It’s a familiar pattern — the President proposes some kind of gawdawful “grand bargain” that the Right won’t take, anyway, while lefties roll their eyes and say, “What is he thinking?” Well, this week he did it again — Paul Waldman explains —

President Obama offered a “grand bargain” yesterday, and although it wasn’t particularly grand, it was a bargain: Republicans would get a lowering of the corporate income tax rate, something they’ve wanted for a long time, and Democrats would get some new investments in infrastructure, job training, and education. Inevitably, Republicans rejected it out of hand. “It’s just a further-left version of a widely panned plan he already proposed two years ago, this time with extra goodies for tax-and-spend liberals,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. At this point, Obama could offer to close the E.P.A., eliminate all inheritance taxes, and rename our nation’s capital “Reagan, D.C.” if Republicans would also agree to give one poor child a sandwich, and they’d say no, because that would be too much big government.

Bloomberg explains it in a way that makes the bargain seem less awful, because it closes a lot of “corporate welfare” tax loopholes for corporations. Bloomberg adds:

More broadly, it’s not hard to see Obama’s strategy: With its cuts in tax rates and narrowed loopholes, the plan is designed to appeal to a wide swath of corporate America, the small-business lobby and a large number of congressional Republicans who support cutting taxes and ending corporate welfare. And with its increases in public-works spending, the plan appeals to organized labor, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a large number of Democrats who support more stimulus spending.

Michael Tomasky:

There are those who might say that it just makes Obama look impotent to keep proposing these things only to the see GOP say, Are you kidding? I guess they have a bit of a point. But I think his only strategy by now is to put offers on the table that make the Republicans look increasingly extreme and unreasonable, so that the American people see more and more clearly what the problem is.

And not just the American people in general—in this case, corporate leaders in particular. Presumably, corporations are going to support Obama’s plan by and large; hard to see why they’d oppose something that lowers their taxes (although it’s true that specific companies in specific areas will fight to retain their loopholes). Corporate leaders have had plenty of patience with Mitch McConnell. But how much patience are they going to have with a McConnell who blocks a tax cut for them?

Maybe still a lot, I don’t know. But this is now the only way left to penetrate the GOP’s wall of obstruction: Drive the wedge right between the congressional GOP and its usual power centers. Corporate America wants immigration reform. It wants lower tax rates, and it (or a large majority of it) will happily accept infrastructure reform as part of a package. Obama wants those same things. The Republicans are against them. Surely at some point, some corporate leader or leaders will step forward and say enough. Even that probably won’t make congressional Republicans move; they are married to the most rabid section of their base, and they are not going to budge.

Corporate America doesn’t always act rationally, however.

I haven’t been following the issue of choosing a new Federal Reserve chairperson that closely, but today lots of people are writing about it, and it’s jaw-dropping stuff.

Apparently the main contenders are Lawrence Summers (booooo!) and Janet Yellen (yay!). Yellen is vice chairwoman of the Fed’s board of governors, and everybody who understands this stuff says she would be an awesome choice.

But the resistance to Yellen has taken what we might call a patriarchal turn. Some guy with the improbable name of Cardiff Garcia writes,

This particular plank of support for a Yellen candidacy was reinforced by the Wall Street Journal’s analysis on Monday of FOMC forecasts since 2009. It turns out that she has also been successful, more than any other FOMC member, at predicting the short-term trajectories of the major economic indicators.

Obviously there’s no guarantee that this would continue, but at the very least this serves to further disprove one very peculiar notion given by Ezra Klein’s sources last week for preferring Larry Summers to Yellen — specifically the notion that “the market” trusts Summers more, because (we guess?) he’ll be a tough manly man on inflation while she’s a homeless-hugging San Francisco hippie female person who will let the US economy revert back to the hellspun apocalyptic landscape of the 1970s, ushering in another era of frozen wastelands and broken homes and shattered dreams.

Say what? Paul Krugman explains that last bit:

I’ve spent five years and more watching the inflationphobes, who weren’t particularly sensible to begin with, descend into shrill unholy madness. They could have reacted to the failure of their predictions — the continued absence of the runaway inflation they insisted was just around the corner — by stepping back and reconsidering both their model and their recommendations. But no. At best, we see a proliferation of new reasons to raise interest rates in a depressed economy, with nary an acknowledgment that previous predictions were dead wrong. At worst, we see conspiracy theories — we actually have double-digit inflation, but the BLS is spiriting the evidence away in its black helicopters and burying it in Area 51.

So at this point I thought I’d seen everything. But no: the prospect that Janet Yellen, a monetary dove, might become the next Fed chair has driven the right into a frenzy of — well, words fail me.

But the real objections coming out against Yellen are more, shall we say, primordial. Ezra Klein writes about The subtle, sexist whispering campaign against Janet Yellen. But after seeing this New York Sun editorial on The Female Dollar, I can’t say I see anything subtle. That’s about the most blatantly sexist thing I’ve read in a long time. I’m not going to quote the thing; just see for yourself.

Jonathan Chait writes

The Sun’s point — captured in its headline, “The Female Dollar?” — struck the Wall Street Journal’s editors as so clever as to bear repeating in their own editorial today. Yellen, the Journal concedes, “doesn’t lack for professional credentials. But her cause has been taken up by the liberal diversity police as a gender issue because she’d be the first female Fed chairman.”

See how it works? It’s not the pigs pundits at the Sun who are sexist, but evil libruhls who support a woman for the position who are sexist. Because no matter how well qualified they are — and Cardiff Garcia, above, links to a Wall Street Journal analysis that says Yellen is very qualified, indeed — the only reason libruhls want women and minorities hired into important positions is that they are women and minorities, which is of course sexist and racist. So the only way to avoid sexism and racism is to hire only white men.