Month: August 2011

The smoking document arrives. Of course the editors knew. All of them. And not just in Murdoch papers either. But the Murdochs and Andy Coulson may well now be asked to return to Parliament to explain the discrepancies between the documents and their accounts of total innocence.

Finally a serious response from the right. After this distracting squib from Rich Lowry, and zippo at Drudge, JPod absorbs the gravity of Perry's rhetorical implosion. It's serious enough that a world-historical event occurs – a neocon admits an error:

In the early going on Twitter, I suggested the harrumphers were knowingly making a mountain out of a molehill to bring him down a notch. I was wrong.

He’s trying to be the next president, and he needs to be judged on that standard. What Perry did was make a thoughtless blunder, an unforced error; we’re now going to spend a couple of days discussing whether he was summoning violence on Ben Bernanke’s head or not, which is of absolutely no use to Perry. He is, or was, moments away from becoming the race’s frontrunner, and what is in his interest is to harness the excitement of his late entry with qualities of leadership and control that will rally the majority of Republicans unhappy with the choices facing them to his side. Rick Perry made that more difficult today; this was a serious rookie mistake on the national stage.

This argument that the current GOP field is extremely weak is perfectly put:

So far, the GOP is not constructing a candidate who can prosper in the states in which the 2012 election will turn. And the two major candidates, Romney and Perry, fail to deliver outside their own narrow, predictable records. Romney’s governorship in deeply blue Massachusetts is a waste and provides no momentum in the heartland, especially given his role in leveraged buyouts that helped transfer America’s manufacturing jobs to Asia. Perry’s governorship in red Texas is equally a waste, as the GOP hardly needs a hog-calling country parson lite from West Texas to carry the Old South. How does Perry go North with the shopworn baggage of Johnny Reb superiority and an unapologetic evangelical paternalism?

And the two protestors have a point. For Biden to have called the Tea Party terrorists without any qualifier ("economic/fiscal terrorists" would do just fine) was not exactly a contribution to civil discourse. Compared with the vitriol coming from the other side, of course, it's minor.

More interesting: examine also the argument of the man in the crowd: just "pass" a balanced budget amendment and all would be fine. But you don't just pass such a thing; the process is long and arduous, as it should be. And the main argument against such an Amendment – that it would tie government's hands if a war or recession or (ahem) both occurred. If such an amendment were to pass today, we would be headed into something much worse than the Second Great Depression, especially seeing how demand is contracting in Europe.

But the president, as always, ends with a conciliatory note:

First of all, in fairness to this gentleman who raised a question, I absolutely agree that everybody needs to try to tone down the rhetoric.

And he sought him out subsequently to talk some more. More of this, please. It's called democracy.

The reason I've been a little circumspect in judging the Perry candidacy is that it's very hard to tell if a candidate this Texan and this far right has any traction in the middle of the country. Perhaps in hard times, he does. But then you examine his actual positions – social security is unconstitutional, secession is an option – and you wonder if this is a fantasy, if the GOP isn't actually committing the kind of grotesque suicide that Obama tends to evoke in his opponents.

What Perry is now shown to have said has a plain meaning. He'd support lynching the Fed Chairman. And he believes that Bernanke's attempts to prevent a Second Great Depression are partisan politics, and an attempt to rig the election. He seems to think, in other words, that the man who was the head of George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and was appointed to Fed Chairman by George W. Bush is somehow a Democratic party operative trying to win the election for Obama. It's a staggering assault on the integrity of a civil servant grappling with some of the most serious economic problems this country has faced in our lifetime.

To my mind, the following statement disqualifies Perry from the race:

If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.

Yes, as Talk Progress notes, treason is a capital offense. And there is no doubt what a bully means when he says someone should be treated "pretty ugly" in Texas. There you have the mindset of a man who could issue a death warrant for an innocent man and who would bring back the most brutal torture techniques he could get away with. As for president Obama's patriotism, that too is in play and in doubt:

These two disgusting statements, in today's polarized climate, are, to my mind, a reason for Perry to withdraw, or for his party to disown this ugly, divisive, violent rhetoric.

A headline worth savoring.

Conor reads the book, applauds the alleged positions and then, well, watches the campaign:

What is there to say about a man who says all that — local control on issues including marriage is what the Founders intended, it's a necessity for holding America together as a country, one-size-fits-all solutions are oppressive, the ability to vote with one's feet should be maintained, novel social experiments strengthen the nation, it's good that people can live in communities ruled by people who share their values, the federal government should only involve itself in the people's affairs as a last resort — and who then favors the Federal Marriage Amendment?

Here's what I'd say about him: either he is willing to passionately profess, at great length, arguments and sentiments he doesn't actually believe, or in order to become president, he is willing to abandon his most closely held and expansively argued convictions. I am not sure which is more damning.

Simon Johnson dismantles the Tea Party's economic "founding myth":

The irony of the Tea Party revolt, of course, is that it undermines the private sector more than it reins in "big government." The S&P downgrade resulted in a "flight to quality," meaning that investors bought US government debt – thus increasing its price and lowering the rate that the federal government pays to borrow. It was the value of the stock market that fell sharply – which makes sense, given that counter-cyclical policy is now severely constrained. The government part of the credit system has been strengthened, relatively speaking, by developments over the past few months. It is the private sector – where investment and entrepreneurial activity are needed to generate growth and employment – that has taken a beating.

Larison sets himself up either for prescience or a Von Hoffmann Award:

In the end, the Bachmann-Perry contest is probably a competition to decide who will end up losing to Romney. What is most likely to happen is that Bachmann and Perry will compete with one another as Huckabee and Romney did in 2008, and by splitting the anti-Romney vote they will allow Romney to capture the nomination in the same way McCain did by eking out a number of victories in the early states. Perry will be very strong in Southern primaries, but outside the South his appeal may be as limited as Huckabee’s was last time.

Brad Plumer breaks down the state's employment surge into various possible sources. His takeaway:

The Texas miracle is a complicated story. Some of the state’s successes – in attracting low-wage workers and doctors and businesses from other states – are difficult or impossible to replicate on a national level. On the other hand, Perry could conceivably speak out on housing policy and the need to reform local zoning restrictions. Or he could propose a massive new federal stimulus program, of the sort that has kept Texas afloat over the last two years. Though, for some odd reason, that latter idea hasn’t made its way into his stump speech yet.

Krugman focuses primarily on the state's high population growth:

But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.

So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.

The above map is a snapshot of job growth in April 2011. It was taken from a fascinating timelapse starting in 2004. It dramatically illustrates how, starting in late 2008, "unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else," notes Krugman.