Horror of horrors! Those nasty Republicans are at it again – holding President Obama “hostage” unless he agrees to their outrageous demands as a condition for their votes to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. At least, that’s what New York Times op-ed columnist and left-wing demagogue-economist Paul Krugman would have us believe in his latest slanderous attack on Republican budget-cutters.

In his op-ed column today entitled “America Held Hostage,” Krugman accuses the Republicans, who control only the House of Representatives, of blackmailing President Obama by threatening to throw the country into economic ruin unless they get their way on spending cuts.

Krugman uses his usual scaremongering tactics to warn about the “seriously bad consequences” if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. He warns:

For if we hit the debt ceiling, the government will be forced to stop paying roughly a third of its bills, because that’s the share of spending currently financed by borrowing. So will it stop sending out Social Security checks? Will it stop paying doctors and hospitals that treat Medicare patients? Will it stop paying the contractors supplying fuel and munitions to our military? Or will it stop paying interest on the debt?

Krugman paints a Depression-era picture of

nervous seniors…wondering how to pay for rent and food

Nevertheless, Krugman urges President Obama to call the “extortionists’ bluff,” rather than give in on any spending cuts in the absence of major tax increases. Thus, if his warnings are to be believed, Krugman by his own admission is willing to risk letting seniors starve and live in the streets, Medicare patients to die due to lack of medical care and our soldiers to fight without bullets, in order to score political points against the evil Republican “extortionists.”

But, to give the devil his due, I think Krugman knows in his heart of hearts that his dire warnings of Armageddon if the debt ceiling is not raised on time are nonsense. He must know that we can still pay our interest obligations and debts as they come due, whether or not the debt ceiling is immediately increased. Thus, he appears willing to mislead his readers about the “seriously bad consequences” of a failure to raise the debt ceiling right on time while urging Obama to play chicken with the Republicans whom he demonizes with childish epithets.

Krugman likes to say that

the federal government is basically an insurance company with an army

But the truth is there are plenty of discretionary areas in the federal budget, outside of “insurance” and defense, that can be suspended without sacrificing our seniors, national defense, or the most vulnerable members of our society.

Federal education and agriculture subsidies come to mind. The discretionary portion of the federal education budget for fiscal year 2011 alone is $68.5 billion.  Discretionary spending for agriculture is approximately $24 billion. Thus, nearly $100 billion of spending could be immediately suspended from just the Education and Agriculture departments alone, if the debt ceiling is not raised exactly on time, with no impact on seniors, the most vulnerable or national defense.

What Krugman refuses to acknowledge is the financial Armageddon that is certain to occur if we continue along the spending trajectory set by the Obama administration.

If the United States continues to spend with reckless abandon, we will go bankrupt. It is common sense that raising the debt limit even more, without moving the nation back to the pre-economic crisis spending levels of 2008, is like giving more whiskey to an alcoholic.

Krugman believes that we can simply print our way out of the debt mess, even if that means inflation. In another article he wrote in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, Krugman said that the inflationary consequences to the rest of the world of our printing too much money are “not our problem, fellas.”

Aside from the xenophobic implications of Krugman’s flippant remark, he is wrong that printing too much money is not our problem. Trying to solve the debt problem and to create jobs through flooding the markets with more paper money is just setting us up for more economic disasters. A principal reason has to do with the effect of devaluation of the dollar resulting from printing more money on the price of dollar-denominated oil.

Krugman argues that what’s pushing up raw material prices, including oil, is the rapidly growing demand from the emerging world. That is only partly true. Supply disruptions and artificial constraints imposed by the Obama administration on domestic drilling also contribute to the problem. So do speculators. But the single most important reason for the spike in oil prices is the devaluation of the dollar, to which oil prices are pegged, as demonstrated by the following chart:

Paul Krugman is so blinded by his left-wing wealth redistributionist ideology that he is willing to throw facts and disciplined economic analysis aside to make his political points. His articles are turning into demonizing demagoguery not worthy of an Economics Nobel Laureate.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam.

A left-wing “children’s advocacy” group known as the “Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood” is committed to ridding the airwaves of any hint of children’s advertising in order to protect their malleable minds from corporate greed. That includes banning certain advertising on “American Idol.”

Sorry, Randy Jackson, Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler. You will just have to get rid of those cups emblazoned with the logo of that demon of American capitalism – Coca Cola – from your judging table.

Like all true progressive groups, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood does not trust the decisions of individuals – in this case, the parents – to decide what their children should watch or buy. Government must step in to prohibit all marketing that can possibly be seen or heard by children.

This group has gone so far as to lobby the Federal Trade Commission to extend the ban that already exists on product placement on children’s television

to include prime time programs, such as American Idol, that are not covered by the ban and are watched by millions of children

In addition to going after “American Idol” and Coca Cola, the Coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has targeted American icons ranging from Disney to Ronald McDonald.

Susan Linn, co-founder and director of the Coalition, makes no bones about her anti-capitalism philosophy. She contends that corporations are inherently bad in their attempt to use advertising to manipulate children’s minds for profits. In her view, even when companies contribute to education projects, they do so only for the purpose of ensnaring the kids into becoming consumers. And corporate messaging of any type to children is wrong, she says, not only for the kids today who are becoming the victims of the “commercialization of childhood,” but also because it contributes, I kid you not, to global warming:

the same generation of children that is being encouraged to prioritize wealth, consumption, and possessions is the same generation that, if current trends continue, will need to drastically reduce its consumption patterns so as to prevent further global climate disruption, habitat loss, and species extinction. As readers of Solutions well know, each of these environmental problems is due in part to people’s consumption behaviors, and particularly to over-consumption on the part of people living in the Western world.

Ms. Linn believes that only the government can protect our kids. She points to the examples of other countries:

The United States regulates marketing to children less than most industrialized democracies. In the Canadian province of Quebec, marketing to children under 13 is banned on television. And in Norway and Sweden, it’s banned to children under the age of 12. In Greece, you can’t advertise toys until after 10 p.m.

Greece as a role model? I don’t think so.

Beyond prohibiting all marketing to children, Ms. Linn advocates mandating that companies use profits from advertising on their adult programming to provide quality educational children’s programming. And she wants to expand tax-payer funded public broadcasting. No wonder. There would be more money to manipulate our kids’ minds in a far Left direction.

The Coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood’s latest target is the children’s publishing company, Scholastic Inc.

In an editorial today, the New York Times praised the “children’s advocacy” group for challenging Scholastic‘s sinful decision to take some ‘dirty’ coal money from the American Coal Foundation in producing a fourth-grade lesson packet called “the United States of Energy.” The sin was that the lesson plan supposedly provided a “one-sided” view of coal usage, talking about its benefits but omitting its detriments.

The Times doesn’t bother to mention that the lesson packet’s large U.S. map includes icons for coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, oil, wind, natural gas, and solar energy. And on the website page for Scholastic‘s “United States of Energy” lesson plan there is a clearly marked link to a “Celebrate Earth Day” page which contains lessons and activities to “help promote environmental awareness for Earth Day and throughout the year.”

There is a further link from the “Celebrate Earth Day” page to a kids’ activism site based on the book The Down-to-Earth-Guide to Global Warming. Who was the co-author for that particular Scholastic project? Laurie David, a global warming activist and the producer of Al Gore’s propaganda-filled “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Scholastic is clearly providing teaching materials covering all dimensions of the energy and environmental issues, incorporating contributions from the Al Gore school of global warming theology as well as from energy industry sources. Teaching critical thinking involves teaching children how to  analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information gathered from multiple sources to arrive at reasoned conclusions based on factual evidence.

But the far left group Coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, supported by the left-wing New York Times, wants only its anti-American capitalism messages heard by our children. And no more Coca Cola logos on “American Idol!”

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam.

Trying to capitalize on the bump in the polls he received from the successful Bin Laden Navy Seal commando operation, President Obama went to the border in El Paso Texas yesterday and blasted Republicans for blocking what amounts to amnesty for illegal aliens.

It’s bad enough that Obama chose to politicize a sensitive issue in order to work up his Latino base. He also lied about his record on border security, maintaining that his administration had “gone above and beyond” what Republicans had demanded to protect the border.

Obama ridiculed those who say that he fallen far short of what is needed:

Maybe they’ll need a moat. Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat. 

You can let the alligators remain in the Everglades, Mr. President.  But how about finishing the construction of an effective border fence across the entire U.S.-Mexican border that will help  keep out the invaders from south of the border?

A February report by Congress‘ chief watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, found that just 44 percent of the 2,000-mile-long border is under operational control, and just 15 percent is totally controlled. That’s a national disgrace.  If the Obama administration were serious about securing the border, it would push aggressively to construct high barrier electrocuted barb wired fencing across the entire border combined, where feasible, with electronic surveillance techniques and unmanned drones to help pinpoint for border agents the exact location of illegal border-crossers.

Moreover, we need more troops to help the border patrol do its job. On the “O’Reilly Factor” last night, Bill O’Reilly suggested adding 7000 more National Guard troops. I would go even further than O’Reilly. We should also deploy at least half of the troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq to the border until it is fully secured.

It is outrageous that we have more than 100,000 troops still in Afghanistan helping to protect a corrupt, dysfunctional government from an indigenous insurgency (when there are reportedly no more than 100 or so active al Qaeda fighters still left in Afghanistan) and have no significant military presence at our own border to protect against the continuing invasion from Mexico. The invaders include not only human smugglers, members of the Mexican drug cartels and other hardened criminals. The border is also open to Islamist terrorists, such as Hezbollah recruits, trying to sneak into the United States.

The Obama administration is failing to fully enforce the federal  immigration laws currently on the books. Instead of fighting Arizona in the courts for its efforts to simply help the federal government do its job and ridiculing its opponents to score cheap political points, the Obama administration should discharge the constitutional obligation of the federal government to protect the states “against Invasion.” (Article 4, Sec. 4)

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam.

Conservatives who are still under the delusion that they can persuade the Left to tone down their rhetorical attacks and play nice would do well to check out Howard Kurtz’s latest column on the Daily Beast, which gives us yet another round of hypocritical finger waving over the Republican Party’s “liability on the fringe.”

Kurtz begins with, of course, the Birthers:

The [House Republican] caucus has 85 new members, more than 30 of whom are new to elective office—“the kamikazes,” they are privately called—and some took strong exception to being urged not to talk about President Obama’s birth certificate. “Well, I don’t think he was born in this country,” one freshman snapped.

A lone quote from a single unnamed GOP freshman, who represents “some” of a group of thirty or so? I guess they just don’t make epidemics the way they used to.

The birther nonsense seems especially pointless—and corrosive—when one considers that Obama was planning the helicopter raid that would kill Osama bin Laden days later, as he was releasing his long-form Hawaii certificate. Conservative author David Frum says bin Laden’s death should end the racially charged insinuations “that President Obama’s identity and loyalties lie elsewhere.”

Frum is no wild-eyed rebel; he helped coin the phrase “axis of evil” in the Bush White House and opposes virtually all of Obama’s agenda.

Don’t you just love it when lefties presume to tell us which conservatives to take seriously? I’m not sure what Kurtz means by “wild-eyed rebel,” but David Frum’s opinion here is meaningless, considering he’s made a cottage industry out of erecting “far-right” straw men he can loudly denounce so publications like the Daily Beast will fawn over how Serious and Responsible he is. Irresponsible attacks (racial or otherwise) against Obama obviously shouldn’t be tolerated, but they should be rejected on their own merits, not because he nailed bin Laden. Likewise, the political no-brainer of taking out the world’s most wanted terrorist shouldn’t insulate the president from substantive critiques of his “identity and loyalties,” like Matthew Vadum’s. Making bad decisions neither justifies dishonest attacks against you nor exempts you from honest ones.

These are the rumblings of slow-motion earthquake, a tectonic shift that may well redefine what it means to be a Republican. What was truly appalling about the birther craziness is how many in the GOP refused either to criticize those peddling the crackpot conspiracy theory—which included Donald Trump—instead offering a wink, a nod, and passive phraseology about taking the president at his word.

Yeah, nobody in the GOP or on the Right is willing to cross the Birthers…well, unless you count Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Michael Steele, National Review, Human Events, American Spectator, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, Hot Air,  Townhall, Red State, and NewsRealBlog. Besides, Birther numbers have plummeted since Obama finally released the thing, suggesting that at least a fair chunk of them really were just suspicious about the president’s apparent reluctance to release it, and that they’re happy to move on now that their curiosity’s been satisfied.

Ah, but hold on, Kurtz says, nuttiness “goes well beyond” Birtherism:

It has roots in John McCain putting Sarah Palin on the ticket. Right-leaning commentators who assailed Palin as unqualified were either excoriated (Kathleen Parker got 12,000 hostile e-mails, some saying she should have been aborted), forced out (Christopher Buckley purged from National Review, the magazine founded by his father), or fired (Frum losing his job at American Enterprise Institute).

Of course, McCain couldn’t possibly have picked Palin because he really thought she’d be a good running mate! (Also, apparently Palin on the bottom of the ticket is proof that the party’s dominated by hard-nosed fanatics, while Maverick’s presence at the top of the ticket means nothing.) I’m sorry that anonymous people on the Internet said mean things about Parker, but that kind of comes with the territory. Christopher Buckley (who, recall, not only disliked Palin but endorsed Obama) wasn’t “purged”; according to editor Rich Lowry, Buckley offered to resign from what was actually a fill-in position for the then-on-hiatus Mark Steyn anyway. Nor was Frum—AEI says they let him go because he hadn’t exactly been earning his keep for some time.

Is the GOP becoming a smaller tent where dissent is grounds for banishment?

Someone’s always carping about imaginary crackdowns from GOP thought police. And yet somehow, we never seem to feel the effects of any such crackdown.

Veteran congressman Mike Castle was booed at a 2009 town meeting when he told an angry woman waving a birth certificate that Obama is a citizen; voters dumped him for Christine O’Donnell in a Senate primary. Former Sen. Alan Simpson, calling the birther flap “absurd,” tells me the GOP is being pulled toward an unrelenting focus on social issues: “If the new paradigm is a test of purity, we haven’t got a prayer.”

Delaware voters had many reasons to boo Castle aside from Birtherism—the guy’s positions were so far to the left on economics, social issues, and defense that one wonders why he even bothered to run as a Republican. Aren’t voters allowed to side with candidates they agree with on the issues? If not, then what’s the point of primaries?

Not everyone agrees. Former Newt Gingrich aide Tony Blankley says “both parties have their extremes, and their leadership can’t embrace them. But you never want to disperse the energy of your supporters. It has to be managed.” Maybe, but Democrats have never enabled the Bush-caused-9/11 nuts this way.

No, prominent elected Democrats just post at Daily Kos, compare Republicans to Nazis, endorse Michael Moore’s conspiratorial lies, and attend churches led by racists. Completely different!

Howard Kurtz and his ilk show little interest in creating original arguments against the Right, and they barely even try to disguise or justify the misdirection and double standards they’ve been recycling for years. If the prevalence of these reruns doesn’t convince you that the Liberal Inquisition can’t be appeased, nothing will.

Despite a string of recent defeats, including the re-election of incumbent Republican Judge David Prosser and the failure of efforts to recall GOP state senators Glenn Grothman and Mary Lazich, the Wisconsin Left hasn’t given up the fight over Governor Scott Walker’s government employee union reforms, and they’re just as willing as ever to fight dirty.

WTMJ radio host Charlie Sykes has the audio and transcript of Stephen Richards, a tenured University of Wisconsin Oshkosh criminal justice professor, beginning his class with eight minutes of not only proselytizing against the reforms, but also bringing in student activists to collect signatures, during class, for the recall effort against GOP state Senator Randy Hopper (full disclosure: Hopper represents my district). Why?

And the reason you see this on campus a lot is that, um, the effect of the, of Walker’s budget on this university is number one, will be an eight percent pay cut for all faculty and staff, eight percent pay cut.

Um, there’ll be um, there’ll be a legal [inaudible] to be, belong to a union. [CF: The audio sounds to me like he’s saying, “it’ll be illegal for us to be, belong to a union.”] And you should know that, um all the faculty, janitors, maintenance people secretaries, they all belong to a union, they’re all in a union right now.  So there union will be decertified.

Um, that um, and this affects teachers, professors, parole officers, corrections officers, and a lot of police and fire.  Police and fire are not exempt from this.

Um, all public employees. So the uh, big salary cuts, uh is eight to ten percent of their wages are cut, um, not just one year but from here on out, um and, um um, they’ll make it so that we won’t be able to belong to unions.

What he means by pay cut is actually the modest reduction to benefits we’ve been over before. The claim that employees simply “won’t be able to belong to unions” is a bald-faced lie; the bill merely makes union contributions voluntary (leave it to leftists, though, to deem the coercive status quo as freedom and damn its reform as tyranny). Richards is also lying when he says police and fire unions aren’t exempted; in fact, seeing how that very point was used as an anti-Walker talking point, it’s hard to imagine he had any other intention but to deceive in saying otherwise.

In the clip, he also encourages a student who lives outside of Hopper’s district to sign anyway (don’t worry, he’s pretty sure the fine, upstanding citizens in charge “just won’t count” it if it’s invalid), and tells students to use their campus address rather than their parents’ when signing. And most disconcertingly, he says:

I think there’s about one hundred faculty that are doing this on this campus.

There’s also the question of how exactly a political dispute over government spending and union regulations pertains to a class about criminal justice. Oh, and did I mention that this criminal justice professor was a convicted drug dealer? On his RateMyProfessors.com profile and according to Sykes’ readers, the general consensus seems to be that Richards is an inattentive teacher who spends more time bloviating on his past and his pet causes than he does the class’s subject matter.

Richards has apologized for “not showing more restraint,” and UW Oshkosh Chancellor Richard Wells has released a statement condemning Richards’ behavior, claiming “agreed-upon corrective action” has been taken (though he won’t tell us what it is), and that feedback from Richards’ students has the administration satisfied that this “isolated incident” (no word on Richards’ claim of “about one hundred faculty” doing the same thing) is resolved and won’t happen again. Funny—that’s not what one of his students anonymously emailed to Sykes:

I’m sitting in Dr. (I use that term loosely) Richards’ class as I’m writing this. Just wanted to let you know that instead of apologizing for his actions and everything that has come out in the last couple days, he scolded us. He started by telling us that he has had a police escort all day due to death threats. He then proceeded to tell us that it is illegal to record a professor without his/her permission. He stated that “anyone has any smart phones or recording devices, to turn them off or leave.” He then proceeded to tell us that he could have charged those students with some sort of BS crime and had us arrested and kicked out of school. His rant has been going on for the better part of 20 minutes now and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down or stopping. Just like his political rants which take place multiple times per week, this is the kind of crap that disrupts our opportunity to learn at an institution of higher education.

So to recap, we have an ex-con with a tenured position poorly teaching criminal justice who uses class time to collect signatures to recall politicians he dislikes and takes it out on his students when he gets caught, and all superiors will do is slap him on the wrist while showing no interest in investigating his claim that many of his colleagues are doing the same thing. And the people of Wisconsin are paying for it all.

Disgraces like this, sadly, are nothing new in the academic world, and they aren’t going away until three things happen. First, many more parents need to pay much closer attention to the kind of education their kids are getting, and put pressure on those in charge to take serious corrective measures. Second, students need to ask themselves if these are the kind of schools they really want to support with their business (believe it or not, there are still places in America where a real education is possible). And third, conservatives in elected office must have the guts to give these institutions an ultimatum: take the public’s trust seriously, or lose taxpayer funding. There is no reason the American people should have to subsidize the rope used to hang them.

The Archbishop of Canterbury (left) and Michael Moore (right) react to news of Osama bin Laden's death.

What do Michael Moore, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and United Nations human rights officials have in common? They are upset over the latest reports that the United States shot Osama Bin Laden to death because the mass murderer, though stained with the blood of thousands of slain innocent Americans, was reportedly unarmed when justice was finally served.

Moore and his co-loonies have reinforced their well-deserved reputations for left-wing looniness by questioning the “legality” of Osama Bin Laden’s descent to Hell, courtesy of our Navy Seals. These bubbleheads, along with other hair-splitting Monday morning quarterbacks complaining that the killing of bin Laden may have violated international law, are completely unhinged from the real world.

Let’s start with Michael Moore, the multi-millionaire film writer and conspiracy theorist who thinks that “capitalism is a sin” while rolling in big bucks from his lie-filled film Fahrenheit 9/11.

With confidence that, in his words uttered thirteen months after al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on our homeland, “there is no terrorist threat in this country,” Moore now feels sorry for what happened to Bin Laden. He told CNN:

They killed him not because there was a fire fight or something going on. They went there with the intention to kill him. That’s an execution or an assassination, whatever you want to call it.

Moore lamented that, in killing Bin Laden, America

lost something of [its] soul

The only thing we lost is an evil, soulless killer. We don’t need the kind of “soul” that Michael Moore is pitching, especially when Moore compared the insurgents in Iraq, who included al Qaeda terrorists aiming to kill our soldiers, to the Minutemen of the American Revolution.  And Moore once described the United States, which was fighting the terrorists, as

a nation that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves

I suppose that if Moore had his way, and could have fit into one of the Navy Seals’ helicopters without bringing it down, he would have enjoyed personally meeting Bin Laden and perhaps would have offered him a leading role as the hero in a Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel.

Meanwhile, across the pond in Merry England, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rev. Rowan Williams, the spiritual head of the Church of England and of the 80-million strong worldwide Anglican Communion, has criticized the United States for shooting dead the reportedly unarmed Osama bin Laden:

The killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn’t look as if justice is seen to be done

The circumstances of Bin Laden’s demise left the Archbishop of Canterbury  ”uncomfortable.” Poor thing. But before you feel too sorry for the Archbishop’s discomfort, don’t forget that this is the same Archbishop who, back in 2008, said that the United Kingdom will eventually have to get comfortable incorporating Islamic sharia law into the English legal system in order to help facilitate social cohesion.

At least the Archbishop of Canterbury should be comfortable with the fact that the Obama administration tried to follow sharia law by conducting a Muslim religious ceremony within 24 hours of Bin Laden’s death, before disposing of his cleansed body.

Finally, there are the transnationalists at the United Nations who want to usurp U.S. sovereignty by trying to get the final say over whether member states of the UN, including the United States, are conforming with international law.

In a statement released in Geneva, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, and the special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Martin Scheinin, said the U.S.

should disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards…the norm should be that terrorists be dealt with as criminals, through legal processes of arrest, trial and judicially-decided punishment

UN human rights chief Navi Pillay also put out a statement requesting more details on what went down at Bin Laden’s lair:

The United Nations has consistently emphasized that all counter-terrorism acts must respect international law.

Unfortunately, after more than ten years of trying to even define what constitutes “terrorism,” the United Nations has come up empty. It’s kind of hard for any UN agency to determine whether a “counter-terrorism act” conforms with international law when the UN cannot even formulate a consensus on what “terrorism” even means.

More importantly, it’s none of the UN’s business how the United States chooses to defend itself against an organization and its leader who declared war on the United States, have continued to plot acts of terrorism against American civilians and have not followed the most elementary rules of law.

The Navy Seal commandos who located Bin Laden had only seconds during their time sensitive mission to make a judgment on whether bin Laden posed any possible danger.  They had just encountered some gunfire from Bin Laden’s courier.  The commandos reportedly also spotted   two guns, one of which was an AK-47 assault rifle, in the room where they encountered Bin Laden. Obviously, they couldn’t pat him down without running a risk of harm and lost time. With their own lives and the success of the mission on the line, the commandos made the only logical call under the circumstances.

Besides, the only valid reason to try and take Bin Laden alive in the face of such risks would have been to extract more information from him via the same enhanced interrogation techniques that helped provide the clues leading to Bin Laden’s door in the first place. But since the Obama administration doesn’t believe in enhanced interrogations and has ended them, Bin Laden served no useful purpose remaining on this earth.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam

Most of the nation is still celebrating the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the monster behind one of the worst days in American history. Some are relieved bin Laden can no longer aid the jihadist cause; others take pleasure in knowing the suffering he caused us has been partially repaid.

But at least one voice is having none of it. At the Huffington Post, “specialist in transformational change” (whatever that means) Dr. Pamela Gerloff writes that celebrating bin Laden’s death is mentally unhealthy and geopolitically dangerous:

“Celebrating” the killing of any member of our species–for example, by chanting USA! USA! and singing The Star Spangled Banner outside the White House or jubilantly demonstrating in the streets–is a violation of human dignity. Regardless of the perceived degree of “good” or “evil” in any of us, we are all, each of us, human. To celebrate the killing of a life, any life, is a failure to honor life’s inherent sanctity.

Plenty of people will argue that Osama Bin Laden did not respect the sanctity of others’ lives. To that I would ask, “What relevance does that have to our own actions?” One aspect of being human is our ability to choose our own behavior; more specifically, our capacity to return good for evil, love for hate, dignity for indignity. While Osama Bin Laden was widely considered to be the personification of evil, he was nonetheless a human being. A more peaceable response to his killing would be to mourn the many tragedies that led up to his violent death and the thousands of violent deaths that occurred in the attempt to eliminate him from the face of the Earth; and to feel compassion for anyone who, because of their role in the military or government, American or otherwise, has had to play a role in killing another. This kind of compassion can be cultivated, as practitioners of many different spiritual traditions will attest […]

It is hard not to think that some of the impulse to celebrate “justice being done” may also contain a certain pleasure in revenge–not just “closure” but “getting even.” The world is not safer with Osama Bin Laden’s violent demise (threat levels are going up, not down); evil has not been finally removed from the Earth; the War on Terror goes on–so any celebration must be tempered with the sobering fact that much work still needs to be done to establish peace.

There’s a lot to unpack here, most of it awful. But first, for the sake of fairness and decency one fair point must be acknowledged: If we truly recognize the intrinsic worth of all human life, we have to recognize that even the worst among us have souls, warped and polluted though they may be, and be careful not to think casually of any killing—even just and necessary killing, as bin Laden’s death clearly was. Now, I’d be lying if I told you I haven’t found some satisfaction in the confidence that Osama now knows the afterlife isn’t quite what he expected, but I also have to admit those thoughts don’t live up to the standard my Savior has set for me.

So we shouldn’t take pleasure in exacting bloody vengeance, but there is another aspect to the celebration that is entirely appropriate. As I survey the reactions of friends, acquaintances, and pundits, it seems to me bloodlust is not the primary animating force of their celebration. Justice is. People are celebrating the fact that an act of tremendous evil has been punished, ensuring that bin Laden will never again threaten the United States and sending a clear message to our surviving enemies: hurt us, and we’ll find you, no matter where on earth you go, no matter how long it takes. And when we do, you won’t like what comes next.

Celebrating the destruction and punishment of evil is not only a proper impulse in a free society it’s a necessary one. Quite simply, a society that does not strongly embrace and venerate the punishment of evil is a society that is incapable of survival.

Gerloff’s failure to understand this is bad, but it’s not what makes her piece one of the most disgustingly immoral things I’ve read in recent memory. No, that would be the moral equivalence between America and the jihadists who want us dead. “Good” and “evil” are placed in scare quotes. We’re told a better response would be to “feel compassion” for anyone involved in any military or government who “has had to play a role in killing another,” as if a drone strike on a terrorist hideout and detonating yourself in a crowded subway are equally tragic. And then there’s this:

The truth is that “celebrating justice” when one person is killed–as happens regularly in the gang wars of American cities–only incites further desire for revenge, which, from “the other side’s” viewpoint, is usually called “justice.”

Consider this: If a leader in our country were killed in the manner in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, as “justice” for his acts of aggression in the War on Terror–and supporters of that act were shown proudly chanting their country’s name, singing their national anthem, and demonstrating in the streets–Americans would likely feel more sickened than joyful, wouldn’t you think? The impulse to celebrate a death depends on what side you’re on.

It doesn’t matter how little you think of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or any American leader. It doesn’t matter how much you disagree with US military operations in Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, or Afghanistan. There is no comparison between any of our leaders or actions and those of al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah. “The other side” might say their cause is justice and ours is revenge, and some might even believe it. But reality is what it is regardless of “viewpoints.” Those who seek to kill and dominate infidels are the bad guys, and the ones trying to stop them are the good guys.

Period.

If the rest of the country were so foolish as to believe that the key to peace with monsters is quashing the celebration of monsters’ deaths, the ensuing suffering would be staggering. However unhealthy the “psychology of revenge” may be, it pales in comparison to the poison that is the neurosis of moral equivalency.

We knew this was coming. No American victory in this day and age, not even the long-overdue death of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, is safe from political hijacking by the useful idiots of the Left.  Within hours of hearing the good news, left-wing Daily Beast flunky Peter Beinart took to the keyboard to declare that the War on Terror is finally over.

Wow, what a relief! So that means Iran’s nuclear program is kaput? Er, no. Well, maybe it means the UN Security Council has stopped playing nice with Middle Eastern thug regimes. Wait, that didn’t happen, either. I know – peace between Israel and the Palestinians is finally in sight! Nope, try again. Um, then maybe anti-American sentiment among Muslim populations is waning? Uh-uh.

If none of that’s the case, then what does Beinart mean?

I don’t mean that there is no threat of further jihadist attack. In the short term, the threat may even rise. I don’t mean that we should abandon all efforts at tracking terrorist cells. Of course not. But the war on terror was a way of seeing the world, explicitly modeled on World War II and the Cold War. It suggested that the struggle against “radical Islam” or “Islamofascism” or “Islamic terrorism” should be the overarching goal of American foreign policy, the prism through which we see the world […] It made East Asia an afterthought during a critical period in China’s rise; it allowed all manner of dictators to sell their repression in Washington, just as they had during the Cold War; it facilitated America’s descent into torture; it wildly exaggerated the ideological appeal of a jihadist-Salafist movement whose vision of society most Muslims find revolting.

Bin Laden’s death is an opportunity to lay the war on terror to rest as well. Although President Obama avoids the phrase, its assumptions still drive our war in Afghanistan, a crushingly expensive adventure in nation building in a desperately poor country whose powerful neighbor wants us to fail. Those assumptions fuel anti-Muslim racism in the United States, where large swaths of the Republican Party have decided they are at risk of living under Sharia law. And they blind us to the differences among Islamist movements, allowing Glenn Beck and company to depict Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as al Qaeda’s farm team.

Instead, we can now take on real problems, like debt and China. Because Barack Obama has been such a crusader on those issues so far.

I’m struggling to decide what the most contemptible part of this screed is. Is it the insane implication that Obama taking one problem less seriously will lead to him taking the others more seriously, despite his manifest unseriousness towards both? The way he relies on his own past smears of conservatives as Islamophobes to prop up his latest thesis? Where he casually says, oh by the way, the Cold War was no big deal either?

I don’t know what the sleaziest element is, but it’s easy to see which one is the most dangerous:

The war on terror is over; Al Qaeda lost.

This has perhaps been no greater point of contention between hawks and doves since the September 11 attacks: is the War on Terror simply an effort to destroy the terrorist organization under whose banner 9/11 was carried out, or is it a larger struggle against the broader ideological movement of which al Qaeda was but one part?

I hate to break it to you, but despite the loss of their leader, al Qaeda has by no means been neutered, and either way, they’re far from the only Islamofascist game in town. Extremists have won a string of governments throughout the Middle East, and in particular, NRB’s Moshe Phillips notes that Hamas is still kicking. Indeed, learning where bin Laden was hiding—right under the noses of our Pakistani “allies”—should be enough to illustrate why it’s a bit early to herald a new era of U.S.-Mideast relations.

Then again, it’s not as if any of the above would change Peter Beinart’s mind—recall that according to him, the War on Terror has never been a war. Whether Osama bin Laden’s relaxing in a compound or sleeping with the fishes means nothing to him; he’d be saying it’s time to pack up regardless. In that sense, his entire column is a farce—bin Laden’s death is just the latest pretext of seriousness he’s using to whine, “are we there yet?”

The economist and New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman wrote an article today entitled “The Truth, Still Inconvenient.” In it, he tried to portray recent congressional testimony by a global warming skeptic, Berkeley physics Prof. Richard Muller, as supportive of the findings of global warming scientists themselves. Krugman described Prof. Muller, who has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, as

a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence

As usual, Krugman is in denial and has distorted the facts.

Krugman starts out by pointing out that Prof. Muller was partially funded by the Left’s arch enemy, the Koch Foundation. He wants us to believe that even a foundation funded by right-wing billionaires has come around to the global warming ‘consensus.’

True, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation has donated $150,000 to The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study. But this was less than one quarter of the total amount of donations to the study. For example, the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (created by Bill Gates) donated $100,000. The largest contributor was the  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  ($188,587). This laboratory, managed by the University of California,  is a member of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. Eleven scientists associated with Berkeley Lab have won the Nobel Prize.

Clearly, Prof. Muller is associated with a renowned scientific organization. He is a highly credible scientist, not part of some “climate skeptic game,” as Krugman would lead us to believe. And, as is true with any credible scientist, Prof. Muller follows the evidence – which is more than can be said about Krugman himself.

Krugman tries to characterize Prof. Muller as having come over from the dark side of global warming deniers to the side of ‘truth’ in reporting preliminary results that affirm the findings of the consensus of global warming scientists. But all that Prof. Muller did in his congressional testimony was to report that, in using a randomly selected group of stations to study temperature changes over time rather than the stations more likely to show temperature increases selected by other climate change scientists, his preliminary results were “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

What Krugman neglected to include were these crucial caveats that Prof. Muller included in his testimony:

The Berkeley data are marked as preliminary because they do not include treatments for the reduction of systematic bias…The Berkeley Earth agreement with the prior analysis surprised us, since our preliminary results don’t yet address many of the known biases. When they do, it is possible that the corrections could bring our current agreement into disagreement.

In other words, the jury is still out on the reliability of the data and what it means for public policy decisions. Drawing scare-mongering conclusions from incomplete, potentially biased data, on the basis of which policy makers should rush headlong into making economically disastrous decisions, is both bad science and bad public policy. Prof. Muller knows this truth. Krugman and his global warming ideologues do not.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam

This list post was originally published here in January.

I write a lot about conservative talk radio, so (alas) I have to keep track of the Left’s hair-raising, borderline insane attacks on Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other hosts.

Here’s a round up of some of the biggest and craziest (unsuccessful) campaigns to destroy these powerful and popular pundits.

First up: the latest attempt to brand a talk radio host a “racist” fails miserably…

#5 “Monkey hear, monkey don’t”

Did you hear about the racist redneck talk radio host who referred to African-American students as “monkeys”?

The truth is: he didn’t.

Earlier this month, while criticizing his city’s dysfunctional public school system, WSPD’s Brian Wilson said:

“But certainly, teaching little monkeys to peel bananas and so on and them learning to do it correctly on cue does not mean that they’ve learned everything except a funny parlor trick.”

If you don’t see anything “racist” in those remarks, you’re not alone. The city’s public school system isn’t even overwhelmingly African-American; it’s 41% white and 8% Hispanic.

Nevertheless, the local newspaper, the Toledo Blade, easily convinced a gaggle of professional race-baiters to condemn Wilson’s imaginary bigotry. Then the trumped up “controversy” led to a public demonstration, with outraged protesters demanding an apology from the station.

Most predictably of all? When Wilson’s defenders pointed out that his 14-second clip had been purposely wrenched out of context, the Blade – which had run the “story” on four consecutive front pages — refused to admit they’d made a monkey out of a molehill.

Instead, the editors kept piling on, pointing out that, “Mr. Wilson doesn’t limit incendiary remarks to the airwaves. Atop his Web site is a picture of a microphone aflame.”

(Did I mention that the name of the crusading newspaper is… the Toledo Blade?)

Thanks to persistent pressure from the city’s alternative paper, the “story” is finally unraveling, but only after two weeks of daily character assassinations, and stubborn rumors of Wilson’s looming dismissal. (He still has his job.)

As the Toledo Free Press put it in their invaluable postmortem of the smear campaign:

“Toledo is not the hub of industry it once was, but if The Blade continues to manufacture stories like its recent Brian Wilson series, the Glass City’s production will rival Pittsburgh’s during the steel boom.”

Next: onto two big names — but only one big brain…

Rachel Maddow has been hinting around the race issue in Michigan with the Emergency Financial Manager issue for communities bankrupted by irresponsible leftist politicians and unsustainable union contracts.

One of her sleazy innuendoes has been to sneak in the word “overseer” instead of manager.  There is no way in which this term is more accurate, as the EMF is very hands on, not just overseeing anything.

But of course, when Jesse Jackson comes to town, it removes any need for subtlety or hinting around.  It’s time to say “black” and “African-American” a lot.

Now just imagine in a Republican were to point out how many of the bankrupt schools and cities were run by black overseers…

Once again, here is the True Twit’s commentary and guests, with the uninvited guest of yours truly adding context and a stray fact or two into the surreal discussion.

MADDOW:  We have been reporting about some extraordinary things being done by the government of the state of Michigan to the people of the state of Michigan.  (DF—No, you haven’t.  You haven’t said one word about what has been done to the taxpayers of the state of Michigan who have been bailing out Detroit with a huge amount of their tax dollars for years while their schools pay millions for teachers they have removed from the classroom and the City Council live like feudal lords.  You have cried about Benton Harbor, but haven’t mentioned they do the same thing on a much smaller scale.  THAT is what is being done to all the OTHER “people of the state of Michigan.”)

…

The new law that makes this possible, Michigan‘s Emergency Financial Manager Law, was the subject of a press conference today in the tiny town of Benton Harbor, with the Reverend Jesse Jackson there and John Conyers there, and the state‘s Legislative Black Caucus all spending time in this tiny African-American town on the shores of Lake Michigan. (Play that card, it shows your desperation) You‘ll remember that Benton Harbor is the first town in Michigan to have its entire elected government essentially put on ice by this emergency law.  (This is baloney.  Under the EMF law under Granholm in Flint, Pontiac, and other cities, the City Councils were stripped of all power to do anything but meet and gripe about the EMF.  The difference is the increase power to deal with the union contracts that are strangling the city budgets.  That’s why you largely see AFSME press releases on this—which Rachel is reading nearly verbatim as commentary.) This emergency manager was appointed by the former Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, but the new emergency law gives the old state-appointed overseer (Okay, I’m getting REALLY sick of this loaded term, and don’t act like it’s not a reference to slavery) sweeping new power—sweeping new power to break a town‘s union contracts, to sell off community assets, even to hire and fire the officials elected by that town. (Well, no, he can’t appoint a new city council…)

Unilaterally, one person gets to decide, no appeal, no process, no local decision making whatsoever. (This is also unadulterated bull.  The town still has a State Representative and a State Senator who are directly responsible to the voters and for the EMF.  Nobody wants to do this and be called a racist dictator.  But the state is no longer going to bail out these egregious contracts.  If these communities would foreswear all state funds…)

In Benton Harbor, the overseer (that’s twice, Twit) has now stripped the mayor and the city commission of all of their duties, and you can see how happy some of the people in Benton Harbor are about their new state-appointed boss.

Benton Harbor and the Detroit public schools are both flat broke.  The state‘s position seems to be that they are broken and that for them, democracy itself is part of the problem.  (Who they elected is damn near ALL of the problem.  Here are a couple examples.

As was reported in an excellent column by Julie Mack in the Kalamazoo Gazette, which destroyed a previous Maddow rant about Benton Harbor:

That occurred, incidentally, after a state review found the city’s pension system was underfunded by $4 million, its cash reserves dwindled from $1.7 million to $300,000 in three years and the city was spending between $80,000 to $100,000 annually in overdraft fees. The same week that Benton Harbor officials forcefully told state officials at a hearing that they didn’t need an emergency financial manager, they had to ask the state treasury for an advance on funds to make their payroll.

And here is how the clowns on the Benton Harbor city council exercises the one power it has left—to have meetings and pass nonbinding resolutions according to station WNDU:

The saga continues in Benton Harbor over the city’s emergency financial managerbut this time, Joseph Harris is getting the last laugh.

Our reporting partners at the Herald Palladium report that city commissioners were trying to pass a motion that would require Harris to attend an upcoming training program for emergency financial managers.

The motion failed, however, once commissioners learned Harris would already be there as an instructor.

Okay enough reality, back to Rachel.

MADDOW: With this emergency law in Michigan, the state says that these places can‘t be fixed with their democracy in place and functioning, that the solution for them depends on doing away with that democracy, doing away with representative government, doing away with their elected officials.  (Did they take them out and shoot them?  Calm down.  And as I pointed out, they still have elected state representatives.) The repair for their brokenness begins with ending their democratic decision making and imposing something shocking name to it but is the only way to describe this—imposing a kind of dictatorship, with the dictator being a person of the state‘s choosing.

If that sounds off to you, consider the news today from Benton Harbor.

Reverend Jackson and the state‘s black lawmakers preparing to challenge Michigan‘s new approach to democracy for hard times.  The message from Mr. Jackson and from others today: organize and sue. (Why would Jesse Jackson saying to sue make me “consider the news” and apply the word “dictator.”  Jesse Jackson doesn’t apply those words to the Assads or Khadaffy.  The fact that he was joined by John Conyers, husband of Monica Conyers who is about to do time for being too corrupt for even the Detroit City Council is just too rich.  I mean, really?)

Joining us now is Democratic State Representative Fred Durhal.  He is chairman of the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus.  He was at the press conference today in Benton Harbor.

Thank you for being here with us tonight, sir.  Appreciate your time.

STATE REP. FRED DURHAL (D), MICHIGAN:  Rachel, thank you very much for allowing us to come and talk with you today.

MADDOW:  Clearly, you consider this emergency manager law to have constitutional problems, enough that you are getting ready to sue over it.  Can you describe for us the basis of this legal challenge? (Yes, Jesse Jackson would never back a lawsuit on shaky Constitutional grounds!)

DURHAL:  Yes.  We are looking at the U.S. Constitution, in Article 1, Section 10-1, which talks about contracts.  It talks about the ability of the federal government to stop any state from being able to squash contracts.  And that is important for this struggle, because what is going on is that you have an emergency financial manager and a new law, which allows him to unilaterally come in and just take contracts and tear them up. (That’s right, we reserve that treatment for UAW members who actually PAY for the mistakes and bad management like the idiots on the Benton Harbor City Council.)

MADDOW:  If this emergency manager –

DURHAL:  So we believe –

MADDOW:  I‘m sorry, sir, go ahead.

DURHAL:  Yes, we believe that it is unconstitutional to do that.  We also have in Michigan a Home Rule Act, and we‘re going to also challenge the violation of the Home Rule Act, which allows cities, villages and townships to be able to function and make their own laws. (… and to be bailed out and spend the rest of the state’s money in perpetuity?)

MADDOW:  If this emergency manager law is allowed to stay on the books, how many Benton Harbors and Katherine Ferguson academies do you think we are looking at?  How many places get assigned this sort of emergency unilateral overseer? (That’s three.)

DURHAL:  Well, let me tell you, in Michigan, we know right now that there are about 120 school districts that are ready to go bankrupt or have some level of financial trouble and that gets them to a point where an emergency manager can be appointed.  We also know that there are approximately 100 cities, villages and townships in Michigan that are in the same state of trouble. (Bankrupt?  The way Rachel and Virg Bernero tell it, all it takes is a sneeze… Bankrupt?  Let’s see, what happens in bankruptcy court.  Oh, right, a judge assumes dictatorial powers and voids all contracts…)

MADDOW:  Why do you think the state wants to try to fix problems in this particular way?  Why would the democratically-elected government of a place like Benton Harbor or the dually elected school board of a place like Detroit be an obstacle toward—an obstacle in those places, getting themselves back on track?  An obstacle rather than the means by which you‘d do it?  (See above and about 114,634,346,657 other examples in these cities.  And who got them in this mess?  Oh, right, George W. Bush!)

DURHALL:  I really don‘t know the answer to that, (because you are just as incompetent?) except to say that it seems to us to be part of a national agenda.  And the national agenda has to do with breaking contracts of the unions, interfering with the ability (“ability?”  If they had “ability” they wouldn’t be “bankrupt.”  If you think they have that “ability” I am sure you won’t mind if they do without aid from the State of Michigan…) of cities to be able to function and solve their own problems.  All of this sounds very anti-democratic to me, and we intend to fight it all the way through if we have to go to the Supreme Court.

MADDOW:  Do you think the people of Michigan are surprised that this is what they got from Rick Snyder as governor?  Was there any indication during the election season that this is what people would be voting for if they voted the Republicans in and this Republican governor in?

DURHAL:  No, I don‘t think so.  I think that during the campaign, Governor Snyder was not very open about what he was going to do and how he was going to fix the problems.  I think that people upon his election began to se the real Rick Snyder.  And I don‘t think that they like it.

Here is a man who talks about taxing seniors‘ pensions, eliminating the earned income tax credit, which is federal in nature and also allows poor people to be able to receive some benefit.  There have been taxes upon education, reducing the pupil allowance by $470.  (Say what?  Reducing aid is a “tax?”  But according to Obama, taking less is an expenditure… my head hurts!) He has also gone and eliminated statutorily revenue sharing, which in the case of the city of Detroit will cost it $179 million.  And when you ad that to its present $150 million deficit, you get $320 million, which sets it up for the emergency financial manager. (And this governor, whose state is sending hundreds of millions of dollars to Detroit every year thinks the state should have a say in whether or not it’s going down a rathole?  The NERVE!)

MADDOW:  Fred Durhal, Democratic state representative and chairman of Michigan‘s Legislative Black Caucus—thank for your time tonight, sir.  It‘s good to have you help us understand this story.  Really appreciate it.

DURHAL:  Thank you so much, we appreciate you.  Keep fighting.

MADDOW:  I‘m trying.  Thank you, sir.

As a postscript, Governor Rick Snyder is going to be on his own trip to Benton Harbor next week.  He will be the grand marshal in the Annual Blossomtime Grand Floral Parade.  He‘ll be the first governor to do that since 1984.  Seriously.  Rick Snyder, Benton Harbor, next week. (Well, he’s got more business to be there than… oh, Jesse Jackson!  Or Mr. Monica John Conyers)

With the use of the word “overseer” the True Twit is trying to conjure images of this:

So, here is Benton Harbor’s “overseer” Joseph Harris:

Here is the Detroit Public Schools “overseer” Robert Bobb:

And here is Detroit Mayor and former Pistons star Dave Bing, who is calling for an EMF for his city:

’nuff said?

Check out NewsReal Blog’s new series exposing The Rachel Maddow Show.

As the White House deals a devastating blow to one Obama conspiracy theory, leave it to leftists to dig up another one to browbeat allegedly-bigoted conservatives with. At the Daily Beast, pseudo-feminist Michelle Goldberg “traces the far-right history of the claim” that something funny’s going on with Barack Obama’s academic background:

Claims about Obama’s educational history date back to September 2008, when The Wall Street Journal attacked him for not releasing his school records, writing in an editorial, “Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference.” Since then, Orly Taitz, queen of the birthers, has developed elaborate theories about Obama’s college years. As Taitz argues, Obama himself acknowledged that he was directionless when he started college. How, then, did he get himself accepted into the Ivy League?

Despite purporting to refute the right-wing “fever swamps,” Goldberg won’t actually reference the WSJ piece again, so it’s worth mentioning that it makes substantive points, among them that the ambiguity of Obama’s college days doesn’t square with the prominence of his personal story in his claim to fame. And as Andy McCarthy points out, Obama has a habit of modifying details of his biography for different audiences. (Ace has more solid analysis of Obama’s college days here.)

But not a peep about any of this from Goldberg. Instead of addressing what serious Obama critics have said, she spends the next couple paragraphs shooting down the theories of Orly Taitz, an especially destructive Birther attorney, who speculates that Obama attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student, attended for a mere nine months instead of two years, and even that he got into Harvard Law thanks to the machinations of a Saudi prince.

Whatever the fact-to-crap ratio of Taitz’s allegations may be (the Saudi connection seems outlandish, but the explanation of the National Student Clearinghouse rep, who says Taitz got bad results from submitting queries to NSC’s database incorrectly, doesn’t seem adequate either), it’s ultimately a sideshow. The point is, Goldberg is making clowns like Orly Taitz the face of the opposition rather than McCarthy or the Wall Street Journal editorial board because she wants to delegitimize their argument without addressing it. Why? Why else—race-baiting:

It’s easy enough to see why this particular narrative has endured. Not only does it position the president as a Muslim Manchurian candidate with longtime ties to agents of the caliphate, but it also assures resentful whites that this seemingly brilliant black man isn’t so smart after all. In that sense, it’s of a piece with the right-wing obsession with Obama’s use of a teleprompter, and with the widespread suspicion that he didn’t really write the eloquent Dreams From My Father, a claim Trump recently made at a Tea Party rally. Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative-action baby.

Trump is clearly not as intelligent as Obama, but he’s not an idiot, either. When he blows this particular dog whistle, he knows exactly what the Republican base is hearing.

No, the Right’s desire to knock Obama’s brain down a peg is a reaction to the endless mainstream media narrative that conservatives and Republicans are morons, while Obama is a genius (indeed, look no further than Goldberg’s own unsupported claim that Donald Trump’s intellect “clearly” pales in comparison to The One’s). To demonstrate the absurdity of claiming this is about Obama’s race, let’s perform a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that instead of black Democrat President Barack Obama, we currently have white Democrat President Barry Osborn, who, aside from his racial and ethnic background, is identical to Obama in every way—same handling of the economy, same healthcare plan, same treatment of Israel, and the same positions on abortion, guns, etc. Then take any of the claims listed above—the president isn’t that bright, he didn’t write his book, he’s helpless without a teleprompter. Regardless of their particular merits, simply ask yourself: do you really think we’d be treating Osborn any more favorably than Obama? Do you think we’d pull these punches against a white ideological opponent, or be more open to left-wing ideas just because they came from a white leftist?

Of course not. Leftists understood from the start that Obama’s skin color would make a potent weapon for smearing opponents instead of engaging their ideas, which is exactly what Michelle Goldberg has done here.

We’re all used to the zeal with which leftists conjure ugly smears of conservatives, but when conservatives prove the stereotype wrong, it takes serious chutzpa to then make a controversy out of that. Such is the spectacle on display in Terry Greene Sterling’s latest Daily Beast report, which tries to make sense out of recent decisions by Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer which don’t exactly fit the MO of a right-wing extremist:

A year ago, incumbent Republican Gov. Jan Brewer was trailing her Democratic rival Terry Goddard in the Arizona gubernatorial race. Then Brewer signed SB 1070, the state’s notorious immigration law, and further pandered to her Republican Tea Party base by touting her proud membership in the NRA, labeling unauthorized migrants drug mules, and scaring the daylights out of Arizonans with false tales of “beheadings” in the desert. Despite an agonizingly embarrassing senior moment in televised pre-election debates, Brewer rode a wave of conservative sentiment into the governor’s office, and achieved iconic status among her supporters.

(Since you bring it up, our friends at NewsBusters actually did find confirmation that at least one immigration-related beheading took place. But I digress)

A year later, incredibly, that iconic status hasn’t diminished, even though Brewer, 66, appears to be changing her political stripes. She reversed a cold-hearted decision to deprive poor people of state-funded transplants in Arizona (after three patients on the transplant list died) and stunned Arizonans on Monday when she vetoed two Tea Party pet measures that had sailed through the state house. Her apparent tick toward the right-of-center comes on the heels of a highly successful Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry campaign to kill five proposed state immigration laws that Brewer likely would have supported a year ago.

In her sudden about-face, Brewer axed a “birther” bill that required federal and state candidates to submit to the Arizona secretary of state a “circumcision certificate” or a “baptismal” certificate absent a “long form” birth certificate. In a letter to House Speaker Kirk Adams, Brewer implied that the circumcision language was tacky and claimed the bill went “too far” while doing nothing “constructive” for the state. And she told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News that the bill was a “distraction.”

She also vetoed a measure that would allow guns on vaguely defined “public pathways” close to state schools. In a letter to her political ally, Senate Majority Leader Russell Pearce, Brewer huffed that the gun measure was “poorly written” and could be construed to mean that people could pack guns on “public pathways” meandering through grammar schools and kindergartens.

“So what gives?” Sterling asks. Why the “shocking” transformation? Why, despite Brewer supposedly having re-invented herself as the second coming of Charlie Crist, aren’t “Tea Party Republicans furious at Brewer?”

It’s all part of a plan, insists State Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat. Republican lawmakers who don’t support the bills vote for them anyway. They do this to appease extremist voters who will shape future primary elections, she says. Brewer, who is not facing re-election due to term limits, then vetoes the bills.

“The legislators knew she would veto the birther bill, and that’s why they passed it,” says Sinema. “Same with the gun bill. I actually had a Republican legislator give me a high-five when Brewer vetoed the birther bill.”

“I don’t think one should give Jan Brewer credit for stepping away from extremism,” adds Andrei Cherny, chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party.

Could be. Then again, it could be that Brewer simply disagreed with the bills, and that her supporters don’t think the occasional disagreement makes them enemies. Brewer regards the chase for Barack Obama’s “real” birthplace as a dead end and a distraction from the challenges facing Arizona as well as the rest of the country. As for the other measures, I’ll leave it for Arizonans to determine whether they’re just cases of “poorly written” bills, or if Brewer really has caved, but it’s worth noting that none of what Sterling references seems to violate the standard conservative litmus tests. It’s not as if Brewer suddenly announced she’s pro-choice, moved to appease unions, or came out in favor of cap-and-trade.

Fortunately, the Left has that base covered, too, as Sterling reminds us that impartially reports on someone else reminding us that Brewer’s still pretty darn extreme:

Brewer’s already done considerable damage, Cherny and other Democrats say. Brewer signed the embarrassing, costly, and ineffective SB 1070.

Embarrassing? To whom? Costly? Illegal immigration isn’t exactly cheap, either. And ineffective? Think that might have something to do with, in Sterling’s own words, the law being “partially stayed by federal courts”?

She signed a law that allowed Arizonans to pack concealed guns without permits.

Ah yes, because we all know that guns always lead to evil and never to good.

She approved draconian cuts to state education and health care.

I hope you’ll forgive me for somehow doubting that state education and healthcare bureaucrats have been spending the cut money wisely.

She signed a measure that would give priority in adoptions to heterosexual married parents over gay or single parents.

Translation: Brewer thinks the state should prefer that orphaned children have both a mother and a father when possible, while still allowing gays and singles to adopt when not. What a nut!

When someone acts contrary to a stereotype assigned to her, normal people usually react by questioning the stereotype and those pushing it. Leftists, however, react by salvaging the smear in any way they can, in this case twisting Jan Brewer’s prudence into evidence that she’s even more sinister than before. If only they could put that ingenuity to less malevolent uses.

Hailing Obama’s budget address this week as “a victory for math” Rachel Maddow proclaimed that Obama had brought needed arguments to the table that were “sorely lacking.”  Maybe she meant clarity of language like this, which would have George Orwell scratching his head:

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA  “… It calls for tax reform to cut about $1 trillion dollars in tax expenditures—spending in the tax code.”

Guess what that means.  Think it through.  Give up?  Maybe that’s because you don’t think every dime you have is at the good graces of government which “spends” it by letting you keep it.

Tax reform usually means lowering rates and closing specific breaks… now think exactly the opposite.

Yep, that’s how Barack Obama describes a $1 trillion tax increase!  And you thought Clinton’s “contributions” phraseology was Orwellian.

But Obama’s view of the world is forever informed by his days as a Chicago community organizer.  ACORN’s view of the world is that people are poor because the rich have taken too big a slice of the pie and left nothing for the proletariat.

That is precisely the point of Barack Obama’s budget speech—perhaps the most class war-driven speech any President has ever given– and the reason for the ecstatic reaction from MSNBC socialists Rachel, Ed, and Lawrence.

Here is Rachel’s complete True Twit Two-Step happy dance after the speech.  It’s long, but informative as to how these people view the world, the economy and just how little regard they have for the idea that Americans can make any economic decisions for themselves.

Rachel started off with a weird stretch of an analogy that made Chris Matthews strangest movie clip seem apropos…

MADDOW”  There are a few problems in American public policy that cannot be explained a little better with help from the great allegory that is “Three‘s Company.”(VIDEO CLIP PLAYS)

MADDOW:  Sorry. Imagine if you will that our roommates in this allegorical case are Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Barack Obama, and your adorable but unemployed and desperately broke cousin, who in this case looks a little bit like Suzanne Somers.

OK.  So, technically it is four‘s a company, not three‘s company.

Maybe Mrs. Roper lives them or something, whatever.  We give a break.

In any case, these are the roommates, and the roommates‘ problem is that their rent is too high.  They can no longer afford the place that they are all staying in.  It was all right when they moved in, but the rent has been going up and up and up.  And now, it‘s just too darn high.  They cannot afford the rent anymore.

So, roommates John Boehner and Paul Ryan go away together and come up with a plan for dealing with the too darn high rent.  They say their plan is that roommate Paul Ryan, roommate Barack Obama and roommate John Boehner should pay less rent than what they are paying now, and the difference should be paid by your cousin.  They say that‘s their plan for making the rent cheaper.

Does that actually make the rent cheaper?  No, no, it does not.  But as far as they‘re concerned, it does.  If nobody is really looking out for your cousin‘s interests, then you‘re sort of getting away with saying that it did.  Thank you “Three‘s Company.”

But that is what the Republican budget does about health care.  It doesn‘t reduce health care costs at all.  It just makes cuz pay for more of those costs and thereby calls it cheaper for everybody else.  It looks at the problem of rising health care costs over time and says the government should stop paying its share of those costs, and let poor people and old people and disabled people—let them just pay more for it on their own.  Sorry, cuz. (Ummm, Rachel, since it’s the people using Medicare that you claim are going to have to pay so much more, this is an inane analogy.  In reality, Cuz has been living there for less than his quarter share, because Cuz doesn’t make as much.  Cuz is the one using all the hot water, has the TV on all day running up the electric bill and eats twice as much as everyone else.  Now that the rent is going up, you think the three roommates who work should continue to pay more… because they can.)

That‘s how Republicans deal with health costs—or rather how they do not deal with health costs at all.  And that rather brutal but true point was one of the many brutal points made today by President Obama in his big, perhaps unexpectedly satisfying speech on the budget and spending, and what is the difference between a Republican and a Democrat in America today?

Now, as I say, I think this point about Republicans and health care was a brutal point.  I demonstrated this brutality by putting in the context of “Three‘s Company.”  Listen to how the president did it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:  The third step in our approach is to further reduce health care spending in our budget.  Now, here the difference with the House Republican plan could not be clear.  Their plan essentially lowers the government‘s health care bills by asking seniors and poor families to pay them instead.  Our approach lowers the government‘s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself.  (END VIDEO CLIP)

 

MADDOW:  He could not have sounded more genial and professorial when he said it.  (Yes, Rachel, we can see where you would call a smug lecture “congenial.”  That would make you Miss Congeniality) It could not have sounded any less blunt.  But the point he was making there was both blunt and confrontational and important, and it needed to be said.  And that‘s what the speech was like today.

Whether or not you saw the president‘s speech, my advice to you is to read it at some point.  It‘s not very long, it only prints out to eight or nine pages long.  But you can actually print it out from our Web site tonight, we posted it at MaddowBlog.MSNBC.com.  We got the full text of it there.  (But somehow you haven’t included the Orwellian way of discussing tax increases above in your long discussion here…)

If you did not see the speech and your first contact with it is going to be reading it.  You will think when you‘re reading it that when he gave the speech, he must have been breathing fire and pounding the podium.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He was utterly sedate.  It look like a Rotary luncheon address.

But the message was less rotary and more roundhouse.  That point about the Republican‘s plan for making health care cheaper by making old people and poor people and disabled people just pay more for it, that is a blunt confrontational point and it is a good point.  (Yes, he bluntly called Paul Ryan “un-American.”  For trying to enforce some minor budget discipline.  Remember the outcry when people hinted that openly rooting for the other side in a war was un-American? )

The president‘s next point on that was that the whole point of health reform is to bring down the cost of health care.  (No, the whole point is to take it over and make in an entitlement.  No one still believes it will cut costs, unless there are wholesale death panels…) Republicans are still attacking that, even as they have no plan of their own on health care costs.  (The fact that you don’t like their plans, that trial lawyers who fund the Democratic Party especially don’t like their plans, that their plans are market based and won’t socialize medicine does not mean they don’t exist.) That is a good point that is both true and has been sorely missing from all the political complaints about health reform. 

The president made the point today that the Paul Ryan proposal to privatize Medicare kills Medicare.  That intrinsic to the whole idea of Medicare is that it is an entitlement, that is it exists as a safety net that everybody can defend on it.  Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid are entitlements for a reason, and by the way, they work.  That was a good point  from the president today and one that has been missing from the debate over budgets and deficits.  (Actually, it hasn’t been missing, this lie is as everpresent as oxygen, it has been screamed from the rooftops by such geniuses as Elijah Cummings ad nauseum, and repeated in every MSM news show on the planet.)

Amid the nonsense arithmetic-free rhetoric about deficits and debt, the president made the point today that historically, you know, it makes sense to run deficits when the country is at war or when the country is in a recession.  But that when you are not at war or in a recession, you should aim to get back in balance.  In other words, deficits themselves are not evil.  They have a purpose.  They should be used strategically.  (That was an arithmetic free argument… it was also economics free, but not intentionally.  There is no evidence that government spending brings anyone out of a recession—unless you count tax cuts as spending, oh, right.  I forgot, you don’t know the difference.)

That, again, is a good point and one that has been sorely missing from the debate about deficits and debt and the budget.  The president made the point today that after the huge Reagan deficits for the 1980s, we actually did get back to balance in the 1990s.  We even got back into surplus.  (Wait, the Reagan tax cuts worked?  Uh, wasn’t that “supply side?”  Yikes!)

He made the point that America‘s finances were in great shape by the year 2000.  Quote, “We went from deficit to surplus.  America was actually on track,” he said, to becoming completely debt-free.  (Yes, and here is the point that Democrats love to forget about.  Clinton did raise income taxes slightly, but he also made trade deals and brought down tariffs faster than any president in recent memory—which were all effectively tax CUTS.)

And we were prepared for the retirement of the baby boomers, (No, we weren’t.  This ticking time bomb has been there ever since birth rates dropped to replacement rates, and probably before then.  It just depends on what accounting trick is being used in what year to put the date Social Security goes broke wherever somebody wants it to be.) but then what happened?  After Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, he lost, we lost our way in the decade that followed.  Yes, bingo!

Mr. Obama continued, “We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program. (Which was about HALF THE COST OF THE DEMOCRAT PROGRAM) But we didn‘t pay for any of this new spending.  Instead, we made the problems worse with trillions of dollars in tax cuts—tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country, (and everybody who pays taxes.  Ummm, gee Barack, remember when you said if you didn’t extend the Bush tax cuts, it would be a big tax increase for the middle class, so big that you had to renew them, even if it would help the hated rich?) tax cuts that will force us to borrow $500 million every year over the next decade.”

“By the time I took office,” Mr. Obama said, “We once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a baby boom retirement that is now starting to take place.  When I took office,” he said, “our projective deficit annually was more than $1 trillion.  And on top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession.”  (and when Nancy Pelosi took the office of Speaker, it was about $150 billion and shrinking…)

And what do you have to do in a recession?  Like he said, before, right, earlier in the speech, in a recession, you are supposed to be able to run a temporary deficit in order to keep the economy ticking.  (By cutting taxes and boosting the private economy, not by growing government and making the overhead and expense to the economy heavier and permanent!) Having to do that itself makes sense, he made the case for that today.

But having to do that while starting from an already catastrophic fiscal position that George W. Bush left the country in, that‘s what does not make sense.  That is the disaster.  That is true.  And that‘s a good point.

And that has been missing from the debate about deficits and budget.  Just naming that the Bush tax cuts were unpaid for, that the Bush tax cuts exploded the deficit—just naming that, frankly, is a hallelujah moment.  That is a victory for math.  Cutting tax revenue reduces tax revenue.  I know, I know, it‘s barely even math.  It‘s almost an axiom.  (Here’s some math, if you taxed millionaires at 100% it wouldn’t take care of this year’s deficit.  Forget about the fact that they would stop working, so you’d only get it for this year…)

But at this point, it is a point that has been almost from the debate.  And the president saying it today is a good point, and one that really should re-center the way that people talk about this stuff.

Mr. Obama today confessed to signing an extension of those tax cuts this past December.  But he again said that he didn‘t think it was a good idea.  He only did it under duress in order to stop something worse from happening that the Republicans were going to force.  (Again, what consequences.  Oh, right, the BUSH MIDDLE CLASS TAX CUTS WOULD HAVE BEEN REPEALED.)

Will he let those tax cuts get renewed again?  Mr. President?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)OBAMA:  We can‘t afford it.  And I refuse to renew them again.  (END VIDEO CLIP)  (Just for clarity’s sake, do you refuse again to renew them, or refuse to renew them again?  You said you wouldn’t once before, and you did…)

MADDOW:  I refuse to renew them again, cut that out and stick it to the fridge.  (That’s right, middle class, you have a date certain for a tax increase if you re-elect the economist from ACORN) Beyond nailing the last Republican president, though, for the disastrous impact of his unpaid for tax cuts, President Obama today nailed the Republican Party for proposing even more of the same, fiscally irresponsible, arithmetically challenge tax cut nonsense.

“House Republicans,” he said, “are calling for $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.”  “Think about that,” he said, “in the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined.  Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each.  And that‘s who needs to pay less taxes?” (Note, he didn’t say their taxes went down, just that their income went up.  This is pertinent to the discussion HOW?  There income didn’t go up the mere 3% that their taxes went down, so therefore, the tax cuts stimulated economic activity… ooops.)

Again, when you read this speech, you would think he would be fire-breathing here, right?  I mean, he‘s making fire-breathing points.  He was not fire-breathing.  He could not have been more calm, cool and collected.

He was doing math out loud—math out loud.  But it is devastating math.  Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)  OBAMA:  That‘s who needs to pay less taxes?  They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that‘s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs.  That‘s not right, and it‘s not going to happen as long as I‘m president.  (APPLAUSE) (END VIDEO CLIP)  (Now the LAST part of that is a promise I can live with!)

MADDOW:  And that was as wild as the crowd went during the whole speech.  (Maybe they liked the talk of the end point to this disaster too?)

Again, this does not sound like barn burning stuff.  But the point President Obama is making here, is exactly the point that the president‘s supporters have been waiting for him to make.  You almost have to telestrate the arithmetic while he does this.  But if you are willing to do it, the impact of what he‘s saying really can hit you.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA:  They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut.

MADDOW:  OK, stop.  So, a $200,000 tax cut.  OK, keep going.

(BEGIN VDIEO CLIP) OBAMA:  That‘s paid for by asking, 33 seniors – (END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  OK, wait, wait.  Thirty-three seniors—do we have an icon for seniors or something?  Yes!  OK, 33 seniors.  OK, keep going.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA:  That‘s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs.  (END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  Freeze.  Stop it.  Thirty-three seniors pay $6,000 each.  The math—(Really, are you afraid that none of your viewers have finished 3^rd grade?  That simple division is a new concept to them?) OK, finish it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA:  That‘s not right, and it‘s not going to happen as long as I‘m president.(APPLAUSE)  (END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  What he‘s saying is that in order to get his $200,000 tax cut as one of the richest people in the country, right, the way Republicans want to finance that is by extracting 6 grand from 33 different old people.  (How about this, the failed stimulus plan that went to bail out public employee unions and push the problem down the road to the current crop of governors was like having around 162,000,000 – for those of you in Rachel’s audience, that’s 162 million—seniors pay $6000 more for their health care.  That did happen, and it happened while Barack Obama was president.  Rather because Barack Obama was President.)

He is right about that.  That is a good point.  That is exactly what the Republicans are trying to do.

They are claiming to reduce the deficit enough to afford this kind of thing for rich people by squeezing that money out of old people (Are Warren Buffet, Ross Perot and George Soros YOUNG people),and disabled people and other people (who are you callin’ “Other people?”) who this country has historically made a commitment to take care of.

Now, whether or not you can tell us straight out in your head while he‘s saying it, it may not have hit like a ton of bricks when he said it, but the president here is making the case that the Republicans‘ proposal for America is transferring resources and money from people who really do not have it to spare in order to give a ton of those resources and money to people who are already rich.  Good point.  (No, not taking something from Person A and giving it to Person B, is most assuredly NOT the freaking same as taking it from Person B and giving it to Person A, it just isn’t.)

And because that is a transfer of resources, and not a saving of resources, it not only isn‘t courageous or brave or serious, or any of the other things that the Republicans are getting called right now on the Beltway media.  It‘s not brave or courageous.  It‘s not even those things.  It‘s not even a real plan to reduce the deficit.

Oh, and the president said that, too.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA:  There‘s othing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending $1 trillion on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.  And I don‘t think there‘s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don‘t have any clout on Capitol Hill.  (Old people don’t have clout on Capitol Hill?  Ask Dan Rostenkowski, ask every congressman who spends half his campaign budget on absentee voter programs, as the Republicans who joined George W. Bush in promoting even the tiniest privatization of Social Security for those who volunteered to participate— and boy, that would be a LOT of wasted AARP contributions. That‘s not a vision of the America I know.  (END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  It is about transferring money from politically powerless people, who don‘t have much, to rich people, and claiming that‘s about the deficit when it is plainly not.  (It’s about NOT  taking from those who have and giving it to those who don’t, so they can afford to employ those who don’t, and oh, because they EARNED IT.) That is not serious or courageous.  In fact, it is radical and it is something that does not resonate with American values—so said President Obama today.  (It doesn’t resonate with Swedish values or French values anyway.)

Whatever you heard about this speech, whether or not you believe the way that I am describing it, whether or not you watched it today, I never say on this show—print out and read this thing, or very rarely say it.  In this case, if you have a second, print it out and read it.  Print it out and keep it around, so if you have minute, spend a few minutes reading it.

If you are a liberal or if you are a centrist, if you are a person who voted for President Obama, if you were worried that President Obama would not confront the Republicans on what they are trying to do with the economy and instead would triangulate against it—Mr. Obama did not do that. (Really, that’s what CENTRISTS were worried about?  Center of WHAT?)

If you were worried the President Obama would sell out Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and say we can‘t forward them any more, like the Republicans wanted him to say—Mr. Obama did not do that.  (If you were worried about that, you haven’t been paying attention.)

If you were worried he would let the Republicans and the Beltway media get away with this bogus assertion that they make constantly that Social Security is causing the deficit, when it is not—he did do not.  He, in fact, called that out as bogus today.  (No, he pretended that the tax cut to the rich was bigger than the looming payouts to Baby Boomers in Social Security demagoguery of the worst order and not even in the same classroom with Math.  Maybe a Philosophy Course at Berkely…)

If you were worried that Mr. Obama would follow the Republican line that deficits themselves are always evil, that he would ignore the fact that Republicans are the ones who create the worst ones and at the worst times, Mr. Obama emphatically did not do that.

I am a liberal.  I am a liberal, and, therefore, I am a professional worrier about Democrats talking smack about what liberals value, and about Democrats trying to sound like Republicans, and about Democrats who are afraid to confront Republicans and who instead eat Republicans‘ framing about what‘s wrong with the country, in particular what‘s wrong about the economy and what are available options are.

You know, coming out of this last deal on the budget that President Obama made with the Republicans on Friday night, frankly this president gave liberals reason to worry all over again.

But today, if this is the start of 2012, if this is how the rest of this term is going to go, leading up to his re-election effort, if this is how President Obama is going to run for re-election, if this is the way he‘s going to call Republicans out for what they‘re for and explain what‘s really going on in the economy and speak up for his own values and explain to the country why he believes Democrats values are the right ones on this stuff—then as a liberal, I am less worried than I was.

My only worry really at this point is why did he give this speech at 1:30 on a Wednesday and sort of whisper it.  (It was because this kind of blatant class warfare doesn’t work with the majority of the American people who, despite a generation of neglecting economic education, still don’t believe the government can spend us into prosperity.  But Obama knew that no matter when he “whispered” it, you would be listening Rachel, you and the rest of the restless twit base, and that you would make sure all of you got the word. With a little fine-tuning, I think this could be a barn burner.  I could imagine this one in a stadium over and over and over again!  (See it worked, now you will quit badgering the guy for a while– until the next time he stumbles into doing something right, or is forced to by reality.)

We‘ll be right back.

VIDEO CLIP, BARACK OBAMA:These aren‘t the kinds of cuts you make when you‘re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget.  These are the kinds of cuts that tell us we can‘t afford the America that I believe in, and I think you believe in.  I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  “These are not the cuts you make when you‘re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget,” he said.  So why would you find them then?  Implying these are the kinds of things you do when you‘re trying to fundamentally change the country.  (Wait a minute, “fundamental change” was what Obama promised and that’s a promise he is doing his damndest to keep.) In other words, it‘s not about the budget.  (That’s right Obama could give a rip about the budget.  Fundamental change from a private sector economy to public sector-driven economy is the goal.)

The president also today called out the Republican‘s plan for claiming to reduce the deficit while also giving away another $1 trillion tax cut to rich people, which means that the president committed math live on television—very dangerous.  (What the President committed was Mathicide.  His cuts are fictional and happen after he leaves office– long after.  Therefore the savings on the debt are fictional too– especially since they assume ludicrous “savings” from Obamacare’s implementation.  The “tax reform” i.e. tax increases, however are real.  You can take it to the bank.  Whenever Barack Obama says he will raise taxes, he means it– even if he can’t quite bring himself to actually SAY it.

The president‘s brushback in criticism of the Republicans today was, I think, stronger than most people expected.  Does that buy him from his own party, his supporters, more faith that his assurances that he will defend and protect Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security even as he said today that they need reform?  (Of course it does, check out all your rave reviews above.  You were the audience he had to fool.  And fool you he did.)

Paul Krugman, economist and New York Times op-ed columnist, wrote a column today entitled “Let’s Not Be Civil.” He loves President Obama’s deficit reduction plan, which would essentially raise taxes on the so-called “wealthy,” cut Medicare funding for seniors by a half trillion dollars to pay for Obamacare, and rely on unspecified savings.

Krugman hates Rep. Paul Ryan’s deficit reduction plan, which proposes long-term restructuring of major entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, elimination of tax loopholes for the well-connected like President Obama’s buddies at General Electric and the lowering of income tax rates across the board for all Americans. Krugman urges the Democrats opposing the Ryan plan not to be civil or try to reach a bi-partisan agreement with Republicans, whom he accuses of intellectual dishonesty.

Krugman cites the consulting firm Macroeconomics Advisers’ criticism of the Heritage Foundation analysis underpinning the Ryan plan. Krugman has faith in the intellectual honesty of Macroeconomics Advisers because it

makes its living telling businesses what they need to know, not telling politicians what they want to hear

If Krugman had a decent track record in offering sensible economic policy prescriptions for the country, then maybe we can forgive his obvious political biases and respect the fact that he did after all win the Nobel Prize for economics. However, the wisdom Krugman may possess as an academician is entirely lacking when he enters the arena of public policy debates. Moreover, he is the one who is intellectually dishonest.

Consider what Krugman had to say back in 2002 about the virtues of encouraging a housing bubble:

The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Realizing by 2009 how embarrassing his “housing bubble” recommendation turned out to be, he tried to deny that what he had written was one of his usual pieces of policy advocacy and said it was “just economic analysis.” For now on, Krugman’s op-ed articles should come with a disclaimer.

Krugman has a habit of trying to re-characterize or even deny what he had said in earlier pieces he wrote when, as often was the case, he was proven wrong by real world events. During a spirited debate with Bill O’Reilly on “Meet The Press” (8/7/2004), for example, O’Reilly pointed out how wrong Krugman had been in saying that the Bush tax cuts were going to be disastrous for the economy. Krugman denied he had ever said such a thing and called O’Reilly a liar. And then, when O’Reilly refused to back down, Krugman admitted:

I said the tax cuts were not going to be effective at creating jobs… this was not the kind of stimulus program that was going to be effective.

What are the facts? At the same point in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies, the unemployment rate was 5.8% in March 2003 and 8.8% in March 2011 respectively.

By February 2004 – the year of the Krugman-O’Reilly confrontation – the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent, the lowest in two years and below the average of the 1980s (7.3 percent) and ’90s (5.8 percent).

And what did Macroeconomics Advisers, the consulting firm whose opinion Krugman seems to respect so much when it serves his needs, say about the Bush tax cut program in 2002? Macroeconomics Advisers’ president described the tax package as

a remarkably well-timed application of counter-cyclical fiscal policy

Macroeconomics Advisers also had some positive things to say about the Obama stimulus program in terms of providing some net boost to the economy, although it called the program “messy and inefficient.” It said that the stimulus was a “’bridge’” not long enough to reach a sustainable recovery” and warned against sunsetting the Bush tax cuts unless the economy is already booming.

Krugman is guilty of what he often accuses his adversaries of doing – cherry picking whatever fits into his ideological straight-jacket. Moreover, he doesn’t have the intellectual honesty to admit when he is wrong. Either he denies ever saying what turned out to be wrong or he tries to revise its meaning in hindsight.

To find out how Krugman rewrites his latest column after events prove him wrong once again, we may have to wait a couple of years.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam

To love your country is to hate red ink.

Sounds like a Tea Party slogan, doesn’t it? This concise declaration of fiscal responsibility would look at home on many a conservative bumper or amid a sea of protest signs, but incredibly, it was uttered by Boston University history professor Andrew Bacevich as—I kid you not—a glowing endorsement of President Barack Obama’s April 13 speech on the federal budget. On the Daily Beast, Bacevich declares that the 44^th president has “expanded the operative definition of patriotism to encompass belief in balanced budgets”:

This is surely a good thing. So too is the president’s willingness to finger the essence of the problem: a widespread desire for an endless free lunch—people coveting government benefits without a willingness to pay for them.

Obama also performed a useful service in pointing out that any serious effort at deficit reduction will have to target the Big Four: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security.

Regarding that last category, the president promises to reassess not only military missions and capabilities, but also America’s role in the world. In our post-unipolar moment, such a reassessment is long overdue. Yet to have more than cosmetic results, Obama will have to take on some very sacred cows and some very powerful interests.

I defy you to find a more surreal reaction to Obama’s remarks. We’ve previously discussed how Diamond Barry’s proposed budgets have been so bloated they call for new taxes by the trillions to sustain them. The president might have said on Wednesday that he wants to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next twelve years, but as Mark Knoller of noted right-wing mouthpiece CBS News reports:

Budget totals issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in February project 10 years of deficits totaling $7.2 trillion between 2012 and 2021. Another two years at that rate would bring the 12 year total to $8.6 trillion.

The Obama 12-year plan would cut the projected deficit total in half, but would leave another $4 trillion in deficits that would be added to the National Debt, which now stands at $14.27 trillion.

Separately, OMB expects the Debt to double over the next ten years to a mind-boggling total of $26.3-trillion in 2021. It’s estimated the Debt that year would cost U.S. taxpayers $928-billion in interest payments. Four trillion dollars in deficit reduction would reduce the Debt to just over $22-trillion, and still inflict $700-billion in interest on the federal budget.

If budget-balancing really is the new patriotism, then Obama falls short of the good, solid B plus range right out of the gate. By the way, Obama has decided signing statements aren’t evil anymore, and is using one to declare that he simply won’t abide by Congress’s vote to de-fund his czars. I don’t see how unilaterally disregarding spending cuts enacted by the legislative branch gets you points as a fiscal hawk. This is what Professor Bacevich considers visionary leadership aimed at cleaning up the mess we’re in?

If we assess Obama’s approach to “sacred cows” (and no, it’s not bold for a leftist to say we’re spending too much on defense, which isn’t the problem area anyway), then the grade drops further still. Consider his reaction to the substantive (if imperfect) plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), which attempts to address Medicaid and Medicare. Did the Uniter-in-Chief applaud Ryan’s willingness to make tough decisions? Did our first post-partisan president offer to reach across the aisle to find common ground between their plans, while offering substantive, good-faith critiques of particulars he disagreed with? Er, not exactly:

But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history […] These are the kind of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America we believe in.  And they paint a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic […]

Worst of all, this is a vision that says even though America can’t afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can’t afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy […] their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.  As Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan.  There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.  There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.

The demagoguery is so thick you could cut it with a knife. The fact is, the Ryan budget returns discretionary spending to not-exactly stingy 2008 levels. And as the Wall Street Journal writes, his Medicare “cuts” are cuts “only in the sense of slowing the rate of growth,” and his healthcare proposals are meant to address government-distortion of the incentive structure: “By capping the Medicare subsidy, seniors would pay for the marginal costs of their care, promoting competitive insurance. That would in turn incrementally change how doctors and hospitals provide care, encouraging competition in price and quality.” And the tax cuts for the rich?

The Ryan budget outline by design does not provide many tax specifics, aside from an instruction to the Ways and Means Committee to propose a reform plan that would swap lower rates for fewer loopholes and special exclusions. This overhaul is not even a net tax cut—the instructions are to design a reform that is revenue neutral. It would hold tax receipts to their post-World War II average of between 18% to 19% as a share of the economy.

The liberal claim that this means a tax cut for the wealthy is based entirely on the fact that marginal tax rates would decline, even though the loopholes primarily benefit higher-income taxpayers. At any rate, Mr. Obama’s own deficit commission also favored lowering the rates and broadening the base for a more efficient and competitive tax code.

Mr. President, the only thing that embodies “a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history” is your vision. Your talk of what “we” can afford, what “we’ve” promised to this or that slice of the population, betrays your ignorance of a simple, quintessentially American truth: the people are not the government. Yes, we the people have a moral obligation to lend a hand to our young, our sick, and our downtrodden, but the role of our federal government is to protect our individual rights so we don’t have to watch our backs all the time, so we can focus on other pursuits, such as bettering ourselves and the world around us.

To recognize that the government can’t afford all the collective charity work our liberal betters think it should undertake is not to reject the individual’s obligations to his countrymen. Mr. President, you accuse conservatives of “changing the basic social compact in America.” America’s social compact is the United States Constitution, and we’re not changing a word of it—we’re simply reasserting it’s original, true meaning.

Is it just my perception or are labor protests nowadays consistently bringing out more communists and various assorted America-haters than they used to? Communists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and other freaks have always been hangers-on at labor demonstrations but a decade ago they tended not to be a significant portion of the crowd.

As I like to say, all political parties and political movements attract kooks, but since Barack Obama became president, the kooks in the labor movement and on the left in general seem to have been multiplying like mogwai in a hot tub. The leftist protests in Madison, Wisconsin, against Gov. Scott Walker’s desperately needed belt-tightening measures seemed to inspire a lot of Marxists to come out of the (union made) woodwork.

Which brings us to a recent labor rally in Chicago at which communists seemed to be in abundance. Union members and anti-American radicals attended a protest there “in solidarity” with the horribly oppressed $150,000 a year bus drivers in Wisconsin who just lost the legal right to collective bargaining.

As RebelPundit observed:

We have noticed an alarming message, prevalent at every single left wing protest we have attended this year in Chicago and the Midwest. While each protest has an official message of a seemingly less alarming cause, such as; Anti-War, Anti-Deportation or “We Are One” with “Union Solidarity”, there is also an extremely disturbing trend of blatant and obvious promotion of a revolutionary transformation of America into a new socialist or communist type of economic system.

The radicals were in full force at the Chicago rally as shown on this video:

RebelPundit noted he had been invited to the rally by a senior employee of the screeching leftist Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois). If Schakowsky’s not a communist in ideology, she’s pretty close. She happens to be married, by the way, to community organizer and convicted felon Robert Creamer who believed in social justice so much he wrote bad checks to cover his not inconsiderable salary at a left-wing nonprofit. But I digress.

All the communists were strangely invisible to the Chicago Sun-Times. That paper reported:

Laborers, carpenters, electricians, machinists, sheet metal workers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, actors, writers and pharmacists from Illinois and surrounding states marched from corners of the Loop, waving pro-union banners and chanting “We are one.”

Not one word about all the communists in attendance.

Kind of reminds you of the Washington press corps, doesn’t it?

Follow me on Twitter and check out my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

President Obama likes to talk about “winning the future.” His version of ”winning” is not even as credible as Charlie Sheen’s. Case in point was Obama’s speech on the deficit yesterday.  Obama invoked his “winning the future” mantra yet again, while offering a re-packaged, partisan version of his deeply flawed deficit-reduction plan and resorting to fear-mongering and exploitation of emotions in place of reasoned analysis.

President Obama’s response to the serious deficit reduction proposals put forth by House Republicans, led by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), was nothing more than a petulant variation on two tired themes – class warfare  and blaming George W. Bush for virtually every problem confronting Obama today — including the growing national debt. In fact, Vice president Joe Biden had heard this boring nonsense so many times before that he actually dozed off.

The New York Times, on the other hand, loved what its lead editorial today called the “reinvigorated” Obama. The Times will never get bored of trying to paint the Republicans as monsters trying to crush seniors and the poor,

while giving the rich $1 trillion in tax cuts

Let’s start with Obama’s attempt to blame his predecessors, most notably George W. Bush, for the deficits he is forced to tackle. Obama has racked up more deficits in his first two years in office than Bush did during his entire 8 years. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a graph depicting the Bush and Obama years, as well as Obama’s own projections for future trillion dollar deficits:

Next, let’s consider Obama’s class warfare arguments. He wants to crush the nation’s job creators with higher taxes. Even the left-wing Media Matters does not dispute that 50% of Americans have paid virtually no federal income taxes at all.

Here is data based on the 2008 tax year compiled by the National Tax Union from the Internal Revenue Service:

Tax Year 2008

Yet Obama wants to require small business owners and others earning more than $200,000 a year (or $250,000 for married couples  filing jointly) to pay even more of their earned income in taxes, rather than use that income to plow into their businesses or investments and help create more jobs.

If Obama is so concerned about “the wealthiest Americans” not paying their fair share, why doesn’t he go after his friends at General Electric? Obama’s favorite company, whose CEO Jeffrey Immelt was selected to serve as chairman of the Obama administration’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness , earned $14.2 billion in profits in 2010, but paid absolutely no federal income taxes. GE’s untaxed profits included more than $5 billion from U.S. operations.

By the way, Obama’s choice to head his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness has overseen GE’s layoff of 21,000 American workers and closure of 20 factories. Despite all this, Obama’s spokesman said just recently that the president continues to have faith in his pal Immelt to run the council. I guess Obama is only interested in selective class warfare while protecting his rich buddies.

Obama talked about spending cuts in his speech but offered only generalities. Without proposing any serious structural reform to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid in order to save them from bankruptcy and ensure that future generations of seniors and the poor will be able to receive federal assistance, Obama fell back on vague promises to cut spending and touted his discredited Obamacare program as an important contribution to that effort.

Obama did show his cards on one cost-reducing technique he is relying on to trim Medicare expenses – a federal panel that will substitute its judgment for the judgment of the patient and his or her own doctor as to what constitutes appropriate medical care for the patient:

we will slow the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumers who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services seniors need.

“Need” by whose definition? The federal government’s expert panels, of course.

Class warfare may play well to Obama’s base, and he may temporarily bump his poll numbers as he exploits populist sentiments. But if Obama’s job crushing tax increases and centralized government power over individuals’ medical treatments should ever become a reality, we will all be losers.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam

Leftist Rule for Engaging Conservative Ideas #1: conservatives’ motives are never what they claim. It must be rigorously asserted that right-wingers are invariably driven by impulses more sinister than making people better off or trying to find solutions to the problems we face. New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait knows that lesson by heart—on the Daily Beast, he argues that from the lowliest Tea Partier all the way up to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the Right is animated by a view of “the poor as parasites” and “the rich as our rightful rulers,” a dogma we’ve picked up from philosopher Ayn Rand:

Ayn Rand, of course, was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard—a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. The enduring heart of Rand’s totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.

John Galt, the protagonist of her iconic novel Atlas Shrugged, expressed Rand’s inverted Marxism: “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”

In 2009 Rand began popping up all over the Tea Party movement. Sales of her books skyrocketed, and signs quoting her ideas appeared constantly at rallies. Conservatives asserted that the events of the Obama administration eerily paralleled the plot of Atlas Shrugged, in which a liberal government precipitates economic collapse.

To be sure, Rand’s ultra-capitalist works have enjoyed a surge in popularity recently, a predicable response to our leaders overreaching in the opposite direction. But it’s not quite true to suggest Rand is universally embraced on the Right; for instance, consider National Review’s March 2009 symposium on Rand, which on the whole takes a dim view of the author (in fairness, she’s much more popular at Big Hollywood).

I haven’t read her, and have no strong opinions about her philosophy either way, but I can certainly tell when mainstream conservative thought is subjected to class-warfare caricatures:

When Ryan warns of the specter of collapse, he is not merely referring to the alarming gap between government outlays and receipts, as his admirers in the media assume. (Every policy change of the last decade that increased the deficit—the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—Ryan voted for.) He is also invoking Rand’s almost theological certainty that when a government punishes the strong to reward the weak, it must invariably collapse […]

Ryan casts these cuts as an incentive for the poor to get off their lazy butts. He insists that we “ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” It’s worth translating what Ryan means here. Welfare reform was premised on the tough but persuasive argument that providing long-term cash payments to people who don’t work encourages long-term dependency. Ryan is saying that the poor should not only be denied cash income but also food and health care.

The class tinge of Ryan’s Path to Prosperity is striking. The poorest Americans would suffer immediate, explicit budget cuts. Middle-class Americans would face distant, uncertain reductions in benefits. And the richest Americans would enjoy an immediate windfall. Santelli, in his original rant, demanded that we “reward people [who can] carry the water instead of drink the water.” Ryan won’t say so, but that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Two main fallacies sink Chait’s argument. First, have and have-not doesn’t have to be an either-or contest. Leftists speak as if one person simply having more constitutes stealing from another, as if there’s only so much wealth to go around. But that’s nonsense for the basic fact that most people, once they have money, don’t just stuff it in a safe and forget about it; we constantly spend it on all sorts of necessities and entertainment, at which point the people we bought from spend it on all sorts of necessities and entertainment, and so on, and so on. This is particularly important when it comes to people in a position to spend their money on creating jobs—you might recognize them as “the rich,” the perennial villains of liberal mythology.

As Rob Port points out regarding the “idea that there is a static amount of wealth in the world”:

If you believe that this is true, I hope you don’t own a business. Otherwise, every dollar you make is actually serving to move your customers closer to poverty. You have to believe that a company like Microsoft or Nike or Target has consigned millions (if not billions) of people to poverty by growing so large.

The second fallacy is in talking about government “rewarding” and “punishing” people. To believe that a tax cut is a “reward” for the recipient, you have to believe the money he’s getting back wasn’t his to begin with, but is basically a gift from Uncle Sam. Likewise, stopping the flow of subsidies is only a “punishment” if the government is taking away money that already rightfully belonged to the beneficiary. But as we’ve discussed before, this understanding of money is bogus. What money the government has, it takes primarily from we the people through taxation. It has no “stash” of its own to draw money from.

Again, I don’t presume to know the genius-to-gibberish ratio of Atlas Shrugged or Ayn Rand’s other works, but when I survey the Right, I certainly don’t see any epidemic of greedy Tea Partiers who want the poor to die in the streets. Kudos to Jonathan Chait for finding a line of attack more original than “racist!,” but if the fruits of Rand’s labors are anything to go by, Chait might have to look for another club to beat us with.

You’d think the Left would be happy. You’d honestly think they’d be jumping for joy. After all, Congress was able to avoid a government shutdown with yet another continuing resolution to keep federal services up and running for at least another week.

Why should the Left be excited about this? The answer is simple: Congressional Democrats stood by with their arms folded, refusing to work with Republicans on moving a real budget forward. The Democrats stood to bear the public relations fallout from a government shutdown for their stubborn inaction. So a resolution to avoid the shutdown theoretically should spare the Democrats a world of hurt.

Crisis averted, right? Not really.

You see, the Left is all up in arms over this stopgap budget deal, largely because it was achieved through bipartisan compromise. Case in point: a post at Daily Kos, written by a blogger calling himself “Meteor Blades” (who, in real life, is Timothy Lange, a “journalist in both alternative and traditional print media” and an “activist on civil rights, anti-imperialism, reproductive rights, environmental advocacy and American Indian issues”). The post, entitled “No shutdown. But the big fight remains,” decries the averted shutdown this way:

The fight Democrats put up against defunding women’s health was a righteous one. And if the Republicans had stubbornly chosen to shut down the government over it, they would looked like the mad men they are instead of coming across — to some — as reasonable. Instead they released their hostage and smiled for the cameras, even though it angered some of their tea party wing. Oh, they did manage to screw over women who live in the District of Columbia, but how many Americans will notice that? The deal includes a rider saying the District cannot use its own funds to cover abortions for women who can’t afford one.

Why so glum? The Planned Parenthood funding remained in the budget. Oh wait. It’s because other entitlements were cut:

As for the rest, it was a sucky deal. Billions of dollars axed from programs mostly dedicated to easing the lives of Americans who, even in the best of times, have a rough go of things economically. And these are not the best of times.