Sunday Night Links

* As I mentioned on Twitter earlier: If it weren’t for this, I’d say Mitt Romney had a better-than-even chance of being elected president next year. The Obama administration just seems hopelessly lost; every failure of their triangulation strategy is only proof they need to triangulate harder.

* The Obama for America fundraiser I spoke with tonight seemed totally unsurprised by my “I’m not giving you any money. I’ll vote for the guy but that’s it” stance. Judging from her response, as well as what people are saying to me on Twitter and Facebook, it’s a line she’s heard before.

* Guestbloggers doing great work during Glenn Greenwald’s vacation: Income inequality is bad for rich people too. Austerity and the roots of Britain’s turmoil. Why “business needs certainty” is destructive.

* Nouriel ‘Dr. Doom’ Roubini: ‘Karl Marx Was Right.’

* Who mourns for Tim Pawlenty?

* Is Verizon the next Wisconsin? Maybe, but I’m hoping Wisconsin is still Wisconsin for a while. Via LGM.

* Looks like the shine is off “Twitter revolutions.”

“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media,” Cameron said in an emergency session of Parliament on Thursday, during which he announced that officials were working with the intelligence services and police to look at how and whether to “stop people communicating via these Web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

Cameron said: “Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.”

* “You can’t reach for the stars at this point”: Generation Vexed. Via MeFi.

Since mid-2008, unemployment in the 16-to-24 age group has been 13% and higher, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last month, it stood at 17.4%.

Dim job prospects have taken some of the sheen off advanced degrees.

…

The job situation could haunt young people for years, said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

More than half of earnings growth over a lifetime happens in the first decade of a career, meaning that early unemployment can depress future wages for life, he said.

But older workers are staying longer in their jobs, forcing twentysomethings to fill up retail, fast-food and other part-time spaces that traditionally give teens their first paycheck. Without work experience, young job seekers will need to scramble for options, he said.

* Seven Creepy Experiments That Could Teach Us So Much (If They Weren’t So Wrong)—and the forbidden experiment doesn’t even make the list.

* And “urban renewal,” c. 1850: 19th-c. African-American village unearthed in what is now NYC’s Central Park.

Share and Enjoy

Official White House talking points for tonight’s shit sandwich.

Depressing Sunday Links

Establishment Democrats are enthusiastically betraying their constituents, and gloating about it. I’ve already committed to not giving money and not volunteering in 2012, but the sticker’s coming off the car if the deal as described goes through. I’m done.

While the New Deal stoically awaits the guillotine, some links, many shamelessly stolen from zunguzungu’s supersized edition of Sunday Reading:

* Congressional Black Caucus: Use the 14th Amendment.

* Jeffrey Sachs: “Every part of the budget debate in the U.S. is built on a tissue of willful deceit.”

* The basic error was that Buchanan approached American politics in procedural or legal terms at a moment when the reigning political conflicts in American life were no longer in any sense shaped or resolved by procedural or legal processes. Obama as James Buchanan. More here from John Judis:

Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to, and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.

* In a nutshell, what’s going on is something that hasn’t happened in American politics for 50 years: an ideologically coherent social movement with clear political aspirations has taken shape out of murkier antecedents and disparate tributaries and at least for the moment, it has a very tight hold on the political officials that it has elected. The movement is not interested in the spoils system, its representatives can’t be quickly seduced into playing the usual games. And the movement’s primary objective is to demolish existing governmental and civic institutions. They’ve grown tired of waiting for government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub, so they’re setting out with battleaxes and dynamite instead.

Social movements that aren’t just setting out to secure legal protection and resources for their constituency, but are instead driven to pursue profound sociopolitical transformations are unfamiliar enough. What makes this moment even more difficult to grasp in terms of the conventional wisdom of pundits is that this isn’t a movement that speaks a language of inclusion, hope, reform, innovation or progress. It speaks instead about restoration of power to those who once held it, the tearing down of existing structures, about undoing what’s been done. This movement is at war with its social and institutional enemies: it has nothing to offer them except to inflict upon them the marginalization that the members of the movement imagine they themselves have suffered.

* Ezra Klein dangles the carrot: maybe Obama won’t capitulate on the Bush tax cuts again. Sure, maybe.

* Surely there must be a name, in advertising parlance, for the figure of the anthropomorphized food item that happily consumes a non-anthropomorphized version of itself?

* The great teddy bear shipwreck mystery.

* On misremembering the victims of injustice as small children.

* Julian Sanchez: “The very existence of such massive trade in “defensive patents” is, in itself, pretty strong evidence that there’s something systematically quite wrong with the American patent system—because a patent that’s useful for “defensive” purposes is very likely to be a bad patent.“ I love that Planet Money and This American Life got non-IP people talking about this.

* And I may have done this one before, but what the hell: Inside an abandoned East Berlin amusement park.

Friday Afternoon Apocalypse

* Obama self-parody watch: hashtag #compromise.

* Also from Chait: Obama’s Incentive To Punt On the 14th Amendment.

The problem is that, even if we get through this crisis with little damage, the debt ceiling is still sitting there, a weapon that will one day explode. Indeed, if there’s one good reason to downgrade U.S. debt, it’s that House Republicans have discovered a kind of doomsday device that, if not used this time, will probably be used eventually. Any use of the debt ceiling to extort policy concessions will encourage subsequent uses.

The only way to actually defuse the long-term threat is to eliminate the debt ceiling vote, which is a completely unnecessary relic. Doing so would provide long-term benefits, while the political costs would be born entirely by Obama. That may explain his reticence. Or possibly his advisors’ legal judgment simply differs from Jeff’s. There is legitimate disagreement here. In any case, it’s worth keeping in mind that fact that Obama’s political incentive structure on this issue doesn’t fully line up with the national good.

* Mystery of the jobless recovery solved: there wasn’t a recovery. More here. Nearly everything that has gone wrong during the Obama administration stems from this single original sin:

The second perhaps more important point is that by the fall of 2009, the Obama Administration had already decided the recession was so yesterday that it was time to shift into deficit-reduction mode. Stimulus was out, austerity was in.

…Why is that important now? You can draw a straight line from the President’s decision in the fall of 2009 to the current default crisis. I don’t want to downplay the impact of the Republican Party taking over control of the House in the 2010 elections — obviously that was a pivotal moment — but the 2010 elections were contested on a battlefield of the GOP’s choosing: that spending was wildly out of control, deficits were threatening the stability of the economy, and long-term debt would strangle the country. The President basically agreed, ceding vast acreage of political, rhetorical and policy ground to the Republicans.

* Boehner’s next plan is even less viable. America!

* And today’s blogpost of the day: Reality as Failed State.

The point, for the climate denier, is not that the truth should be sought with open-minded sincerity – it is that he has declared the independence of his corner of reality from control by the overarching, techno-scientific consensus reality. He has withdrawn from the reality forced upon him and has retreated to a more comfortable, human-sized bubble.

In these terms, the denier’s retreat from consensus reality approximates the role of the cellular insurgents in Afghanistan vis-a-vis the American occupying force: this overarching behemoth I rebel against may well represent something larger, more free, more wealthy, more democratic, or more in touch with objective reality, but it has been imposed upon me (or I feel it has), so I am going to withdraw from it into illogic, emotion and superstition and from there I am going to declare war upon it…

Via that state of states, MeFi.

Thursday Night Links

* Sabotage accomplished: S&P warns there’s a 50 percent chance it will downgrade US credit rating within 3 months. This is really, really bad.

* One of the stranger features of the debt ceiling debate is the fact that Republican intransigence is the only thing saving us all from Obama’s neoliberalism. Ezra Klein tries to lay out the thinking, such as it is. And Matt Yglesias hopes the whole thing really is kabuki theater:

It’s generally wise to assume that the White House isn’t blind to that obvious potential political problem. Part of what they’re thinking is that a 2011 agreement to long-term spending cuts is the best way to avoid the need to reduce spending during the election season. How’s that? Well, it’s because the fiscal consolidation plans being discussed are for trillions of dollars worth of cuts over a 10-year horizon. Since you’ve got that horizon, it’s not strictly necessary for any of them to come between September 2011 and November 2012.

Meanwhile, Harry Reid continues his tireless life’s work stabbing his party in the back.

* What do we lose if we default?

* On the lighter side: the FBI has announced it will investigate NewsCorp. for alleged 9/11 hacking.

* Fall science fiction TV premiere dates.

* And Fox’s Eric Bolling can’t remember a single terrorist attack on U.S. soil between 2000 and 2008. This man is paid a salary to be a pundit.

Destroying the Republic in Order to Save It

Very bad news from the White House today as the Obama administration is now floating an even more ambitious austerity package than Republicans have even been asking for. There’s a lot of debate about whether this is an earnest attempt to compromise with nihilists, a poison pill, what Obama genuinely wants, or (in the words of one intrepid Talking Points Memo reader) “mutual positioning to try to win what is seen as an inevitable post-apocalypse blame game.” Regardless of the intent, it’s truly obscene; the right answer to this mess is staring them in the face but they simply refuse to take it.

Saturday Links!

* Krugman: “This is actually a fairly familiar thing from my years as a pundit: the surest way to get branded as not Serious is to figure things out too soon.” Of course this morning he couldn’t resist the opportunity to remind us all he was right about Obama, too.

* Ezra Klein and Steve Benen capture well just how infuriatingly irrational the Republicans are being. Of course, it was obvious from the start that this is what they were planning, so Obama really has no one to blame but himself.

* Good Obama news now: The Department of Justice has filed a brief arguing that DOMA is unconstitutional.

* The Nation reports (shock of shocks) John Lennon was not a closet Republican when he died.

* And io9 has a piece on Robert Kirkman’s next comic project, which focuses on time-travel. These desperate bids for my attention have to stop…

And Brutus Is an Honorable Man

If I didn’t know better, I’d almost have to think Republicans aren’t negotiating in good faith:

So when the GOP’s economic policy team sat down to make the strongest case they could for growth-inducing deficit reduction, they recommended a mix an 85:15 mix, not a 100:0 mix. And then, when the Obama administration agreed to an 83:17 mix, the Republican leadership walked out of the room and demanded that taxes be excluded from the deal altogether. How do you negotiate with that?

Mr. President, it’s time for Plan B.

UPDATE: Jonathan Chait takes aim at the only person I’ve seen arguing against the wisdom of this plan, who is weirdly also Ezra Klein:

Indeed, it’s not even clear that the Republican leadership actually wants the enormous and destructive power it now demands. Its base may be demanding a debt ceiling showdown, out of specific opposition to Obama and general ignorance of how the debt ceiling works. But John Boehner knows full well that we can’t just ignore the debt ceiling. If Obama successfully asserts the power to ignore the debt ceiling vote, then he’ll allow the debt negotiations to proceed in a less fraught environment, and have defused a massive source of ongoing political instability. Cutting a deal to lift the debt ceiling may soothe the markets more in the short term, but it merely pushes the political risk further back.

More than that, Ezra’s argument (he has a second attempt here) is incoherent at a fundamental level. Whatever the markets might infer about the dysfunction of the American political system from Obama’s declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional, there’s no way it could ever be worse than default, which would catapult us long past inference, and simply remove all doubt.

Obama Cuts Deal to Live in Tent on White House Lawn

Tomorrow’s headlines today, via Jacob.

Monday!

* Thirteen Three ways of looking at Obama:

* What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?
* Regardless of whether or not you think President Obama is a progressive surrounded by failing institutions, a Rubinite centrist who puts on a good show, a political neophyte who is perpetually getting rolled by his adversaries or someone who hates fighting and prefers either floating above the fray or getting the half-a-loaf quickly, the way he is losing his battles should worry you about the longer-term project of liberalism and the Democratic Party.
* And, of course: 11! Dimensional! Chess!

* In other political news, Republicans have no one.

* When words change meaning.

* When space shuttles are retired.

* Science proves your students don’t really understand their sources.

* Science proves for-profit universities are a huge scam.

* Of course you had me at 10 Spectacularly Third-Rate Spider-Man Villains.

* And Tom Tomorrow is an it-getter.

Middleman Saves the Day Again

It looks like a budget deal has been secured—and Obama only had to negotiate John Boehner seven billion dollars above his opening offer.

Truly, another triumph.

Even More Links for Wednesday

* “With the lame duck, the 111th Congress may even surpass the 89th [of President Lyndon Johnson] in terms of accomplishments,” said Norman Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute. Obama’s spin on this (naturally) is that his approach works; my sense is that the 111th Congress was successful despite his efforts at compromise, not because of them, and that it could have done even more had he proved more willing to get bloody. One of the big disappointments from the lame duck, the failure of DREAM Act, is still a clear win in political terms; it hurts Republicans badly, perhaps permanently, with America’s fastest-growing demographic. I believe the technical term for this is “making them eat shit”; it’s the next best thing to actually achieving your policy goals.

* Is this Obama’s second act? It feels like it. Maybe it’s just the rosy afterglow of the Spider-Man shout-out.

* Of course, every time I start feeling better about Obama, he goes and does something like this.

* Another way to fight climate change without Republican interference: use the executive branch’s purchasing power.

* 100% of returning Democratic Senators want to fix the filibuster at the start of the next Congress. That’s great news. I can’t wait to hear the excuse when they don’t.

* Rachel Maddow and #mooreandme.

* On the science tip, it turns out placebos work even when you know they’re fake.

* And austerity is your word of the year. Second place: pragmatic. Third place: moratorium. 2010 really hasn’t been great.

Friday Night

* Kevin Drum throws some cold water on the notion that the payroll tax cut is a GOP Trojan horse. Be careful, though—unlike Obama the GOP really does play 11-dimensional chess.

* But while we debate the tax policy compromise, the Obama White House moves boldly on to its next preemptive capitulation.

* Is Bernie Sanders still talking?

* Salon asks whether the time has finally come for the rich to just outsource the entire country. Charlie Stross has an even more promising cognitive framework:

We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

* Five science fiction books for children.

* And Conan O’Brien vs. lesser-known DC superheroes.

The Great American Champion of Moderation, Bipartisanship, and Further Moderation

And civility triumphs once more.

Tuesday Night!

* I got a retweet from the Great Orange Satan over this nonsense. I also wasted the better part of yesterday arguing about how stupid this is in the MeFi thread.

* Speaking of arguments, don’t miss the epic Wikileaks thread. Nothing will ever be the same.

* Incorrect: President Barack Obama told GOP leaders behind closed doors Tuesday that he had failed to reach across party lines enough during his first two years in office, a senior administration official told CNN.

* Once in a century droughts every five years.

* Law and the Multiverse: Superheroes, Supervillains, and the Law.

* This week in great newspaper corrections (Davis Simon edition.)

* And I’ve already promised this image from the ruins of Detroit to Lisa for the cover of her first book. Sorry, everybody else.