The Austerity Assassins

Krugthulu:

When David Cameron became PM, and announced his austerity plans — buying completely into both the confidence fairy and the invisible bond vigilantes — many were the hosannas, from both sides of the Atlantic. Pundits here urged Obama to “do a Cameron”; Cameron and Osborne were the toast of Very Serious People everywhere.

Now Britain is officially in double-dip recession, and has achieved the remarkable feat of doing worse this time around than it did in the 1930s.

Kthug goes on to point out that with the Brits, these are self inflicted wounds- basically Cameron is tightening the cilice on the thigh of England for past sins of the financial markets. However, I wonder how many trillions of dollars of wealth are being left uncreated, leaving tens of millions mired in poverty, as Europe continues it slow death march to the martial beat of Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble’s austerity drums?

In other austerity news, this is amusing (in a sick kind of way):

Not long ago, the Dutch were among the hardest of hardline enforcers of budgetary discipline in the euro zone. As the crisis intensified last autumn, the country’s prime minister and finance minister argued that states which failed to control their deficits should face external supervision, fines, or even expulsion from the single currency.

That commitment to fiscal rigour abroad has been undermined by domestic economics and politics. The Netherlands has been hard hit by the slowdown: growth went into reverse in the fourth quarter of 2011, and the International Monetary Fund expects the Dutch economy to be the only core euro zone country to endure recession this year. This puts the country at risk of breaching the euro zone’s deficit targets, and forced ministers to consider more austerity. But the planned cuts proved too harsh for the fragile Liberal-Christian Democrat coalition – and for Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, on whose support the government relied. Elections now look likely, possibly as early as mid-July.

It also looks like Sarkozy will fall. It should now be obvious to everyone that Krugman has been right all along, and that austerity is the equivalent of bleeding with leeches, except instead of using leaches, you just slit your own throat while telling yourself the math demands it.

*** Update ***

Atrios:

The cunning plan of growing the economy by making sure that nobody but rich people has any money will work! It cannot fail, it can only be failed!

Pretty much.

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Pierce on Douthat

This entire piece is great, but may I suggest that this might be one of my favorite paragraphs Pierce has ever written:

Ross Douthat is a very sincere young man who writes a column for the New York Times, and someone who, alas, usually makes David Brooks read like Richard Brautigan, albeit with one memorable exception. Like many people who were born too late to have lived through the sixties, young master Douthat pretty much blames that decade for fashioning the handbasket in which his beloved America is currently en route to Hell. This is usually an occasion for a screed about drugs, and Beatles music, and sexytime outside of clerically-approved limits, and long hair, and George McGovern, and bra-burning, and the New Black Panthers and the assorted other denizens of the unruly — and largely imaginary — menagerie that offend the modern conservative intellect. However, Ross has a new book in which he describes yet another American institution that went bad at about half-past Pet Sounds — the Christian religion.

I’m still chuckling at half-past Pet Sounds. Plus, a Brautigan reference!

At any rate, as they say, read the whole thing. The Lost in Space reference is also genius.

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Public Enemies: “How Pete Peterson is driving the fiscal consensus”

Felix Salmon pulls back the curtain to show who’s pulling the strings:

Trudy Lieberman has a good post at CJR on the “surprisingly broad consensus” around the need to reduce the fiscal deficit in general, and to take aim at Social Security in particular. “Social Security,” she writes, “is the one issue on which the electorate is not divided” — but that hasn’t stopped a bipartisan group of Washington grandees from preaching doom whenever it is brought up.

More generally, the idea of “fiscal responsibility” seems to have become as American as motherhood and apple pie — both parties preach it, and say the other guys are the profligate ones. The group of people saying “hey, we print our own money, interest rates are at zero, inflation is not an issue, the corporate sector isn’t borrowing, there are a thousand more important things to worry about right now, why on earth is everybody worried about the deficit all of a sudden” is in a decided minority.

The obsession about fiscal prudence is a new phenomenon, and can be dated, pretty much, to 2008, when Blackstone went public and Pete Peterson took his billion dollars in proceeds and decided to use it to found the Peter G Peterson Foundation. Wherever fiscal prudence is preached, Peterson’s money can nearly always be found…

One of the most annoying parts of the fiscal debate, at least for me, is the way in which it has become synonymous with spending cuts rather than tax hikes. Say “fiscal balance” and people start thinking in terms of means-testing Social Security, rather than, say, implementing a carbon tax or a financial-transactions tax. And so we get the likes of Paul Ryan being taken very seriously — Mitt Romney is positively gushing about him, these days — even as the idea of paying for expenditures by raising taxes becomes increasingly un-American.

Reasonable people can differ on the question of how important it is to balance the budget, but I think it’s fair to say that there are lot of screamingly important issues, from endemic long-term unemployment to global nuclear proliferation, which aren’t getting a fraction of the attention that fiscal policy is getting. Which only goes to show, I think, just how powerful Pete Peterson’s targeted millions can be.

Pete Peterson, needless to say, is not ‘donating’ his millions so much as he is investing them— in a longterm scam offering him, if he can fool enough people / buy enough politicians, a very respectable ROI.

Not that he doesn’t have plenty of help, much of it from people who should know better. It’s well worth reading Trudy Lieberman’s whole post, too, because she focuses on the media’s failures intersecting with those of our political ‘masters’:

... The media haven’t reported much about how the nuts and bolts of proposals to fix Social Security would affect ordinary people, but they’ve done a super job of showing how Social Security’s opponents have brought one of the biggest segments around to their way of thinking—Congressional Democrats, including the second ranking member of the Senate, Dick Durbin, who is often the media’s go-to guy for the progressive perspective. It’s kind of a validation of Cato’s manifesto. As Politico reported, though Durbin had long allied himself with Social Security supporters, he said he’s been convinced that action is vital. “If we don’t do something and do it quickly bad things can happen in a hurry,” he said.

“We used to have Democrats speaking out (in support of the program) which we don’t have today, “ says Eric Kingson, co-director of the advocacy group Social Security Works. It was the Democrats who pushed for the payroll tax holiday—helped along by the media, which have passed along their quotes about assisting working people. Too often the reportage has glossed over the negatives of the tax cut, without noting what would happen if the tax is not restored. Kingson’s group and others, including some Republicans, argued that if the payroll tax is not restored and the government must borrow money from the Treasury to pay benefits to current recipients, Social Security will contribute to the deficit, which it doesn’t do now. That will produce more reasons to change the program. “Once the dominant view on each side of the aisle was that seniors need Social Security, and it was fair to everyone,” said Kingson. “Generations were not in conflict.”...

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Wiley’s Book Release Open Thread

In the middle of a wild party to celebrate Wiley Cash’s book release. he came into town to give a presentation to the faculty and students (he teaches here at Bethany), and now I have 15-20 very tipsy academics in my house (and my dad is here humiliating me once again with embarrassing stories from my youth). Here’s Wiley and his lovely wife Mallory:

We’re still working on the details to have a live chat or two with Wiley, but I figured we should wait a while until people have a chance to read the book. You can purchase his book here. Wiley’s personal website is here, and you can read various chapters free.

*** Update ***

Things have taken a turn for the crazy:

It’s only ten. I have a feeling I am going to be washing carpets tomorrow.

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Barney Frank: If It Feels Good, You’re Doing It Wrong

Barney Frank’s New York Magazine interview has only gotten attention for what he said about healthcare reform, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it, starting with this:

I believe very strongly that people on the left are too prone to do things that are emotionally satisfying and not politically useful. I have a rule, and it’s true of Occupy, it’s true of the gay-rights movement: If you care deeply about a cause, and you are engaged in an activity on behalf of that cause that is great fun and makes you feel good and warm and enthusiastic, you’re probably not helping, because you’re out there with your friends, and political work is much tougher and harder. And I think it’s now clear that it is the disciplined political work that we’ve been able to do that’s won us victories. I am going to write about the history of the LGBT movement partly to make the point that, in America at least, this is the way you do progressive causes.

The story of how he came out to Tip O’Neill is also pretty good.

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Fortunate Sonuvabitch

Via Jesse Singal at the Washington Monthly, the Texas Monthly’s Joe Hagan does a longform retelling of George W. Bush’s first big signature screwup (and the blowback that’s distorted American politics ever since):

... It was the 1988 presidential campaign of Bush’s father that first raised the issue of a privileged son from Texas getting special access to the National Guard—only the privileged son wasn’t a Bush. Michael Dukakis, the elder Bush’s opponent, had recently chosen Senator Lloyd Bentsen, of Houston, as his running mate. One Sunday morning in August of that year, George H. W. Bush’s campaign co-chairman, New Hampshire governor John Sununu, went on TV to attack Bentsen for allegedly helping his son, Lloyd Bentsen III, enter the Texas Air National Guard in 1968. “Someone called Senator Bentsen to point out to him that this special slot, which was rare, came open,” said Sununu, and Bentsen “ran to get his son to fill that.”

This was the first presidential election in which candidates’ Vietnam-era decisions were resonating among the electorate. The question of who did what in the sixties, when an unpopular war divided the nation, had become a litmus test. (Incidentally, this was also the year that Dan Rather established himself as a Bush family enemy by needling then–vice president Bush with questions about his role in the Iran-Contra affair in an infamous live interview on CBS.) With Democrats attacking the elder Bush’s own running mate, Dan Quayle, for joining the Indiana National Guard during Vietnam, Sununu’s claim was a natural counteroffensive. But it boomeranged. It turned out that George W. Bush, at the time a senior staff member in his father’s campaign, had served in the same Houston unit as Lloyd Bentsen III and was recruited the same year by the same man, Colonel Walter “Buck” Staudt. That unit, the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, tasked with defending the Gulf Coast, was well-known as a “champagne unit” because it housed not only Bentsen and Bush but a number of other sons of the Texas elite, such as John Connally III, son of the former Texas governor and Nixon treasury secretary; Al Hill, the grandson of oil tycoon H. L. Hunt; and several members of the Dallas Cowboys.

Sununu’s attacks died after Bentsen and Staudt denied the allegations, but the issue had been introduced, and the timing and circumstances of Bush’s entry into the Guard were enough to raise eyebrows. In February 1968, three months before Bush graduated from Yale, the Tet offensive left more than five hundred U.S. soldiers dead in a single week. That same month, Walter Cronkite famously declared the Vietnam War “mired in stalemate” just as President Lyndon Johnson canceled draft deferments for most graduate students. Days before he would become subject to the draft, Bush, whose father was then a U.S. congressman from Houston, won a coveted slot as a pilot in the 147th.

Bush maintains he simply interviewed with Staudt and was accepted on the spot. That may be true, but it would be hard to argue that there weren’t more-qualified candidates: Bush received the lowest acceptable score on his pilot aptitude test…

As some disappointed commentors have pointed out, there’s nothing really “new” in this story—not even the slapstick sideshow explaining how Harriet Miers made her bones with the Bush crime family—but it’s a nice tight summary of the whole shameful saga. Word is the story goes behind a paywall shortly, so catch it before the Bush minions cripple the website while it’s still available.

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Bad Meat Standards

Even the pro-corporate Grey Lady seems to be joining the “real food” groundswell. Mark Bittman, the NYTimes’ Food Maven, weighs in on “The Pink Menace“:

...A little review: Lean Finely Textured Beef was born about 10 years ago, as an attempt to eliminate E. coli from ground beef. Using fatty beef trimmings, which are especially susceptible to E. coli and salmonella contamination, B.P.I. created a product that could be sprayed with ammonia (yes, that stuff, referred to by B.P.I.’s former quality assurance manager as “Mr. Clean,” in this dramatic piece by Michele Simon) to kill the bacteria. It was then mixed with “normal” ground beef. Voilà: safe hamburgers.

Except that despite B.P.I.’s claim that the ammonia treatment killed E. coli and salmonella, and despite the U.S.D.A.’s support for this process, those pathogens have been found in B.P.I. meat. Oops…

But pink slime, as Grist writer Tom Laskaway says, is the tip of the iceberg; it’s a symptom, not a disease. Remember why it was originally created — to eliminate bacteria found in ground meat. The fact that pink slime was a “solution” might lead you to ask: What’s the problem?

The answer lies in the industrial production of livestock on a scale that’s far too large to sustain without significant collateral damage. E. coli, found in the digestive tracts of cattle, is common on factory farms where cattle are fed only grain. (Their stomachs are meant to digest grass.) The incomprehensible quantity of manure produced by these cattle — also often containing E. coli — is deposited on the land, sometimes seeping into the water supply; that’s how you wind up with E. coli in vegetables. To make matters worse, “healthy” farm animals are routinely fed so many antibiotics that E. coli, salmonella and other pathogens are developing resistance to commonly prescribed drugs.

The Food and Drug Administration has just been given a golden opportunity — well, it’s a legal mandate — to remedy this. Ruling on a lawsuit brought last year by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a federal court decided that the F.D.A. must finally conclude whether the practice of routinely feeding antibiotics to farm animals constituted a threat to human health. If the F.D.A. decides that it does, it must ban the practice altogether…

See, MegaCorpAg is all about the forward-thinking solutions. People being poisoned by E. coli in their burgers? Don’t bother looking backwards, reconsidering the wisdom of feeding an unnatural diet to thousands of animals crammed together in life so that their carcasses can be bulk-processed “efficiently”—just slap a chemical patch on the assembly-line results! People complain about bleach-treated additives? Get the results legally redefined as “L.F.T.B.”!

And don’t bother switching to chicken sandwiches. Nicholas Kristoff, also at the NYTimes, worries about “Arsenic in Our Chicken?”

... Big Ag doesn’t advertise the chemicals it stuffs into animals, so the scientists conducting these studies figured out a clever way to detect them. Bird feathers, like human fingernails, accumulate chemicals and drugs that an animal is exposed to. So scientists from Johns Hopkins University and Arizona State University examined feather meal — a poultry byproduct made of feathers.

One study, just published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Environmental Science & Technology, found that feather meal routinely contained a banned class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones. These antibiotics (such as Cipro), are illegal in poultry production because they can breed antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” that harm humans. Already, antibiotic-resistant infections kill more Americans annually than AIDS, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

The same study also found that one-third of feather-meal samples contained an antihistamine that is the active ingredient of Benadryl. The great majority of feather meal contained acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. And feather-meal samples from China contained an antidepressant that is the active ingredient in Prozac. Poultry-growing literature has recommended Benadryl to reduce anxiety among chickens, apparently because stressed chickens have tougher meat and grow more slowly. Tylenol and Prozac presumably serve the same purpose.

Researchers found that most feather-meal samples contained caffeine. It turns out that chickens are sometimes fed coffee pulp and green tea powder to keep them awake so that they can spend more time eating. (Is that why they need the Benadryl, to calm them down?)

The other peer-reviewed study, reported in a journal called Science of the Total Environment, found arsenic in every sample of feather meal tested. Almost 9 in 10 broiler chickens in the United States had been fed arsenic, according to a 2011 industry estimate.

These findings will surprise some poultry farmers because even they often don’t know what chemicals they feed their birds. Huge food companies require farmers to use a proprietary food mix, and the farmer typically doesn’t know exactly what is in it. I asked the United States Poultry and Egg Association for comment, but it said that it had not seen the studies and had nothing more to say…

The industrial producers of feather meal, incidentally, having established that this factory-farming byproduct “can increase lean percent in broilers and swine, provide important by-pass protein for ruminants, and provide an economical source of protein for aquaculture diets“, decry the wasteful American squeamishness that resists using it in pet foods as a replacement for more expensive protein sources. How fortunate we are (she said piously) that no reputable American pet food manufacturer would import sketchy bulk ingredients from nations with thriftier recycling standards...

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Open Thread: Seventy-leven Seals

In honor of Santorum’s (temporary, I’m sure) departure from the politicaltainment media, here’s a link to Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker discussing Elaine Pagel’s book on Santorum’s favorite Bible chapter:

The Bible, as every Sunday-school student learns, has a Hollywood ending. Not a happy ending, certainly, but one where all the dramatic plot points left open earlier, to the whispered uncertainty of the audience (“I don’t get it—when did he say he was coming back?”), are resolved in a rush, and a final, climactic confrontation between the stern-lipped action hero and the really bad guys takes place. That ending—the Book of Revelation—has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. (“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.”) Although Revelation got into the canonical Bible only by the skin of its teeth—it did poorly in previews, and was buried by the Apostolic suits until one key exec favored its release—it has always been a pop hit. Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.

In a new book on those end pages, “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation” (Viking), Elaine Pagels sets out gently to bring their portents back to earth….

... Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look… Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.

What’s more original to Pagels’s book is the view that Revelation is essentially an anti-Christian polemic. That is, it was written by an expatriate follower of Jesus who wanted the movement to remain within an entirely Jewish context, as opposed to the “Christianity” just then being invented by St. Paul, who welcomed uncircumcised and trayf-eating Gentiles into the sect. At a time when no one quite called himself “Christian,” in the modern sense, John is prophesying what would happen if people did. That’s the forward-looking worry in the book. “In retrospect, we can see that John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into ‘Christianity,’ a new religion flooded with Gentiles,” Pagels writes. “But since this had not yet happened—not, at least, among the groups John addressed in Asia Minor—he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God’s people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture. So, John says, Jesus twice warns his followers in Asia Minor to beware of ‘blasphemers’ among them, ‘who say they are Jews, and are not.’ They are, he says, a ‘synagogue of Satan.’ ” Balaam and Jezebel, named as satanic prophets in Revelation, are, in this view, caricatures of “Pauline” Christians, who blithely violated Jewish food and sexual laws while still claiming to be followers of the good rabbi Yeshua. Jezebel, in particular—the name that John assigns her is that of an infamous Canaanite queen, but she’s seen preaching in the nearby town of Thyatira—suggests the women evangelists who were central to Paul’s version of the movement and anathema to a pious Jew like John. She is the original shiksa goddess. (“When John accuses ‘Balaam’ and ‘Jezebel’ of inducing people to ‘eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication,’ he might have in mind anything from tolerating people who engage in incest to Jews who become sexually involved with Gentiles or, worse, who marry them,” Pagels notes.) The scarlet whores and mad beasts in Revelation are the Gentile followers of Paul—and so, in a neat irony, the spiritual ancestors of today’s Protestant evangelicals…

And some Opus-Dei Catholics, as well. In Santorum’s personal Book of Revelations, accept that gay people you don’t even know might have a right to marry, and before you know it we’ll be sanctioning man-on-dog fornication. Tradition!

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Romney/Ryan: What’s in Your Wallet Platform?

(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)

I can’t stop, because they won’t. The Economist’s Will Wilkinson goes gooey for the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver:

... Unfortunately for Mr Obama, Mr Ryan is no Newt Gingrich. He is not a pompous, self-aggrandizing bloviator in the grand southern style. He’s a likeable, hardworking, detail-oriented, Midwestern wonk who just happens to be something of a looker. Moreover, Mr Ryan’s conservatism largely eschews the odious cultural politics of social conservatives and focuses instead on a pragmatic, fiscally conservative market-oriented meliorism, the appeal of which is by no means limited to the hard right. He’s an attractive politician offering an attractive comprehensive alternative to the administration’s approach. And that’s why it is a matter of urgent political necessity for Mr Obama to try to smear Mr Ryan’s budget as a recipe for brutal, devil-take-the-hindmost injustice…

Mr Ryan is ready and able to debate the substance of public policy in way only a few members of congress, left or right, can match. He’s become a de facto leader of the GOP not because he’s a big idea man in the Gingrich mold, but rather because he’s extraordinarily capable of approaching America’s big-ticket structural problems with coherent, detailed policy proposals. After Mr Obama’s Tuesday speech, Mr Ryan’s office released a sharp, systematic rebuttal on Facebook. You don’t have to agree with Mr Ryan’s politics to see the substance here. Although he is at least Mr Ryan’s equal as a debater and policy wonk, Mr Obama has not and will not win every fight he picks with him. Mr Obama seems to be gambling on the assumption he is safely encamped on the moral high ground, and can therefore lose a good few battles and nevertheless win the war…

First off, humectified much, W.W.? If Ryan-mania doesn’t blow over like every other GOP fad this season, Rick “Sarah Starbursts” Lowrey may lose the Most Transparently Embarrassing Media Moment award he stole from Chris “Dubya’s flightsuit package sends a tingle up my leg” Matthews. Secondly, because I am old enough to remember stuff that happened even before 2001, I do not believe the words “sharp, systematic rebuttal” and “Facebook” should be used in the same sentence. As for content, let’s defer to a real economist, discussing “The Gullible Center“:

The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”

The reaction from many commentators was a howl of outrage. The president was being rude; he was being partisan; he was being a big meanie. Yet what he said about the Ryan proposal was completely accurate.

Actually, there are many problems with that proposal. But you can get the gist if you understand two numbers: $4.6 trillion and 14 million.

Of these, $4.6 trillion is the revenue cost over the next decade of the tax cuts embodied in the plan, as estimated by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These cuts — which are, by the way, cuts over and above those involved in making the Bush tax cuts permanent — would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, with the average member of the top 1 percent receiving a tax break of $238,000 a year…

Meanwhile, 14 million is a minimum estimate of the number of Americans who would lose health insurance under Mr. Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicaid; estimates by the Urban Institute actually put the number at between 14 million and 27 million.

So the proposal is exactly as President Obama described it: a proposal to deny health care (and many other essentials) to millions of Americans, while lavishing tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy — all while failing to reduce the budget deficit, unless you believe in Mr. Ryan’s secret revenue sauce. So why are centrists rising to Mr. Ryan’s defense?

My personal response would be “Because those self-styled ‘centrists’ are either morons or liars, or both”, but you can check the link Professor Krugman’s sober, reasoned, adult conclusions.

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Just follow the leaders

It’s a lot of work following Americans Elect, because one has to delve deep into the weeds of the rules to get any real sense of what the hell is going on there. Don’t do that. Instead, just read the dedicated and self-sacrificing people who follow their every move. This is from AE Transparency, which is only one of the sites that track AE:

We Pay Attention To Americans Elect Corporation So You Won’t Have To

in a surprising new development this week, undeclared ‘draft’ candidate David Walker skyrocketed out of nowhere (OK, out of 25th place) last week to break into our Top 20 candidate list this week in 17th place, leapfrogging all but three declared candidates. This surprise move had nothing to do with actually winning voter support (Walker gained only a lamentable 8 qualifying votes this week, anemic even by Americans Elect’s standards) and had everything to do with back-room funny business.

How can just 8 votes (out of AECorp’s membership of 400,000+) significantly propel a candidate toward success in the Americans Elect beauty pageant? They can’t, of course. But moving the goal-posts sure can, and that is what transpired this week while you weren’t looking, as AECorp insiders quietly upgraded Walker’s ticket to ride.

Americans Elect’s Candidate Certification Committee apparently originally classified Walker as a “contingently qualified” candidate, requiring him to net 50,000 qualifying votes to advance to the next round of balloting. Yet sometime during the past week (in the dark of night, perhaps, while we were all asleep?) Walker’s candidacy status on his Americans Elect web page appears to have been quietly changed to “Former Head of a Federal Agency” without any announcement, and his qualifying vote requirement was accordingly reduced from 50,000 to just 10,000. In other words, AECorp generously upgraded Walker’s ticket from coach to first class. Thus Walker (with only 94 qualifying votes) thereby automatically leapt from 25th place – behindcontingently qualified declared candidates Michealene Risley (454 qualifying votes) and TJ Ohara (141 qualifying votes) to 17th place (ahead of them both). And with just 11 more votes Walker will surpass contingently qualified declared candidate Laurence Kotlikoff (524 qualifying votes), as well.

[UPDATE: Tip of the hat to Irregular Times’ Jim Cook for independently verifying Walker’s Easter Week Ascension (He is Risen!), with an able assist from Bing’s cache. Thanks, Jim!]

All this would be much ado about nothing, but for the fact that David Walker, who has long lobbied for massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other safety-net programs, is an Americans Elect Board of Advisors member (i.e., an AECorp insider himself), as well as for the existence of numerous signals over the past few weeks that Walker is a particular favorite of his fellow AECorp insiders. As Jim Cook of Irregular Times has carefully documented, AE insiders Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild and Mark McKinnon (George W. Bush’s former campaign manager) have both sung Walker’s praise as a potential presidential candidate lately, as has apparent AE auxiliary, “No Labels”. AE itself has issued a gushing press release extolling Walker’s virtues, and AE’s cheerleader on the New York Times op-ed page, Thomas Friedman, published a shamelessly flattering column in the Times in February imagining the glories of a Walker presidency. This represents a lot of serious firepower being brought to bear in support of a candidate who has, as yet, persuaded only 94 Americans to give him their qualifying votes at Americans Elect. Strange indeed.

‘Kremlin watchers’ here at AE Transparency (that is, the more paranoid among us) suggest that AECorp’s odd move this week…moving David Walker’s goal-posts by re-defining the term ‘Federal agency’...signals a growing impatience within the Americans Elect penthouse with Buddy Roemer’s now clearly established inability to draw votes (one of the major reasons for AE’s embarrassingly unsuccessful ballot thus far). Casting about for another potential draw (or so the theory goes), insiders have set their last desperate hopes on Walker. All that is required in order to save AE’s disastrous first-round balloting would be for humble, self-sacrificing Walker to officially declare his candidacy, for AE to once more rev up its powerful publicity machine in his favor (with reliable support from the Times’ Friedman), and – if absolutely necessary – to ever-so-slightly re-jigger the rules just one more time to, say, automatically advance the top three declared candidates (which could soon easily include Walker) to the next round of balloting, whatever their vote totals might be.

Right now, it’s just a theory. But our hawk-eyed election monitors will be closely observing AECorp’s moves in these final weeks of its first-round ballot, looking for further Walker-promoting skullduggery. Maybe you should, too. After all, “Ninety-Four-Vote Dave” Walker might just be the next leader of the free world, if that’s what Ackerman Elects.

Wouldn’t it be great if someone would ask Tom Friedman just how much he understands about this process he’s endorsed and promoted? Ask him a question. “How does AE work, Tom, specifically?”

h/t Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog

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Pelosi: Healthcare “A Right for All, Not A Privilege for A Few”

Dan Amira at NYMag’s Daily Intel spots Madame Pelosi talking about SCOTUS and the ACA:

Nancy Pelosi’s political predictions seem at times to be based more on wishful thinking than on an objective assessment of reality. “One thing I know for sure is that Democrats will retain their majority in the House of Representatives,” she said in May of 2010, a few months before the Democrats lost their majority in the House of Representatives. Yesterday, at the Paley Center for Media, she predicted that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of Obamacare in a 6-3 vote.

As some of the commentors there point out, Pelosi is a damned smart & effective leader, and not given to throwing around numbers just to hear her own voice. The hour-long “PALEY100: Private Luncheon in Conversation with Nancy Pelosi” video starts slow—no teleprompters!—but it’s a fun listen when you’ve got the time. The healthcare portion starts around the 26.00 mark, and Pelosi’s prediction falls at 33.36… followed by a couple of rude, thoughtless, unserious cracks about the family-planning choices of those individuals most invested in the GOP War Against Women, which made me LOL-for-true.

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: What Romney Will Not Say

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)

Because I can’t resist sharing, here’s a taste of Charlie Pierce at Esquire on the Romneybot’s Wisconsin triumph:

... To pull off as shameless and utterly unprincipled a “pivot” as the one that is being proposed by the various handicappers on the bus would tax even the formidable internal guidance system of the Romneybot 2.0, for which being shameless and unprincipled is the only one of its prime functions that has worked perfectly throughout the campaign. The only way I see of doing it is to be so honest about being shameless and unprincipled that the whole wide world is so impressed by the sheer magnitude of your big, clanging brass balls that it forgets that you’d sell Massachusetts to the Somali pirates for five more points in next month’s Gallup poll, or 250 votes in Alabama… So, now that it’s very nearly, perhaps, almost, sort of Opening Day, let me suggest a “Big Speech” the candidate can deliver some time over the next three weeks, when nothing is really going on, and all that’s left to the campaign is empty bloviating (Hi, Newt!) and bitter recrimination (or, as it is known around the Santorum household, Our Reason To Live.) Give it to ‘em between the eyes, Willard:

“I’m Willard Romney, bitches, and how you like me now?

“See what I did there on Tuesday night? I hammered those punks like ten-penny nails into a wedge of fine cheddar. I am a strong, able Republican with more money than God and an even greater taste for mindless destruction and casual vengeance. I am not a jack Mormon. I am a gangsta Mormon, motherfkers, and the country is my bling. I am Moroni’s Omar. I am the Stringer Bell of the Great Alkali Plain and the world is mine, whenever I want it. Come at the king, you best not miss. I’ll bury your ass like I buried Santorum’s, under so much money that nobody will ever find it, even though I hear it glows red in the dark every time someone mentions The Pill. I bought me a Wisconsin and a Maryland and a D.C., although I am aware that even my wealth — and have you noticed that I have $250 million stashed away for a rainy fking century? — wouldn’t be enough to carry The District in the general. But all I really have to do is spend enough to carry 51 percent of the Green Rooms there and I’m home fking free. And I can do that. Chuck Todd’s already halfway down into my vest pocket, looking for loose doubloons. And you know why?

“Because I’m Willard Romney, bitches, and I can buy and sell your great-grandchildren and you won’t even know it happened.

“You actually think I believe some of jive I’ve been running this year? That’s the part of you that I fking own now. You think you own me, but I own you, motherfkers. None of your heroes took the field, and everyone else who did was a clown. Meanwhile, I’m spreading green like I’m Vigoro and today, you look up and it’s me or That Person in the White House, and you’re all quivering in your Sansabelts. Don’t you fools understand? I bought your party. You hated me. You distrusted me. And now you have to vote for me. See how that happens? Happens all the time with me. The Supreme Court put your party up for auction and I was the high bidder, and I was the high bidder because I’m Willard Romney, bitches, but you can call me, “Sir.”...

Much more hilarity at the link. So… apart from Republicans Acting Badly, what’s on the agenda this evening?

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Preservation

We’re having a fight over preserving an old brewery in Rochester. Preservation is a hard sell in this town. Even though the downtown core is getting more popular, there are still a lot of empty buildings and a lack of development. So when the local brewery (Genesee Beer) offered to build a visitors’ center on their grounds in a fairly desolate downtown-adjacent neighborhood, there was a lot of enthusiasm., even though they wanted to tear down an old brewhouse built in 1898. It didn’t matter that they had been given a $9 million package by taxpayers when the current owners bought the brewery, or that they building was designated as being of historical value (and therefore subject to a special city ordinance limiting development). The owners argue that their visitors’ center would fail without the extra parking provided by tearing down the building, even though there’s plenty of room to park across the street.

That’s all in the way of background to one of the best pieces of preservation advocacy I’ve seen in a long time, on a local blog called Rochester Subway:

Over the past two weeks we’ve reviewed at some local eyesores …or rather, opportunities, nearly lost. Those include the Flatiron Building,Station 55, Hoyt-Potter House, Lehigh Valley Railroad Station (Dinosaur Bar-B-Que), Parazin Building, Partners Building, and the Powers Building.

If you click on those links, you’ll find a great set of before and after stories of buildings that could have been torn down but instead became local landmarks. If you’re involved in some preservation advocacy in your part of the world, it’s well worth a look, because these fights tend to be over the future of one building taken out of context of the history of the town. It’s much easier to argue that tearing down a busted-up old building would be a huge loss when people imagine the loss of other places that are important to their daily lives.

Also, too: This will be my last post for a week and a half, since I’ll be traveling for Easter.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: “Pink Slime Economics”

(D.B. Echo at Another Monkey)

Professor Krugman reminds us not to get so distracted by the SCOTUS anti-ACA antics that we forget to keep a sharp eye on zombie-eyed granny-starver[*] Paul Ryan:

... The Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.

To be sure, we’ve had irresponsible and/or deceptive budgets in the past. Ronald Reagan’s budgets relied on voodoo, on the claim that cutting taxes on the rich would somehow lead to an explosion of economic growth. George W. Bush’s budget officials liked to play bait and switch, low-balling the cost of tax cuts by pretending that they were only temporary, then demanding that they be made permanent. But has any major political figure ever premised his entire fiscal platform not just on totally implausible spending projections but on claims that he has a secret plan to raise trillions of dollars in revenue, a plan that he refuses to share with the public?

What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that this is what happens when extremists gain complete control of a party’s discourse: all the rules get thrown out the window. Indeed, the hard right’s grip on the G.O.P. is now so strong that the party is sticking with Mr. Ryan even though it’s paying a significant political price for his assault on Medicare.

Now, the House Republican budget isn’t about to become law as long as President Obama is sitting in the White House. But it has been endorsed by Mr. Romney. And even if Mr. Obama is reelected, the fraudulence of this budget has important implications for future political negotiations…

[W]hat we learn from the latest Republican budget is that the whole pursuit of a Grand Bargain was a waste of time and political capital. For a lasting budget deal can only work if both parties can be counted on to be both responsible and honest — and House Republicans have just demonstrated, as clearly as anyone could wish, that they are neither.

[* h/t Charles Pierce]

Apart from empty-eyed GOP charlatans, what’s on the agenda for the new week?

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I Can’t Go For That

Win:

WTF is Zach Galifianakis doing in this van?

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