Respect your elders

By Capt. Fogg

One of the things that annoys me the most about living in the most crimson county in a red state is the presumption by the inmates that you couldn't possibly be anything else but one of them. The lack of inhibition allowing them to launch into some vicious right-wing verbal assault, packed like a fat kid's lunchbox with unhealthy swill gives me no end of grief, but of course there are times when it backfires on them.

Republican Governor Rick Scott had one of those precious moments the other day, naturally assuming that a group of retired folks in nearby Boca Raton would, like a juke box, play his song when he pushed the right buttons. Wrong. The expression on his face tells it all.

Scott, who is filling my TV screen every evening with scurrilous lies and sleazy half truths about his Democratic opponent, blaming him for the recession, but worse, blaming him for not hating Obama and everything he's done enough -- Scott who oversaw what was at the time the largest medicare fraud in history, expected the doddering old folks to respond Republican-style to his questions about just how much they hated Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.

What he found was a satisfied group with few complaints, says the Sun Sentinel. Some actually praised "Obamacare." One woman, some years younger than I responded that if young people don't have insurance the rest of us will have to pay their bills and if there really were cuts necessary under the ACA to provide equal care for others, as Scott claims it would, ( he lies) then people like her weren't going to fight to keep every last benefit because "it isn't the United States of senior citizens."

Another older fellow said if there really were cuts to Medicare, he hadn't seen them and that's of course because the cuts aren't to the beneficiaries but to service providers.  Perhaps people with some time to read noticed that the "cuts" were actually Medicare cost-savings passed by a Republican Congress.

Other people confirmed that they had seen no cuts, that they were satisfied.  Others affirmed that contrary to Scott's claims no doctors were quitting.  We get used to the image of everybody over 65 as feeble, barely rational and uninformed. That's as wrong as Scott's (did I mention that he ripped off Medicare for billions?) similar presumption that they aren't only drooling morons but Republican stooges? Is that redundant?

Did Scott's condescension and presumptions irritate his audience as much as his corruption and apparent dishonesty? Who knows? Stealing so much money from Medicare that he can become a governor through paid TV lies about Medicare, makes me glad I wasn't there at the Volen Center in Boca Raton to comment. I'm old enough, of course, but sorry to bust the stereotype, I'm more likely found in other venues like gun ranges, waterfront dives and biker bars where we've seen too damned many liars and con men like Rick Scott and remember him all too well to be fooled again.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

With seniors turning on Republicans, are Republicans done?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(See also Frank's post on this.)

Carville and Greenberg notice something interesting, and perhaps transformational, going on:

There's something going on with seniors: It is now strikingly clear that they have turned sharply against the GOP. This is apparent in seniors' party affiliation and vote intention, in their views on the Republican Party and its leaders, and in their surprising positions on jobs, health care, retirement security, investment economics, and the other big issues that will likely define the 2014 midterm elections.

We first noticed a shift among seniors early in the summer of 2011, as Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare became widely known (and despised) among those at or nearing retirement. Since then, the Republican Party has come to be defined by much more than its desire to dismantle Medicare. To voters from the center right to the far left, the GOP is now defined by resistance, intolerance, intransigence, and economics that would make even the Robber Barons blush. We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens.

It's never made much sense to me why seniors would vote Republican given the the Republican effort to dismantle the social safety net, the government programs so many seniors rely on, but I suppose there's something to be said for tradition, and of course part of voting Republican is being motivated by fear of change, of the new, of what is young and different.

But the Republican Party is moving further and further to the right, becoming the party solely of anti-government Tea Party types, right-wing Christian fundamentalists, neocon warmongers, and, of course, the Romney-style rich. And for all the post-election talk of rebranding, the Republican Party is doubling down on pushing away minority voters as well, it seems, as anyone else who isn't of this ideological stripe, including seniors generally.

We'll see if this holds next year. Midterm elections are characterized by low voter turnout dominated by an older, whiter electorate. But if Republicans are losing old white people, at least enough of them to make a difference, what hope do they have?

Inside Obama's budget

By Frank Moraes 

In his "Happy Hour Roundup" at The Plum Line the other night, Jonathan Bernstein provided links to three articles that argue in different ways that there is much to like in Obama's new budget. I've never argued otherwise, but I have been too focused on the entitlement cuts. Let's be clear though: Obama's offer of these cuts is very bad. Even if nothing happens in the next four years, Republicans will go on to accuse Democrats of intransigence: "Even that socialist Obama thought we needed to cut entitlements!"

Annie Lowrey over at the Economix blog argues that Obama's entire focus, not just his budgets, have been about reducing income inequality. She rightly notes that the ACA (Obamacare) will help the issue. Just on the face, giving people healthcare who didn't have it before makes them richer; it doesn't matter that you aren't giving them cash. But perhaps as important, it will make medical bankruptcies far less common. (Remember the big push by the feds to make bankruptcy harder because all of these spendthrifts were abusing the poor bankers? It was mostly bankruptcies because of our broken health-care system.)

She goes on to mention a number of good things that are in the new budget. It includes a rise in the minimum wage, universal preschool, and of course, slightly higher taxes for rich people. One thing that is in there really surprised me: the earned income tax credit (EITC). The budget would make it permanent. I thought it already was, especially since traditionally, that is one form of welfare conservatives agree with. Well, it is only in effect until 2017. That's a big deal. The idea that President Paul Ryan would end the program is very troubling.

In the great Wonkblog fashion, Brad Plumer presents the "Winners and Losers in the White House Budget." The winners (at least in terms of programs) are primarily the poor. As Lowrey points out, there is the EITC and the minimum wage. But in addition, although Medicare is cut, Medicaid is not. To some extent, this defines Obama's economic policies. I can see that he truly does care about the poor. It is when you move up the income ladder to the middle class, that he thinks things are fine. But they aren't fine. And helping the middle class thrive is really important to all of the classes.

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Holding freedom hostage

By Mustang Bobby 

Paul Krugman writes that the Republicans have dusted off an old argument from years ago to block the agenda of President Obama and the Democrats. Instead of arguing the merits of, say, expanding Medicaid to people who need it, they now say that giving people a guarantee that they will have health insurance is an assault on freedom:

Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) "If you and I don't do this," Reagan declared, "then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." What you might not guess from the lofty language is that "this" — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.

These days, conservatives make very similar arguments against Obamacare. For example, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has called it the "greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime." And this kind of rhetoric matters, because when it comes to the main obstacle now remaining to more or less universal health coverage — the reluctance of Republican governors to allow the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of reform — it's pretty much all the right has.

They trot out this pony for lots of other things, too. Universal background checks and liability insurance for gun owners shreds the Second Amendment. Giving free or reduced lunches to impoverished children takes away the parents' rights to feed their children the way they see fit. Banning interracial marriage is an assault on the rights of states to protect their own traditions, and of course the one we've been hearing a lot of recently, permitting marriage equality is a blatant attempt to muzzle the freedom of the "religious" to bully and harass the LGBT community.

David Brooks' column last week where he said that granting gays more freedom actually meant less was a caricature of the argument, and this is how we know that they're getting down to the fumes. When they have to tell you that more is actually less and up is actually down; that more choice for more people is tyranny and that finding a way to stop a madman from sweeping a kindergarten with 154 bullets in less than five minutes is the last step before Stalinism, it makes you wonder at what point will it dawn on them how utterly contemptuous of freedom they really are.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Media accountability

By Frank Moraes

Yesterday, I wrote about Liz Cheney's insane rant against Obama and Obamacare. The insightful health care policy observer Aaron Carroll wrote about the Reagan quote she used that freedom was over because of the evil which Cheney dare not speak its name. That evil, of course, is Medicare. Cheney conveniently left out that context for the quote because it only would have highlighted how wrong Reagan was and Cheney is with their hysterical domino theorizing.

Carroll puts it all into context:

Yes, Medicare was the death of freedom in 1961. It was tyranny. It was the end of America.

Last I checked, Medicare passed, and America is still here. Now it's Obamacare that will kill freedom, enact tyranny, and end America.

At what point do people who use such hyperbolic rhetoric stop and recognize that their dire warnings never come to pass? One would imagine that people who repeated Reagan's talking points back in 1961 might find it a bit humbling to see how wrong they were. You'd think they'd shy from repeating those arguments again.

But, no. They get op-ed space in the WSJ.

This, I think, is the real problem. No one ever loses anything because they are shown to be shockingly ignorant. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, no one wants to be around others who make them look bad. So someone like John McLaughlin is not going to fill his panel show with people who were right about the Iraq War or the housing bubble. The mainstream media will continue to be wrong about major policy issues because they don't want to admit being wrong in the past. Another reason is just that the people on the TV machine and in major newspapers are not there because they are right or smart; they are there because they are friends with with the people who run the TV stations and newspapers.

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A watery state

By Carl 

Thus goeth Marco Rubio's presidential aspirations. Apparently, Rubio can't stand the heat. 

But, as to the President's State of the Union address, all seems to be in order. It was populist, and took much more liberal stances on issues that Obama had in his first term, as it followed closely on the heels of his stemwinder of an inaugural address. 

He outlined a vision of a middle class that is healthy and growing that is in distinct contrast with the patrician and elitist views of the Republicans in Congress. His "ladders of opportunity" and support for increasing the minimum wage (a modest increase of less than 30%, to be sure) mirror my liberal libertarian views on government. 

Government ought to be levelling the playing field.

Let me take a moment to brief new readers on what I mean: I view society as a three-legged stool. There's the people, the government, and the business sector. 

When these are in balance, the country is stable. It can grow and everybody benefits to some degree.  

When one of these comes up short, the country is unstable and when two come up short, the country is set to topple over. 

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Republicans fight to kill Medicare

By Frank Moraes 

Do you remember the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)? It is what Sarah Palin famously called "death panels." It is necessary for not only making more affordable Medicare and Medicaid, but all health care in the United States. Of course, conservatives hate it. They wouldn't have hated it had McCain been crowned president and the Affordable Care Act been a Republican law. But it wasn't and so the reason they claim to hate it is that it limits care. In fact, it does not. What's more, these people who are oh so concerned that we won't spend millions of dollars keeping brainless babies alive are not at all concerned about the 50 million Americans without health insurance.

The IPAB has come up recently because the House said it is going to stop the current law that states that the IPAB should be fast-tracked. (Strangely, the vote was supposed to take place on Thursday, but I haven't been able to find any information indicating that the vote took place.) What this means is that the Republicans are trying to kill healthcare cost containment. They claim that this is in the name of of providing "Freedom!" But of course it is the opposite.

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Americans side overwhelmingly with Obama and the Democrats on fiscal policy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've got this, Speaker. You lose.

Reflecting the right-leaning, Republican-friendly, split-the-difference views of the Beltway media generally, NBC is pumping up a new poll that suggests Americans are hungry for compromise:  

An overwhelming majority of Americans want Congress and the Obama White House to reach a deal featuring both tax increases and spending cuts to avert the so-called fiscal cliff, according to the latest national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Oh really. So Americans just want each side to give in and meet halfway, because apparently each side is equally right/wrong and perfection can be found right in the middle alongside the Beltway media and its indisputable wisdom? 

Uh, no:

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No, Boehner, you tell us what popular programs you'd like to cut

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As usual, more ridiculousness from Republicans on the "fiscal cliff":

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said on Tuesday that he was still waiting on the White House to detail what spending cuts President Obama would be willing to make in a potential deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff at the end of the year.

"Where are the President's spending cuts?" Boehner said in speech on the House floor.

Talk about negotiating from a position of weakness. This is just bullshit posturing. As Greg Sargent notes, "Dems have already agreed to well over $1 trillion in spending cuts in 2011 -- cuts Boehner himself said were significant at the time. By contrast, Republicans have not agreed to a penny in new rates."

Two things are going on:

1) As Sargent suggests, "the idea is to try to blame the White House and Dems for the failure to reach a deal. But polls continue to show that Republicans are losing this PR battle badly."

2) "As for the demand that the White House go first in detailing its spending cuts, this is an almost laughably transparent ruse. As I keep noting, if Dems propose more in detailed spending cuts, Republicans will simply dismiss them as unserious, no matter what Dems offer -- pulling the talks further and further in their direction."

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Is Obama selling us out -- again?

By Frank Moraes 

Ezra Klein reported yesterday afternoon and then again in the evening on The Rachel Maddow Show, that a debt ceiling deal is all but done: the president will take a top marginal tax rate of 37% and raise the retirement age to 67. It sounds outrageous, but Klein makes a compelling case, even though it is very much akin to tea-leaf reading. Basically, he's saying that Obama used to always say the top marginal tax rate must go back up to the Clinton levels and now he is signaling that he would take less. But this isn't new. I noticed right after the election that Obama had started saying that income over a quarter million must be taxed more -- specifically neglecting to mention how much more. So this isn't some sudden change.

Also note that Ezra Klein was completely wrong a couple of weeks ago when he said that fiscal cliff negotiations were all but done -- right before the Republicans made a week long show of how there was no progress on the negotiations. So I'm not at all certain that he is right. But as I said, he makes a compelling case. And if he is right, this is really bad.

Paul Krugman wrote exactly what I think:

First, raising the Medicare age is terrible policy. It would be terrible policy even if the Affordable Care Act were going to be there in full force for 65 and 66 year olds, because it would cost the public $2 for every dollar in federal funds saved. And in case you haven't noticed, Republican governors are still fighting the ACA tooth and nail; if they block the Medicaid expansion, as some will, lower-income seniors will just be pitched into the abyss.

Second, why on earth would Obama be selling Medicare away to raise top tax rates when he gets a big rate rise on January 1 just by doing nothing? And no, vague promises about closing loopholes won't do it: a rate rise is the real deal, no questions, and should not be traded away for who knows what.

So this looks crazy to me; it looks like a deal that makes no sense either substantively or in terms of the actual bargaining strength of the parties. And if it does happen, the disillusionment on the Democratic side would be huge. All that effort to reelect Obama, and the first thing he does is give away two years of Medicare? How's that going to play in future attempts to get out the vote?

He's completely right. If Obama does this, it will indicate that he's been playing us all along. He talks pretty, but he is nothing close to liberal. I wish I weren't so cynical that I didn't believe it entirely possible.
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Screw rich a little, poor a lot

By Frank Moraes

I try not to read David Brooks, but Matt Yglesias tricked me into reading him with this tweet:

I don't understand what David Brooks is proposing here or why:nytimes.com/2012/12/04/opi…
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 4, 2012

So I went ahead and read "The Truly Grand Bargain." What Brooks is doing is a bit of a mystery. Normally, I would think he was just admitting that some Republican demands are hopeless. For example, the top marginal tax rate will go up to 39.6% automatically on 1 January. But he isn't calling for that. Instead, he claims that the Republicans should be, "Willing to see top tax rates go up to 36 percent or 37 percent." What?!

But it gets worse. He wants major cuts to Medicare and Social Security in exchange for this one or two percentage point increase in the top tax bracket and a one year ceasefire in the Republican war on the United States credit rating, know as the debt ceiling. Dean Baker did some calculations on this offer. He finds that Brooks is asking for a 6% cut to poor retirees' incomes and in exchange, Brooks is offering a 1.5% cut in the incomes of the rich through tax increases.

Baker notes, "It's interesting to think about what he would suggest putting on the table if the Republicans had won the election."

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Dumb, Dumberer, Dumberest

By Carl 

You'd think after having their asses handed to them in the November elections, Republicans might be a little more... flexible.

And you'd be wrong. The Great Orange Satan -- No, not Kos, the other one -- has stopped crying long enough to lash out at working Americans:

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner proposed $2.2 trillion of spending cuts and new revenue that lack what President Barack Obama calls essential for a fiscal agreement: higher tax rates for top-earning Americans. 

Boehner, an Ohio Republican, yesterday called it a "credible plan that deserves consideration by the White House." The Obama administration promptly rejected the proposal, which would raise the Medicare eligibility age and slow Social Security cost-of-living increases. 

[...]

With the Republican blueprint, both parties now have their opening offers on the table. Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, a Democrat, said the Republican plan signals "act two" in negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff. "There will be an act three undoubtedly, and hopefully the distance between the bid and ask is closed," he said.

In fairness, at least one of the aspects noted above might make sense, in a perverse way: raising the Medicare eligibility age.

Look, people are going to have to work longer for a bunch of reasons (not least of which is the two major recessions that have triggered on the watch of President Bush, destroying 401(k)s), which means there is a good chance that they'll have private health insurance available to them under Obamacare. By delaying the port over to Medicare, the nation could save billions over time.

Of course, who relies on Medicare but the folks who weren't able to sock away shrinking wages for retirement.

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Media push conservative ideas

By Frank Moraes

There is a question that is always floating around the minds of liberals: why don't perfectly respectable progressive policy ideas get any media attention while wacky conservative ideas get promoted like journalists are being paid by marketing companies? Earlier today, Paul Krugman posted a really great, if short, article that gives an example of this -- contrasting what is considered "serious" versus what is not. Raising the Capital Gains and Estate taxes is not serious. Raising the age of eligibility for Medicare is Very Serious indeed.

But here's the thing. Krugman looks at the total in new revenue that Obama is suggesting: $1.6 trillion over the next ten years. Raising the Medicare eligibility age would save $0.113 trillion over the next ten years. That means that the unserious Obama proposal would raise almost 15 times as much money as the Serious Republican proposal would save.

What's going on here? Krugman says that a proposal is only considered serious if it is painful for the poor and middle classes. But I think he's just being glib -- although certainly not completely wrong. I do think there is a common mindset in America that the only way a proposal can be effective is if it is painful. This is the "no pain, no gain" philosophy. And I am with Krugman in that this is part of the story. But there is a much more important part.

The most important issue here is that the media are just too cynical to accept that any plan that makes demands of the rich is politically viable. Like everyone else, they are so used to a system that is overwhelmingly tilted toward the rich, that they can't imagine that things could be any other way. Thus, when presented with a budget proposal that would do much good but demands sacrifice from the rich, it is labeled a non-starter. (See, for example, the People's Budget.) But a budget proposal that does little good while harming the poorer classes? They've seen that before! They know that's definitely a possibility.
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Calling out Republican bullshit on the "fiscal cliff"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

At Time, Michael Grunwald calls out the media for regurgitating Republican bullshit over and over again despite all the contradictions:

It's really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama's opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It's even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn't cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn't just cognitive dissonance. It's irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don't want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party.

It's a great piece. Make sure to read the whole thing.

My only quibble: It's not at all amazing to see this. Such irresponsibility is central to the way these reporters do their business. It's the rule, not the exception.

Republicans reject Obama's initial "fiscal cliff" proposal, but he was right to make it

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Times reports:

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal on Thursday to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, $50 billion in immediate stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits.

The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, met strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced the goal of finding $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other social programs to be worked out next year, with no guarantees.

Tax increases (on the rich)? Stimulus spending? No more Republican-made debt ceiling crises? Now that's some change I can believe in. No wonder Republicans immediately rejected the proposal.

So does that mean it was pointless? Absolutely not.


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I got mine...

By Mustang Bobby

James Kwak in The Atlantic on the future of entitlement programs:

When people say that we can't afford our entitlement programs, they're really saying that rich people won't pay the taxes necessary to sustain our entitlement programs. To be fair, many rich people probably would be willing to pay higher taxes if they knew the facts. But a small number of extremely rich people have successfully spread the myth that we can't afford our entitlement programs.

By the way, the term "entitlement" has been used to make it sound as if people are getting something for nothing. Of course that's bullshit. Everyone who collects a paycheck pays into Social Security and Medicare. But it's not like it's going into a savings account with their name on it; they're paying for the people on it now, and when they retire, the people working will be paying for them. So if everybody — and that includes those of you in the royal boxes — pays their fair share, the system works and it will keep on working.

Ironic that the ones who are the real freeloaders are the rich folk who don't give a rat's ass about anyone else.

Along those lines, I really like what Josh Marshall has to say about how to solve the fiscal crisis:

When you want to efficiently raise revenues, you raise rates. A major simplification of the structure, rooting out all the miscellaneous loopholes and special interest deductions, is probably also a good idea. But that's for fairness and efficiency. Not what you do if the federal coffers simply need more money.

Usually when people say they're willing to raise revenues but want to do it by closing loopholes, they're BSing you. And that's most of what we're hearing today. But I think we're at the point where some of the Republicans making these arguments have gotten themselves so wrapped up in a ball of anti-tax verbiage that they may actually be ready to accept some bizarre Rube Goldberg approach to deduction caps which would raise something like the same amount of revenue as tax rate hikes. And that may be possible.

But at the end of the day, just clean your clothes. If you've got some weird hangup about doing the laundry you could keep buying new clothes after each wearing. Or you could use more perfume. Or you could socialize only with people with no noses. But at end of the day, just f'ing clean your clothes. And the same way, just raise the rates.

Anything else is just people in denial or bargaining from people who need to quickly move through all five stages and get to acceptance. Or a fight they need to have with Grover Norquist. Whatever the problem is, get into therapy, get over it and don't inflict it on the rest of the country or the nation's finances.

Just do it.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Progressive ideas get media coverage

By Frank Moraes

Keith Ellison (D-MN)

The House Progressive Caucus has long had a lot of good ideas. But in general, they get little coverage. For example, while all the media were going gaga over Paul Ryan's budget, the Progressive Caucus released the People's Budget, which was ignored except when it was used to ridicule its name. Whereas the Ryan budget was just a Trojan horse meant to justify huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the People's Budget actually balanced the budget.

The line from the mainstream press was always the same: the People's Budget was a non-starter. No one would ever take it seriously. On the other hand, Paul Ryan's budget was very serious because people took it seriously. Of course, the people who took it seriously were primarily the usual suspects (wealthy people who want to reduce their taxes) and the mainstream press itself. It is interesting that reporters claim they should only report what the two sides say and never comment that one side is wrong. And yet, when it comes to something like this -- budget proposals on the right and left -- they choose to not even report on the left side.

In this context, I am pleased to see some actual liberal budget proposals seeing a little media light. As I've been screaming for years, a good way to fix entitlements is to actually fix them and not destroy them. On the right (and sadly, in the White House), we mostly see proposals to cut benefits -- directly, through cost of living declines, and through increased eligibility requirements. What exactly is getting fixed here? I think it is the problem that Social Security and Medicare even exist. Those on the right and in the middle see that as the problem: government was just too generous in the past and now we need to do something about it. This is why their arguments are generally so weak or flat out wrong, like the argument that Social Security was only meant to support a population that had a life expectancy below 65. (This argument is literally wrong and weak: it is not true and even if it were it would be a terrible argument.)

Last week, Senator Mark Begich has introduced a bill that would eliminate the payroll tax cap that makes Social Security the ridiculously regressive tax that it is. Similarly, the Progressive Caucus, led in part by Keith Ellison, is pushing the same idea in the House.

I don't expect these proposals to get much traction. But the fact is that at least the radio silence on them is starting to lift. More reporters are covering this stuff. I suspect that most people think that ideas to "fix" entitlement programs only come from the right. The fact is that only ideas to destroy entitlements come from the right. Ideas to truly fix entitlements come exclusively from the left. And the only way anyone will know this is if we talk about it in the public square and don't relegate it to rooms so quiet no one can hear.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Behind the Ad: Obama on his commitments to seniors

By Richard K. Barry 

(Another installment in our extensive " Behind the Ad" series.)

Who: The Obama-Biden campaign.

Where: Florida.

What's going on: Last week, the Obama-Biden campaign started running an ad in Florida that emphasizes the commitment his administration is making to seniors to protect Social Security and Medicare, in contrast to the Romney-Ryan plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Tampa and the will to power

By Capt. Fogg

As I've been saying since Richard "you sure as hell are a crook" Nixon departed the White house and the Republican War on truth began, if the Republicans accuse their opponents of something, you can be sure not only that it isn't quite true, but that the accusation is an attempt to distract from their own guilt. So when the war criminal Allen West disgusts us with the accusation that the Democrats are "the most racist party I've ever seen in my life," we know the opposite is true.

And why doth West protest? Why because the press isn't showing him the respect his hypertrophied ego demands, and why would anyone detest the torturer of innocent civilians and despise the accusations that Democrats are Nazis and Communists (at the same time, no less?)  It could only be that he's got dark skin, of course. 

And then there's Paul Ryan, the delight of Tea Perverts everywhere, who enlightens us with lies like:

And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly... So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama...

when it isn't actually true -- the cuts are in payments to hospitals, not in coverage to individuals. The cuts are savings, while Ryan's plan would actually deprive Medicare recipients of coverage. Paul Ryan is a liar, but what did you expect? The truth would ride out of town with him on a rail and covered with feathers.

And then there's Paul Ryan howling like a damned soul about the "corporate welfare" that was the stimulus package. Welfare and Communism and all that, even though the Republicans asked for a much bigger package and with no requirement to tell us who was getting what, even though Ryan stomped his feet and whined and begged for even more money for Wisconsin companies. Paul Ryan is a lying, duplicitous, forked-tongued son of a bitch, but I repeat myself. I already said he is a Republican candidate.

And then there's Paul Ryan, the con man, the liar, the swindler, the bearer of false witness -- there's Paul Ryan blaming Obama for the closure of a Janesville, Wisconsin plant that was shut down before Obama became president.

And there's Ryan claiming from the platform in Tampa that Obama disregarded the advice of a bipartisan debt committee that Ryan himself condemned.

Did I mention that Ryan is a Republican? Lying is what they do, whether it's lying to start wars, lying about how top-bracket tax cuts don't cause recessions when they do and raising them prevents growth when the opposite is true. That's what history says, but hey, you can't believe history -- history is liberal. Hell, you can't even hear history, it speaks in timorous whispers while the right wing roars and threatens and rages from every screen, from every radio speaker and every corporately owned newspaper.

But why lay the lies on Ryan alone? They're all liars and pickpockets and Romney has to take responsibility for it all. He has to explain why taking the $716 billion in Medicare savings achieved by Obama and spending it will reduce spending and why reducing revenue will pay off the debt. He has to give us more than vague generalities and slogans and promises that are negated by other promises, but he can't because what he says is designed to "energize" people who know nothing and prefer to remain angry at their chosen scapegoats.  

But of course the truth would lose the election for him and of course the New Right isn't about fixing the country anyway, it's about power. It's not about you or your life, your liberty or your pursuit of happiness. It's about power, power, and more power, and such concentrated power that answers only to money -- power over a country that is more and more irrelevant, increasingly deluded and ignorant, ever more bellicose, and yet has the power to destroy the world.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Romney's race card and the GOP's new Southern Strategy

By Richard K. Barry

Chris Matthews can sometimes make me crazy, but I was proud of the man yesterday on Morning Joe when he called out RNC Chair Reince Priebus for the particular variant of the Southern Strategy being played out by the GOP with their lies about Obama's supposed changes to welfare rules and equally untrue statements about the reallocation of Medicare funding to Obamacare.

Nothing else is working for Romney, which is why he is playing the "race card," as Matthews correctly pointed out.

There is an excellent piece at The Atlantic Wire by Elspeth Reeve on this shift in strategy.

According to Reeve:

Romney's advisers believe Romney "needs a more combative footing against President Obama in order to appeal to white, working-class voters and to persuade them that he is the best answer to their economic frustrations," The New York Times' Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg reported. And as we pointed out on Friday, if Romney gets 61 percent of the white vote, he wins. If you have any doubt that Romney is playing the race card, check out his YouTube page. There are five ads falsely accusing Obama of gutting welfare reform. The Republican National Committee has put out its own welfare ad. And another three Romney ads say Obama is raiding Medicare to pay for Obamacare. The latter ads show white faces and say "you paid in" but now health care is going to somebody else.

Here's Matthews's exchange with Priebus:

(Cross-posted at Lippmann`s Ghost.)