Best line of the day

And William Greider wrote it:

The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer can be thought of as the Potemkin village of American democracy. Every evening, it presents a prettified version of political debate — ever so civil and high-minded — that thoroughly blots out the substance of dissenting critics or the untamed opinions of mere citizens.

The latest News Hour snow job? The humanization of the Fed by way of "Gentle Ben" Bernanke! It's valium for the frightened! Lest we forget for what and whom the Fed stands, Greider helps us by recalling the Olympians who saved the world during the last great crisis:

Keepin the guberment out of Medicare

Joshua Holland suspects that:

Many observing these [healthcare] debates from abroad have probably concluded that we, as a nation, have finally gone completely mad. And it's hard to argue otherwise.

How sane could be a polity that sits by with relative complacence when its leaders launch devastating and groundless invasions of foreign lands but approach a full-on rebellion when those leaders make some modest moves to deliver decent health care at a price people can afford?

And how could these people be so divorced from the dynamics of their own health care that they don't appear to understand that the Medicare they value so highly is very much a government-run health care program?

I would bet that observers of the United States suspected Uncle Sam of political madness since the moment when Republican conservatives generated another Constitutional crisis — that is, when they sought to impeach Bill Clinton for his boorish sexual practices. And, if that sorry episode failed to convince them, surely the 2000 election debacle finished the job.

It is always unwise to underestimate the effectiveness envy and vindictiveness, vanity and greed, hatred and paranoia have in human affairs.

The official and real unemployment rates (8.2009)

On the Bernanke reappointment

Dean Baker opines:

It would be an insult to the tens of millions of people who have lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their life savings to see Bernanke reappointed. Failure should have consequences, even for central bank chairmen.

Jim Cramer backs another loser

Obamanomics…

The New York Times reports that:

President Obama on Tuesday will nominate Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, administration officials said.

Knee-jerk neo-liberalism

Ronald Reagan refuses to die

Paul Krugman's latest deliberates on the remarkable irrationality to be found in the healthcare debate:

The debate over the "public option" in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.

And, Barack Obama = Hitler…

Krugman offers this explanation:

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.

But the fiend lives still. "So why won't these zombie ideas die?", Krugman asks.

Part of the answer is that there's a lot of money behind them. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something," said Upton Sinclair, "when his salary" — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — "depend upon his not understanding it." In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.

But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn't used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That's ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America's thinking as well as its tax code.

How will this all work out? I don't know. But it's hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we're at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.

It takes two…

President Obama may abandon any effort to create a bipartisan consensus on healthcare reform, according to Bloomberg. Perhaps the President will make transparent the reasons he held on for so long to a goal that was always quixotic.

A very clear presentation on the financial crisis

The author: William K. Black (a link to the video can be found at Economic Populist):

More incredible people protest a good thing

Astroturf nation responds to another threat

The New York Times reports that:

Hard on the heels of the health care protests, another citizen movement seems to have sprung up, this one to oppose Washington's attempts to tackle climate change. But behind the scenes, an industry with much at stake — Big Oil — is pulling the strings.

Hundreds of people packed a downtown theater here on Tuesday for a lunchtime rally that was as much a celebration of oil's traditional role in the Texas way of life as it was a political protest against Washington's energy policies, which many here fear will raise energy prices.

"Something we hold dear is in danger, and that's our future," said Bill Bailey, a rodeo announcer and local celebrity, who was the master of ceremonies at the hourlong rally.

The Times did not provide Bailey's opinion on what the future would hold for the world if a mega-polluter like the United States were to fail to significantly reduce its green house gas emissions.