"You won't have Miz Palin to kick around anymore."

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Open Thread below...

Christmas sure has a lot of songs, but 4th of July not so many. This one by Soundgarden is a fantastic slab of total sludge that's buried toward the end of their classic album Superunknown, and I always skip ahead to it.

"Fourth of July" by X is another great one.

What will you be spinning at your BBQs this weekend?

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(Gann and Jarvis - the boys you can thank your IOU for today)

With California circling the economic drain, it's interesting to consider where this chaos all started. A little populist movement called "Prop 13" that captured the anger of California in 1978 and plunged us into the stone age as the result. It all centered around property taxes, placing a cap of 1% of the property's value as taxable. The anger centered around tax revenues being redistributed to other communities, rather than the community where the tax was being levied, not to mention tax rates increasing for everyone, not just new home buyers. The fear card was played that older home owners would be forced to sell their homes because tax rates would increase to the point of bankruptcy for most, and certainly this became the rallying cry.

The effect was almost instant, with a $5 billion dollar surplus evaporating in a short time with services and education funds slashed to practically nonexistent. Since it has been written into it's constitution, California has slid into depression almost continuously since then.

And Prop 13 has become the infamous "third rail" by which no one dares question - challenges to the laws validity have been struck down by the State Supreme Court and politicians caught even breathing Prop 13 revision have been hounded out of office, or threatened with it. The lobby surrounding the Prop 13 movement has a vice grip on the state legislature. So any thought of revision or modification is ignored.

But on June 9, 1978 the news was pretty much like it is now. Only now we have 31 years of failure to look at.

And we're left scratching our heads.

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Glenn Beck was frothing at the mouth this week -- just before he went on an obviously much-needed vacation -- about an obscure French book that is hard to obtain and which no one appears to be reading, aside from a handful of anarchist aesthetes:

While the government warns that right-wing extremists could be domestic terrorists, and The New York Times, says I could incite those crazy conservatives to violence, the extreme left is actively calling for violence!

As world economies go down the tank and unemployment continues to rise, disenfranchised people are set to explode.

The dangerous leftist book that could spark this is "The Coming Insurrection." This is a call to arms for violent revolution, authored anonymously by a French group called the Invisible Committee who want to bring down capitalism.

This started in France and spread to countries like Greece and Iceland, where people are out of work, out of money and out of patience.

Now it's coming here. The book comes out in English in the U.S. in August. I have one of the first English copies.

... Remember the media will tell you the right is the one to be feared. They do everything they can to tie any random nutjob shooting to conservatives. "The shooter was a fan of '24' — '24' starred Jon Voight — Jon Voight is a conservative!"

But this is a call for violence. Here is more:

"It's a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight."

The synopsis of the book describes it as "an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe... a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to spread anarchy and live communism."

A few years ago I said that Europe is on the brink of destruction. This is yet another sign that it's coming. Even in Japan where protests have been seen as taboo since the 1960s, young people angered over the economy and fear for their future — taking to the streets, beginning to unionize. The communist party of Japan says they are getting 1,000 new members a month.

This book has not even been released in this country yet. It has been passed hand to hand and via the Internet, much like the pamphleteers in pre-revolution America. Thomas Paine was one of them. He issued a call to arms. I am not doing that. You are an idiot if you start shooting people — all that does is delegitimize the cause. Be like Ghandi, like Martin Luther King.

But people on the extreme left are calling people to arms.

Funny thing about that. The extreme right -- the people Glenn Beck wants you to forget all about -- have actually been calling people to arms for a number of years now.

They've done it with books like The Turner Diaries and Hunter, as well as lesser-known texts such as Richard Kelly Hoskins' Vigilantes of Christendom, Robert Pummer's The Road Back to America, and Ben Klassen's The White Man's Bible. All these texts explicitly advocate the use of lethal violence on a massive scale in instituting white-supremacist rule. And they have roughly the same kind of circulation that The Coming Insurrection does.

Which is to say, they're largely relegated to the fringes. But that doesn't mean people don't act on them -- these books have in fact inspired the very kinds of acts of domestic terrorism that Beck wants to pretend away as just "isolated incidents" that have nothing, nothing at all!, to do with right-wing fearmongers like himself.

The people who read these books are very much with us. In the 1990s, they called it the militia movement or the "Patriot" movement. Now they just call it the Glenn Beck Fan Club. Some of them are the same folks who have been putting Beck's screed, Common Sense, on the bestseller list.

Hmmmmm... Can you say, "projection," people? I knew you could.

Krugman was right again. Instead of taking a strong leadership position and insisting on a larger package, Obama played nice with the so-called "moderates" of both parties (i.e. morons who would sell their own mothers to feed their swollen egos). And here we sit, in a stagnating economy that sinks even deeper in recession as jobs are flushed down the drain.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite business books, "Management by Baseball." Author Jeff Angus (who also has a great blog) says one of the most common management mistakes is when a manager assumes a strategy that has been successful for him as a player will apply to all situations when he's a manager. Obama's built his career on being a cautious incrementalist, but what's called for now is bold vision.

So what's Obama going to do about it? Krugman has some suggestions:

So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.

Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.

There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”

It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.

And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.

It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.

So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.

Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.

So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.

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Funny Sean, my recollection was more of a nightmare than a "dream" with how the GOP ran things under Bush. But never let that get in the way of Sean Hannity bringing on Karl Rove to propagate the latest GOP propaganda. Can someone please explain to me why this man is on Fox News instead of in a jail cell? I'd really like to know.

Karl seems to think that the GOP just needs a more positive message. Hannity...freedom!!!...lol. And Karl reminds us not to forget about those "family values" as well. Yeah... save that advice for Sanford and Ensign and spare the rest of us from your empty rhetoric please.

Hannity and Rove decide on "The Party of the American Dream" being the new mantra for the GOP. These guys Can't stop writing their own punch lines.

The New Yorker has a great profile of Sheila Bair, the populist Republican who's at the helm of the FDIC. (h/t Riverdaughter)

As you may already know, Bair is not well liked by the Wall St. crowd that's running the White House show. (Apparently she has this bizarre idea that her job is to look out for working folk. Crazy talk!) Well, she's very popular with regular people - the administration wouldn't get rid of her, it would make a stink. Instead, they've just neutered her:

These debates entered into the Administration’s discussions about building a new regulatory architecture. In late March, Geithner previewed for Congress some of the key concepts that Treasury wanted. The outline seemed to match the Bair camp’s ideas. [Ladies, has this ever happened to you?] A new authority with the power to take over large financial institutions that posed a systemic risk to the economy was modeled on the F.D.I.C., which, Geithner suggested in his testimony, would be an equal partner with Treasury in resolving such firms if they failed. He seemed to be saying that although he and Bair may have disagreed about how to handle the current crisis, there was much more consensus about how to deal with a future one.

But in the white paper detailing the new legislation, which the Administration released on June 17th, all the new authority to regulate firms that posed systemic risk was vested in the Federal Reserve. During Geithner’s testimony before the Senate, Jim Bunning, of Kentucky, echoing Bair, was incredulous. “It took fourteen years for the Fed to write one regulation on mortgages after we gave it the power to do that,” he said. “What makes you think that the Fed will do better this time around?” In addition, while the March plan said that the “Secretary and the FDIC would decide” how to resolve a failing firm, the new plan said such power should “be vested in Treasury.” Geithner could appoint the F.D.I.C. to do the technical work of cleaning up the firm, but between late March and mid-June — when Bair’s aggressive ideas about how to handle Citigroup leaked to the press — Bair’s agency had been downgraded from Treasury’s equal partner to a sidekick.

The senior Treasury official said that stripping authority from the F.D.I.C. had nothing to do with pressure from the banks. “Making a group decision on something that must be done really quickly is not easy,” he said. “At the end of the day, someone has to have the ability to make a call, and it’s better to have that authority vested in one person.”

When I asked Bair about the plan, she said, “I think it reflected a lot of input from a lot of different agencies, and the private sector, and insurance and consumer groups. It’s a very difficult task to try to balance all the different perspectives and come up with a package, and every compromise is going to have people who are unhappy about various parts of it. So I think it’s a starting point.” I said that she sounded disappointed. “I don’t know if ‘disappointed’ is the right word,” she replied.

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[Media from Scarce at our own Video Cafe.]

From the MSNBC:

WASILLA, Alaska - Sarah Palin plans to resign as governor of Alaska in a few weeks, KTUU-TV reported Friday.

Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008, made the announcement at her home Friday morning, the station said.

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will take over at the end of the month, KTUU reported.

This raises many questions. Palin says she thinks she can be more effective outside of government. Really? More effective than being Governor? Hell, Mark Sanford was caught with a mistress and is in the midst of a major, public meltdown and he's staying in office. We'll stay on top of this and bring you more information as it happens.

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UPDATE: Sarah Palin is stepping down as Governor of Alaska. Details here.

Quick! Someone alert the Red State Army Strike Force! Republican backstabber on Aisle 26 of Fox News!

We mentioned the other day that, if nothing else, the recent Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin made clear that the Beltway Villagers' view of Sarah Palin is "road kill in the rear-view mirror".

Charles Krauthammer on Fox the other day drove that point home by completely dismissing her as a potential candidate:

Krauthammer: Now, as to Palin, I agree entirely with what Mara [Liasson] said -- she is, she has star power without any doubt, she has an extremely devoted following, but she is not a serious candidate for the presidency.

She had to go home and study and spend a lot of the time on issues with which she was not adept last year. And she hasn't.

She has to stop speaking in cliches and platitudes. It won't work. It could work for eight weeks if you're the No. 2 candidate, as she was last year. But even so, she got singed a lot in that campaign. You cannot sustain a campaign of platitudes and clichés over a year and a half if you’re running for the presidency.

Interestingly, even Allahpundit at HotAir was inclined to agree.

Surely the RedState Strike Force, as the action wing of "Operation Leper", will be descending upon these hapless backstabbers in short order.

Hey, whatever happened to "Operation Leper" anyway?

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Fox News is airing a new commercial on their station that frankly had me almost throwing up in my mouth a little when I saw it. Fox has decided to roll out their full list of regular pundits to espouse the network's journalistic integrity and "core principles". No...I'm not joking.

Here are some of the "principles" they claim Fox News promotes: civility, mutual respect, strengthening our diverse society by striving for unity, tolerance, open debate and civil discourse.

Yeah, that's exactly what I think of when I see the likes of Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly screaming over one of their guests. Or Glenn Beck riding that crazy train off into the horizon. Or Laura Ingraham on one of her hate filled screeds that's akin to listening to finger nails on a chalk board.

And for a real hoot, check out the ticker that's running below the ad. Breaking News!!... Fox News realizes that Helen Thomas exists and actually cares about what she has to say now that it's criticism of the Obama administration.

I love Helen to death, but her whining about Nico Pitney getting a question from the White House sounds like sour grapes to me from a typical Villager. There's plenty to complain about besides a blogger getting to ask one lousy question that's wrong with that White House press corps if she wants to go on a rant about what's wrong with our media.

I think this Fox Nation ad could use a better description than the one I came up with for the video and the post. I'd love to hear suggestions from the readers here who by and large are always more creative than I am when it comes to these things. We've done some "write your own caption posts". I'll gladly have this be a "write your own video description" instead. Submissions welcomed if you'd care to give all of us a laugh.

I've been following this issue for a while and was pretty surprised to conclude that the government doesn't have much choice. The way data travels means the entire country's far too vulnerable to cyberattacks, and they don't really have many effective options that don't to some degree compromise our privacy. The question is, who can we trust with that kind of power? We need a robust public debate over that very issue, but since they dumped this on the last day before a three-day weekend, I'm guessing not so much:

The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.

President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic" and Department of Homeland Security officials say that the new program will only scrutinize data going to or from government systems.

But the program has provoked debate within DHS, the current and former officials said, because of uncertainty over whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency's involvement in warrantless wiretapping under the Bush administration would draw controversy.

[...] Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the pilot called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian government agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block malicious computer codes.

AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications firm, was the Bush administration's choice to participate in the test, which has been delayed for months as the Obama administration determines what elements of the Bush plan to preserve, former government officials said. The pilot was to have been launched in February.

"To be clear, Einstein 3 development is proceeding," DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said. "We are moving forward in a way that protects privacy and civil liberties."

[...] The program is the most controversial element of the $17 billion cybersecurity initiative that the Bush administration launched in January 2008. Einstein 3 is crucial, advocates say, in an era in which hackers have compromised computer systems at the Commerce and State departments, and have siphoned off sensitive military jet data from a defense contractor.

The plot thickens...

RIO DE JANEIRO — A television anchor who's the only journalist known to have spoken with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's Argentine lover since news of their affair broke last week said the couple received an e-mail threat from the person who hacked into her Hotmail account.

Eduardo Feinmann, who worked with Maria Belen Chapur when she was a translator for Argentina's C5N news channel, said in a telephone interview from Buenos Aires that a member of Chapur's family told him of the threat on Saturday.He said the family member told him that the e-mail from the unidentified person warned both Sanford and Chapur that "you don't know who you are messing with." He said he didn't know how either of them responded.

Sanford's wife has said she's known about the affair for many months, so if true, this would certainly explain a lot:

Chapur said in an e-mail to Feinmann, which the anchorman read on the air Sunday night, that her Hotmail account was hacked into around Nov. 24. She became aware of the intrusion shortly thereafter and by Dec. 8 had succeeded in having the account closed. Read on...

Another controversy where the Obama administration is walking in the footsteps of BushCo!

I will say here that I'm no more optimistic that Hillary Clinton's response would have been any different. The nature of power is such that one can always find a strong enough argument for retaining it "just in case" once it's been exercised. But then again, Clinton wasn't the one who sold herself to us on the basis of a new transparent era, either:

A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration's public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations.

The administration's discussion of Wilson's link to the CIA was meant to undermine criticism by her husband of administration allegations that Iraq attempted to acquire uranium, a matter that her husband had probed for the CIA, according to testimony presented in a 2007 trial.

A list of at least seven related conversations involving Cheney appears in a new court filing approved by Obama appointees at the Justice Department. In the filing, the officials argue that the substance of what Cheney told special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in 2004 must remain secret.

No such agreement was reached between Fitzgerald and Cheney at the time of their chat, according to a 2008 Fitzgerald letter to lawmakers. But the Bush administration rejected requests by Congress and a nonprofit group for access to two FBI accounts of the conversation, saying the material was exempt from disclosure under subpoena or the Freedom of Information Act.

The Obama administration has since agreed that the material should not be disclosed. A Justice Department lawyer at one point last month argued that vice presidents and other White House officials will decline to be interviewed in the future if they know their remarks might "get on 'The Daily Show' " or be used as fodder for political enemies.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan expressed doubt about that argument. To counter Sullivan's skepticism, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer said in a supporting affidavit to the new court filing that the department needs the ability to interview White House officials informally in future law enforcement investigations, and that if the Cheney interview summaries are made public, "there is an increased likelihood that such officials could feel reluctant to participate." Breuer served as special counsel to President Bill Clinton during the Whitewater probe.

The nonprofit group pushing for disclosure, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, responded yesterday with a statement that the Justice Department has subpoenaed such officials without difficulty in the past. "It is astonishing that a top Department of Justice political appointee is suggesting other high-level appointees are unlikely to cooperate with legitimate law enforcement investigations. What is wrong with this picture?" said Melanie Sloan, head of the group.

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Bill O'Reilly never has liberals fill in for him when he takes a vacation, so I was surprised to see Juan Williams in the anchor chair Wednesday night. And then I asked myself: Self, why am I surprised? Williams is BillO's chief apologist night in and night out and he would make a good little conservative talk show host in a pickle. And he did. Well, there were none of the Talking Points Memo segment that opens up The Factor every night because they probably didn't trust Juan to deliver them with the proper hateful spin, but he easily tried to do a BillO imitation the rest of the show.
It was quite hilarious listening to him stiffly yell about taxes being raised by the evil Obamanites. And then came Bernie Goldberg. They were both so appalled that CBS' Scott Pelley wouldn't invite any global warming deniers on his Global Warming special. Juan said: Not a single one. The horror, I say. And then Bernie went off on his new affirmative action plan.

Goldberg: I came up with a plan and it's a brilliant plan. Every white person in America who thinks that affirmative action is a good thing and it makes America a better place, voluntarily gives up his and her jobs immediately, right now on one and only one condition. That they be replaced by somebody who isn't white. That way, by tomorrow or the next day we'd have a lot more Blacks, a lot more Hispanics, a lot more other minorities in very important positions....

Juan: Bernie, hold on. Aren't you mocking the seriousness of this because to my mind look,....but the fact is doors have been closed, Bernie.

Listen, we have an ugly racial history...at least my plan is addressing liberal, white liberal hypocrisy because when I put this plan.(blah, blah, blah) White liberals don't want to pay a price. They only want to dole out their racial goodies.

Can Goldberg tell us the number of white liberals who have or have not got a job in part because of affirmative action? Of course not. Conservatives were the only people targeted. Oy.

Bernie, your stupidity knows no bounds. I won't waste any time writing about how offensive his statements are because there are so many other implications to the rest of his rant. You can do that in the comments. And Williams couldn't even muster much of a response to Bernie's nonsensical whim other than, doors have been closed...because he was waist deep in being a conservative commentator. Go, Juan, go!

Mock, Paper, Scissors: Can Sanford salvage his book deal? Oh, yes..

Echidne of the Snakes: Hacktackular Howie

Booman Tribune: Advice for Harry Reid

Corrente: Terminological Interlude

Calitics: At the end of this process, somebody will step up to a microphone and claim how reaching agreement is a sign of success.  No.  It's a sign of failure.

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: MN Progressive Project, Blue Heron Blast, Economic Perspectives from Kansas City, archy