Krugman has another post up worth reading —

Consider what the different sides in economic debate have been predicting these past six or seven years. If you got your views from, say, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you knew – knew – that there was no housing bubble, that America in 2008 wasn’t in recession, that budget deficits would send interest rates sky-high, that the Fed’s expansion of its balance sheet would produce huge inflation, that austerity policies would lead to economic expansion.

That’s quite a record. And yet I’m well aware that many people – including people with real money at stake – consider the WSJ a reliable source and people like, well, me flaky and unbelievable.

Krugman links to a commentary saying that people are more likely to accept a credible argument when some knowledgeable person in their “cultural community” accepts it. But that doesn’t go nearly far enough. The truth is that a large part of the public doesn’t understand the difference between “fact” and “opinion.” Put another way, the falsehood or veracity of something is not judged by actual data, results, or real-world experience, but by whether one believes that a thing is supposed to be true, or not. And the arbiter of suppositions is one’s adopted ideology.

You might remember awhile back I took on a rightie comment thread challenging the notion that Paul Krugman has been “wrong time and time again. The fascinating thing about this exercise was that the righties in the thread had absolutely no idea what I meant by “wrong.” What I meant — and which I explained several times — is show me something that Krugman predicted about the economy that turned out to be wrong. Show me when he said the economy would do X and it actually did Y.

And of course, they couldn’t do that. Instead, they simply linked to his columns (which I suspect they hadn’t read) without explaining why they were wrong, or dredged up the old story about his having worked as a consultant for Enron.

In their minds, Krugman is “wrong” because he says things that contradict what right-wing think tank economists say. The actual track record of the think tankers versus Krugman is irrelevant.

From time to time I’ve caught flak from people who think I should try harder to communicate with righties. The truth is that years ago I went through a phrase of really, really trying, being respectful and patient and polite and just presenting facts and reason. And after a long time I gave up, because I realized I might as well be trying to teach a toaster to tap dance.

There’s very little you can disucss with people who don’t understand what a “fact” is.

The Left is not immune from irrationality, of course. We have our “Obama is worse than Bush” and “The Democrats are just as bad” crowd. The difference is that the leftie-bots generally are not totally untethered from facts; they just cherry pick the facts that support what they want to believe and declare everything else irrelevant.

But righties refuse to acknowledge anything that might wander into the world of evidence-based objectivity. The only truth that matters is what their ideology tells them is supposed to be true, and the hell with reality.

Today’s theme is “Good Conservatives Must Not Allow Reality to Tarnish Their Holy Belief System.”

Krugman has a number of posts up that point out how conventional wisdom about the economies of other countries, plus the news stories about those countries, tend to leave out anything resembling objective reality. Here’s one, about how Argentina is recovering from the financial crisis, and Ireland isn’t. But somehow Americans are being told just the opposite.

I’d just add something else: press coverage of Argentina is another one of those examples of how conventional wisdom can apparently make it impossible to get basic facts right. We keep getting stories about Ireland’s recovery when there is, in fact, no recovery — but there should be, darn it, because they’ve done the “right” thing, so that’s what we’ll report.

And conversely, articles about Argentina are almost always very negative in tone — they’re irresponsible, they’re renationalizing some industries, they talk populist, so they must be going very badly.

The “right” thing is, of course, going full-monte austerity, and the “wrong” thing is following basic Keynesian principles.

Of course, righties are famous for denial. Global climate change comes to mind. This denial often is coupled by projection. Jonah Goldberg’s new book sounds like a study in pathological projection, for example.

[Update: Speaking of climate change — now they’ve got a billboard campaign going that compares climate scientists to terrorists and mass murderers.]

But the richest example of rightie denial to come down the pike lately is their reaction to the murder-suicide allegedly commited by J.T. Ready, a neo-Nazi deeply imbedded in Arizona Republican politics. Ready’s political proclivities are beyond dispute, as Maddow explained last night —

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Immediately the dumber elements on the Right stepped forward to associate Ready with Occupy.

As Zandar observed,

Remember, America doesn’t have a right-wing domestic terrorist problem. We have a long string of completely unrelated “mass shooting” events where gunmen declare that various minority groups or random bystanders are the enemy and kill a bunch of them seemingly out of the blue in an attempt to strike fear into the hearts of millions and/or to force political change through bloodshed, but since these folks are FOX News viewers, it’s just “unfortunate” when this happens every couple of months or so. Meanwhile, the real terrorists are the New Black Panther Party because OOGA BOOGA BLOOGITY BLACK. Cue the scary chyron, folks.

In America today, “conservative” should be defined as someone so pathologically blinkered by ideology that he is blind to reality.

But the economic fantasies Krugman talks about are being pushed by alleged “centrists” too. The truthiness of austerity economics has been so firmly established by the money of those who stand to gain by it that reality itself is banished to Siberia, so to speak. For more on the latter, read Krugman’s latest column, “Feel the Confidence.”

This is going to piss everybody off, I fear. The President is in Afghanistan explaining how he has signed a deal to withdraw U.S.troops by the end of 2014, but MSNBC keeps running a banner saying that the deal will keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 2024.

He’s saying the U.S. will not build permanent bases in Afghanistan, and that U.S. military personnel will be in some kind of supporting non-combat role. It’s going to take a while to digest this.

Does President Obama play too much golf? That’s what the wingnuts are screaming about today. I ran into some dippychick on Facebook who wrote (in this thread, which is a hoot in itself) that the President has done “More golfing than all other presidents combined.”

True? Well, those of us of limping into our vintage years might remember another president who played a remarkable amount of golf. This is from a Golf Digest article:

Dwight David Eisenhower got in his share of golf, and then some. A study of the 34th president’s daily itinerary during his eight years in office from 1953-’61 turns up a staggering 1,000-plus days of golf, including almost 800 rounds everywhere from Augusta National to Cypress Point to Turnberry and beyond.

This was while he was President, mind you. On top of that, Ike had a putting green installed on the White House lawn. Imagine what the wingnuts would do if the Obamas did that.

By contrast, according to this anti-Obama website, President Obama has played 95 rounds of golf since his inauguration, as of April 21. I suspect that’s about average for presidents. It’s probably good for their physical and mental health, frankly.

I was a lot younger then, of course, but I don’t remember people going ballistic about Eisenhower playing golf. They just joked about it.

According to CNN, Woodrow Wilson played even more golf than Ike did. Wilson played every day, it says, which I assume includes the duration of World War I. Which kind of makes the idea that a president must not play golf while troops are in the field kind of ridiculous.

There are claims that George W. Bush was savaged for playing golf during the war in Iraq, but I don’t think it was the golf that irritated people. It was the attitude.

He could have kept playing for all I cared. I just wanted him to can the attitude. But he canned golf and kept the attitude. Oh, well.

I don’t know how far back you’d have to go to find a President who played no golf at all while President. I remember reading that Ulysses S. Grant was introduced to golf while traveling in Scotland, after he left the White House. He said he thought the game was good exercise, but he didn’t understand what the ball was for.

Anyway — it appears that the Right is pushing the meme that the Obamas are living some ritzy, ostentatious lifestyle unseemly for a President and First Lady. They have been seen in public wearing evening clothes! How outrageous! No presidential couple ever did anything like that before!

Seriously. The only thing that would make these nitwits happy is if the First Couple dressed only in overalls and got their exercise pulling weeds in the watermelon patch.

Here’s a cheerful article from Forbes, official journal of the cluelessly over-privileged — there’s been an upswing of hospitals suing patients who are unable to pay their bills.

According to the Charlotte Observer, over a five year period (2005 to 2010), North Carolina hospitals – most of which are tax-exempt non-profits – filed more than 40,000 lawsuits against patients with overdue bills. In at least one stunning example of patient-engagement, the article highlighted a bill collector who told an elderly woman “You have the right to remain silent.” Most of the lawsuits wind up against people that were uninsured – a category that typically pays the highest possible retail rate for healthcare services.

You’ll love this part:

In another example of aggressive collections – this time reported by the New York Times – debt collectors are starting to appear earlier in the healthcare process – including bedside in the ER. One organization, publicly traded Accretive Health is “embedding collectors as employees in emergency rooms and demanding that patients pay before receiving treatment.”

Whatever you do, don’t leave home without proof of insurance, if you have it. Consider having your policy information tattooed on your body somewhere, just in case. Otherwise, if you are unconscious, you could die before the hospital figures out who you are and whether you are insured.

But get this graph (click to enlarge):

Click to Enlarge

This is from the American Hospital Association, and it’s showing us the billions of dollars of unpaid bills hospitals are stuck with every year. And the thing I wish someone could get across to baggers and wingnuts and everyone else who doesn’t want to pay for “entitlements” is — we’re all paying those bills.

The average U.S. family and their employers paid an extra $1,017 in health care premiums last year to compensate for the uninsured, according to a study to be released Thursday by an advocacy group for health care consumers.

Families USA, which supports expanded health care coverage, found that about 37% of health care costs for people without insurance — or a total of $42.7 billion — went unpaid last year. That cost eventually was shifted to the insured through higher premiums, according to the group.

And of course this is a stupid, cost-inefficient way to pay for health care for the poor. A lot of those dollars represent uninsured people who didn’t seek medical help until some long-festering health problem was becoming critical, and also more expensive to treat. In theory, it ought to take less money out of our pockets to simply pay for health care for the poor with tax dollars, giving the poor better access to preventive and care for chronic illnesses.

But instead, too many of us scream stupidly about taxes and don’t notice that we’re already paying for this stuff, and we’re going to pay one way or another. Pretending that we aren’t paying for it is kind of stupid.