This was the Calvin and Hobbes comic posted today.

This is the headline of a “Featured” CNN story that caught my eye this morning: Readers sue, say Armstrong book is a lie. I’d give you the link, but the article is short and stupid so you might as well stay here.

They would have enjoyed it less? The inspiration is nullified and any positive effect that a celebrity’s embellished story may have had on their lives doesn’t count? Rob Stutzman and Jonathan Wheeler are perfect examples of Americans’ twisted sense of entitlement and appalling, self-created, and opportunistic victimhood. Their petty greed is surpassed only by their gullible stupidity. No one is always honest. No one is always good. No one gets through life without making a regrettable mistake.

If you look up to someone, do it as an adult, not as a four-year-old. Instead of pretending to be an innocent victim, duped by a celebrity you mistook for an Olympian god, why not grow up and stop being selfish, useless bastards.

Last night on the Colbert Report, I was introduced to The Atlasphere, a dating service for devotees of Ayn Rand’s novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Colbert did a funny bit about the website. He said, “The Atlasphere is the best place for Randians to find the one they love, other than their bathroom mirror.” But it all focused on the egomaniacal aspect of this group. I admit that this is the most defining aspect of the Rand’s movement. But when it comes to sexuality, it is not.

In both The Fountainhead and Night of January 16th, the hero rapes the heroine. Which begs the question: what sane woman would want to meet a man who loved The Fountainhead. A researcher in abnormal psychology? Somehow I doubt it will be a woman who holds “the values of reason, independence, hard work, and personal integrity.”

Yes, yes, Ayn Rand was a deeply troubled person. And it is her commitment to a bizarre mixture of fascism, anarchism, and Hollywood romanticism that makes her so popular among mostly ignorant aspirants. But like Christians, Randians have to do a lot of work to distinguish between what they like and what they don’t. And that’s just fine. You have to do that with any dogmatic system. (And Objectivism is certainly that!) But that doesn’t mean I’d trust anyone dating on the basis of Rand’s creepy pro-rape writings.

Kamau Bell explains that Django Unchained released the n-bomb 109 times. This is a new record. Do you know what was the last record holder? Watch the two and a half minute video and find out!

I love this woman! I’ve never thought as highly of Hilary Clinton as I do now, having watched her take on these ridiculous Republicans. As more and more information has come out, the Republican position on Benghazi has become so narrow that it could fit through the eye of a needle. And Clinton calls Ron Johnson on this bullshit. He asks, “Do you disagree with me that a simple phone call to those evacuees to determine what happened wouldn’t have ascertained immediately that there was no protest?” That is a classic “Monday morning quarterback” question. Clearly, the State Department had more important things to think about other than, “Gee, I wonder what we should say on TV?”

Basically, the Republicans have reduced this entire “controversy” down to, “You gave incorrect information on the Sunday morning talk shows!” So all of the other aspects of the murder of four government employees doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the Republicans are angry that the one remaining thread they have—misinformation reported on Meet the Press—is what is most important. These Republicans think that it is more urgent to get to the bottom of what they consider the treasonous act of misreporting something on Fox News Sunday, than to properly fund the State Department going forward.

So you had a clear contrast: Clinton hammering the House for not dealing with the needs of State versus the Republicans hammering the “controversy” of giving George Stephanopoulos the wrong idea for a day or two. I’ll leave it to you to decide who looked presidential and who looked like a fucking idiot.

If you haven’t seen this exchange between Clinton and Johnson, you owe it to yourself to watch it. It is fantastic!

Hilary Clinton 2016! I’m signing up now!

The Republican leadership seem to have listened to Obama’s claim that they mustn’t crash the economy because, you know, we have to pay our bills. The budget is the time to cut costs, not afterwards when the bills come due. As a result of this realization (or at least the realization of the bad political optics of it) they are now claiming that they will tie the Debt Ceiling raise to a plan to balance the budget in ten years.

Before we get to this plan, let’s take a moment to step back and marvel at the ridiculousness of this bit of political theater. They want to be seen as Very Serious. But first and foremost, debt is not a problem—at least not now and not until the economy is doing a lot better. Even if it were, this congress can only budget for this congress. As we learned all too well during the first years of the Bush Jr administration: fiscal restraint from one administration can easily turn into fiscal recklessness from the next.

Paul Ryan’s Budget: a Primer

Now let’s talk about that budget. Let’s talk about Paul Ryan. You see, John Boehner has turned to him to come up with this budget balancing plan. And that, my friends, is high-larious. Paul Ryan was not even able to balance the budget over 30 years. He certainly won’t be able to do it in ten!

I know there was a lot of reporting on the Ryan Plan and how it balanced the budget. But it was all done with fairy dust. Here’s his plan in about as much detail as he provided:

1. Cut income tax rates (Very specific!)
2. Cut deductions (Vague!)
3. Stimulate the economy (Fairy dust!)
4. Cut spending (Vague!)

Now I understand that Paul Ryan is a follower of Ayn Rand. And that means he understands important Randian concepts like: X = X. But we normally expect a bit more rigor from our budgets. Ryan’s entire plan comes down to this: “I will balance the budget by cutting spending and stimulating the economy.” And if you’ve ever seen a budget, you know it doesn’t look like that. What Paul Ryan has proposed is a statement of purpose. The problem is that we know for the last 30 years, all Republicans have wanted to do that. We are still waiting for the details.

But even a plan this vague can be shown for the nonsense it is. Total taxes are going to remain the same. Under most circumstances, this would have no effect on the economy. But not in this case! As we saw with Romney’s tax plan, this one can’t help but lower taxes at the top and increase them in the middle. So the people who already have more money than they know what to do with (Why else do you think they are paying the government to hold their money?) will have even more. Meanwhile, people who generally spend all of their money will have less. Thus, Ryan’s tax changes will hurt the economy.

But wait, there’s more! Cutting government spending will also hurt the economy. (Just ask people living in the United Kingdom!) So Ryan’s great idea will cause the economy to tank. And thus there will be less tax revenue. And this will mean that all of his unspecified spending cuts will be partially offset. And thus, he will need even more savage spending cuts. But don’t worry! It is certainly the case than in 20 or 30 or 40 years, the economy will recover.

What They’re All Saying

Political watchers are no more impressed than I am. Jonathan Chait notes that the only way that Ryan could make his budget work is to cut about 90% out of our spending on the poor and sick. But he puts his general thoughts very poetically:

Matt Yglesias questions the very idea of balancing the budget. He gets to the heart of what I was talking about this morning, The End of History. Can it possibly be that we are at exactly the right amount of taxation? Mostly, he’s just poking them to note that they have no reasons for their position on the budget. They just “feel” that certain numbers are right.

But mostly everyone else is still focused on Paul Ryan’s problem yesterday: his claim that he never said that people on Social Security and Medicare were “takers” (or the more common Randian term “moochers”). Mother Jones provided this video to jog his memory:

Update (23 January 2013 5:16 pm)

Ezra Klein has a great article that shows just how much of a charlatan Paul Ryan is, What Happened When I Asked Paul Ryan Why He Hates Taxes. It is very much worth reading.

Just for the record, John Boehner is still a very weak Speaker of the House. The House of Representatives voted to suspend the Debt Ceiling through 18 May. This in itself is a chickshit move. Boehner had decided that he didn’t need to make his caucus have to vote to raise the Debt Ceiling; instead, he would just have them ignore it for a while. Why not just “ignore” it forever? And I’m sure that a lot of people in the next set of Republican primaries will ask that very question.

But what makes Boehner look weak is that yet again, he could not get legislation passed without the help of the Democrats. Only 199 Republicans voted for the bill that required at least 230. And this was with the ridiculous unconstitutional[1] “sweetener” of saying the congress doesn’t get paid if it doesn’t pass a budget. The truth is that it is clear that he can’t control his caucus. But the bill did at least fulfill the Hastert Rule, so Boehner has to be pleased about that.

I think we should all be pleased about this vote, however. It shows a willingness on the part of the Republican leadership to work with the Democrats. If Pelosi had whipped the Democratic caucus, Boehner’s bill would have likely gone down in defeat. Boehner had to be a little uneasy about bring the bill up for a vote. And more important: he must have brought it to the floor because he thought that the Democrats would work with him. This doesn’t mean that it will work the other way around, but it is some movement in the right direction. Boehner is using his weakness for good rather than evil.

[1] The 27th Amendment is really clear, “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”

[Jonathan Bernstein writes for various parts of the Washington Post. But his name always links to Robert Samuelson’s page, and regular readers will know that we don’t much care for Mr. Samuelson. But we do care for Mr. Bernstein, so we’ve decided to make an “About Jonathan Bernstein” page for him. Including an image! -Ed]

Jonathan Bernstein does not write a weekly economics column that usually runs in the Washington Post on Mondays. That would be Robert Samuelson. You can be forgiven for thinking it otherwise. Bernstein writes other stuff. But he was most likely never a columnist for Newsweek magazine from 1984 to 2011. But Robert Samuelson was. It’s hard to say exactly what Bernstein was doing before he came to the Post; have you ever searched for “Jonathan Bernstein”? There are at least 26 people on Twitter named Jonathan Bernstein! [It would be totally cool if he changed his name to Jonomatopoeia Bernstein. -Ed]

He began his journalism career somewhere else. It probably wasn’t where Robert Samuelson started, as a reporter on the Washington Post business desk, from 1969 to 1973. In fact, it is quite likely that Bernstein wasn’t even alive in 1973! Bernstein most definitely is not the author of The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008) or The Good Life and Its Discontents (1995). He grew up somewhere, perhaps even in White Plains, NY like Robert Samuelson.

Unfortunately, I can’t find Robert Samuelson’s email address, because I’m sure he could forward any email to Jonathan Bernstein. They are thought to be close; they even share the same web page.

This morning, Jamelle Bouie at The Plum Line blog wrote, GOP Isolated on Abortion, Too. It notes that overall, Republican voters are pro-choice, but the party is aggressively anti-choice. The newest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (PDF) shows that 70% of the nation support upholding Roe vs. Wade. In all, 89% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances. (But read my article about people who believe in “exceptions,” On Hating Women.)

So what’s going on here? Democratic voters overwhelmingly support abortion rights. Republican voters support them, but are more divided. Why is the Republican Party so out of touch with their own voters?

You could ask the same question of the Republicans about guns. The vast majority of Republican voters are for universal background checks. The vast majority of NRA members are for universal background checks. But the Republican Party and the NRA itself? Not so much.

Bouie thinks what is really going on is that the Republican base is keeping their elected officials more conservative than the Republican voters as a whole. There is much to this, but I don’t think it is the heart of the matter. The majority of voters can be easily manipulated. So it is one thing for people to calmly be asked if they think women should be allowed the right to abortion. It is quite another to ask them if they want to vote for that guy who is in favor of killing babies! The same goes for guns: there is a big difference between universal background checks and, Obama is taking your guns away!

In the halls of Congress, the Republican constituency is not really the people who voted for them. (And yes, the same thing can be said to a lesser degree about the Democrats.) Their real constituency is big business. So the Republicans get the prols to vote on guns and fetuses. And understand: these people get a return on their investments—just look at the Supreme Court! But to the Republican elite, this doesn’t matter except that it allows them to stay in power. They’re primary concern is to continue to funnel welfare checks to the richest people in the country.

Afterword

Whitecat over at the Denver Post put this up:

Paul Krugman coined a new acronym this morning. He was discussing an article by Larry Summers that argues that we are focusing too much on the deficit. The question is: if this is how Summers feels (and it is; Summers is a White Hat) why does he spend the first two paragraphs talking about how terrible the budget deficit is? And it is to explain this that Krugman coins of the acronym. Summers, he says, is providing these two paragraphs as his INK disclaimer: “I’m Not Krugman.” In other words, “I’m not that crazy liberal Krugman who just happens to be an insanely great economist who won the John Bates Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize.”

The point of Krugman’s article is that Summers is mistaken in thinking that he can have a reasonable conversion with the Very Serious Deficit Scolds. As I’ve written about many times before, these people are not interested in the budget deficit at all. Just look at the gold-standard in the field: the Simpson-Bowles proposal. The first thing is does is cut income tax rates. As Matt Yglesias brilliantly pointed out, this ain’t about deficit reduction!

Krugman says the same thing:

And that gets to something important about our political environment: a lot of those Very Serious Deficit Scolds are Democrats. Erskine Bowles and Ed Rendell come immediately to mind. But on some level, this isn’t even about politics. These people are just paid spokesmen. Krugman again:

So trying to have an honest conversation with them is worse than useless: it is dangerous. These people already get far too much attention as though they are something more than paid lobbyists. And that’s the battle we need to fight. Trying to convince them that the budget deficit isn’t a big deal will only hurt matters. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And the Very Serious Deficit Scolds’ salaries most definitely depend on not understanding that the deficit is not killing us.

But then, although INK, I totally agree with him.

Here is a good video on the Debt Ceiling from the great C.G.P. Grey:

We are on filibuster reform eve. Three weeks ago, Harry Reid recessed the Senate, so when the Senate comes back into session tomorrow, it will still technically be the first day. And so, they can reform the filibuster with a simple majority vote. The question is whether they will. It is looking more and more like the Democrats will do what we can almost always depend upon them doing: folding. If there were a Nobel Prize in being spineless and not standing for anything when it matters, the Democratic Party would have racked up a whole lot of them over the last three decades. But there is no such prize, so all they’ve racked up is a bunch of losses.

I have two positions on the filibuster: ethical and practical. From an ethical standpoint, I’m against it. The filibuster makes an already ridiculously undemocratic Senate even more undemocratic. This isn’t about minority rights; we have the Constitution for that. This is about minority veto power. We should get rid of it for purely ethical reasons.

But there is perhaps an even more compelling practical reason to get rid of it. The Republicans will destroy the filibuster as soon as it is to their advantage. The moment a Democratic minority blocks their legislative agenda, the filibuster will be killed. Any Democrat who thinks otherwise is hopelessly naive. The Republicans play for keeps and when they are in power, they don’t fret over the thought that at some time in the future they might not have the filibuster to protect them. Anyway, the Republicans are also whiners. Even with their excessive use of the filibuster, most Senate Republicans think they have been badly abused.

So what’s the problem? Well, Harry Reid, a man I have long admired, seems to be set to collapse on filibuster reform. Actually, it is worse than that. Politico reported last Thursday that he no longer supports the “talking filibuster” where Senators would have to hold the floor in order to grind the Senate to a halt. So what we are likely to get is a change in the rules that will be useless. But! It will set a precedent so that when the Republicans are in power, they can destroy the filibuster and the Democrats will have absolutely no room to complain.

I still have a little hope. Jeff Merkley, who wrote the main reform plan being discussed, says that he has the votes. So who knows? According to AMERICA Blog, not only is Harry Reid wavering, but so are both of my Senators: Feinstein and Boxer. Thanks a lot, gals!

Regardless, write or call your Senators. This is really important!