This holiday season, let's spare a kind thought for the decent people who toil inside Washington's legislative machinery. These good folk must live and work inside the dreamlike bubble that is today's policy and media world. Each day they strain to see reality through the reflected light of the false but colorful narratives projected against the bubble's surface.

Or would it be a better metaphor to say they're prisoners in some cold underground cell? No matter how many polls are conducted, no matter how many economic analyses are performed, no matter how many bitter lessons are taught and re-taught, there are those who hope to deny them even a glimpse of reality.

Instead these good people are forced to stare into the harsh glare of synthetic reality, hour after hour, as if were a naked lightbulb in windowless room. Only a few precious slivers of genuine sunlight penetrate the dank basement of illusion that imprisons them.

Well-intentioned staffers in Washington need good information to do their jobs well. Instead they're being inundated with confusing pseudo-facts and empty fear-mongering. This week's case in point? The Congressional "Super Committee." Did you know that unless they come up with their cuts there will be no Christmas this year? You didn't? Then you haven't been reading the Wall Street Journal.

Unfortunately, that kind of distortion isn't the exception. It's the rule.

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Back when they were teaching gun safety to my generation, there was a term for people who ran or jogged while carrying a loaded weapon. The term was "idiot." And back when we were learning basic geometry they had a book called Flatland that told a story set in a two-dimensional world. It was a place where everything was flattened and the people had no depth.

Welcome to Rick Perry's Flatland.

As Robert Borosage notes, Perry jogs with a handgun and reportedly shot a coyote that threatened his dog. Typical Republican overkill: You can scare off a coyote by throwing rocks at it. And speaking of overkill, the gun-totin' candidate's new flat tax proposal looks like a desperation move, a way to win some attention back from Herman Cain's headline-grabbing economic proposal.

"9-9-9," meet "SOS."

The political types tell us that a flat tax proposal makes for easy the messaging. It's simple, different, and it promises immediate relief from something most people hate (filling out tax forms). Hmm ... simple, different, and promises immediate relief. You know what else fits that description? Jumping off a bridge.

There's been a lot of commentary on the flat tax's policy implications. But what would the country look like a few years from now if it were enacted? Let's pretend that the entire country has jumped off a bridge by electing Rick Perry, and as a result we're all living in a place you might call "Flatland USA."

Let's take a look around our new home.

Bankaneer's Paradise

In Flatland USA, President Rick Perry was swept into office on a wave of disaffection over unemployment and stagnating wages. When Perry's flat tax became law in 2013,corporate tax revenues plunged. Conservatives love to complain that the official corporate tax rate for the United States is "the second highest in the developed world," as Perry put it when he announced his plans. (Our official tax rate is 35 percent, second only to Japan.) But corporations have so many loopholes, and such smart tax lawyers, that the average rate they really pay today is only 13.4 percent. That's less than the average for industrialized countries, which is 16 percent.

In Flatland USA, Perry's flat tax lowered the top rate but didn't get rid of the loopholes. (I'm making that assumption because Perry wrote today that "Cut, Balance and Grow also phases out corporate loopholes and special-interest tax breaks to provide a level playing field for employers of all sizes." In plain English, that bureacrat-speak means "Corporations will get an even bigger tax break now, and we'll fix all those other loopholes ... someday." And you know what? Someday never comes.)

Anybody remember "Wimpy," the old freeloader from the Popeye cartoons? "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," he'd say. In Rick Perry's Flatland, Tuesday never comes - and his tax plan is "wimpy" on corporations.

The loss of corporate taxes in Flatland starved the government of the revenue it needed to provide basic services.

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Big Mike -- MoveOn.org's "Break It Down" guy -- is kind of a rationalist response to Glenn Beck: He too uses blackboards, etc., to explain seemingly complex issues. But unlike Beck, who actually makes things out to be much more dense, murky, and inexplicable than they really are (not to mention inventing things that never were), Mike has the gift of taking complex subjects and actually helping ordinary people understand them.

So I every much enjoyed his latest "Break It Down" installment -- this time on the ongoing federal-budget battles. It really is about the nation's Top 1 percent income earners against the rest of us -- and it's going to become even more intense:

And all of this fighting is just over this year's budget. Next year's budget is where things get really crazy.

Because even though taxes for the rich are the lowest they have been in generations, the Republicans want to cut them even further, so millionaires and billionaires are paying 25% instead of 35%.

But where are they going to get the trillions of dollars they need to do that?

Their ideas are fairly simple: Slash $350 billion from things like food stamps, education, training, employment, Cut another $400 billion from programs that help low-income families. Oh, and get rid of Medicare.

Yeah, almost forgot about that. They're going to take away Medicare, give seniors vouchers, and throw them on the mercy of Big Insurance. Because when I think compassion, I think Big Insurance.

So if you or your aging parents actually depend on Medicare, they can look forward to a future where they can choose between buying their meds….or eating.

If we want to get serious about shrinking the deficit, it won't happen on the backs of the middle class that’s already being squeezed.

He actually might have made good use of another chart MoveOn recently published:

BeggarsCanBeChoosers: The Pentagon's hypocrisy on Iraqi deaths

We are respectable negroes: Rushbo suggests that Michelle Obama's vacation is linked to reparations for slavery! On the other hand, G-Dub - not his WIFE- spent all or part of 977 days at Camp David or at a ranch in Texas during his presidency.

cab drollery: The Social Security Trust Fund is not in any immediate danger, no matter what such oligarchs as Pete Peterson and some of the members of the Catfood Commission have been saying.

Angry Bear: "Run Government Like a Business" = Deficit Spending

skippy the bush kangaroo: Environmental news stories you may not hear about

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Saint Peter II, Antemedius, Grits for Breakfast

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Sarah Palin's very proud of her idiotic "cojones" jibe at President Obama last Sunday, and went on Sean Hannity to crow about it some more last night:

HANNITY: Yes, it's amazing to me. I wonder -- and tell me this is separate and apart. I think on national security issues and some other issues like immigration a willingness to really take on a controversial issue, do you think over time the narrative that the president is wimpy is going to take place?

PALIN: I think he's quite complacent and I think he's over -- in over his head and I think he has poor advisors surround him and I think he's really influx kind of when it comes to what his governing philosophy actually is. Some of this though is a result of he not having much experience and then a complicit media, and maybe some voters who chose not to allow him to be vetted very closely.

It's a combination of things that's resulting in a president who's not taking a strong stand on those things that are the will of the people. Obviously the will of the people is to enforce the laws that we have on the books.

HANNITY: Yes, but you know, Governor, I've tried to make this observation as many times as I can. It seems that -- you know, I know we are supposed to have government of, by, and for the people. That's what I -- that's what I always understood.

But this administration -- Democrats in particular -- right now seeing it's government by and of and for Obama. And by that I mean, you know, look at where the American people are on immigration. Look at where they are on health care.

Look at where they are on deficit spending. And then look at the Obama administration's positions. They seem at odds and a willingness to be at odds with the American people so often.

Is it ideology? Is it a lack of sophisticated political knowledge? What do you think it is?

PALIN: It's ideology and it's a commitment to what he had set out to do as a candidate. Barack Obama. And that was to fundamentally transform country.

So wait, which is it? Is Barack Obama a lousy president because he's a wishy-washy leader who doesn't really know which way to go? Or is it because he's a hardcore radical ideologue who refuses to budge or compromise or try to work with Republicans?

These nabobs seize on any straw in a windstorm to bash Obama. It's pretty pathetic, really -- except, of course, that one of them is about 90 percent likely to be a major Republican candidate for the presidency in 2012.

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Laura Ingraham, filling in for Bill O'Reilly last night, invited Karl Rove on to come and whine about how mean President Obama is for ripping into the deficit-spending policies of President Bush. He even calls Obama a "teenager" and "juvenile" for, um, pointing out the truth that Karl Rove hates to hear.

But then Ingraham pointed out that Bush was not particularly beloved of the new conservative-movement darlings, the Tea Partiers:

Ingraham: You speak to a lot of the Tea Party folks. I mean, you go all across the country promoting your book. You know, though, that the Tea Party people will say, 'Look, you know, we love President Bush, he's a patriot, he's a great man, but these guys were deficit spending, these guys were soft on the border, they weren't listening to us.' And they're running against candidates like Bennett in Utah, who got his marching orders, and others across the United States, who are the Establishment candidates, who supported a lot of what President Bush did, Karl. And how do you respond to that charge?

Rove: Well, first of all, look, I've just come through a 111-city book tour and I ran into a lot of Tea Party people. I didn't get that animus toward President Bush that you got. In fact, I got a lot of people who said 'We miss him terribly, we wish he were back in office.'

Apparently Rove has managed to miss all those episodes of the Glenn Beck program where he definitively labeled George W. Bush a "progressive Republican" -- and therefore part of the "cancer" that's destroying America -- as he did, for instance, in this bit:

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Ever notice that Rove never shows up on the Beck program?

But Rove is no doubt right. There certainly ARE a lot of Tea Partiers who looooved them some deficit spending when it was a Republican president doing it while cutting taxes for the wealthy. And they really don't want to have to admit that they were wrong. They just want to have something to bitch at Obama about, because that's who they ALL have an animus toward.

Rove is really just admitting what we already know: The Tea Party is really just the Sore Loserman Party.

(Steve Sack, Minnesota Star-Tribune.)

Oh dear, the Democrats have fallen into the fetal position again!

That's because they're 1. Too inarticulate to effectively defend their policies to voters 2. Seemingly oblivious to the fact that Republicans will attack them NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO and 3. are too afraid of being accused of being on the side of the VICTIMS in class warfare.

Which leads me back to the same question, again and again: What, exactly, do Democrats stand for? Besides their own re-relection, I mean:

On one side: teachers, doctors and their patients, the jobless, disaster victims, the troops.

On the other: private equity firms, hedge funds, venture capitalists, real estate partnerships and bond holders.

It would be hard to fashion from scratch a more politically potent standoff, yet the Republican Party is barely being forced to fight -- as Democratic lawmakers balk at deficit spending and hesitate to close a tax loophole on a wealthy class of investors with close social and political ties to powerful Democrats.

At issue are two bills to preserve several soon-to-expire provisions. One of them, the American Jobs and Closing Loopholes Act, colloquially known as the "tax extenders" bill, contains several tax breaks for corporations and families, along with $47 billion to preserve enhanced unemployment benefits for the rest of the year and subsidized COBRA health insurance, $24 billion to help states with Medicaid costs in 2011 and $64.6 billion to preserve elevated Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors for the next five years.

The second cobbles together money for the war as well as aid for teachers and Haiti and Gulf state disaster relief. Though it's moving through Congress as a separate vehicle from the extenders package, it's all part of the same fight. And Democrats can expect little help from the GOP. After years of passing emergency supplemental war bills with no attempt that they be paid for -- and, in fact, while cutting taxes at the same time -- Republicans have decided that troop spending bills are now items that can be opposed without one's patriotism being called into question.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the extenders bill will lard the federal budget deficit with $123 billion, a horrifying sum to Democrats already under attack for spending borrowed money. But the deficit isn't what has some Dems antsy -- rather, they're concerned about a revenue-raiser in the bill that would close a tax loophole through which rich investment fund managers would otherwise funnel $18 billion to themselves over the next ten years.

The bill, pitting the jobless against the cream of Wall Street, should not present a difficult choice for Democrats. But its passage is so far from assured that Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana who is routinely at odds with the party base, chastised his caucus during a Tuesday lunch meeting. "This is why we came here," an unusually fired-up Baucus urged.

Now, think about that. Max freakin' Baucus is telling them to vote for it, and they're still too scared. It never seems to occur to them that they won't need huge Wall Street donations to win if they have the people on their side.

Perhaps we should medicate our highly anxious and flaccid Democratic political class: Xanax - and Viagra.

While two million people have run out of unemployment benefits, the Senate Republicans are insisting they're just protecting us from deficit spending by obstructing another extension. They weren't worried about deficit spending when Bush wanted massive tax cuts, and they weren't worried when Bush started two wars. But while 25 million people are unemployed with many of them clinging to their unemployment checks just to survive, Republicans are playing partisan games.

Will one brave Republican stand up for those hit hardest by this recession?

Congress is poised for another partisan showdown over extending unemployment insurance, as concerns about the growing budget deficit have complicated the path forward for an otherwise popular program.

On its first day back in session following a two-week recess, the Senate is scheduled to vote Monday on whether to end debate on a measure extending jobless benefits, subsidies for the COBRA health insurance program and federal flood insurance through May 5. Democrats will need at least one Republican supporter to get the 60 votes necessary to proceed.

The Senate failed to agree on the bill in late March, after Republicans rejected an attempt to expedite the measure's passage. Because of the impasse, beginning April 5 more than 200,000 unemployed people who had already exhausted their states' jobless benefits could not apply for additional benefits from the federal program, according to estimates by the National Employment Law Project, a liberal advocacy group.

Each party has been eager to blame the other for the cutoff.

Democrats point out that they easily moved an extension through the House and were primed to do the same in the Senate before Republicans, led by Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), stood in the way.

"The fact is, an extension to help American families was passed unanimously in the House before it was blocked by a handful of Senate Republicans," said Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "The only point some Senate Republicans have succeeded in making is that they are out of touch with the harsh reality that some families all across America are facing today."

Republicans respond that they're not opposed to extending unemployment benefits but want to offset the $9 billion cost with spending cuts elsewhere.

"We both want to extend unemployment benefits," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), the GOP's No. 3 leader. "The Democrats want to do it by adding to the debt. Republicans don't want to add to the debt."

Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run

I gotta tell you, the new found concern the Republicans possess for deficit spending is so unintentionally hilarious. They must thank their lucky stars for the mindless memory hole that is the collective American consciousness to not remember the drunken sailor spending that defined the past eight years. Evidently, from the guests this morning, spending will again be the focus, with lots of little digs on how the stimulus is obviously not working and how the best choice is to keep the Bush tax cuts. With Larry Summers, Christina Romer and Alan Greenspan as scheduled guests, what are the chances that someone will bring up sensible legislation and regulation such as the Glass-Steagall Act as the way to avoid another economic collapse? Not bloody likely, methinks. Also, our favorite grasping-to-be-relevant McCain minion, Joe Lieberman, will be back to give his very best Deputy Dog whine on how anything the Democrats propose for health care will cause him to have to filibuster reform. That's Joe, taking the (health insurance) money, and running.

ABC's "This Week" - Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council; Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan; Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich.; former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Dan Rather, Kelly O'Donnell, Helene Cooper, Andrew Ross Sorkin. Topics: Obama's Big Contradictions on Health Care, War & Peace and Economic Recovery; The Cultural Chasm on Global Warming.

CNN's "State of the Union" - Summers; Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and John Thune, R-S.D.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - A timely debate between Bjorn Lomborg and Paul Krugman on global warming. Plus a free-ranging discussion with a panel of stars on everything from Obama's Nobel Prize to what is happening in Dubai.

CNN's "Amanpour" - General Stanley A. McChrystal - commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and James Inhofe, R-Okla.; Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.; Inez Tenenbaum, chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

I always ask teabaggers when I run into them, how any federal deficit has hurt them personally? They can't respond to that. They have no answer except to cry "socialism."

Sure, it's much better to have a surplus like Clinton did, but these same deficit hawks were quite happy when the Bush tax cuts came down and the rich got richer and the economy collapsed. But I ask again: How has deficit spending hurt you?

Long term debt is nothing to sneeze at, but when we're talking about reforming health care for America, who really cares if it's $700 billion for 10 years or $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion? (By the way, I love the way the press never tells America what it would cost per year because then the figure doesn't sound so bad. They make it appear that the cost is $700 or 900 billion a year.)

Go ask a teabagger about costs and see what they say. What will it matter in the long run? We can figure out how to pay for it. Even FDR was hampered by these deficit hawks when he brought the country out of the Great Depression, and now these deficit hawks almost put us back into a Depression because they were so deficit crazy.

The deficit hawk is code for keeping the rich---rich. And then finding ways to keep their money pouring in.

Digby has a great post up today about costs:

The Peterson Foundation is ready with the news. They released a report (pdf) on the Kennedy Bill today...

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The fact is that if all these benefits were actually realized, the country would be far, far better off, both financially and otherwise. Nobody expects that spending will go down, merely that the growth in spending will be less. Therefore, if the government finds itself having to pay out all that money in health care benefits, this healthier, more prosperous nation can surely afford to levy the necessary taxes to pay for it, right?

I don't give a damn what this is going to cost in 2029. And nobody else should either because these projections are based on bullshit. Nobody can see that far into the future. If we can pay for it now, then we should do it now. And if it costs more down the line, then we will find a way to pay for it. This nonsensical obsession with deficits decades into the future is nothing more than a scam designed to keep the gravy train going for the wealthiest Americans at the expense of everyone else.

If these numbers are correct, then the fiscal scolds are going to have to argue that people today have to die so that wealthy people in 2029 don't have to pay higher taxes. It's that simple.

The president is also talking about having a deficit neutral bill, but he's being attacked for it by the usual suspects.