Monday Morning Links

* These kids today, and their games.

* The Post has a profile in motion of freshman House Republican Ted Yoho (FL). The focus is how he’s part of the faction who forced John Boehner to trigger the government shutdown and now wants to move along to default on the national debt. How bad will default be? “I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets,” Yoho told the Post.

* In Conversation: Antonin Scalia.

Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

You know, Antonin, I believe in the Devil too — and I even know his secret identity!

* Open Letter to Everyone Who Secretly Controls the US Government: Are you okay? Do you need help?

* Why I’m calling on all university faculty to refuse to write letters of recommendation to TFA.

* No, this is Detroit.

* And over 100 long-lost Doctor Who episodes found by dedicated fans – in Ethiopia. Someone’s getting over 100 replica Daleks.

Tuesday Midday

* Why Are UC Administrators Such Bad Letter Writers, And Why Should We Care?

* UC Davis Students Set Up Huge Geodesic Dome On Quad.

* Turns out the optimal marginal tax rate is… 76%.

* Pennsylvania will put its plan to rig the Electoral College on pause. Hooray?

* And Jon Taplin just can’t understand why progressives think they lost the budget fight.

President Obama immediately threatened to veto any attempt to undo the spending cuts. That means that Republicans would have to get a 2/3rds majority to undo the first meaningful cutback in the Military budget in 60 years. In addition, if Obama also threatens to veto any attempt to restore the Bush Tax cuts in 2012 (they expire automatically on January 1, 2013), progressives will have totally changed the inequality dynamic, without having to pass a single piece of legislation.

If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs…

The Absurdity of Devising Economic ‘Solutions’ to Please Those Institutions That Got Us into the Financial Crisis

Nick Dearden in Counterpunch says bring on the Debt Court.

Monday Morning Links

* The line on Obama’s jobs plan from establishment bloggers is that Obama’s new mode is “no compromise.” We’ll see. At the very least we could get another wonderful debt ceiling clash out of all this, allowing my beloved debt ceiling alignment chart another chance to go truly viral.

* Two David Graeber interviews at Louisville’s Radical Lending Library and Democracy Now! (at ~23 minutes).

* The questions we don’t ask: Science Lags as Health Problems Emerge Near Gas Fields. Thanks for the link, Fiona…

* And the questions we do: A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday against a prominent Baltimore medical institute, accusing it of knowingly exposing black children as young as a year old to lead poisoning in the 1990s as part of a study exploring the hazards of lead paint. (via)

* And Netflix utterly determined to destroy itself. Unbelievable.

Money for Nothing

The United States government can currently borrow at a -0.34% yield, meaning we’d actually have to pay back less money than we borrow after adjusting for inflation. It’s literally free money. Meanwhile we have a deep recession, high unemployment, and tons of important infrastructure work that needs to be done. This is the whole reason national debts exist in the first place.

I have no idea what the White House could possibly be thinking. Cutting government spending in this context makes absolutely no sense. We should be borrowing like crazy. Here’s Ezra:

The path forward is obvious: We should borrow now and put in place a firm plan to cut deficits later, once the economy is back on track and investors have other places to put their money. But refusing better-than-free money now in order to talk about reducing our deficit later? Well, that may be the craziest sentence I’ve ever had to include in a column.

Monday Links

* Manned space flight after the space shuttle.

* Fascinating user revolt at HuffPo in the comments of their icon design contest.

* Bachmann, Perry, and Christian Dominionism.

* Inconceivable! 23 straight polls say people want to raise taxes to pay off the debt.

* And if liberals say the world is warming, it must really be cooling: Rick Perry’s daft climate change conspiracy theory. 2012 is going to be a long year.

The Fiend!

Mr Chambers, the chairman of S&P’s sovereign ratings committee, has come under scrutiny himself since the downgrade.

Political observers have noted that he never studied economics and that he majored in literature and philosophy and has a master’s in English literature.

‘If a Center-Left Coalition Succeeds in Stabilizing the Budget, Republicans Will Eventually Destabilize It’

In a nutshell, when you have a political party that does not agree that revenue levels must bear a relationship to outlays, and is willing to foment a systemic crisis in order to maximize its leverage, you’re in trouble.

Jonathan Chait on the U.S. debt trap.

‘Fiscal Irresponsibility’

A brief history of the U.S. national debt, from Steve Benen.

More Good News

UPDATE: Yeah, it’s done.

A government official tells ABC News that the federal government is expecting and preparing for bond rating agency Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the rating of US debt from its current AAA value.

Officials reasons given will be the political confusion surrounding the process of raising the debt ceiling, and lack of confidence that the political system will be able to agree to more deficit reduction. A source says Republicans saying that they refuse to accept any tax increases as part of a larger deal will be part of the reason cited.

The official was unsure if the bond rating would be AA+ or AA. 

Via ThinkProgress.

Tuesday Afternoon!

* If only! Newt Gingrich, currently riding a cresting wave of fake Twitter followers all the way to the White House, declares the Obama administration the “Paul Krugman presidency.”

* How bad is the debt deal? Really bad.

The Obama-GOP plan cuts $917 billion in government spending over the next decade. Nearly $570 billion of that would come from what’s called “non-defense discretionary spending.” That’s budget-speak for the pile of money the government invests in the nation’s safety and future—education and job training, air traffic control, health research, border security, physical infrastructure, environmental and consumer protection, child care, nutrition, law enforcement, and more.

The White House’s plan would slash this type of spending nearly in half, from about 3.3 percent of America’s GDP to as low as 1.7 percent, the lowest in nearly half a century, says Ethan Pollack, a senior policy analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

There’s a reason John Boehner is so happy.

* Former Reagan and Bush economist Bruce Bartlett has joined the Canavan caucus and called for the elimination of the debt ceiling.

* BREAKING: Neil Cavuto knows nothing about anything.

CAVUTO: I would welcome a downgrade. I really would. I think it would be the pain from which we have a gain.

STOSSEL: Maybe that would wake people up.

* Internal polls apparently show Wisconsin Democrats retaking the state senate after the recall fight—if the debt-ceiling debacle hasn’t blown the mission there as well.

* “If you’re younger than 26, you have never seen a month where the global mean was as cold as the 161 year average,” observes Robert Grumbine. In contrast, “there are no periods as long as even 20 years of continual below reference temperatures.” He finds that the period 1880-1940 seems to best represent a stable long-term average for global temperatures. If that’s the case, then the “last time the global mean was below the climate normal was March, 1976. If you’re 35 or younger, you have never seen a global mean below climate’s real normal.”

* But in good news: Spider-Man takes one giant leap closer to the Donald Glover era.

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.

Thursday Night Links

* ‘Michele Bachmann Pledges to Destroy Economy in First Ad.’

* Rortybomb: Why is the Obama Team Embracing Hooverism?

* Chuck Grassley endorses the constitutional option on the debt ceiling.

* Where was David Foster Wallace going with The Pale King? Two thoughts in the L.A. Times.

* Paradigm shift? All My Children and One Life to Live will survive as Internet shows.

* And the Chicago Tribune is very proud to announce that it tells the truth about climate change 75% of the time. Well done, sirs. Well done.

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.

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.