Paul Krugman accuses Bernie Sanders himself of becoming a "Bernie Bro."

Courtesy of The New York Times:  

Mr. Sanders is starting to sound like his worst followers. Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro. 

Let me illustrate the point about issues by talking about bank reform. 

The easy slogan here is “Break up the big banks.” It’s obvious why this slogan is appealing from a political point of view: Wall Street supplies an excellent cast of villains. But were big banks really at the heart of the financial crisis, and would breaking them up protect us from future crises? 

Many analysts concluded years ago that the answers to both questions were no. Predatory lending was largely carried out by smaller, non-Wall Street institutions like Countrywide Financial; the crisis itself was centered not on big banks but on “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers that weren’t necessarily that big. And the financial reform that President Obama signed in 2010 made a real effort to address these problems. It could and should be made stronger, but pounding the table about big banks misses the point. 

Yet going on about big banks is pretty much all Mr. Sanders has done. On the rare occasions on which he was asked for more detail, he didn’t seem to have anything more to offer. And this absence of substance beyond the slogans seems to be true of his positions across the board.

I think Krugman has a point here.

Sanders likes to use bumper sticker ready slogans to make his arguments, which sound good when shouted out at rallies, but are much trickier to rationalize when confronted with just how they would translate into actual policy, and who he would find to support him in creating those policies.

And as we learned by reading that New York Daily News interview Sanders does not have a clear idea himself of how to accomplish what he promises, if elected, to accomplish.

Remember if your only tool is a hammer then every problem you see is a nail.

But what happens if your hammer is non-existent?

Speaking of non-existent that seems to be the definition for Sanders' invitation from the Vatican as well.

Courtesy of The Hill:  

Sanders earlier on Friday had said the Vatican had invited him to attend a conference on social and economic issues to be held on April 15, just days before the New York primary. 

The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is hosting the event. "It was an invitation from the Vatican," Sanders said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "I was very moved by the invitation."

Invitation from the Vatican, during a contentious American election season? Why would the Pope interfere like that?

The short answer is that he wouldn't.

This from US News: 

Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, blasted the Vermont senator for "monumental discourtesy," suggesting he wrangled a back-door invitation that kept her in the dark, according to Bloomberg Politics.

"Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons," Archer said. "I think in a sense he may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly – not that he will."

This was further corroborated by the Pope's spokesperson:

Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope's spokesman told the Italian news agency Ansa that the Academy of Social Sciences invited Sanders, not Pope Francis, and that His Holiness doesn't plan to give the senator an audience. 

"For the moment there is no expectation that there will also be a meeting with the pope," Lombardi said.

You know when your brand is that of a truth teller you might want to make sure that the truth is what you are telling. 

Update: To be fair it appears that Vatican politics are playing a role in this little drama, and in fact Bernie may not be the one who is failing to tell the truth.

It is still accurate to say that Sanders was not invited by the Pope, but not accurate to say he was not invited by the Vatican.

Former economic advisers sign open letter to Bernie Sanders claiming the promises made by his policies are unrealistic.

Courtesy of Letters to Sanders:

Dear Senator Sanders and Professor Gerald Friedman, 

We are former Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. For many years, we have worked to make the Democratic Party the party of evidence-based economic policy. When Republicans have proposed large tax cuts for the wealthy and asserted that those tax cuts would pay for themselves, for example, we have shown that the economic facts do not support these fantastical claims. We have applied the same rigor to proposals by Democrats, and worked to ensure that forecasts of the effects of proposed economic policies, from investment in infrastructure, to education and training, to health care reforms, are grounded in economic evidence. Largely as a result of efforts like these, the Democratic party has rightfully earned a reputation for responsibly estimating the effects of economic policies. 

We are concerned to see the Sanders campaign citing extreme claims by Gerald Friedman about the effect of Senator Sanders’s economic plan—claims that cannot be supported by the economic evidence. Friedman asserts that your plan will have huge beneficial impacts on growth rates, income and employment that exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact of their tax cut proposals. 

As much as we wish it were so, no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes. Making such promises runs against our party’s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic. These claims undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda and make it that much more difficult to challenge the unrealistic claims made by Republican candidates. 

Sincerely, 

Alan Krueger, Princeton University 

Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, 2011-2013 

Austan Goolsbee, University of Chicago Booth School 

Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, 2010-2011 

Christina Romer, University of California at Berkeley 

Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, 2009-2010 

Laura D’Andrea Tyson, University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business 

Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, 1993-1995

It should be noted that even though these are economic advisers from Democratic administrations supporters of Bernie Sanders might simply dismiss them as Hilary supporters and ignore entirely any advice they may provide.

But should they?

Beats me, I'm no economist.

However Paul Krugman is one, and he had this to say: 

Sanders needs to disassociate himself from this kind of fantasy economics right now. If his campaign responds instead by lashing out — well, a campaign that treats Alan Krueger, Christy Romer, and Laura Tyson as right-wing enemies is well on its way to making Donald Trump president.

Essentially almost every problem that Bernie Sanders sees he believes can be solved through more jobs, a better economy, and taxing the wealthy.

If top Democratic economists pile on him like this that is going to seriously undercut his message, and potentially damage his credibility.

P.S. Before we begin to discuss this remember no hair pulling, eye gouging, or biting. Okay?

Paul Krugman, not always the President's biggest supporter, decides that Obama is pretty damn impressive after all.

Courtesy of Rolling Stone:  

When it comes to Barack Obama, I've always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of political virtue. 

And I wasn't wrong. Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP's unwillingness to make even token concessions. 

But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn't deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it's working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it's much more effective than you'd think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy. 

During the entire article Krugman seems to pay his respect to the President's achievements almost grudgingly, as if it is causing him actual physical discomfort to have to admit just how well the President has done in the face of almost overwhelming opposition.

But in the end Krugman sums it up like this:

Am I damning with faint praise? Not at all. This is what a successful presidency looks like. No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to. FDR left behind a reformed nation, but one in which the wealthy retained a lot of power and privilege. On the other side, for all his anti-government rhetoric, Reagan left the core institutions of the New Deal and the Great Society in place. I don't care about the fact that Obama hasn't lived up to the golden dreams of 2008, and I care even less about his approval rating. I do care that he has, when all is said and done, achieved a lot. That is, as Joe Biden didn't quite say, a big deal.

In my opinion Krugman is going to have a lot of company in the years to come from Obama critics, who will have to admit that in retrospect the President's achievement are not only impressive, but  taken as whole, almost superhuman.

Paul Krugman lays out just how wrong the conservatives were concerning Obamacare.

In the article Krugman lays out six predictions made by the naysayers, and then points out that all of them turned out to be wrong: 

1. Enrollment will be very low, and 

2. Even if people sign up, they won’t pay their premiums. 

Reality: Signups exceeded expectations, and the vast majority paid. 

3. More people will lose coverage cancelled by Obamacare than gain it. 

Reality: Sharp drop in the number of uninsured. 

4. Rate shock. 

Reality: Like it says, affordable care. 

5. Young people not signing up, and death spiral. 

Reality: Pretty good demographics. 

6. Soaring health costs. 

Reality: Health costs are below anyone’s expectations.

But you know none of this matters within the Right Wing bubble, where facts are of no consequence and denying reality is their lifeblood.

Still I find it very gratifying to know that they were all wrong.

Not that I really EVER suspected that they would be right.

Breitbart.com continues to be the shining light of Right Wing "journalism" by reporting yet another parody story as actual news.

Courtesy of Business Insider:  

A satirical item published last week purporting that economist Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy has spread to Boston.com and the conservative website Breitbart this morning. 

The item originated in The Daily Currant, a satirical news site. Austria's Format online magazine picked it up, and their report was subsequently cited by Boston.com. Then it spread to Breitbart. 

Apparently Breitbart has since taken it down, but other sites have not.

However my favorite part of this story is Krugman's response to it:

Krugman responded to the mix-up this morning, writing on his blog that he knew of the fake news item and was asked about it by a Russian television station. He wrote that he did not address it on his blog because he "wanted to wait and see which right-wing media outlets would fall for the hoax." 

Yeah isn't it helpful to have these new conservatives news sites and blogs reporting the information that the "liberal" media is too "in the tank" to report?

I always assume "in the tank" is code for "demonstrates journalistic integrity."

By the way if you think you have heard of this Daily Currant site before, you are right:

The Daily Currant is the same site the Washington Post cited in a false report last month that former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was joining Al Jazeera.

 Well at least Breitbart.com is in good company. Or is it the other way around?

Paul Krugman explains the Republican party's allergic reaction to facts.

The great Paul Krugman explains the problem for the Republicans and facts:

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence.

And there you have it.

THAT is essentially the difference that separates the two political parties in this country, AND it is what will ultimately doom the GOP, at least in its current incarnation, in the long run.

They are the party of faith, not logic. The party of religion, not science. And, even more sharply, the party of lies, versus the party of truth.

The problem for the Republican party is that the Millenials, are information addicts, and they are hooked up to numerous electronic gadgets that provide the ability to fact check statements made in real time, and THAT puts those used to bullshitting their way into power in a very untenable situation.

The future indeed looks grim for a party that is historically resistant to change, and very bright indeed for the party that embraces it.

Paul Krugman on Right Wing attacks directed at Nate Silver.

Courtesy of the New York Times:

 For those new to this, Nate is a sports statistician turned political statistician, who has been maintaining a model that takes lots and lots of polling data — most of it at the state level, which is where the presidency gets decided — and converts it into election odds. Like others doing similar exercises — Drew Linzer, Sam Wang, and Pollster — Nate’s model continued to show an Obama edge even after Denver, and has shown that edge widening over the past couple of weeks. 

This could be wrong, obviously. And we’ll find out on Election Day. But the methodology has been very clear, and all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may. 

Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all. 

This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive. 

This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.

I would like to formally welcome Paul Krugman to the  thousands of us already freaked out by the Right Wing's constant attacks on logic and reasoning.

And yes his recognition of the underlying motive for this is dead on. If ALL information is subjective, then facts become irrelevant, and low information people are free to eschew anything which conflicts with their preconceived notion of what constitutes "truth."

In my opinion that was always the business model of Fox News, which has now been embraced by ALL of the Right Wing media.

Like they say, facts have a liberal bias, so WHY would the Right Wing want their constituents exposed to any of those commie liberal brain infections?

P.S. Speaking of facts, it appears that perhaps the pollsters, even our own Nate Silver, might have seriously underestimated the number of actual Obama voters out there. Can you say "cell phones?"

Newsweek cover goes "full retard!" Yeah I said it!

This cover is absolutely stunning coming from a magazine that I once thought leaned left to some degree, or at the very least was moderate. This looks like the cover of the National Review.

I would not even wipe my ass with the National Review, because my ass deserves to be treated with more respect than that.

The cover is to represent Niall Ferguson's fact free diatribe against the President, in whihc he essentially accuses Obama of everything except raping puppies.

This has brought swift and, in my opinion, completely justified blowback from the likes of Paul Krugman, who points out:  

There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says: 

The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period. 

Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for. 

Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making — he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.

Did you get that? The article is nothing more than a Right Wing assault on Obama's policies, using obvious falsehoods to support the attacks. (Because you know the Righties are confident that Americans won't do the research to call them out on their lies.)

Gee where have we seen that before? Fucking everywhere these days that's where!

And this is from the pages of NEWSWEEK for Odin's sake!

Actually Krugman went kind of easy on Ferguson, others have also chimed in with a little more sting to their words, with one suggesting that the only right thing for Newsweek (And the Daily Beast) to do in this case is "fire his ass!"

I think that is a capital idea!  It is one thing for journalists (Or bloggers.) to get a story wrong through sloppy research or poor information, but quite another for them to PURPOSEFULLY attempt to misrepresent the facts in order to support their agenda.

And ANY news organization that finds such a "journalist" on their payroll, has a duty to remove that cancerous influence from the healthy news gathering body which surely they wish to remain.

But don't shed a tear for Niall Ferguson, we already know there is a job waiting for him over at Fox News. You know, the organization that won a lawsuit which allows them to lie to the American people. He should fit in there just fine.

Sometimes the things that President Obama accomplishes may seem small, but they also have significantly positive impacts on our country.

Courtesy of David Roberts:

Anyone who pays attention to green news will have spent the last two years hearing a torrent of stories about EPA rules and the political fights over them. It can get tedious. After a certain point even my eyes glaze over, and I'm paid to follow this stuff. 

But this one is a Big Deal. It's worth lifting our heads out of the news cycle and taking a moment to appreciate that history is being made. Finally controlling mercury and toxics will be an advance on par with getting lead out of gasoline. It will save save tens of thousands of lives every year and prevent birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases. It will make America a more decent, just, and humane place to live.  

Paul Krugman weighs in:

As Roberts explains, we’ve known about these costs of mercury pollution for decades, yet it took until now to get something done. The reason is, of course, obvious: special interests, hiding behind claims of immense economic damage if anything was done, were able to block action. 

It’s worth noting that these claims of economic harm from pollution regulation have always been proved wrong when the regulation finally came. Ozone regulation was supposed to cripple the economy; so was acid rain regulation; neither did. 

Oh, and if we’re going to have to scrap some power plants and replace them, it’s hard to think of a better time to do it than now, when the workers and resources needed to do the replacing would largely have been unemployed otherwise. 

The point that strikes me most, however, is that this shows that it matters who holds the White House. You can complain about Obama’s lack of a strong progressive agenda, which I sometimes do, or wonder what good it is to hold the White House when the other side blocks every attempt to do good through legislation. But mercury regulation would not have happened if John McCain were president. 

As I have noted before, there is MUCH that this President is doing that we, the public, are simply never made aware of. 

In fact it seems to me that the main problem with the Obama presidency is not so much a lack of accomplishments, but a lack of the President blowing his horn to let us KNOW about his accomplishments. The sad fact is that because this man is so humble, we are not being made aware of just how great of a president he has become.

Dare I say that this President might be better served if he adopted just a little of George Bush's swagger?

Only this time it would a "swagger with substance."

Paul Krugman explains why the Occupy Wall Street protestors are important.

Courtesy of Politicususa:

We are just three years after the greatest banking crisis since the 1930s. I think it was brought on by excesses on the part of the financial industry and the financial industry was bailed out at the public’s expense and risk and yet we’re still in an economic crisis. And somehow the discussion of who are these guys, why are we supporting them, why haven’t they paid more for this, what are the reforms that’s going to stop this from happening again, all that disappeared from the debate. 

We have been arguing about who’s going to cut Social Security and what about that budget deficit? And we lost the whole thread of the core issue in our society right now. And these protesters, who are a mix of all sorts of people, suddenly brought that back into the center of our national debate. And that’s an enormously positive contribution.

This is also why OWS is NOT the same as the Teabaggers, who seemed filled with anger, but it was an unfocused anger that seemed to be directed at the President even though what they attributed their anger to had little to do with him and his policies.

Well at least it did at first, until they were co-opted by the Koch brothers and Republican party and re-educated to be angry at "Obamacare" and the Obama stimulus bill.

I think OWS is here to stay and that is scares the hell out of the conservatives, as evidence by Andrew Breitbart's craven attempts to damage their brand

Paul Krugman steps back to compare the strategies used by both sides in the health care debate.

Just a portion of this fascinating opinion piece from the New York Times:

And let’s be clear: the campaign of fear hasn’t been carried out by a radical fringe, unconnected to the Republican establishment. On the contrary, that establishment has been involved and approving all the way. Politicians like Sarah Palin — who was, let us remember, the G.O.P.’s vice-presidential candidate — eagerly spread the death panel lie, and supposedly reasonable, moderate politicians like Senator Chuck Grassley refused to say that it was untrue. On the eve of the big vote, Republican members of Congress warned that “freedom dies a little bit today” and accused Democrats of “totalitarian tactics,” which I believe means the process known as “voting.”

Krugman really does no more than state the obvious, but he does so in a way that is quite enlightening and demonstrates just how badly Republicans may have damaged their brand in the long run in order to battle a program that is going to gain universal acceptance in just a matter of months.

In case you missed it...

Here is Paul Krugman confronting Roger Ailes on ABC"s"This Week" about the misinformation that is constantly disseminated by Fox News.



I hate it when these jerks on Fox News pretend to defend the intelligence of the American people, when in fact they are using it as a smokescreen to hide the fact that they are actively trying to dumb down their audience.

In this clip from the same show Ailes defends Glenn Beck's crazy talk and avoids answering whether or not newest Fox news contributor Sarah Palin's is qualified to be president. (Here is a hint, she is NOT.)



God that guy is a pompous ass.

Well I think he rolled the dice one time too many when he hired Sarah Palin. She is the Typhoid Mary of politics, and she will surely infect Fox News as well.

According to Paul Krugman "The G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit."

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Paul Krugman discusses the danger of ignoring the "Teabaggers".

The key thing to understand about that rally (last week in Washington) is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Instead the "Conservative Party" chose Doug Hoffman, a "carpetbagger" who did not live in the district, did not understand the issues facing the voters, but actively embraced the wing-nutty philosophy of the Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin crowd. He lost, but not by the kinds of numbers that should make any of us feel secure.

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

Essentially the patients are now running the asylum.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections.
The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

I had a conversation on the phone yesterday with somebody who was thrilled with the idea of the Republican party actively destroying itself. But I expressed concern at what might rise up to replace it. Sure Democrats might reap the benefits in the next major elections, but what happens ten years from now? If this fringe group, now rapidly becoming the Republican majority, stay disaffected, they may become even MORE polarized and disconnected from reality.

In the not too distant future Americans will be dissatisfied by the Democrats, it may be happening even now, and start looking for an alternative. What if the ONLY alternative were a Glenn Beck listening, Sarah Palin loving, "Teabagging" conservative? What if THAT person gets into the White House, or becomes the majority in the Senate?

The crazy thing is that THIS is exactly what Sarah Palin said she would be focusing on when she gave her resignation speech, and against all logic, it actually seems to be happening. She has tapped into a truly frightening fringe group of Americans, and somehow managed to validate them in the eyes of the Republican party.

And now instead of simply being used by the GOP, they are infecting the GOP and causing it mutate into a party they feel more comfortable with. And if the Republicans fail to change enough, they will simply bleed it dry and take up residence in its decaying corpse.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

On this last point I am not in total agreement with Mr. Krugman. I believe that pointing out the lunacy of the group with the use of humor and parody is very powerful indeed.

I think that a great deal of credit can go to Jon Stewart for pointing out how ludicrous the Bush administration was through the use of humor, and Tina Fey's contribution to the outing of Sarah Palin, as a pretty package with nothing inside, cannot be celebrated enough in my opinion.

The bottom line is that, regardless of which medium is used, it is important to constantly reveal the agenda behind Sarah Palin and the wing-nuts, and to open the eyes of the American people to what is really happening in the political arena right now.

(Please click the title to read the rest of Paul Krugman's important article.)