William Greider has been writing about economic issues since the 1960s, and is best known for his book Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. He's been warning us that the Obama administration intends to cut Social Security (this video is a year old):

What's extraordinary about this assault on Social Security is that a Democratic president is leading it. Obama is arm in arm with GOP conservatives like Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, who for decades has demonized Social Security as a grave threat to the Republic and has spread some $12 million among economists, think tanks, foundations and assorted front groups to sell his case. If Obama pulls the deal off, this will be his version of "Nixon goes to China"—a leader proving his manhood by going against his party's convictions. Even if he fails, the president will get some protective cover on the deficit issue. After all, he is targeting Big Government's most beloved and trusted program—the New Deal's most prominent pillar.

Obama's initiative rests on two falsehoods spread by Peterson's propaganda—the notion that Social Security somehow contributes to the swollen federal deficits and that cutting benefits will address this problem. Obama and his advisers do not say this in so many words, but their rhetoric implies that Social Security is a big source of the deficit problem. Major media promote the same falsehoods. Here is what the media don't tell you: Social Security has accumulated a massive surplus—$2.5 trillion now, rising to $4.3 trillion by 2023. This vast wealth was collected over many years from workers under the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) to pay in advance for baby boom retirements. The money will cover all benefits until the 2040s—unless Congress double-crosses workers by changing the rules. This nest egg does not belong to the government; it belongs to the people who paid for it. FICA is not a tax but involuntary savings.

As a candidate, Obama assured voters that any shortfall was in the distant future and could be easily resolved with minor adjustments. As president, he has abandoned this accurate analysis and turned rightward without explaining why. He faces an awkward problem, however. Despite conservative propaganda, cutting Social Security will have no impact on the deficit problem that so stirs public anxiety. The White House knows this, and some advisers admit as much. So why is the president targeting Social Security?

Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve chair and adviser to the president, declares, "In my view, we can deal with the Social Security problem fairly promptly." Cutting benefits, Volcker adds, "is not going to deal with the deficit problem in the short run, but it's confidence building." John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, another adviser, agrees but says, "Reforms could starkly demonstrate to skeptical debt markets that the United States is willing to take on a politically difficult fiscal issue."

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Desperate to change their miserable present, Republicans are traveling back in time to rewrite the past. And so it is with President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Hoping to block President Obama's stimulus program designed to prevent the next Great Depression, right-wing authors, pundits, and politicians insisted FDR failed to cure the first one. Now, Glenn Beck tells us, Americans reacted to the death of the man who led America back from economic collapse to victory in World War II by claiming with relief, "I'm glad he's dead."

On his Friday show, Beck featured regular guest Burton Folsom Jr. to peddle his book proclaiming the New Deal a failure. (Citing the thoroughly debunked work of Amity Shlaes, GOP leaders like John McCain and Mitch McConnell in 2009 similarly called he New Deal a bust, while Ohio Rep. Steve Austria amazingly declared that FDR "put our country into a Great Depression") After Folsom praised the Republican Roaring Twenties for producing Scotch Tape and zippers, Beck summed up his feelings for Roosevelt:

BECK: Roosevelt...Am I wrong by saying there was a good portion of people that thought, "Holy cow, I'm glad he's dead. He was turning into a dictator."

FOLSOM: Well, there were a lot of people who thought that. As you pointed out, we immediately had a constitutional amendment to prevent any other president from serving longer than two terms...It had not worked well with four terms under Franklin Roosevelt.

Of course, Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945 brought shock, disbelief and national mourning. And he was wildly popular. His approval rating, which reached 84% in 1942, never dipped below 48% (in 1938). His passing on the eve of victory in Europe stunned Americans, whose approval of him topped 70%.

And with good reason. He had been overwhelmingly elected in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944. (He never won less than 36 states and 432 electoral votes.) Even before the onset of World War II, FDR slashed unemployment by more than half and largely restored industrial production and GDP growth. (Only when Roosevelt wavered in the face of conservative pressure in 1937 did his New Deal temporarily falter.)

Among FDR's ardent backers were the Schecter brothers, whose 1935 Supreme Court challenge to his National Recovery Administration struck down much of his New Deal regulatory program. As David Leonhardt wrote in the New York Times review of Amity Shlaes' book:

Among Roosevelt's supporters, evidently, were a family of chicken butchers in Brooklyn named the Schechters. "Their major political concern in the 1930s was anti-Semitism," Shlaes's appendix quotes one of their descendants as saying. "They believed that if Roosevelt had not solved the problems of the Depression, the U.S. could have gone the way of Nazi Germany." The Schechters apparently voted for Roosevelt every time he ran.

(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)

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Glenn Beck continued his eliminationist attacks on progressives yesterday with a novel and absurd comparison:

Beck: History will equate this as, as big as the New Deal or Pearl Harbor. And if you think that's overstating the importance, remember we are talking about one-sixth of the U.S. economy.

As he was talking, the screen behind him showed the bombs falling on ships at Pearl Harbor and smoke billowing up in their aftermath.

Of course, Beck has also compared HCR to the 9/11 attacks.

Yeah, providing health-care insurance for millions of uninsured Americans is just like horrific and violent attacks that leave thousands of Americans dead.

The point, of course, is that the "progressives" pushing health-care reform are the "enemy within" intent on destroying America.

The rest of the rant was dedicated to exploring this in detail. He dismissed the CBO report that the health-care reform bill would result in a $130 billion deficit reduction in its first ten years by sniffing: "Well, that's a party in my pants!" -- because, according to Beck, it's just a "transition" to making health care a right, "just like FDR" intended. This notion is now being promoted, he said, by Cass Sunstein, who he pronounced "the most evil man, the most dangerous man in America."

You see, it's not deficit reduction that matters -- it's the loss freeeeedom! that HCR represents. HCR, according to Beck, is "slavery" and "oppression":

Beck: I promise you America -- oppression is one promise our government will keep.

Because, of course, decent health care is just so oppressive. Not to mention that it's like bombing thousands of Americans to death.

Obviously, there's no one left among the brass at Fox capable of keeping some kind of rational perspective in their broadcasts at all.

Lawyers, Guns and Money: A staple of right-wing New Deal denialism.

Faithful Progressive: Foreign investors and U.S. elections.

Attackerman: Not a single intelligent human being believes there isn’t bloat in the defense budget.

Sadly, No: Torture and abuse are bad again – as long as we can blame it all on gays and women.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I just remembered Chris Matthews was white.

HOLY CRAP: Between God and a hard place... Law of unintended consequences... "Freed" of gay urges... Pushing religion in the courtroom... What if God existed?... My personal relationship with Jesus (NSFW)... Advice for debating William Lane Craig... Social conservatism as a coercive tool of the state... Liberals ruined Buddhism?

Guest post by Batocchio. Mike is back tomorrow. Send tips to finnsagain AT aol DOT com. Thanks much.

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Heh. Sam Donaldson really smacks down the ever-unctuous (and historically inaccurate) George Will on This Week's roundtable discussion about the teabaggers:

WILL: What this was about, as was the original Boston Tea Party - which was barely about taxes but about Parliament's role in their lives, was a view that we're now in something called the "third wave" of government. You had the expansion of the New Deal, you had the expansion of the Great Society to complete the New Deal, what those people who rallied there were saying this is something different, this third wave is to erase the distinction between the public and private sectors, and that frightens them.

DONALDSON: Oh, they weren't saying that, George. What they were saying is, we don't like Obama. And this is a proxy way to say that. Because it's true, he's going to lower taxes on 95% of the American public, and the rest are going to have higher taxes. You were quite correct, it's not about the level of taxes. Those rallies were mainly, it seems to me, organized to say, "We don't like Obama" across the board.

Peggy Noonan, believe it or not, is the one who more accurately nails the mood as anti-ruling class. Unfortunately, Fox News- and talk-radio voters are invariably under-informed as to the root causes of our economic woes.

Notice that when it comes to conservatives, they always consistently attack the legitimacy of any Democrat who wins the White House. So no Democrat is ever really the President, and should be challenged at every turn! There, wasn't that easy?

Oh, to live in that happy place where Fox News resides: where the sun shone out of Ronald Reagan's behind, and FDR, not Hitler, was the real villain of his time...

After Wise Men Mort Kondracke and Fred Barnes pull their chin hairs and speak in somber tones about how Obama's economic stimulus package will actually hurt the economy - just like FDR's New Deal did - they wax rhapsodic over Reaganomics. (After tsk-tsking about unions quite possibly wrecking the economy under Obama, of course.)

I, too, have fond memories of Reaganomics. Why, until Reagan waved his magic wand, our unemployment checks weren't even taxed! I was absolutely thrilled to be able to make that sacrifice to fund tax cuts for the wealthy:

Another Reagan proposal that came in for criticism was the plan to tax all unemployment compensation.

[...] "What he's doing is taxing something to a person who is under a rough time to begin with," noted Herbert Paul, a New York tax lawyer. "But you don't seem to have a strong lobby group to push to eliminate that, so I think it may well stick."

And stick it did. Why, thanks to Reagan's Tax Reform Act of 1986, I only recently finished paying the taxes (and interest) due on unemployment income from 2001 - and here I am, unemployed again, thanks to yet another Republican-sponsored economic crash.

But I digress. The fact is, facts simply aren't relevant to Republicans, since their economic views and objects of veneration are more appropriate to a religious cult than intellectual rigor. (You might want to get Will Bunch's new book for a look at this phenomena - and why it's so important.)

I'm not going to pick apart the specifics of everything Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes said, because they're only interchangeable players in the larger conservative game plan. We've seen just about every possible Republican bobblehead spouting this same nonsense in the past few weeks, fresh off the RNC talking-points fax machine.

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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was interviewed on 60 Minutes yesterday to promote his book, My Grandfather's Son, and he had some just odd things to say about his critics. When asked why there was so much controversy about his nomination to the highest court in the land, his answer: abortion. Huh? While he is correct that there was an overriding concern amongst Democrats of the time that a conservative majority would result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I think it's a vast oversimplification to put the focus solely on that.

But then again, Thomas has a habit of making strange oversimplifications and assertions. As Marty Kaplan recounts:

But no less an authority than arch-conservative fellow Associate Justice Antonin Scalia told Thomas' biographer, Ken Foskett, that Thomas "doesn't believe in stare decisis, period." If you think nutcase is too strong a word to summarize that view, listen again to Scalia, as quoted in this Terry Gross interview with Jeff Toobin about his new Supreme Court book, The Nine:

TOOBIN: Clarence Thomas is not just the most conservative member of the Rehnquist court or the Roberts court. He's the most conservative justice to serve on the court since the 1930s. If you take what Thomas says seriously, if you read his opinions, particularly about issues like the scope of the federal government, he basically thinks that the entire work of the New Deal is unconstitutional. He really believes in a conception of the federal government that hasn't been supported by the justices since Franklin Roosevelt made his appointments to the court. You know, I went to a speech that Justice Scalia gave at a synagogue here in New York a couple of years ago, and someone asked him, `What's the difference between your judicial philosophy and Justice Thomas?' I thought a very good question. And Scalia talked for a while and he said, `Look, I'm a conservative. I'm a texturalist. I'm an originalist. But I'm not a nut.'

This is the last day I'll run the current donation drive. C&Ler Jeannette says she'll match donations up to 500.00 dollars so if you haven't donated and think you might, please do. I'm ordering new equipment at this moment from your contributions and have negotiated a new deal for bandwidth.....You can donate using the paypal/credit card button.

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HOLY CRAP: Otisolatry Down Under...Chuck Norris does not understand irony...Relics For Sale...slacktivist reads 'Left Behind'...Killing Gays is Good

The Satirical Political Report: Rush Limbaugh claims FDR faked polio to pass the New Deal

The Heretik: Slam dunk on torture

THE NEWS BLOG: You down with GOP?

Shakespeare's Sister: BU$HCO and single-sex public education

No Capital: Commander Codpiece reverses course again!

Here's more about Clarence:

via Ian: As Saunders explains, Thomas would not only adopt the Bush Administration's view of Presidential power, but would also strike down much of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Era...read on"