Paul Krugman comments on the Third Way:

So progressive Democrats have seized on an op-ed by the group Third Way — an op-ed attacking Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio for their terrible, horrible economic populism — as a way to start reclaiming the party from the “centrists”. And it’s working: the centrists are very much on the run.

Why? Part of the answer is that the Democratic party has become more progressive. But I would argue that the centrists are also suffering from their own intellectual bankruptcy.

How so?

I mean, going after Warren and de Blasio for not being willing to cut Social Security and their “staunch refusal to address the coming Medicare crisis” ??? Even aside from the question of exactly what the mayor of New York has to do with Medicare, this sounds as if they have been living in a cave for years, maybe reading an occasional screed from the Pete Peterson complex.

This is literally true, as I’ll explain in a bit.

On Social Security, they’re still in the camp insisting that because the system might possibly have to pay lower benefits in the future, we must move now to cut future benefits. Oh, kay.

But anyway, they declare that Medicare is the bigger issue. So what’s this about “staunch refusal” to address Medicare? The Affordable Care Act contains lots of measures to limit Medicare costs and health care more generally — it’s Republicans, not progressive Democrats, who have been screaming against cost-saving measures (death panels!).

See, for example, Ruth Marcus, who sorrowed over the President’s recent economic populist speech as a missed opportunity.

Now for the tough love. On the debt and entitlement spending, Obama did not only miss an opportunity – he kicked it in the teeth. “When it comes to our budget, we should not be stuck in a stale debate from two years ago or three years ago,” he said. “A relentlessly growing deficit of opportunity is a bigger threat to our future than our rapidly shrinking fiscal deficit.” Yes, the deficit is shrinking, but Obama’s snappy language evades the bigger point: Dealing with the long-term debt and entitlement spending should be a progressive goal. Over time, a debt of such magnitude slows the economic growth that the president correctly identifies as an essential element of solving the inequality problem. It diverts scarce resources from investing in America’s future to paying interest to foreigners. And speaking of resources, the growing claims on the budget of programs for the elderly inevitably pit the nation’s most vulnerable children – the very ones who the president worries are being denied the American Dream – against its seniors. Curtailing Medicare and Social Security costs in a way that protects the neediest beneficiaries ought to be a national priority. Too bad the president couldn’t – wouldn’t – rouse himself to say so. Speaking truth to power is easier when the power is not in your own party, and when your own power is at such a low ebb.

They just can’t get beyond the idea that we must cut Medicare and Social Security for the sake of the young folks. It doesn’t matter how much data you dredge up showing that cutting these programs would hurt the economy, not help it. Just let’s see how the young folks like it when they are stuck with their aging parents’ medical bills.

Charles Pierce:

They’re never going to let this go. They are like dogs with a chew toy. This one touches all the bases.I “I’m a liberal so everything I have always believed has been doomed by a glitchy website.” In the long run, Teh Deficit will eat us in our beds. Social Security and Medicare always are lumped together, even though the former does not have anything to do with the federal budget. The best thing any Democratic president can do is reject his party’s most fundamental difference with the lunatics on the other side. (You will note that Marcus treats Paul Ryan, that great fake, much more gently, wrapping him tightly in her arms against the nasty old president’s nasty old citations of things Ryan actually has said.) The problem with today’s youth is not that they can’t find work, or that student loan scams are burying them under debt, but that some greedy old person somewhere is making $1200 a month. Kicking granny onto the ice floe is “speaking truth to power.” And Ruth Marcus is a pink balloon.

Back to Third Way — there really are ties between Third Way and the Pete Peterson complex. Third Way founder Jonathan Cowan has another group he calls “The Can Kicks Back.” According to SourceWatch:

The Can Kicks Back (TCKB) describes itself as a “non-partisan, Millennial-driven campaign to fix the national debt and reclaim our American Dream.”[1]

According to the Washington Post, The Can Kicks Back is a “group of young deficit hawks making it their mission to warn the Millennial Generation about the dangers of an out-of-control deficit.”[2] The group is the champion of stunts and videos, like handing out bags of empty tin cans to reporters[3] and teaching Alan Simpson to dance Gangnam style (see video). Simpson and Erskine Bowles of the Simpson-Bowles Commission are on the group’s board, and it has the same goal as the campaign to Fix the Debt (a “grand bargain” by July 4; see below for more).

Nothing says “millennial-driven” better than Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. I can hear the violins playing “Younger Than Springtime” even now. Here’s the video cited above, btw:

Yes, I’m sure this really resonates with the young folks. (/sarcasm) It’s like watching Lawrence Welk conducting the Greatest Hits of the Rolling Stones.

SourceWatch says that The Can Kicks Back appears to be “not only a partner but a project of the Peterson-funded Fix the Debt campaign.” So, yeah, there’s your connection.

Also, too, Lee Fang found out Third Way uses a lobbying firm that also works for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Third Way calls itself “Senate-focused progressive advocacy group.” No, you don’t get to call yourself “progressive” and advocate cutting social programs like Social Security. This is like “Mercenaries for Peace” or vegans promoting the American Angus Association.

See also “Third Way Op-Ed Writer Says Elizabeth Warren’s Backing Of Social Security Plan Was The ‘Final Moment‘” and (from last year) “Third Way’s Jon Cowan: Once Again, Ginning Up Faux Youth Outrage.”

See New York Times article about New York’s junior senator. I’ve been withholding judgment on Kirsten Gillibrand, because at the time she was first appointed to the Senate the word was she was more of a “centrist” than a liberal. But she represented a largely Republican district, I understand, so maybe she was just catering to her voters, and now that she’s in the Senate her inner liberal is coming out. We’ll see.

She is sometimes mentioned as a possibility for the presidential nomination in 2016. Seems unlikely, but who knows.

Let’s pretend you are a rightie. And like most righties, you have a documented history of supporting every regressive, backward, oppressive, and bigoted idea or movement that has trotted down the street over the past several years.

Now let’s say someone who is admired around the world for upholding values like freedom that you pretend to support also has died. But you are on record as trashing the guy. What do you do?

Let the Wall Street Journal show us the way. (Via)

The WSJ found an ingenious way to reconcile the old party line on Mandela with the new party line: http://t.co/HvuX4XJrSw Worthy of Pravda.

— billmon (@billmon1) December 6, 2013

You can’t make this up. Peter Beinart:

Now that he’s dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was considered an enemy of the United States. Unless we remember why, we won’t truly honor his legacy.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

Also too, let it not be forgotten that Saint Ronald of Blessed Memory strove mightily to undermine Nelson Mandela’s work:

Ronald Reagan was angry. It was October 1986, and his veto against the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act had just been overridden — and by a Republican-controlled Senate, at that.

He had appeared on TV a month earlier to warn Americans against the Anti-Apartheid Act, decrying it as “immoral” and “utterly repugnant.” Congress disagreed, and one month later, it produced the two-thirds majority needed to override Reagan and pass tough new measures against South Africa’s apartheid government. These measures included a ban on bank loans and new investments in South Africa, a sharp reduction of imports, and prevented most South African officials from traveling to the United States. The Act also called for the repeal of apartheid laws and the release of political prisoners like African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela, who had spent the last 23 years prison.

But if you really want to see the dark heart of American conservatism, check out some of the comments on Ted Cruz’s facebook page. See also Steve M’s collection of right-wing tweets.

He made a difference.

Today corporate stooge Glenn Kessler, WaPo‘s so-called fact checker, actually (and very selectively) quoted Paul Krugman to argue that Krugman opposes raising the federal minimum wage. And, of course, Krugman has been among those calling for raising it. Krugman’s most recent NYT column, in fact, called for raising the minimum wage.

It cannot be that even Glenn Kessler is so stupid that he would have looked up something Krugman said in 1998 and ignore what he wrote last week. No, this was deliberate fudging of facts to make a “centrist” (i.e., plutocratic) argument that the working poor just need to suck it up.

What’s going on here? Are the elites getting nervous?

Fast food workers are striking today. Democrats across the country are pushing for a minimum wage increase. I’ve seen a number of news analyses saying that Elizabeth Warren represents the soul of the Democratic Party.

Yesterday President Obama gave a speech that Ezra Klein called “perhaps the single best economic speech of his presidency.” In the speech, the President called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time.”

Greg Sargent provides a summary:

A few key takeaways from the speech: Obama described the decline in economic mobility as a direct consequence of inequality — as opposed to arguing that lack of mobility is itself the problem — and as the product of trends that are decades in the making. He cast the need to ensure that ”opportunity is real” for our children as “the defining issue of our time.”

Obama also argued that current levels of inequality and lack of opportunity as out of sync with the country’s founding values, noting that “the premise that we’re all created equal is the opening line in the American story,” and that the way to preserve that promise is to ensure that “success doesn’t depend on being born into wealth or privilege, it depends on effort and merit.”

And, crucially, Obama described the overall problem as the result of the rich pulling away from the rest. He noted that the share of the country’s wealth is increasingly going to the top while tax cuts for the wealthiest have cut into investments that benefit the rest, emphasizing that this has made it harder for poor children to escape poverty. Meanwhile middle class incomes have stagnated thanks to technological advances and declining unions. Result: The “basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed.”

Praised be, even the Pope is warning us about the dangers of unfettered capitalism.

The Right is pushing back. Recently the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece from Third Way solomnly warning Democrats they should back off from economic populism if they know what’s good for them. Elias Isquith wrote,

Their argument is not convincing but, surprising no one, establishment centrists like Mike Allen of Politico and Ron Fournier of National Journal loved the piece. Allen even went so far as to categorize it as a game changer (which evidently sent a thrill up the leg of whoever runs Third Way’s Twitter account). But for those of us who don’t already wish to see Social Security and Medicare benefits cut, Third Way’s piece was little more than a reminder of the selfishness (and increasing irrelevance) of the economically plutocratic wing of the Democratic Party.

Game changer? It’s basically the same arguments Republicans have been making since McKinley. But, you know, hope springs eternal. Some people really need to believe that the rubes will continue to buy the snake oil.

First, I am grateful for the response to my fundraiser. I’m much closer to replacing Old Glitchy, the laptop, but not all the way there yet, so I’m keeping the fundraiser going a couple more days, But it’s looking hopeful.

Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee wasted everyone’s time and taxpayer dollars fantasizing about how much they want to impeach President Obama. And, y’know, they’d probably do it except that they know the current Senate wouldn’t vote to remove the President from office.

Via TPM, here is a list of the grave and impeachable offenses of our President:

Examples included bombing Libya without congressional authorization; delaying implementation of some provisions of Obamacare; waiving immigration restrictions to enable children of illegal immigrants to remain in the United States; easing federal drug enforcement in states that have legalized the medicinal or recreational use of marijuana; ending mandatory-minimum prison sentences for some drug offenses; and permitting the Internal Revenue Service to scrutinize conservative organizations’ applications for non-profit, tax-exempt status.

Putting aside the quibble that the last thing didn’t actually happen — if these actions are cause for impeachment, has there been a President since, say, Truman who wouldn’t have been worthy of impeachment? Or is it just a high crime to be President while black (and a Democrat)?

The wonders of The Mahablog are more wondrous than you may realize. I’m cranking it out on a laptop purchased as a discontinued model in 2008. And while it may have some life in it, I’ve taken to evoking protective spirits every morning to ward off the Blue Screen of Death one more day. Some of my software crashes every few minutes. Overall, the thing has become slow and glitchy, and the keyboard is now missing a couple of key caps, notably the cap on the letter N, which I actually use sometimes. (I blame Sadie Awful Bad Cat for this.) My printer has good and bad days as well.

So I keep thinking, OK, next month for sure I’m getting another computer. And next month some unanticipated expense comes up that makes spending the money on a computer a bit frightening. So now I’m thinking, screw it; I’m having a fundraiser.

Your contribution will go into my new computer fund and also help cover the cost of bandwidth at my web host. I’m paying more for bandwidth that I probably need to, but the web host I finally settled on is wonderfully reliable and I’d hate to cut back. I’d also like to point out that if you buy stuff from Amazon (OK, yeah, it’s Amazon), if you go to Amazon through the links in the right-hand sidebar I’m supposed to get a small cut of the sale.

Please know that I appreciate your support, in whatever form.

You may have missed them, but awhile back Rick Santorum was being praised, or at east packaged, as the populist working-man’s candidate for the Right (example). He made a ripple earlier this year for this—

When all you do is talk to people who are owners, talk to folks who are ‘Type As’ who want to succeed economically, we’re talking to a very small group of people,” he said. “No wonder they don’t think we care about them. No wonder they don’t think we understand them. Folks, if we’re going to win, you just need to think about who you talk to in your life.”

Trying to carve out a role as a leading populist in the 2016 field, Santorum insisted that Republicans must “talk to the folks who are worried about the next paycheck,” not the CEOs.

But today I read that Santorum was on CNN complaining that the Affordable Care Act was allowing “sicker, older” people to be insured. That’s going to cause terrible problems for insurance companies.

So, they can make populist noises if someone writes a speech for them, but they seem to be easily distracted.

And, of course, there’s that thing with women expecting their insurance to pay for birth control, even if it violates the tender spiritual sensibilities of their employers.

Amid reports that the gender gap is getting wider, Ryan Cooper points out that 99 percent of sexually active women use birth control. So who are they trying to pander to with the anti-contraceptive talk? There are a lot more sexually active women in America than there are control-freak right-wing business owners.

Good to see this on CNN.