Now the President can’t even salute properly. The country is going to hell in a teapot, I tell you.

First off, Jon Stewart takes down Peggy Noonan.

John Schwartz of the New York Times writes about the lack of tornado shelters in Tornado Alley. Oklahoma officials are reluctant to add tornado shelter requirements to the building code, because freedom. Coming from a tornado-prone area myself, I do wonder where peoples’ heads are. Tornadoes are hardly rare in Oklahoma.

Here’s a clip and save — A Calm, Reasonable Explanation of Why Michael Kinsley Is Wrong About Austerity by Ryan Cooper.

Like, hurricanes are wet and stuff. And they don’t strike Oklahoma.

Joan Walsh:

Inhofe, of course, believes his state deserves those resources, even though he voted down aid to Hurricane Sandy victims. On MSNBC, Chris Jansing confronted Inhofe about his calling the Sandy aid bill a “slush fund,” and the brazen right-winger insisted the two issues shouldn’t be linked.

“Let’s look at that, that was totally different,” Inhofe told Jansing. “They were getting things — for instance that was supposed to be in New Jersey, they had things in the Virgin Islands, they were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.; everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy taking place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

Inhofe’s answer is too dishonest to fully parse. First of all, there was Sandy damage way beyond New Jersey, including in the Caribbean and in Washington, D.C., too. And Inhofe had different objections to the Sandy bill at the time. In a rambling, hard-to-follow Senate floor speech blocking Sandy aid last December, the Oklahoma conservative objected to the bill’s timing — “There’s always a lot of theater right before Christmas time … We shouldn’t be talking about it right before Christmas” — even though it was already going on two months since the storm ravaged the East Coast.

New York Daily News:

The Sandy relief bill initially contained money for projects outside of areas damaged by Sandy, with the hope of attracting enough votes to get it through Congress.

That spending represented a small portion of the massive bill – and much of it eventually was dropped from the legislation after objections by Republicans in the House.

The Sandy relief legislation did not contain money to put roofs on homes in Washington, but there were funds to repair museum roofs damaged by the hurricane.

Oklahoma’s other waste of space senator, Tom Coburn, is demanding that there be budget cuts to offset any disaster aid. Let somebody in someone else’s state suffer.

It’s safe to say not a day goes by without some part of Congress selling out to moneyed interests, and today was no exception. Today the House Committee on the Judiciary began fast-tracking a bill that obstructs promised compensation to asbestos victims. The Committee broke a promise to hold a public asbestos victims’ hearing and instead sent the bill to a full committee markup and vote without bothering even with a subcommittee vote.

The bill is H.R.982, called the Furthering Asbestos Claim Transparency (FACT) Act of 2013. It is supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and based partly on “model” legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for state legislators. The bill would require asbestos victim compensation trust funds to make public the personal information of those making claims on the trust. It lays no burden of “transparency” on companies that exposed workers and others to asbestos, however.

Asbestos victims’ advocate Judy Van Ness, who lost her husband to asbestos-caused disease, said of the bill,

“The FACT Act forces the asbestos trust funds who administer claims to reveal on a public website personally identifiable information about us and our families including the last four digits of our social security number, private work history and personal information of children exposed at an early age. This information could be used to deny employment, credit and health, life and disability insurance. It could also make us more vulnerable to identity thieves, con men and other types of predators.”

Some background — Because of his flameproofing properties, use of asbestos exploded in the 20th century, in ships, building materials, and machine and auto parts. Internal documents revealed during litigation showed that asbestos industry officials knew that breathing asbestos particles causes severe lung disease by the 1930s. The connection between asbestos and the deadly mesothelioma cancer was well documented in medical journals by the early 1960s. Yet the industry continued to recklessly expose workers and consumers to asbestos while aggressively lobbying against government safety regulations.

Not until the late 1970s did the Consumer Product Safety Commission ban asbestos use in wallboard patching compounds and gas fireplaces. And not until 1989 did the EPA attempt to ban most other asbestos products, a ban partly overturned by a federal appeals court in 1991.

Today there are stringent regulations regarding handling and disposal of asbestos, but all those years of recklessness have taken a toll. It is estimated that 10,000 U.S. workers die each year from asbestos exposure.

As asbestos manufacturers faced lawsuits from sick and dying workers, many went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect their assets. Some of these manufacturers were required to set up asbestos personal injury trusts, which were responsible for compensating present and future claimants. The FACT Act of 2013 would require these trusts to disclose much personal information about the claimants, a requirement that seems to have little purpose except to dissuade people from filing claims. (According to the General Accounting Office, personal information about individual claimants may be obtained today with the permission of the claimants or in response to a legitimate subpoena, but otherwise the privacy of claimants is respected.)

FACT would also create delays in addressing claims, which creates great hardship for the victims. Most mesothelioma patients die within six to eighteen months of the diagnosis.

Industry associations and “tort reform” organizations have spread stories for years about greedy litigants looking for “jackpot” jury awards and alleged asbestos victims gouging money out of every company in sight without even being sick. The fact is that the trusts are set up with all kinds of safeguards against fraud.

The Asbestos Cancer Victims’ Rights Campaign has an online petition to stop the FACT Act. The larger point, though, is that this is just one more example of the way Congress, especially the House, has stopped working for the People.

Here’s the back story: Paul Krugman has an article called “How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled” in the current New York Review of Books. It’s a long article, but in it the Professor makes the point that austerity economics is more about morality than economics. It grows out of an emotional need to make somebody pay for our sins.

Michael Kinsley wrote what was supposed to be a rebuttal to Krugman that made Krugman’s case. Kinsley accuses Krugman of making a moral case against austerity, and then said austerity is good because it is payment for past sins and just like eating one’s spinach. See also Michael Kinsley Humiliates Himself In Terrible Defense Of Austerity and Kinsley loves austerity because it is “spinach.”
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Since then there has been a high-level piling on, joined by people like Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias, as well as some blog posts by Krugman himself. This includes a post today called Macroeconomic Machismo.

It was obvious during the runup to the Iraq war that what was going on in the minds of many hawks — and not just the neocons — was not so much a deep desire to drop lots of bombs and kill lots of people (although they were OK with that) as a deep desire to be seen as people who were willing to Do What Has to be Done. Men who have never risked, well, anything relished the chance to look in the mirror and see Winston Churchill looking back.

Actually, I suspect that even the torture thing had less to do with sadism than with the desire to look tough.

And the austerian impulse is pretty much the same thing, except that in this case the mild-mannered pundits want to look in the mirror and see Paul Volcker.

It occurs to me this theory could be extended to just about every stupid thing in U.S. history, from the firing on Fort Sumter to the McCarthy witch hunts to LBJ’s ordering troops into Vietnam. Feel free to discuss.

See also Neocons:Munich :: Austerians:Stagflation

Jay Rosen reviews the saga of ABC News’s Jonathan Karl and the fabricated email about Benghazi talking points, and says Karl got played by his source. But at FAIR, Peter Hart makes a strong case that Karl was a right-wing mole all along.

Karl has been disingenuous about his bogus reporting, and I believe ABC has yet to acknowledge what happened.

After several days of scandal flame-fanning by Republicans, President Obama’s approval ratings are actually up just a tick.

The latest wrinkle in Benghazi gate is that President Obama may not have been in the White House situation room during the attacks. Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer, on Fox News, said that the precise location of the President during that attack was an “irrelevant fact,” and the wingnuts are getting huffy about this.

Dear Wingnuts: Do we want to review where President Pet Goat and Vice President Undisclosed Location were during the 9/11 2001 attacks? And somebody’s got the nerve to complain that the President may not have been in the situation room?

Via Kevin Drum, here’s an LA Times article on why the Administration was not happy about the leak of information to AP reporters.

Disclosure of a highly classified intelligence operation in Yemen last year compromised an exceedingly rare and valuable espionage achievement: an informant who had earned the trust of hardened terrorists, according to U.S. officials.

The operation received new scrutiny this week after the Justice Department disclosed it had obtained telephone records for calls to and from more than 20 lines belonging to the Associated Press news service and its journalists in April and May 2012 in a high-level investigation of the alleged leak of classified information.

To make a long story short, British intelligence had a mole planted in al Qaeda in the Saudi Peninsula, and he had given the U.S. some information on new bomb-making techniques and the people behind them, but information leaked to and published by the AP made further use of the mole impossible. Apparently the Administration was after the leaker, not the reporters.

So the Amazing Keyboarding Vegetable has one of his standard, weaselly, more-in-pity-than-anger columns up about When Good Governments Go Bad. A sample:

It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy.

It would be far worse if the senior workers of the I.R.S. have become so isolated by their technocratic task that they didn’t even recognize that using the search term “Tea Party” was going to be a moral and political problem. If that’s the case, then the members of the I.R.S. leadership are suffering from a tunnel vision that turns outside reality into abstractions. When government workers lose touch with the normal human context of their job, that’s when the real horror show commences.

But it’s not really hard to tell now, because the IG report found that when upper management found out what the Cincinnati staffers were up to, upper management ordered them to stop. To give the Cabbage credit, he is silent on the issue of Benghazi emails, which may signal some parts of the Republican establishment are ready to shut up about them.

On the very same editorial page today, the editorial board of the New York Times writes,

The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines.

Here it gets juicy —

But reality simply isn’t solid enough to hold back the vast Republican opportunism on display this week. Whatever cranky point Republicans had been making against President Obama for the last five years — dishonesty, socialism, jackbooted tyranny — they somehow found that these incidents were exactly the proof they had been seeking, no matter how inflated or distorted.

“This is runaway government at its worst,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said at a Tea Party news conference on Thursday about the I.R.S. scandal. “Who knows who they’ll target next.” Representative Michele Bachmann knew. Standing next to Mr. McConnell, she said the I.R.S.’s next target would obviously be the religious beliefs of people seeking health insurance.

For Senator Mike Lee of Utah, these incidents proved that the federal budget has to be cut even more deeply. “We need to return it to a simpler, more manageable government,” he said, “because that’s the only way that we’re ever going to prevent things like this from happening.”

There are no “things like this,” beyond a coincidence of bad timing. But they do have one thing in common: when bound together and loudly denounced on cable television and in hearings, they serve to obscure the real damage that Republicans continue to do to the economy and the workings of government.

Now, you and I already know this. But compare/contrast to the way media acted during the endless Whitewater/Monica investigations. CBS News has actually said that Republicans provided “doctored” versions of White House emails to make the White House look bad. And the report didn’t tack “Democrats do it too” at the end. At least some parts of national media are not helping Republicans cover their butts for a change.

The scandals are falling apart, writes Ezra Klein. He takes apart all three — Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP/DOJ mess. Regarding Benghazi, Steve Benen is Watching a ‘scandal’ evaporate before our very eyes. He adds,

There’s just nothing left. Trying to characterize this as a genuine political story worthy of attention has been a misguided partisan exercise for months, but now, it’s reached the point of ridiculousness.

But there is no sign that the Right is letting up. A Fox News guest has even compared the IRS non-scandal to Nazi Germany.

One of the many charming traits of today’s conservatives is that they never stop flogging the dead horse. There might be nothing left of the beast but hide and bones, but the Right will keep flogging, hoping to wring some more life out of it.

Greg Sargent considers who the horse flogging will hurt more, the GOP or the President.

It’s always possible that the scandal pile-up will undermine confidence in Obama’s leadership or feed a negative storyline about Obama and bigger, intrusive government, a point made by Karen Tumulty today. But it’s also possible that the scandals will be perceived as inside-the-Beltway noise and that voters won’t blame them on Obama or see in them any larger storylines about his leadership or vision. Indeed, a glance at Mike Allen’s Playbook suggests the narrative is already shifting: “OBAMA ACTS ON THREE FRONTS to calm storm.” And predictions that suddenly the voters will come to see Obama’s vision of government as dangerous, out of control, and radical have been made for literally years.

I can think of a third possibility — that most people outside the Beltway will be even more disgusted with Congress than it is already, for wasting time on this nonsense rather than addressing real issues.