There was a time — thirty years ago, maybe — I would have pooh-poohed some of what Jesse Myerson is proposing in Rolling Stone — “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” Now I just say, go for it, young folks.

Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider and Kathleen Geier at Washington Monthly both explain that Myerson’s ideas aren’t as radical as they might seem at first glance. Geier writes,

All right, settle down, these proposals are hardly as far-out as they may sound at first glance. Number one is a public works program, number two is a universal basic income, the third is a land value tax, the fourth is collectivizing wealth ownership by having the government buy up private sector assets and paying a dividend to all citizens (Alaska has a program similar to this in place), and the fifth is pretty much what it says: i.e., a public bank that doesn’t rip off its customers or rape the country. …

… Myerson’s program may or may not be, in the words of Michael Harrington, “the left wing of the possible” — at least not yet. They are too visionary for that. But that’s not to say that what he envisions does not exist in the world, and could never exist here. The reforms he outlines are your basic social democracy — you know, society as it exists in uncivilized hellholes like Denmark and Sweden — spiced with some classic American populism. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, or next week, or in the next five years. But I think it’s important for progressives to have a long-term plan that is truly aspirational and idealistic — in other words, something other than fending off further cuts and praying the Republicans don’t get re-elected in the next two or four years. Without boldness and imagination, a political movement will fail. It will lose its power to inspire, and it will end up at best barely holding steady, and at worst, seriously losing ground.

In our current political climate these ideas may be non-starters. And to say that the Right is going ballistic over Myerson’s article is an understatement. They’re having a Red Scare meltdown and hurling every infantile insult they can think of in his direction.

But y’know what, wingnuts? We’ve tried it your way. It doesn’t work.

In their minds markets are never free enough and taxes are never low enough, so righties will deny their way has been tried. But every time the country enacts another tax cutting and market-freeing measure, life gets harder and more precarious for most of us. That’s just a plain fact. We’ve been lurching toward Reason Magazine Promised Land lo these more than 30 years, and now we’re close enough to see it. And it doesn’t look so hot.

This is rich: Newt Gingrich sneered at New York Mayor De Blasio’s new administration as “small soy latte liberalism.”

“Those earning between $500,000 and $1 million a year,” the new mayor continued, “…would see their taxes increase by an average of $973 a year. That’s less than three bucks a day — about the cost of a small soy latte at your local Starbucks.”

It was sadly symbolic that Mayor de Blasio was speaking one week before the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a “War on Poverty.” …

… Here are the facts: After 50 years and trillions of dollars, bureaucratic government has lost the war on poverty. Each year, we spend $17,000 per person in poverty on means-tested welfare programs alone, as Peter Ferrara points out. That adds up to more than $16 trillion since 1965. Yet today, left-wing leaders like Mayor de Blasio and President Barack Obama still call inequality “the defining issue of our time.” What does this say about their welfare bureaucracies? …

… Poor Americans need a fundamental break from a system which has trapped so many in dependency.

A small reminder that the last President with genuinely progressive domestic policies was Lyndon Johnson. Too bad his Administration crashed and burned in Vietnam, but at least he wanted to expand the New Deal, not cut it. And, yeah, we’re talking 50 years ago. Since then, we’ve had varying degrees of timid, let’s not scare the chickens moderation to full bore, rape the earth uber-Reaganism. Johnson’s War on Poverty was gutted decades ago. The biggest financial disasters of our lifetimes came about because New Deal regulations were cut so that markets could be freer. Every time we let the Right get its way, things get worse. And economic inequality grows. And more people get trapped in a poverty hole with no ladder out.

So, y’know what, righties? Bloviate all you like. You got nothin’ Your ideas are zombies. They don’t work. The more power you have, the more you screw up our country. So kick your heels and cry and scream about Marxism and insult us all you like. We should all have started ignoring you a long time ago, but maybe it’s not too late to start now.

From browsing around the Web I see that the political Right and its zombie followers have settled on these Articles of Faith about Obamacare:

1. It’s imploding. Now everyone but the libtards will finally get behind repealing it.

There are two corollaries that accompany this belief. One is that President Obama cleverly intended the ACA to be a disaster so that he could then declare an emergency and enforce a single payer plan. The other is that President Obama is incompetent. You can find people who appear to hold both views simultaneously.

As proof for the “implosion” scenario, the Right is hyping every story it can find about problems in U.S. health care. This includes problems that have been going on for years. The Daily Mail had a “hard-hitting” investigation complete with photos with some faces pixil’ed out saying that people were showing up at hospitals without proof of insurance coverage and being told they would be stuck with the bill if they aren’t insured. Like that never happened before.

There was also a study being talked about earlier this week predicting that visits to emergency rooms would go up, not down. One of the selling points of the ACA was that reduced emergency room visits would save us all money. More implosion!

Think Progress reported that this happened in Massachusetts for a while. People gaining insurance for the first time don’t understand how the health care system works, and they continue to go to emergency rooms because that’s the only health care they know. (Hey, it’s what Mitt told them to do, right?) It takes awhile to educate people how to use the other parts of the health care system.

2. More people have lost coverage from canceled policies than have gained it.

The number I keep seeing on Twitter and in comment threads is either 5 million or 6 million, or sometimes 6 point something million, which is supposed to be the number of policies that have been canceled, causing the people who were covered by those policies to either go without coverage or to be “forced” to take Medicaid — or both — and either way they’re going to start dropping dead any minute for lack of health care. Wingnuts weep and mourn for these alleged 6.something million, but of course the 48 million who were uninsured before January 1 were of no concern to them.

I believe the number of policies that were canceled is thought to be as high as 4.7 million, which rounds up to 5, so that’s where they get the 5 million. I’m not sure where they are getting the 6.something million figure, however, and why so many have seized upon that number when there are worse numbers floating around out there.

For example, in November the Heritage Foundation solemnly predicted that 85 percent of private plans and 65 percent of employee benefit plans would be canceled, and that adds up to a whole lot more than 6.something million. You actually have to read the Heritage report to find those numbers, however, which may be why the wingnuts haven’t found them.

Some guy at Frontpage reported mid-December that for every one person gaining coverage under the ACA, 14 people would lose coverage. This guy went on to say that 7 million people are losing coverage, so maybe he’s rounding up the 6.something. But he doesn’t give sources for his numbers.

The sub-articles of faith that go with this one is that anyone whose policy has been canceled is SOL because (it is assumed) they can’t find an affordable alternative, and being stuck with Medicaid is the same as being uninsured.

And here’s the reality check, with the caveat that there are some hard numbers we won’t have for awhile:

Now, a new report from the minority staff of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has destroyed the foundation of that particular GOP claim. It projects that only 10,000 people will lose coverage because of the ACA and be unable to regain it — or in other words, 0.2 percent of the oft-cited 5 million cancellations statistic.

I skimmed the report, and it’s not clear to me why the 10,000 were left completely without options, but this is something that needs to be looked at. Nevertheless, this doesn’t look like “implosion” to me.

It’s also the case that Republicans are having a terrible time finding people who have lost insurance coverage whose stories even make sense.

3. Everyone’s insurance costs will be higher.

Wingnuts want to believe this, so it must be true.

4. Most of the people getting new insurance are illegal immigrants.

They don’t come out and say “illegal immigrants and blacks,” but if you read between lines that assumption isn’t hard to find.

Right now I think most people are confused about the ACA because the Administration didn’t do as much as it should have to educate people. And I think that’s going to continue for the first half of the year. Barring any new glitches, by summer I suspect most people will have settled down and realized the ACA is actually OK, if not perfect, but of course the Right will continue to believe in their articles of faith for the rest of their lives.

There’s one good thing about Kathleen Parker’s insipid column — some of the comments are great. I liked this one in particular:

One nit: True, the economic pie is not precisely a zero-sum game as the pie does grow. BUT when one segment of society is cutting ever larger pieces for itself faster than the economy as a whole grows–as we’ve seen now for many years–the amount of pie left for everyone else very definitely does decrease.

“The Disneyfication of Tibet” by Pearl Sydenstricker is one of the best articles I’ve read on the continued Chinese occupation of Tibet. There’s little in here that I haven’t been hearing for awhile, and I believe it to be accurate. One thing I hadn’t heard was that the Chinese are selling tickets to the “sky burials.” Sick.

Basically, China is turning Tibet into a tourism theme park, and the monasteries are the equivalent of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride. And China is being every bit the exploitative imperial power in Tibet that Europeans were in China a century ago. This is not just about religion. Tibetans are now second-class citizens in their own country.

Bill DeBlasio was inaugurated today. I’m not going to link to the really stupid New York Times article about him, but instead will link to dread pirate mistermix commenting on the article.

See also Don’t you know the crime rate’s going up up up up up?

Seriously, I hope the new year is good to you, and to me, too. I intend to celebrate by spending some quality time with Sadie Awful Bad Cat.

My prediction for 2014, based on the I Ching, is that for the next few months the nation and world will be stumbling along as it has for the last few months, and we’ll somehow manage. Things shouldn’t get any worse, anyway.

Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times fires back at the Right:

Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who has made a special crusade out of the attack on the American diplomatic and intelligence compound in Benghazi, was asked on “Meet the Press” to justify Republican claims that Al Qaeda agents planned and executed the operation. (The article found no evidence that Al Qaeda was involved.)

Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC put her finger on the political question when she asked Mr. Issa why Republicans “use the term Al Qaeda.” After all, she said, “you and other members of Congress are sophisticated in this and know that when you say Al Qaeda, people think central Al Qaeda. They don’t think militias that may be inspired by Bin Laden and his other followers.”

“There is a group there involved that is linked to Al Qaeda,” Mr. Issa said. “What we never said — and I didn’t have the security to look behind the door, that’s for other members of Congress — of what the intelligence were on the exact correspondence with Al Qaeda, that sort of information — those sorts of methods I’ve never claimed.”

I’m still trying to parse that sentence.

Sometimes weasel words do turn around and bite you, don’t they, Rep. Issa? I think, though, that these days the term “al Qaeda” (which just means “the base”) can mean just about anything one wants it to mean. It can mean a particular organization that is currently being run out of Pakistan, or it can refer to a kind of amorphous movement of dissociated anti-Western militias, and many things in between.

This makes weaseling pretty easy. A Republican operative can say “al Qeada,” meaning any Muslim from Turkey to Malaysia with an attitude about the West; and the followers hear “al Qaeda,” meaning the specific organization founded by Osama bin Laden.

(In Rightie World, a lie doesn’t count as a lie if they can argue there’s some literal truth to it, depending on how terms are defined, even if the statement is intentionally deceptive.)

The Weaseling continues:

On Fox News on Sunday, Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan insisted the story was wrong in finding that “Al Qaeda was not involved in this.”

“There was some level of pre-planning; we know that,” he said. “There was aspiration to conduct an attack by Al Qaeda and their affiliates in Libya; we know that. The individuals on the ground talked about a planned tactical movement on the compound — this is the compound before they went to the annex.”

What does any of that even mean? “Some level of pre-planning” in rightie speak could mean that in 2009 some Libyan sent an email to his brother-in-law in Islamabad calling for death to westerners. “There was aspiration?” “Individuals on the ground?” Please. Basically all he’s saying is that the Libyan militants had given some thought to how they might attack the U.S. compound before they attacked it — which nobody is denying — and that the group is ideologically similar to and admirers of the original al Qaeda — which nobody is denying.

Rosenthal continues,

For anyone wondering why it’s so important to Republicans that Al Qaeda orchestrated the attack — or how the Obama administration described the attack in its immediate aftermath — the answer is simple. The Republicans hope to tarnish Democratic candidates by making it seem as though Mr. Obama doesn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. They also want to throw mud at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who they fear will run for president in 2016.

Which brings us to one particularly hilarious theme in the response to the Times investigation. According to Mr. Rogers, the article was intended to “clear the deck” for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Rosenthal leaves out what I thought to be the most hilarious reaction to the Times story, from Bob Taylor in The Washington Times.

That does not mean, however, that the Times timing of the story should not come under some degree of scrutiny. A piece of journalism as extensive as this does not happen overnight. Obviously the Times set out well in advance with the idea of breaking the story on the weekend before the new year.

Obviously? It’s certainly not obvious to me.

One of the dirty little secrets about investigative media is that more often than not reporters already know the story they want to tell before they leave the building. The “investigation” results in seeking out the people who can corroborate the result the media outlet is seeking.

Ah, he’s been hanging out with the Fox News crew, I see.

If the Times discovered al Qaeda had been involved in the Benghazi attacks the investigation would have been for naught. It would have been a non-story.

That makes absolutely no sense. Actual evidence of a real al Qaeda connection (meaning the al Qaeda al Qaeda, not al Qaeda lite) would have been a huge scoop for the Times and The Story of The Year. It would have sold newspapers up the wazoo. Discovering that the attackers were just local yokels is the non-story.

So the question, or questions, become who is the Times protecting? Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Or both?

No, the question is, What kinds of drugs is Bob Taylor on?

For example, consider the phrase, “the raid was accelerated in part by anger over the video.” Not a definitive statement to say the least. Surely, given the amount of time spent on pursuing the report, the Times could have reached a more concrete answer than that.

Does Taylor speak English? “The raid was accelerated in part by anger over the video” seems pretty definitive to me.

The quote by Abu Khattala who “suggested that the video which insulted the Prophet Muhammad was justification for the killings” is hardly a strong verification either. “Suggested” merely refers to the “possibility” that the video was a culprit.

Or, it’s a accurate description of what Abu Khattala said.

Furthermore, the world “justification” is significant in any understanding of Islamic radicalism. The word “justify” appears throughout the Koran. In the Muslim world, if you can “justify” your actions it is all that is necessary to be free of any responsibility. Barack Obama uses such tactics all the time. It is one of the primary reasons many people believe he still has Muslim ties.

I’m guessing ol’ Bob is on something like Diazepam or Dopamine, but since I don’t know him personally I have no way to know that. It’s possible he’s just nuts. Sorry I can’t be more definitive.