This is really great.

Ted Cruz is one of the Republicans who have been running around whining about the Gang of Eight immigration bill. According to him it is 844 pages and no one could read it in the 5 days he’s had to read it (it was actually 6). Of course, reading the bill isn’t critical. People have staff and they can be provided with the important information. Needless to say, the complaint is just a delay tactic. This is SOP in Congress. Senators are rarely against something. It is usually more like, “I’d love to vote to outlaw child rape, I’m just concerned about [some pathetic, minor issue].” And note, if that issue is removed, the Senator will just find another reasons he would loved to vote for the bill but just can’t.

In the following clip, Cruz tries to trap Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. He asks her if she’s read the bill. Unfortunately for him, she has. So he has to talk about something else. It is wonderful to watch him because you can tell he’s pleased with himself for having come up with such a great zinger. Take a look:

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their last president. Yes, it is reevaluate George W. Bush time! And the pundits are out with their “Bush weren’t so bad” articles. (Yes, that was a little grammar humor with the subjunctive.) As you can probably guess, I don’t think much about this rethinking. The truth is that I have major problems with the current president and he is almost unimaginably better than the last.

Of course, the big thing now is for conservatives to come out in favor of Bush. Jennifer Rubin told us earlier today that Bush Is Back. And I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of that. Also today, Matt Yglesias tried to buff this iconoclast credentials with, Some Good Things George W. Bush Did. But sadly for Mr. Bush (but great for truth, justice, and the America way), he was not up to the task.

He mentions, as he said, some good things that Bush did. But they all come with negatives. Sure, Bush put more money into education; but he also enshrined our testing mania. He gave prescription drug coverage to seniors; but that was just a way to create one of the worst examples of corporate welfare ever. He created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief; but he also limited sex education to abstinence only and spread disinformation about condoms. In the end, the best that Yglesias can say is, “Does this outweigh exceptional poor macroeconomic performance and well-known national security policy failures? Probably not.” That’s an understatement.

We’ve already read about Jeb Bush and others claiming that history will be kind to Bush. Yesterday, Jonathan Bernstein wrote an excellent article that destroys that claim, The Wrath of the Conquest of the Planet of the Bride of the Son of the Return of Cranky Blogging. He doesn’t look were most people have: at the disastrous outcomes of Bush’s policies. Instead, he looks at process and especially how disengaged Bush was. His conclusion:

And it isn’t like Bernstein is some radical. Earlier today, he wrote a mostly positive discussion of Max Baucus’ career. Regardless, I think Bernstein is correct. Bush’s improved polling numbers are just due to the fact that most people have forgotten how Bush governed. Historians will not be fooled by that. Time will only sharpen the historical lens on both his processes and his outcomes. What’s more, his partisan apologists will eventually die off and there will be no one to replace them. Bush will be remembered as a bad president, but I wouldn’t necessarily say the worst; there is so much competition for that.

Max Baucus is retiring. I’m beginning to think that by the time 2014 rolls around that every Democratic senator will have decided to retire. Jamelle Bouie at the Plum Line blog says that even though Montana is a conservative state, the Democrats have a good chance of keeping the seat because former governor Brian Schweitzer will likely run for the seat. He also cautions liberals from freaking out about Baucus’ announcement. Why would they do that? Well, Baucus voted against the gun bill. So many will likely question why he didn’t vote for it if he wasn’t going to be facing re-election.

Bouie argues that Baucus was likely just doing what he thought his constituency wanted. I agree with him that we shouldn’t get any more upset at Baucus than we already are, but for a different reason. The problem with politicians who make it to the national level is that they have become so used to compromise that they no longer have the original ideals that got them to go into politics in the first place. I’ve argued that President Obama really wants to cut entitlements and that it isn’t just a political maneuver. Well, Baucus is almost certainly the same way. His A+ NRA rating isn’t from pandering; the pandering is who he is.

There is a more fundamental problem with Bouie’s contention that Baucus is just doing the work of his constituency: he doesn’t seem to care about his constituency when it comes to economic matters. For example, he repeatedly voted to make bankruptcy harder for individuals. He’s for the elimination of the estate tax. He was in favor of the Bush tax cuts which primarily benefited the rich. He’s against getting rid of tax incentives for companies that move jobs overseas. He was against single-payer healthcare reform. And his delaying tactics hurt the reform that we did get. All of these things have cost the poor and middle classes huge amounts of money. Baucus is not a man who cares about his constituency, unless you consider his constituency the very rich.

As I’ve noted in the past, it is unfair to complain when red state Democrats are conservative. Just the same, when it comes to issues like bankruptcy and corporate welfare, I don’t see a groundswell of resistance. But when proto-fascists like Dianne Feinstein from blue states are for the Bush tax cuts and the elimination of the estate tax, it is no wonder that red state Democrats feel no pull to vote for liberal economic policies.

Still Baucus has generally been a good team player for the Democratic Party. (It’s the Democratic Party that is the problem.) If his seat goes to a Republican, it will be a bad thing.

Update (23 April 2013 5:33 pm)

Chris Hayes on All In just said almost exactly what I did here.

I’m not quite sure what Justice Banking is, except that it is some kind of social satire group. But you really should watch this video. What I particularly like about it is that it focuses on what I just wrote: bankers are the ones who are supposed to be looking out for their interest; the borrowers will naturally want money that they may have difficulty paying back. Of course, in this video, they take it further—which isn’t to say that it isn’t still absolutely accurate.

As we’ve seen over the last 20 years, the laws have been changed to make finance harder for individuals and easier for corporations. It is now very hard for an individual to file bankruptcy. But it is easier than ever for a corporation! Bankers have always had an easy time screwing the individual. But as banks have gotten bigger, they’ve been able to get their pals in government to make it even easier.

Check out this video. It’s really great:

H/T: Digby

Ed Kilgore made a good point over at the Political Animal blog, More Pain For Economic Victims. In it, he talked about the widely reported William Dickens and Rand Ghayad paper (pdf) that showed that employers would rather hire a less qualified applicant who has been unemployed for a short time than a more qualified applicant who has been unemployed a long time. He noted that this is part of the environment where the people who suffered because of the 2008 financial crisis were widely blamed for it.

You may remember this. Rick Santelli performed a live CNBC rant about how people taking out mortgages they eventually couldn’t afford were the reason for the financial crisis. This, of course, was entirely off base and entirely typical of elite opinion. The way the system is supposed to work is that a poor person goes to the bank and asks for a loan. The bank then decides if the poor person is a good risk. It is not surprising that poor people would ask for loans they can’t afford. It is the bank’s obligation to protect itself by only loaning money that is likely to be repaid. Santelli and his stock broker friends just loved the idea of turning this on its head. Those poor bankers! They were taken advantage of by those thoughtless poor people!

What’s more, we heard not a peep out of Santelli when it came to TARP, the law that paid out hundreds of billions of dollars to banks. It was only when the government decided to spend about a tenth of that with the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan that he started ranting. So you can see where the Santelli crowd was coming from. What was surprising was that the Tea Party movement would burst into existence as a result of Santelli’s rant. These were, after all, middle and upper-middle class people whose interests were better represented by the later Occupy Wall Street movement. But no, helped along by Fox News and the Koch Brothers, they were on the streets demanding that government not help individuals. (In fairness, the Tea Party claimed to be against TARP, but almost without exception, they have backed candidates who are against helping individuals and for helping corporations. We can either say that the people in the Tea Party hate regular Americans or they are stupid/ignorant, but we can’t say that they are smart and don’t hate their neighbors.)

The outcome of the Tea Party movement has been a more radicalized Republican Party and generally a more conservative and fearful Democratic Party. This despite the fact that the Tea Party never did have any real power. They were just the right flank of the Republican Party—now with a catchy name. And generally it’s meant a much more callous attitude toward those who are struggling in this economy. Perhaps the worst aspect of this has been the focus of Washington on debt over the last three years while ridiculously high levels of unemployment have just been ignored.

Kilgore notes that some of the army of long-term unemployed may eventually be driven to economic crime. But not to worry:

But I don’t totally agree with him. The 20% of Americans who associate themselves with the Tea Party have always been of the philosophy that if you fall down they’ll kick you but if you mess up they’ll jail you. The only question is whether reasonable politicians will continue to fear these vile and hateful conservatives enough to go along.

Yesterday was Sunday and that can mean only one thing: Robert Samuelson wrote something stupid in his column over at the Washington Post and Dean Baker destroyed it with mockery and, you know, facts. I really don’t like Samuelson; he’s the embodiment of the Very Serious Pundit who claims to simply explain what the facts are, when he actually pushes conservative ideology. And given that Samuelson writes about economics and finance (what I care most about), he is one of “the most slappable people on earth.”

This week, he really outdid himself. His argument is that all this austerity that he’s been pushing for four years hasn’t worked and now none of the people he’s been listening to know what is going on. He wrote, “The public is confused, because economists are divided.” But that’s not really true. As Paul Krugman noted, there are economists who have been right and economists how have been wrong. Samuelson insists on talking to the economists who have been wrong. And given that these austerity economists still don’t want to admit that they were wrong, they just claim that no one knows and that the macroeconomic field is divided.

Jared Bernstein makes fun of Samuelson’s claim that nothing we seem to do helps the economy:

Or to put it less fancifully, “We’ve done everything we can to slow the economy down, but it all just seems to slow the economy down. It’s a mystery!”

But what is most surprising about Samuelson’s article is it’s ending. And no one has mentioned it, perhaps because everyone expects this kind of thing from him. Samuelson uses the fact that “no one knows” what’s going on in the economy to justify—Wait for it!—more austerity!

So when we “knew” that austerity was good we pursued austerity. But now that we don’t know if austerity is good we should pursue… austerity?

If economists somehow prove to Samuelson that austerity is bad, I guess he will tell us to pursue… austerity.

I guess he’s right: economics is confusing!

Last night, I watched this video 24 Hours of Madness. It is some kind of British celebrity game show. You know the kind where everyone goes on just to show that they are more clever and charming than the Yankees? And I got sucked in. It was loads of fun. But if you are going to watch it, fast forward to about 10 minutes, because it is a raw tape and you can’t hear anything up to that point.

One of the celebrities was comedian Sue Perkins. And I thought—in addition to being, of course, clever and charming—she was lovely. And then I thought, “I’ll bet she’s a lesbian.” So I looked it up in “Who’s a lesbian,” also known as Wikipedia, and sure enough: she’s a lesbian. And that got me wondering, “Why do I always find lesbians so attractive?”

My answer is that it is the hair. I love short hair on women. Normally, I would call for more straight women to cut their hair short. But the truth is that it works for me that short hair appears to be a lesbian thing. That way, I can have unrequited crushes on women and know that it absolutely is nothing personal. And that’s a very comforting thought as I make my way through the frumpy years.

The New York Times just reported that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be tried in a civilian court. Thank God for small favors. Really, there should have been no question. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the United States who are hellbent on destroying the United States Constitution, even while they claim to love it. And the current occupant of the White House is one of them.

Over the weekend, Glenn Greenwald discussed the Democratic and “liberal” responses to Lindsey Graham’s tweet, “The last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to ‘remain silent.'” Although Graham’s tweet is repellent, it goes right along with Obama administration policy over at least the last two years. Greenwald is genuinely confused about how Democrats can support the president when he does it but oppose it when Graham calls for it. To me it is very simple: Democrats trust that Obama would only use such powers in extreme situations. And this is not that bad an assumption as can be seen in this recent news about a civil trial. The problem, of course, is even if we should always trust Obama (and I don’t think we should), eventually, the White House will be occupied by someone more like Bush Jr or Dick Cheney. Giving these powers to Obama is giving them (And more!) to every future decider.

Yesterday, Ari Melber wrote an excellent article for Reuters, Can Tsarnaev Be Ruled an ‘Enemy Combatant’? In it, he discusses three major legal questions that relate to this case. The first question is the title of the article: can this young man be treated as an enemy combatant? Melber says that in general he can’t. The only authority the president has to do this comes from the 11 September 2001 authorization of force. And to use this, the government would have to directly link Tsarnaev to al Qaeda or the Taliban.

I find the entire question offensive, but entirely America. We have defined a new term, “enemy combatant.” This places anyone we like in a no man’s land between civilian (where civil courts are in power) and soldier (where the Geneva Conventions are in power). Thus, we can effectively disregard hundreds of years of habeas corpus, even while we still maintain that the United States is the land of liberty. And what is it exactly that people like Graham and McCain think they get by pretending we are in some kind of traditional global war? It reminds me very much of Jeff Trent in Plan 9 from Outer Space. When told about a bomb we are about to develop that will destroy the universe, he says, “So what if we do develop this Solanite bomb? We’d be even a stronger nation than now!” “Belligerent” and “dangerous” are not synonyms for “strong.”

Melber’s second legal question is whether being an accused terrorist should change what legal rights Tsarnaev is given. (I know: rights are not supposed to be given. Mark that down on the list of lies you were taught in civics.) It is on this question that the Obama administration (with little push back from “liberals”) has been really bad. In 1984, the Supreme Court found that Miranda Rights did not have to be given to a suspect if there was a public safety concern. For example, “Are there any more bombs? Is your apartment booby trapped?” I don’t even understand why the court allowed this exception. Police can ask any questions they want. Miranda only matters when it comes to which statements are admissible in court. I don’t see any reason why these necessary public safety questions need to come up in court. But as Liberal Viewer noted last night, Deval Patrick has said there is no danger, so there really is no justification for the “public safety” exception.

Regardless, this exception has only ever been allowed for a matter of minutes. The longest time ever was 50 minutes. But in 2010, the Obama administration announced that it would seek the legal authority to never give Miranda Rights to terror suspects. And that is Melber’s third legal question. Instead of going to Congress, Obama did what the Bush administration was so good at: make up the rules themselves—which they did in March 2011. The problem, as Melber points out, is that the Obama administration is a lot smarter than the Bush administration. Bush was publicly slapped down by none other than Antonin Scalia. But Obama pushes the envelope and thus gets away with it.

The common reaction is, “So what? They’re just terrorist?” Of course, the point is that they are terror suspects. But that aside, there are important reasons to care, as Ari Melber makes plain:

And that is an important point. Because we like Obama, we need to hold him accountable. Accepting him as “not as bad as Bush” does him a disservice as well as ourselves.