In a column titled “America Goes Dark,” Paul Krugman writes about the collapsing empire.

… a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

The question is, why can’t people see what we’re doing to our own country by refusing to invest in infrastructure and education? Of course, a big part of the answer is that people have been soaked in right-wing anti-government propaganda for so long they think rot is normal. But I’d like to think there are a substantial number of Americans who would support investing in infrastructure and education if someone would stand up and show some leadership in that direction.

In fact, I think that’s why a lot of people voted for Obama, but he’s gotten bogged down somehow. Maybe The System is just too big, too entrenched, for even a president to shake it.

BTW, on Right Wing News our buddy William Teach criticized Krugman’s column, and then in the comment thread wrote,

A person is only an expert as long as they are usually correct in their assumptions/predictions/etc. Krugman has been wrong time and time again, as has Obama and Co.

So I asked for a list of ten examples of Krugman being wrong, and of course they can’t come up with ten examples. One guy provided a list of Krugman’s most recent columns, but of course there was no proof that Krugman said anything wrong in those columns, just that the guy disagreed with the columns.

What’s actually come out of the experiment is that the wingnuts can’t tell the difference between opinion and fact. In other words, an opinion they agree with is the same thing as a fact in their world. I keep pushing for real-world examples, and they obviously have no idea what I mean by that.

But that’s part of the problem, I think. Apparently this crew is still insulated enough that they can live in their fantasyland, but one of these days the real world is likely to bite them in the ass. And then maybe they’ll notice what the difference is between fact and opinion.

Truly, the anti-mosque hysteria sweeping the country bears an uncanny resemblance to the know-nothing movement of the 19th century. From Wikipedia:

The Know-Nothing movement was a nativist American political movement of the 1840s and 1850s. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to Anglo-Saxon values and controlled by the Pope in Rome.

I’m not finding it now, but I recall reading that mobs of know-nothings would occasionally burn down Catholic churches, because somehow Catholicism was seen as a threat to American liberty. If Catholics took over, they would run the country under orders from the Vatican. (This sentiment still existed when John Kennedy was running for president in 1960; I remember some of the old folks saying that if Kennedy were elected, he’d be taking orders from the Pope, and the Pope would be running America.) The know-nothings tried to stop immigration, especially from Germany and Ireland, because, um, they were German and Irish. Whatever.

Fast forward to 2010:

In all of the recent conflicts, opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. They quote passages from the Koran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law.

These local skirmishes make clear that there is now widespread debate about whether the best way to uphold America’s democratic values is to allow Muslims the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans, or to pull away the welcome mat from a faith seen as a singular threat.

“What’s different is the heat, the volume, the level of hostility,” said Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky. “It’s one thing to oppose a mosque because traffic might increase, but it’s different when you say these mosques are going to be nurturing terrorist bombers, that Islam is invading, that civilization is being undermined by Muslims.”

‘

I like this part —

Recently, a small group of activists became alarmed about the mosque. Diana Serafin, a grandmother who lost her job in tech support this year, said she reached out to others she knew from attending Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies….“As a mother and a grandmother, I worry,” Ms. Serafin said. “I learned that in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be overtaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that.”

Really, if you replace “Islam” with “Catholicism” and “sharia law” with “papal authority,” you’d be right at home with the know nothings. Same stuff.

The fear that somehow a Muslim majority — the most recent Pew survey says Muslims make up .6 percent of the U.S. population — could exist in 20 years and could implement sharia law for everyone reveals a gross ignorance of both human biology and how the government thing works. And it seems contemporary stupid Americans are no less ignorant than 19th century stupid Americans.

By now you may have heard that Fareed Zakaria has returned an award given him by the Anti-Defamation League because of the ADL’s backward position on the Islamic center near Ground Zero. It’s good to see someone display principle.

On the other hand, the “listen to us DFHs next time, bozo” prize goes to Joe Klein, who has concluded he was wrong to support the invasion of Iraq. what he says is mostly right, and it would have been brilliant if he’d written it eight years ago. It would have been commendable if he’d written it six or seven years ago. Now it’s just — yeah, Klein, right. Thanks for catching up.

And the “WTF?” prize goes to a person named Neda Bolourchi, who claims to be a Muslim opposed to the building to a mosque (it’s not a mosque, bleepit) near Ground Zero. Her mother was on one of the planes that slammed into the towers, and no doubt she has profoundly deep emotions about the 9/11 attacks. However, she writes,

From the first memorial ceremonies I attended at Ground Zero, I have always been moved by the site; it means something to be close to where my mother may be buried, it brings some peace. That is why the prospect of a mosque near Ground Zero — or a church or a synagogue or any religious or nationalistic monument or symbol — troubles me.

This is puzzling, Ground Zero is surrounded by prominent churches. I can’t see how anyone could go there and not notice. Some of the larger churches are marked on this satellite image of lower Manhattan. The churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel is directly across the street from Ground Zero, for example. Unlike where the Islamic center will be, St. Paul’s is very visible from Ground Zero, and Ground Zero from St. Paul’s. Likewise St. Peter’s Catholic Church and several smaller churches.

And if we want to talk about nationalistic symbols — again, going back to the satellite image, you see that right across Vessey Street from where the World Trade Center used to be is a big huge honking and fairly ugly federal building that houses the New York offices of several state and federal agencies. That building is festooned with nationalistic symbols, including American flags, as I recall.

So while I don’t want to disrespect anyone who lost a loved one on September 11, I have to question if Neda ever actually went to Ground Zero. Or maybe she went there just once several years ago and doesn’t remember it well.

“I know Ground Zero is not mine alone; I must share this sanctuary with tourists, politicians, anyone who chooses to come, whatever their motivations or intentions,” she writes. Well no, Neda, what you need to realize is that Ground Zero is a big hole in the middle of a vibrant and living city, and the people who live in that vibrant and living city, and who travel past that hole and have seen it every bleeping day, for nine bleeping years, are way past ready to bring that misbegotten bit of real estate back into the land of the living, and fill that barren space once more with the daily life of New York.

Life does go on, if we don’t get in its way.

Glenn Greenwald has a depressing, but probably prescient, post up called “What collapsing empire looks like.” Among other things, he points to an article in the New York Times about what city and state governments are cutting because they have no money —

Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.

Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.

Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

The United States came into being officially in 1781, with the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, which of course were replaced by the Constitution in 1788. At the time, conventional wisdom in Europe was that republics might work OK in a small country, but U.S. needed the strong hand of a monarch to govern it. There was no way, they thought, that a people scattered over such a large area could govern themselves through elected representation. It wasn’t until after the U.S. successfully pulled itself back together after the Civil War that Europe stopped expecting the U.S. political system to crumble apart at any moment.

In the years after the Civil War, the U.S. enjoyed a remarkable degree of political stability given the diversity of our people and regions. Federal and state governments managed to function more or less as they were designed to, in spite of the usual elements of corruption and idiocy common to all human enterprises.

However, the system does seem to require that some critical mass of elected officials be adults, emotionally as well as physically. Some critical mass has to be able to keep their natural larceny and self-delusion within accepted parameters. Some critical mass has to be observant enough to know chickens from toasters.

What we’re seeing is what happens when we lose that critical mass.

Today the idiot children Republicans are squawking about job losses in June and July. Matt Yglesias writes, —

The new unemployment report highlights the fact that the economy remains lousy and John Boehner is going to be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives. Ironically, it also demonstrates the bankruptcy of Boehner’s way of thinking. The new conservative orthodoxy has been that somehow teachers, police officers, guys who repair street signs, bus drivers, librarians, etc. don’t have “real jobs” and that police departments, roads, trains, buses, libraries, etc. don’t contribute to economic growth. In those terms, the unemployment report was actually fine—the private sector added 71,000 jobs, which isn’t the greatest number in human history but it’s okay.

The big losses were government jobs, and that was both predictable and preventable. We just have to have the will to pay for those jobs. While a big chunk of the job losses were from laying off the temporary census workers, we see that essential jobs, as well as services, are also being cut for lack of money. We’re essentially choking ourselves to death because we’ve developed a phobia about paying taxes.

Republicans seem to think that the money required to run police departments, schools and libraries come from the Good Money Fairy. Or maybe it grows on trees. If we Believe hard enough, the money will just be there, and we can go on as we always have taking a basic level of infrastructure and services for granted. Matt continues,

But because in the Senate a minority of members can get their way, action wasn’t taken. Consequently, we have a horrible jobs number. Which would be bad enough, but the way the American political system works, the minority party that prevented the majority from addressing the crisis will accrue massive political benefits as a result of the collapse.

Conservatives won’t admit it today, but what we’re looking at is a major breakdown of the logic of the American political system.

I’ve said before that America was able to coast for a long time on the investments in people and infrastructure made during the New Deal and during and after World War II. Well, we ain’t coastin’ no more. We have stopped. And we can either find the will to re-invest, or we can let the country rot. It’s our choice.

Righties like to tell us that freedom isn’t free, meaning that they require the blood sacrifice of other people going to war for their freedom from time to time. Well, folks, little about a nation is free. Roads aren’t free. Police cars aren’t free. Armies aren’t free, for that matter. National parks and monuments aren’t free. Schools, from kindergartens to universities, aren’t free.

This nation still has wealth, natural resources (most of ’em, anyway), and a reasonably skilled workforce. There is no natural reason why the economy is this bad. The righties can argue whether nature or mankind causes global warming, but there’s no question nature didn’t screw up the economy. We did this to ourselves, but we did it to ourselves because movement conservatives sold Americans on the fairy tale that we can keep the same prosperous, stable and safe America we’d come to expect in the 20th century but not have to pay for it.

Righties can argue all they like about how their tax-cutting, supply-side economic theories aren’t to blame, and the fault belongs to “tax and spend” liberals. Never mind that the historical evidence says otherwise.

Paul Krugman has a must-read column today on the allegedly innovative economic ideas of Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. However, “Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce,” Krugman says. It’s the same old, same old — just relieve the rich of their tax burdens, and everything will work out.

Oh, of course, we’d have to dismantle Medicare, but that’s OK. We’ll give the old folks vouchers they can take to insurance companies to buy their own insurance. Of course, if the health care reform act is repealed the insurance companies will refuse to insure old folks anyway, so the vouchers would be worthless, but at least the old folks will die knowing that their corpses will be buried in a land where the free market prevails.

A federal judge has declared California’s Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional. As I understand it, thie ruling found that all same-sex marriages performed in the state before Prop 8 have been ruled to be valid.

From LA Times:

Both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa praised the judge’s decision. “Because a judge had the courage to stand up for the constitution of the United States, prop 8 has been overturned!” the mayor wrote on Twitter.

This ruling will be challenged, of course, so this saga isn’t over. But today we can enjoy some good news.

The other bit of cheerful news also is from California. Demonstrations against construction of a mosque (a real mosque, this time) in Temecula, California, experienced epic fail. The plan was to show up at the Muslim community’s current place of worship with many dogs, on the theory that Muslims hate dogs. I understand that dogs are considered ritually unclean in some schools of Islam, but that’s not my area of expertise, so … whatever.

Anyway, more counter-protesters than protesters showed up, and there was only one dog. Many of the counter-protesters were from area churches, and they carried signs saying “Leave These American Citizens Alone.” Read about it at TPM.

I see that my state-of-origin, Missouri, voted overwhelming to nullify the health care reform law, in particular the individual mandate. The ballot proposal to nullify the law, Proposition C, passed everywhere in the state except for Kansas City and St. Louis.

Now, I know the state pretty well, and I know that in some of those counties at least 20 percent of the population is below the poverty line. Further, in big chunks of the state the the kind of jobs that come with full benefits are scarce.

So there’s little doubt that many of the people who voted for Proposition C in Missouri yesterday have no health insurance, have no hope of getting insurance, and are not getting medical care they need. They are also poor enough that when the time comes for them to purchase insurance through the exchanges they will benefit from all kinds of subsidies or will be able to enroll in Medicaid for the first time.

For example, let’s look at Washington County. According to Wikipedia, the per capita income there is $16,095. The median income for men is $27,871; for women $18,206; and for families $38,193. All of those incomes fall well below the cutoff for subsidies. According to the Kaiser health reform subsidy calculator, a median Washington County family with four kids and a 40-year-old head of household would get a tax credit for 82 percent of their anticipated annual premium, leaving them with an actual expense of $1,757 annually, or just under $145 a month.

And I wish it were lower, and I wish it were a direct subsidy and not a tax credit, but you know Republicans like their tax credits, and Republicans insisted that the for-profit insurance companies get a big enough cut so the CEOs can vacation in France. Which has better health care than we do.

But without the mandate, the premiums would be higher for everyone, and we’d be back in the same death spiral pattern we’re in now, with younger and healthier people dropping insurance, leaving the older and sicker in a shrinking risk pool with rising premium costs, causing more people to drop insurance, etc.

The state is far more conservative than it used to be. I haven’t lived there since about 1977, and back then a reasonably progressive, New Deal Democrat like Stuart Symington could do very well. I guess all those years of listening to Rush have done their job. Now the elites of the Right jerk their chains, and the people of Missouri do their bidding.

I understand there’s little chance Missouri would be allowed to opt out of the health care reform law, unless Republicans retake enough advantage in Congress to rewrite or repeal the law. And I’m sure the lemming voters of Missouri will do their best to make that happen. The state motto should be changed from “show me” to “which way to the cliffs, oh master?”

Update: John Cole writes,

Though I’m sure we’ll be hearing how it’s part of a groundswell against Obama and Congress, I’ll take the simpler explanation that everyone wants to eat cake, but nobody wants to get fat. Mandatory insurance is the unpleasant part of HCR that makes the whole thing work, and it’s not surprising that the least palatable part of the bill is unpopular.

Maybe, but I think it’s more likely My Fellow Hillbillies were whipped up by rhetoric about sending a message to Obama and not letting the Gubmint control my health care. Some of those people aren’t getting any health care, but they’re ready to do without rather than have any part of it tainted by connection to the Gubmint, until they turn 65 and can collect Medicare. And then it’s OK, as long as Gubmint keeps its hands off Medicare, because Medicare comes from Jesus, or maybe the health care fairy. Nah, probably Jesus.

Lemmings, I tell you. Stupid, ignorant lemmings. They’re charging for the cliffs as fast as they can charge, and they’re trying to drag the whole country with them.

There’s a lot of squawking about how the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan would cause pain to the families of September 11 victims, so it should not be built. But some of those families are Muslim. And notice that most of the people presuming to speak for the families of September 11 victims do not belong to families of September 11 victims, who as far as I know have not been polled for their opinions.

The Families of September 11 have made no statement about the Islamic Center that I could find on their website. The September 11 Families’ Association website hosts some news stories about the Islamic Center, but I could find no opinion or position about it on that site, one way or another.

But the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group founded and steered by families of September 11 victims, has issued a strong opinion. It supports the building of the Islamic Center.

I realize some individuals who lost family members on September 11 have vocally opposed the Islamic Center, but it’s a leap to assume that they speak for anyone but themselves. So I say again to Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the buttinskys who don’t live in New York and have no personal connection to those who died there — MYOB.

Today New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission is expected to reject a proposal to designate as a “landmark” the property at 45-47 Park Place in lower Manhattan. That is, of course, the proposed site of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” that would not be a mosque and would not be at “Ground Zero.” And of course the proposal was made in an attempt to stop construction of the Islamic Center That Would Not Be a Mosque and Would Not Be at Ground Zero.

Via a deceptively headlined article by Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard, I learned that that a Quinnipiac poll found 46 percent of voters living in Manhattan support the Islamic Center project; 36 percent oppose it, and I assume the remainder are undecided.

However, people living in the other four boroughs are less supportive, especially Staten Island voters, who oppose the center by 73 to 14 percent. All five boroughs put together show that 52 percent of New Yorkers oppose the center, but nearly as many either support it or don’t care.

This is interesting:

A mosque near Ground Zero would “foster understanding and teach people that not all Muslims are terrorists,” 42 percent of New York City voters say. Of this group, 68 percent support the mosque.

Another 42 percent of voters say the mosque “is an insult to the memory and families of 9/11 victims.” Of this group, 93 percent oppose the mosque.

So New Yorkers overall are split evenly between people who think the center (which would not be a mosque) would be a positive thing or a negative thing. But notice that a hefty minority of people who thought the center would be a positive thing still oppose building it. This suggests to me the effects of peer pressure, or perhaps people who are not personally bothered by the center oppose building it because other people are bothered. That’s not exactly a reason for trashing the Bill of Rights, though.

There have been plenty of times in American history that big majorities of Americans supported causes and policies that would appall later generations. Slavery and Jim Crow come to mind, and so do Wounded Knee, much of the Philippine–American War, and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Opposition to the Islamic center obviously fits into the same shameful, hateful category.

So sometimes a majority are wrong, which is why the Founders did not establish a purely majoritarian government. Stopping Muslims from doing something lawful just because they are Muslims obviously violates the First Amendment and is something that government has no power to do, even if it’s the will of the majority.

But conservatives, for whom the word “liberty” refers to their assumed license to stop other people from enjoying liberty, have formed a virtual mob to try to intimidate New York City officials into stopping the building of the center, Bill of Rights or no Bill of Rights. And if they succeed, they’ll go off to make speeches about how they support the rule of law over the rule of men.

Elsewhere — William McGurn writes for the Wall Street Journal about the Auschwitz nuns. These were Carmelite nuns who turned a building on the edge of the Auschwitz concentration camp site into a convent, intending to pray for the souls of the victims. Jewish groups took offense, and eventually Pope John Paul II asked the Carmelites to move into another convent. I infer from the WSJ editorial that the new convent is in the same city (OÅ›wiÄ™cim) as the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, just not within site of it. In any event, McGurn’s argument is that the Islamic Center is analogous to the situation of the Auschwitz nuns, and the Islamic center builders should follow Pope John Paul II’s example and take the center elsewhere.

Except that it isn’t analogous. The proposed Islamic Center will not be visible from the old Trade Center site. And the people taking offense at the building of the Islamic Center are not a clearly defined group with a special connection to the site, but just people who don’t want it there.

Essentially, McGunn is saying that we can ignore the Bill of Rights whenever a big enough mob says we can.

And in associating all Muslims with the September 11 terrorists, the opponents are acting a lot more like, well, those who associated all Jews with some nefarious plot to undermine Germany. You do know who I’m talking about, I assume.

Update: Holy Joe should put the brakes on his mouth. Senators from Connecticut, not New York, should butt out.

Update: As expected, the Landmarks Commission decided the building on Park Place is not a landmark. I doubt very much that the mob will be able to stop the building of the Islamic Center. Unfortunately, the city may have to keep the construction under guard so that busloads of out-of-town yahoos don’t take it on themselves to stop construction.

Update: I can’t read the article because it’s behind a subscription firewall, but the blurb is bad enough — “An Open Letter on the Ground Zero Mosque: The location undermines the goal of interfaith understanding.” Translation: Those Muslims should understand they can’t get away with something that’s not conservatively correct.

Update to the last update: I picked up from a rightie blog that the WSJ article linked above says this:

Our deeper concern is what effect Cordoba House would have on the families of 9/11 victims, survivors of and first responders to the attacks, New Yorkers in general, and all Americans. As you have seen in the public reaction to the Cordoba House, 9/11 remains a deep wound for Americans—especially those who experienced it directly in some way. They understandably see the area as sacred ground. Nearly all of them also reject the equation of Islam with terrorism and do not blame the attacks on Muslims generally or on the Muslim faith. But many believe that Ground Zero should be reserved for memorials to the event itself and to its victims. They do not understand why of all possible locations in the city, Cordoba House must be sited so near to there.

Again somebody presumes to speak for the families of 9/11 victims, who have pretty much been rendered voiceless in all the noise. “They understandably see the area as sacred ground. … many believe that Ground Zero should be reserved for memorials to the event itself and to its victims” — there’s a bleeping strip club south of Ground Zero (the Pussycat Lounge and Shogun Room, 96 Greenwich St.) that is about as close to Ground Zero as the Islamic Center would be. There are many, many bars closer to Ground Zero than the Islamic Center would be. There’s all kinds of stuff between Ground Zero and the Islamic Center site that don’t have a bleeping thing to do with September 11. So since when is all that territory “reserved for memorials”? Give me a break.

Another update: “If He Could, Bin Laden Would Bomb the Cordoba Initiative” by Jeffrey Goldberg.

I know Feisal Abdul Rauf; I’ve spoken with him at a public discussion at the 96th street mosque in New York about interfaith cooperation. He represents what Bin Laden fears most: a Muslim who believes that it is possible to remain true to the values of Islam and, at the same time, to be a loyal citizen of a Western, non-Muslim country. Bin Laden wants a clash of civilizations; the opponents of the this mosque project are giving him what he wants.

Exactly. Exactly.

Updated Again: My nominee for Flaming Useless Idiot of the Hour … I started to say of the Week, but the Right cranks ’em out way faster than that … is Jennifer Rubin, who writes for Commentary —

The left continues to feign confusion (it is hard to believe its pundits are really this muddled) as to the reasons why conservatives (and a majority of fellow citizens) oppose the Ground Zero mosque. No, it’s not about “religious freedom” — we’re talking about the location of the mosque on the ash-strewn site of 3,000 dead Americans.

No, Jennifer, the center will not be on the ash-strewn site of 3,000 dead Americans.. It will be two city blocks away and hidden from view behind two larger buildings. It will actually be much closer to the New York Dolls topless bar and “gentleman’s club” than to Ground Zero.

And we’re not at all confused about why you righties are hysterical about the Islamic Center. It’s because you’re a pack of bigoted cowards who are so fearful of a few moderate Muslims you’d sell out every value this country stands for to keep them out of your sight.

It is interesting that the word mosque is not employed by those excoriating the mosque opponents. As a smart reader highlights, why is it described as a “cultural center”?

Because it’s going to be a cultural center and not a mosque. A mosque is a particular kind of building that conforms to a specific format, and the cultural center will not be that. Instead, it will be modeled after the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural center that nobody ever calls “synagogue.”

FYI, there are a number of locations in lower Manhattan in which Muslims gather for prayer services. This has been going on for many years, long before the 9/11 attacks. No, they are not mosques, either, just rooms set aside for the purpose.

Obviously, Jennifer, you are terribly confused, and about many things. If you need anything else explained to you, let me know.

Uppity Uppity Update: Mayor Bloomberg delivers stirring defense of Islamic center that Salon editors still confuse with a mosque.