuring of federal entitlements. Of course, there are serious points of disagreement, but let’s not pretend like its the fringes who are to blame for America’s sorry shape. That distinction belongs to the Beltway elites who dominate our political discourse.

(cross-posted from my blog)

I respect E.D., but he’s completely off base here:

And yes, even though it may cause healthcare reform to die in its tracks, I still think that the right person won in Massachusetts.  I also think that there are ways the Democrats could scale back reform and get some conservatives on board with a much more modest, more market-friendly reform that still helps a lot of people who need help. [...]

In the end, I’m not too down over healthcare reform bottoming out.  I don’t think it’s over, for one thing.  And maybe something better, something more fiscally sound that still covers most Americans will emerge from all of this – perhaps even something with bipartisan support. Maybe a better, less cynical Republican party will begin to take root as well.  Maybe, just maybe, people will take another look at Wyden/Bennett….

There is almost nothing in recent political history to suggest that the Republican Party is anything but hostile to health care reform.  And if not hostile, then indifferent.  Republicans had nearly four years of uninterrupted dominance with which to tackle health care reform, and neither President Bush nor congressional Republicans proposed anything. What’s more, the bulk of Republican legislators are comically ignorant of health care policy, and those that aren’t are far more concerned with their political futures than they are with reforming the health care system (see: Olympia Snow, Chuck Grassley).

By suggesting that Democrats “scale back” reform, E.D. is effectively blaming Democrats for Republican intransigence, which is completely absurd.  Last year, Democrats offered Republicans the chance to make their mark on health care reform.  Yes, it would happen within a liberal framework, but Democrats were more than willing to compromise and scale down if it meant GOP support.  Republicans were repeatedly offered the opportunity to alter the bill to their liking; if Republicans wanted market-friendly reforms, they could have gotten them.  If Republicans wanted something modest and limited, Democrats probably would have delivered.  But they didn’t.  Despite that, Democrats produced and passed a bill that is moderate and bipartisan in everything but name.  The current bill is dramatically more conservative than Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform health care, and owes far more to Mitt Romney than it does to say, Harry Truman.

The simple fact  is that there isn’t a single shred of evidence to support the idea that congressional Republicans have any interest in passing health care reform, even conservative, incremental health care reform.  They are opposed to health care reform, they have always been opposed to health care reform, and if this bill fails, they will still be opposed to health care reform.  If this bill fails, there won’t be another and — if previous history is any indication — it will be fifteen years before another president attempts to tackle health care reform, and in the meantime, the system will move closer to complete failure.

I don’t think I can be emphatic enough about this: the idea that there are Republican votes for a conservative health care bill (it’s already pretty moderate) is a complete fiction.  The truth is that Republicans have made a conscious choice to categorically oppose each and every one of President Obama’s priorities, under the theory that obstruction is the surest way back to political success. Judging from their success so far, I think it’s fair to say that isn’t going to change anytime soon.  To pretend otherwise, as E.D. does, is to be willfully ignorant of political reality.

(cross-posted from my blog)

If you look at the breakdown for the House’s vote on health care reform, you’ll see that of the 39 Democrats voting against reform, 24 were Blue Dogs.  Nearly each of the Blue Dogs voting against reform came from districts that supported John McCain in 2008, and of those, fourteen were freshmen Democrats defending seats in districts that went for McCain by at least ten points.  Most of those districts are predominately rural, and it’s very likely that they rank on the low end of most socio-economic indicators.

All of this is apropos of low-tech cyclist’s discussion of “Blue Doggism” or the tendency on part of Blue Dogs to adopt positions and support policies that hurt their districts economically.  The health care bill stands prominently, but there are dozens of smaller, equally egregious instances of Blue Dogs signing on to legislation that benefits the wealthy and privileged at the expense of the folks they actually represent.  Low-tech cyclist blames the Blue Dogs themselves for this behavior, and while that explanation holds water for some Blue Dogs — see: former Rep. Harold Ford (TN-9) — I’m not sure if it’s true of each Blue Dog.

Looking at the data from the health care vote, my hunch is that the majority of Blue Dogs are actually reflecting their constituents’ preferences.  I’m certain that if you were to look at each of the Blue Dogs that voted against health care reform, and polled health care reform within their districts, you’d find that their constituents are significantly (if not overwhelmingly) against the legislation.  Yes, your average Blue Dog is a corporate lackey, but he also represents aconservative district and in all likelihood, is reflecting the preferences of his constituents.

When it comes down to it, the problem isn’t that Blue Dogs are spineless, it’s that a large swath of rural America –disproportionately poor and disadvantaged — has decided that its interests are best served by conservative policies. Which, at the moment, amount to little more than giveaways to the wealthiest and most privileged Americans.

(cross-posted from my blog)

Writing in praise of Halperin and Heilemann’s Game Change, Marc Ambinder predicts that political scientists won’t find much to love in the book’s depiction of politics:

Political scientists aren’t going to like this book, because it portrays politics as it is actually lived by the candidates, their staff and the press, which is to say — a messy, sweaty, ugly, arduous competition between flawed human beings — a universe away from numbers and probabilities and theories.

Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time around political scientists, my guess is that they — like most people, frankly — won’t be all that interested in the book, and those that are will read it as nothing more than a collection of interesting gossip about the campaigns.  Which, you know, is what it is.  That said, it’s worth actually addressing the substance of Ambinder’s assertion that political scientists are too sterile and systematic to appreciate the glorious mess that is American politics.

I have little doubt that most political scientists don’t particularly care for the gossip, drama and triviality that characterizes the political dialogue.  Contra Ambinder however, it’s not that political scientists are too cold and lifeless to appreciate the human drama, but that political scientists understand that the human drama says little about the actual outcomes of politics.  Taking a magnifying glass to “politics as lived”  – looking at personalities, staff dynamics, and press relationships — is interesting, but it doesn’t really tell you anything.  At basic, elections are determined by the fundamentals: the economy, incumbency, population distributions etc, and the vast majority of presidential elections can be predicted by the macro-factors.

This isn’t particularly satisfying, granted, but political scientists aren’t in the business of dredging up scintillating details about campaigns and candidates.  They are in the business of explaining and describing politics as it works.  While it’s true that politics is a messy, ugly affair, it’s also true that political behavior can be systemized, organized, and explained. And on the whole, that systemization and organization tells us a whole lot more about how our politics operate than does a bunch of gossipy, barely substantiated quotes.

(cross-posted from my blog)

Atrios:

One of my longstanding pet peeves is that everyone in the US pretends we don’t have an “industrial policy” because that implies naughty state intervention in certain sectors. But of course we have lots of naughty state intervention in certain sectors, we just don’t do it even notionally for any good reason. We prop up the single family homebuilding industry and the automobile industry (even before the bailouts). We prop up certain agricultural sectors. We favor big business over small. Now we’re massively propping up one skimmer industry – the financial industry – and are about to prop up another skimmer industry – health insurance.

This is actually related to one of my long-standing pet peeves, which is that everyone in the US pretends like we don’t have heavy government intervention in the economy, when in fact we do, but it’s in the form various tax breaks and incentives, and effectively hidden from plain sight.  In a lot of cases, the aim of liberals isn’t necessarily to massively expand the reach of government as much as it is to add some intentionality and rationality — as well as make explicit — the ways in which wealready intervene in the economy (health care reform is a perfect example of this, I think).  Of course, the concealed nature of our welfare state is the exact thing which makes it incredibly easy to demagogue liberal efforts to expand it; for the average American, an attempt to make spending explicit looks exactly like an attempt to massively expand the scope of spending.

(cross-posted from my blog)

I know this shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but the Nuge is an idiot:

“I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist. Mao Tse Tung lives and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. This country should be ashamed. I wanna throw up.”

A quick observation: for as much as right-wingers like to play freedom fighter and throw around the word totalitarianism like a twelve-sided die, it’s really clear that  as an actual historial phenomena, totalitarianism means absolutely nothing to them.  Anyone with a modicum of respect for the tens of millions of lives lost during Mao Zedong’s decades-long control of China would at least hesitate before using his name as a point of reference in criticizing a U.S. president.  But that would be expecting a bit much of right-wingers like Ted Nugent* or the National Review’s Andy McCarthy, who name-drops totalitarian dictators on a fairly regular basis in his barely coherent — but always entertaining — “columns.”

The simple fact is that the constant comparison of President Obama to Mao, Stalin and Hitler is deeply offensive; hundreds of millions of people suffered and died under totalitarian regimes, and it does a gross disservice to their memory to trivialize their deaths by using “totalitarianism” as a blunt criticism for moderate, incremental domestic policy you happen not to like.

*Also, as Digby pointed out, shouldn’t he be getting the Dixie Chicks treatment or something, you know, for criticizing the president abroad.

(cross-posted from the United States of Jamerica)

(Before I even begin, this is all apropos of the fact that I’m rereading a few of the older books in the Expanded Universe)

It’s basically an article of faith among Star Wars fans that the Galactic Empire — as depicted in the original trilogy — is purely evil and the Alliance to Restore the Republic (or Rebel Alliance for short) is unambiguously good.  And there’s a lot of solid evidence for that assessment.  On-screen, we’ve seen the Empire wipe out the Jedi, destroy entire worlds, enslave peaceful peoples, and declare that their ultimate aim is perpetual rule through fear of force alone.  Indeed, the Empire is so evil that it actively rewards cruelty: Grand Moff Tarkin — the commanding officer of the first Death Star — was awarded his title after slaughtering hundreds of anti-Imperial protesters in cold blood.

All of that said, I’m not so certain that the operating philosophy behind the Galactic Empire — that despotism is necessary to maintaining the peaceful cohesion of a galaxy-spanning empire –is entirely wrong.  Especially since we have enough examples of republican forms of galactic government to know that the alternative isn’t that much better.  The previous galaxy-spanning political unit – the Galactic Republic — collapsed largely because it was too large to be effective.  The Republic didn’t even possess the strength or legitimacy to handle a trade dispute on a minor core world, much less an existential threat like the Clone Wars.  On the other end of the timeline is the successor regime to the Rebel Alliance, the New Republic.  The New Republic was, like its namesake, a loose confederation of worlds united by common economic ties and a representative body.  It maintained a large military, for the purpose of defense and peacekeeping, and was firmly committed to respecting the rights of sentient beings.  It was also a complete failure.

For the full 23 years of its existence, the New Republic was beset by division and problems of legitimacy.  Consensus was habitually hard to come by, even in times — like the Thrawn crisis — when it was absolutely necessary.  Indeed, the New Republic fell precisely because it couldn’t muster the cohesion or will to defend itself against the extra-galactic Yuuzhan Vong, despite possessing the combined resources of an entire galaxy.

Now, to me at least, this suggests that a single galactic, representative governing body — no matter how well intentioned — is simply incapable of dealing with such an overwhelming diversity of cultures, viewpoints and agendas (remember, we’re talking about trillions of people and tens of thousands of different lifeforms).  If you’re committed to something vaguely democratic, the only real option is a galactic confederation — not dissimilar to the Federation in the Star Trek continuity — where each member planet or sector has extremely limited ties to a central “governing” body of limited authority.  Of course, there are real threats from within and outside the galaxy, and there is a real need for a centralized authority, if only for collective defense.  In which case, it seems that the only way you could have effectivecollective defense is by forcing each member planet to provide for a common army and navy, which requires enough force for coercion, which in this context can only be successful if the regime has little respect for rights: i.e. the Empire.

Palpatine was incredibly brutal and evil, but he also understood — correctly — that successful galactic dominion requires the kind of cruelty and brute force that we see on display in the movies.  Otherwise the whole thing will collapse into petty-infighting and jealousy.

(cross-posted from the United States of Jamerica)

This is a little ridiculous (via Dara’s Google Reader feed):

Boss Creations, a new holiday decor company, has introduced the new “CHRIST-mas” Tree, featuring the unique trait of a trunk in the shape of a wooden cross. Company owner Marsha Boggs says the tree was specifically designed to counter the “war on Christmas.”

“When I became a Christian a few years ago,” says Boggs, “I was appalled by the secularization of the Christmas holiday. When retail stores started substituting ‘Happy Holidays’ for ‘Merry Christmas,’ and schools began calling their Christmas programs ‘Winter Plays,’ it all seemed ridiculous to me. That’s why we have created products that remind people what the Christmas season is really all about – the birth of Christ.”

It’s hilariously ironic that Boggs would use a Christmas tree as a means of combating the “war on Christmas.”  After all, the Christmas tree has distinctly pagan roots and stands mostly outside of Christian tradition.  Indeed, there was a time when Christmas itself was a controversial subject among Christians, many of whom wanted nothing to do with a celebration that hearkened back to the pagan festivals of old (if we’re going for accuracy, the Persian god “Mithras” is the real reason for the season).   If anything, Ms. Bogg’s Christmas tree has the opposite effect: it reminds me that early Christians were a fairly opportunistic bunch, and would happily co-opt pagan celebrations if it meant that they could save a few souls (see: Easter).

That aside, the yearly outrage over the “war on Christmas” reminds me of one of the things that really bothers me about contemporary conservative evangelicalism, namely, it’s tremendous hostility to religious pluralism.  “Happy Holidays” is a fundamentally inclusive greeting.  It’s a way of respecting non-Christian Americans and acknowledging the fact Christmas coincides with other religious holidays equally worthy of respect (like Hanukkah, for instance).  When someone wishes you “Happy Holidays,” they are saying something roughly the same as this: “I’m not sure what your religious beliefs are, but whatever they are, I hope you enjoy the holiday season as much as possible.”

This is the furthest thing from “offensive” that I can imagine, and yet, there are many Christians who are apoplectic about the change.  From what I can gather, the offense comes from the fact that they have to share the holiday.  It’s not enough that Christmas and Christianity are in every other way privileged above other religious celebrations, no, we have to actively avoid acknowledging the existence of other religions.  “Religious freedom” for them isn’t the right to practice as they see fit, it’s the “right” to banish every other religion from the public square, or something to that effect.  It probably isn’t my place to say this (since I’m not the ultimate arbiter of right belief, or something), but the stunning lack of charity and understanding inherent in this approach to other religions and other people strikes me as a pretty clear-cut example of what Jesus specifically asked us not to do.

(cross-posted from the United States of Jamerica)

Patterico, a conservative blogger, describes his “pontifications” as “harangues that make sense.”  Assuming the definition of sense has remained relatively constant, this can’t possibly be the case.  Especially when the blogger in question — in a post linked approvingly by America’s Worst Race Theorist — cites African-American discomfort with interracial marriage as a modern-day example of racism.

Ignoring the fact that it is completely ridiculous to cite a single news article as indicative of a larger trend of “Racist Black People Oppressing the White Man,” it is simply the case that black attitudes regarding interracial marriage make a lot of sense when considered in context (which I understand is a scary word for conservatives).  The simple fact is that in this culture, “blackness” is bad, and to be black and female is to be considered fundamentally problematic (see: most depictions of black women in media) and undesirable.  And the worry among a lot of black women is that black men who date “outside the race” have internalized this frame of black women as being undesirable.  Accordingly, many black women and black men feel uncomfortable when they see prominent black men dating white women, as they take it as an explicit rejection of their blackness (hence the fact that Michelle Obama bolstered Barack’s appeal among black voters – it convinced them that he wasn’t ashamed of his blackness).

To call this racist is, well, stupid.  It is no different than the in-group preference you see in any other racial or ethnic minority.  Indeed, it is best understood as another way to preserve cultural cohesion and push back against negative depictions of ones ethnic group.  Of course, seeing as how conservatives are constantly on the hunt for anything to deflect charges of racism onto minorities, it’s not really a shock that they would latch on to this as an “example” of racism.

*Now is probably a good time to add that I’ll be blogging at my own place more often. So if you’re remotely interested in reading what I have to say, you should probably head over there from time to time.

Via Meteor Blades at Daily Kos is Sam Pizzigati explaining that the top 1 percent of income earners have a ridiculously low state and local tax burden relative to their low and middle-income fellow citizens:

America’s most affluent 1 percent now pay, on average, just 6.4 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes. But they actually pay even less than that, since they can deduct their state and local taxes from their federal tax bill. The state and local tax burden on America’s rich, after taking this offset into account, drops to 5.2 percent.

Middle-income families — to be precise, those families who make up the middle fifth of America’s income distribution — pay, after the federal offset, 9.4 percent of their incomes in total state and local taxes.

America’s poorest families pay even more. Tax collectors take 10.9 percent of the incomes of households in the nation’s bottom 20 percent, more than double the share they take from the incomes of the nation’s top 1 percent.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy paper, Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States, covers non-elderly households. Incredibly, the study details, some states “ask their poorest residents — those in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale — to pay up to six times as much of their income in taxes as they ask the wealthy to pay.”

Surely we can all agree that it is absurd for low and middle-income Americans to have a state and local tax burden nearly twice that of the very-wealthiest Americans.  Not only is this patently unfair as a matter of justice — the low tax-burden on the wealthy has more to do with their over-representation in the political system than it does with any virtue/productivity on their part — but it’s also bad policy.  According to the CBPP, 35 states are facing budget shortfalls for the 2010 fiscal year, and while I don’t know the details in each state, I’m confident that a modest tax increase on the wealthiest residents of those states would go a long way in fixing the shortfalls without cutting needed services to poor and marginalized Americans in those states.

That said, I can also see why state-based tax increases would be a terrible idea; raising taxes is a surefire way of driving your most lucrative tax base to another, low-tax state.  Better would be for the federal government to either raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans (which I discussed here) or repeal the Bush tax cuts, which have been responsible for more than $2 trillion in loss revenue since their implementation.  Repealing the cuts (thus upping the tax burden for the wealthiest Americans to something a bit more reasonable), and using the revenue gains to fund direct aid for states makes a lot more sense and is a lot more appealing — as a matter of policy — than having the states shoot themselves in the foot by raising taxes.