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.

There’s not a lot of news to comment on right now. Maybe we should give ourselves a break and just make Thanksgiving a whole month, and not let Christmas eat into it.

Here’s another story about how right-wing whackjobs in Texas dictate what goes into everybody’s textbooks. A couple of comments.

One, speaking as one who worked in the textbook industry for years — Publishers for many years have cranked out separate “Texas editions” of their textbooks. In fact, any state that has a committee deciding what books get adopted for the state gets its own edition. Usually the differences from one edition to another are very subtle. Often most of the differences are in the teachers’ editions and not the books the children use. To save money, publishers do try to make the state and national editions as uniform as possible so that, when the books are being printed, the printers only have to change the black plate (to change the text) but not the plates that print the colors in the illustrations.

But if Texas demands become too extensive to make that work, I’m not sure what the publishers would do. The costs involved in hiring an entirely separate Texas textbook division to create Texas-salable books might cause publishers to abandon Texas, at least in some subject areas like social studies and science, even if it is a huge market. The Texas market is a crapshoot, anyway, because it sometimes happens that publishers invest a lot of money and time catering to the Texas textbook committee and still fail to get “adopted” for some capricious reason. (For the record, that has happened with California too, sometimes.)

Second, when I hear about bozos like Don McLeroy, interviewed for the article, it makes me wonder how someone that stupid can not only survive, but achieve success. As a species, we don’t seem to be selecting for intelligence very efficiently. There was a time when the early hominid McLeroys would not have survived to procreate, you know. He might have mistaken a Arctodus simus for a Megalonyx jeffersonii and try to pet it. He might have tried to walk across a tar pit. Now he wears nice suits and dictates textbook content. I fear for humanity.

Yesterday the Mahadaughter and I got out of cooking by going to the Thanksgiving buffet at a fancy local hotel. The food was OK, but I really miss pigging out on the leftovers for the rest of the weekend. So think of me when you bite into your turkey sandwiches.

Some stuff for your post-feast digestion — first, noting that I’m generally ambivalent about Noam Chomsky, I really did appreciate his response to a truther:

The truthers’ response to the video is typically trutherish. The truther in the video cited a “consensus” of 2000 architects regarding Building 7, apparently saying its destruction was a planned demolition, or something. Chomsky dismissed the 2,000 as an inconsequential number. “Noam please do your math. Over 2000 architects does not equal a few,” said one commenter. Um, out of how many architects in the U.S. now? Not to mention engineers and physicists? And the consensus of the truthers is that Chomsky — Noam Chomsky, mind you — is now a lackey of the U.S. government. MIT gets significant funding from the Pentagon, after all (wink, nudge).

I don’t always agree with Noam, but I respect him for his independence. And if there’s any group of people on the planet more irrational than baggers, it’s truthers.

See also “A Realist’s Take on Obamacare,” “Obamacare’s Secret Success” and “Rooting for Failure.”

Take a day off from politics, and try not to argue with your right-wing relatives too much!