The whole "fiscal cliff negotiation" theme is driving me crazy. Ever since Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein started acting like there were serious negotiations underway, everyone has gone wild on both sides.

I realize it was only ten days ago, but you know there was a time where we were banging the drum for the White House to hold fast, and you know who was losing that battle? John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and the entire Republican party. We were winning. They were losing. And they knew it.

Representative Tom Cole said the votes were there to pass the middle class tax cuts without any deal, without any bargain, without anything but bringing the bill to the floor. That was on December 12th.

All of a sudden, Boehner started playing "Let's Make a Deal" and the Villagers went crazy with it. But we don't have to. I don't understand why we're letting them muck this up with all manner of stupidity, which is only bolstering Republicans' images at the expense of Democrats.

All anyone has to do is start with what we know: Republicans do not negotiate in good faith ever, and they only negotiate at all when they are pressed to the wall. Therefore, we can all assume this is a lot of smoke with lots of mirrors and absolutely no sincerity.

I am of the belief that absolute clarity is needed in order to get this done in an orderly fashion. That means no muddling up the issues. It is absolutely driving me crazy to see the narrative driven by media that Medicare, Social Security, tax reform and the debt ceiling MUST be wrapped up in a tiny little neat package by December 31st.

No. Nothing need be wrapped up by December 31st. Absolutely nothing. I've heard arguments for why they should be, and so I'll take them one by one:

• Unemployment extensions expire 12/29: These are urgent. I am not minimizing that. But they are separate from any discussion about tax reform, tax rates, and tax cuts. There is no relationship between them and they should be addressed separately from the other issues. If the extensions are renewed in the first weeks of January, it will not do harm to recipients, and can retroactively be corrected.
• But the debt ceiling. ZOMG, the debt ceiling: President Obama needs to have us clamoring and echoing him on this: the debt ceiling is UNRELATED to the tax revenue question now and forevermore, and we should be prepared to have Republicans shut down government over it. Let them take the hit for their folly. Never before 2011 was the debt ceiling a serious hostage, and it shouldn't be one now.
• More stimulus! - The stimulus package the President is suggesting won't even cover Hurricane Sandy relief, which the sick GOP cheapos in Congress have already delayed and dithered about for weeks now. Seriously. President Obama is asking for $56 billion in stimulus. Sandy relief is expected to cost around $60 billion. It's just math.
• Better a Democrat shore up Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, right? Sure. But certainly not in the name of deficit reduction or tax reform. Again, these are issues that are being intentionally smashed together to muddy up what is a simple, straightforward process.
• The payroll tax expires! Uh oh. Good. It should expire. It was always dangerous territory. If they want to extend it, they can extend it in the form of a refundable tax credit for 2013, which doesn't cause money from the General Fund to be transferred to the Social Security trust fund. Withholding can be adjusted to account for the credit, and the economy will be saved from ruin.

The only time Republicans care about the deficit is when they are not in the White House. This is a game, an act, an obscene dance of political gamesmanship, but it is NOT a negotiation.

What we should be doing:

• Ignore the Villagers' hand-wringing
• Stop accepting what they say as truth.
• Stop reacting to everything.
• Start saying out loud that the only thing that should happen before January 1st is an up or down vote in the House on the Senate extension of middle class tax cuts.
• Stomp your feet, call your Congressman, shout it out: ONLY an up or down vote on the middle class tax cuts is warranted, and that means one vote on the Senate bill, not some stupidly crafted package of nonsensical, arcane, ridiculously meaningless "cuts".

Ten days ago we were winning this by not budging at all. Yes, President Obama, that means YOU too. Now suddenly we're engaging in the farce Republicans call "negotiations?" Give me a break. This has been an exercise in how to turn media narratives around for the Republicans' benefit, but it is nothing like a negotiation.

If we really want to win, we simply stop acknowledging all of the stupid GOP party trial balloons floating around us and start pushing for one vote. One vote before December 31st. Just one. No amendments, no extras. One vote on the Senate bill to extend the middle class tax cuts.

Then make them sit at OUR table next year, when the upper rates are set and not going back down. That's how it's done. Our way, not theirs.

(The fiscal scolds must be obeyed!)

Is there a more frustrating liberal columnist than Jonathan Chait? At times he does stellar work, but at other times he becomes another casualty of the beltway villager syndrome when he says Go Ahead, Raise the Medicare Retirement Age.

This seems like a useful time for liberals to sort out the difference between budget ideas we don’t like and budget ideas we can’t or shouldn’t accept. (Ezra Klein has some other sensible ideas here.) Many of my liberal wonk friends have been making the case against raising the Medicare retirement age — seeSarah Kliff, Matthew Yglesias, and Jonathan Cohn.

Their basic case is that raising the Medicare retirement age is a really stupid way to save money because it just forces people to stop buying health care through Medicare, which is relatively cheap, and start buying it through private insurance, which costs way more. They’re all totally right about this. Still, when the question comes to what concessions the Democrats are going to have to accept, rather than what policy makes the most sense, raising the Medicare age seems like a sensible bone to throw the right.

Raising the age of Medicare isn't a damn bone, it's a six inch dagger sticking into the hearts of millions of elderly Americans. It's been analyzed by the best and consensus is that raising the age of eligibility is horrible for health care, people, future costs and savings.

The majority of 65- and 66-year-olds would end up with skimpier coverage than they’d have with Medicare—and some would end up with no coverage at all—leaving them exposed to higher expenses. Businesses would also face higher costs, because some of those 65- and 66-year-olds would stay on employer policies. Medicare premiums would also inch higher, since the pool of people in Medicare would be older overall. Overall, according to independent assessments, the government would spend less on medical care, but the country as a whole would spend more, which is precisely the opposite of what public policy is supposed to be achieving right now. (This report from the Kaiser Family Foundation has a full analysis and this item from Sarah Kliff puts it into context, if you want to know more.)

So why does Chait think this is a good idea?

For one thing, it has weirdly disproportionate symbolic power, both among Republicans in Congress and establishmentarian fiscal scolds. Mitch McConnell and Erskine Bowles alike would regard raising the retirement age as a sign of serious belt-tightening and the “structural reforms” conservatives say they need. Meager and inefficient though the savings may be, they pack a lot of punch in delivering Republican votes.

So instead of good policy and compassion we're supposed to surrender on something that does nothing to ease the so-called fiscal cliff just so teabirchers in Congress can feel better about themselves because they screwed over millions of working class elderly Americans. And of course we must appease the fiscal scolds which in reality have been turned into bipartisan GODS for the beltway villagers and they need their sacrifice. It's not shared sacrifice that politicians proclaim is needed, but the Edward G. Robinson golden calf kind of sacrifice to the GODS in The Ten Commandments. The fiscal scolds must be obeyed or ye shall be punished!

DDay then debunks Chait's final argument about how raising the eligibility age of Medicare would strengthen ACA:

Then there’s this bit of folly:

What’s more, raising the Medicare retirement age would help strengthen the fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act [...] The political basis for the right’s opposition to universal health insurance has always been that the uninsured are politically disorganized and weak. But a side effect of raising the Medicare retirement age would be that a large cohort of 65- and 66-year-olds would suddenly find themselves needing the Affordable Care Act to buy their health insurance. Which is to say, Republicans attacking the Affordable Care Act would no longer be attacking the usual band of very poor or desperate people they can afford to ignore but a significant chunk of middle-class voters who have grown accustomed to the assumption that they will be able to afford health care. Strengthening the political coalition for universal coverage seems like a helpful side benefit — possibly even one conservatives come to regret, and liberals, to feel relief they accepted.

This is cynical, to say the least. It’s also completely wrong. The one thing we know will be a side effect of increasing the Medicare eligibility age is that insurance premiums will skyrocket. It will make Medicare more expensive because they lose relatively healthy 65 and 66 year-olds from their risk pool, and it will make private insurance more expensive because they add relatively sick 65 and 66 year-olds to their risk pool. Insurers hate the idea for just this reason. As a result, everyone’s premiums will rise, and cost-shifting will ensue from the government to its citizens.
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It’s maybe the worst strategic plan in the world to raise the Medicare age to bolster support for the Affordable Care Act by raising how much everyone has to spend on health insurance, particularly those who don’t get subsidies, the same “significant chunk of middle-class voters who have grown accustomed to the assumption that they will be able to afford health care.”The idiocy on display here can hardly be believed. The dangerous part is how many members of the Democratic caucus might agree with this logic, Nancy Pelosi excepted.

Stupidity unfortunately isn't a deterrent in the hallowed grounds of Congress, but one thing I do know. We can't afford to have more establishment liberals succumbing to satiate the hunger of the barbarous tea party to cut entitlement/earned benefit programs that Americans depend on to survive.

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Yes, I'm always nervous about the outcome of any election that I'm invested in and I get a bit more stressed when it's a national one. I was very anxious the entire day four years ago when I knew Obama had it in the bag in 2008. This time it's a lot closer. Fox has created its own political reality as I've been writing about and Romney is following right along. it's never been more evident since the third and finale debate took place on Monday.

Jonathan Chait:

In recent days, the vibe emanating from Mitt Romney’s campaign has grown downright giddy. Despite a lack of any evident positive momentum over the last week — indeed, in the face of a slight decline from its post-Denver high — the Romney camp is suddenly bursting with talk that it will not only win butwin handily. (“We’re going to win,” said one of the former Massachusetts governor’s closest advisers. “Seriously, 305 electoral votes.”)This is a bluff. Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fox News is beating this drum loudly also. See, we've seen this many times before. Karl Rove is the master at playing this garbageand he's continuing the trend.

Karl Rove employed exactly this strategy in 2000. As we now know, the race was excruciatingly close, and Al Gore won the national vote by half a percentage point. But at the time, Bush projected a jaunty air of confidence. Rove publicly predicted Bush would win 320 electoral votes. Bush even spent the final days stumping in California, supposedly because he was so sure of victory he wanted an icing-on-the-cake win in a deep blue state. Campaign reporters generally fell for Bush’s spin, portraying him as riding the winds of momentum and likewise presenting Al Gore as desperate.

Unfortunately it worked so now it's a staple of their play book.

Obama’s lead is narrow — narrow enough that the polling might well be wrong and Romney could win. But he is leading, his lead is not declining, and the widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.

Digby writes:

So, I'm hearing this morning that despite the fact that President Obama cleearly won last night's foreign policy debate, he actually lost...

That's all you hear on FOX, but it's much subtler on other cable news channels. They say that since Mitt memorized some talking points he passed the commander in chief test.

Michael Tomasky writes about this in his piece this morning:

Today may be the most important single day of the campaign. Obama won the debate. Everyone this side of Charles Krauthammer agrees that Romney was general and platitudinous and not that engaged. That makes two out of three. You might think that would mean momentum. And yet the conventional wisdom is congealing right now—it is hardening this morning, minute by minute—that Romney is going to win the election.

From Playbook, which distills the c.w.: President Obama won last night’s foreign-policy debate on substance, in snap polls and with the pundits, but Mitt Romney did well enough that for the first time in six years, Romney folks emailed, “We’re going to win.”
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In reality, Obama is the favorite. The state maps still make him so.

Digby then continues:

Conservatives know all this. But they’re constructing an opposite reality. This is at the heart of everything going on right now, I think. It’s what they can do that liberals can’t really do. They've always done it. “Romney is going to win” in 2012 isn’t so different from “We’ll be hailed as liberators” in 2003. They say something and try to make it so, and the media go for it time and time again.
And... they are.

This is the right's great advantage. They have their own media, (which the Democrats stupidly validate every chance they get) and they have a boatload of professional spinmeisters ready to instantly hit the talking points. They have been at this for a very long time and they are probably better at doing it than anything else --- especially governing.

To me, it was clear that Obama won the debate. He was much more fluent on the issues, and obviously truly engaged. This is what he cares about. Indeed, everyone should remember that until the fall of 2008, domestic issues weren't at the top of the list and Obama made his bones on his foreign policy promise. The country was looking for someone who would get us out of the stinking mess Bush's bellicose neocons had created.

Conservatives are trying to condition the media to report that Romney is killing it now and help pump undecideds to vote for Mittens. The con never sleeps in tea party land.

Do the lords and ladies of Versailles on the Potomac not have any trusted advisors? You know, the kind of people who can clue them in about the reality that Republicans really don't care about the deficit, except as a handy tool with which to bludgeon Democratic presidents. (I suppose they also believe professional wrestling doesn't use scripts.) Because really, their part in putting the stamp of approval on this debt ceiling fiasco is beyond absurd.

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait spells it out as he takes the Versailles establishment to task for pushing so long for President Obama to use the debt ceiling vote (granted, they didn't have to push him very far, since he already supported the idea of a Grand Bargain) as an opportunity for Very Serious Deficit Reduction:

The failure to understand the crisis we were entering was widely shared among centrist types. When Republicans first proposed tying a debt ceiling hike to a measure to reduce the deficit, President Obama instead proposed a traditional, clean debt ceiling hike. He found this position politically untenable for many reasons, one of them being that deficit scolds insisted that using the debt ceiling to force a fiscal adjustment was a terrific idea, and that connecting the deficit debate to a potentially cataclysmic financial event was the mark of seriousness. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget argued:

[F]ailing to use this debt ceiling ‘hammer’ to force serious fiscal reforms would be a dangerous lost opportunity. This country needs a deal to achieve $4 to $5 trillion in deficit reduction, and we need to put such a deal in place as quickly as possible.

The Concord Coalition chimed in:

[T]he need to raise the debt limit does provide an opportunity to assess past fiscal decisions and, if necessary, make corrections. In the past, major increases in the debt limit have often been accompanied by the enactment of deficit reduction plans such as the November 1990 increase of $915 billion, the August 1993 increase of $530 billion, and the August 1997 increase of $450 billion. In the absence of such linkage, Congress has been reluctant to raise the debt limit by more than is necessary to get through a short period of time. Thus, while the debt limit is not, by itself, a fiscal firewall, in the absence of other more effective mechanisms, it is one of the few budgetary speed bumps left to provide a sense of fiscal discipline.

And the Washington Post editorial page repeatedly endorsed using the debt ceiling to force a deficit reduction. The operating assumption was that both parties required encouragement to act on reducing the deficit:

[W]e retain some shred of hope that the bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Six will come forward with a productive contribution. The group is working off a blueprint produced by the fiscal commission that the president convened and then abandoned. Perhaps the fact that the other main alternative on the table is the considerably less centrist plan put forward by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will lure the White House into the fray.

The political assumptions here turned out to be badly wrong. The main problem is that the Republican Party does not actually care very much about the deficit. It cares about, in order: Low taxes for high-income earners; reducing social spending, especially for the poor; protecting the defense budget; and low deficits. The Obama administration and many Democrats actually do care about the deficit and are willing to sacrifice their priorities in order to achieve it, a desire that was on full display during the health care reform debate. Republicans care about deficit reduction only to the extent that it can be undertaken without impeding upon other, higher priorities. Primarily "deficit reduction" is a framing device for their opposition to social spending, as opposed to a genuine belief that revenue and outlays ought to bear some relationship to each other.

There are times when I respond quite harshly to views that Chait writes for TNR which make my blood boil and then some time will pass and he'll write something I really enjoy so I link it up. And then he writes something like this: Give Coburn And Lieberman A Chance

My-head-hurts. Make it stop. Now if you'd rather read some intelligent writing on this, click here.

Jonathan Chait got the ball rolling from the left wing elitists when he attacked Jack Conway's Aqua Buddha ad against Rand Paul when he wrote that he had sympathy for Paul. Many of us objected to this for many reasons, but how does Chait answer the criticisms? He makes shit up. Here's his defense of Paul:

Is Rand Paul misleading the electorate about his religion? Sure. But he's not running on a religious platform. It's Conway who's making religion an issue. I think an atheist, which is what I'm petty sure Paul is, ought to be able to run for office without having his belief system publicly interrogated.

Is he this naive about our current political system? When hasn't a Democrat's religion been question? John Kennedy's Catholicism was a big issue in 1960. The question of his electability because of his religious beliefs was a central question in that election. And since Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed injected religion into our mainstream political discourse beginning in the 1980s, it's only gotten much, much worse.

Chait admits that Rand Paul is probably lying about his belief in religion -- which I might agree with, but then he insists that even an atheist should be allowed to run for office. I agree with that completely -- except for one thing: Republicans don't believe in that assessment. Rand Paul doesn't believe that assessment. Republicans throw religion into every part of their party and into every debate we have, but for some reason others are forbidden to bring up the issue of religious values. Either Chait hasn't been following Baby Paul's campaign or is ignorant about what Rand has publicly stated about his views on religion. Paul did make religion part of the debate after he trumpeted his Christian faith -- evidently in contrast with Conway -- back in May, via Sarah Posner:

Appearing on The Brody File, Rand Paul, who believes that portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act need "further discussion" and may violate private business owners' First Amendment rights, said that we wouldn't really need laws in this country if everyone were a good Christian:

I'm a Christian. We go to the Presbyterian Church. My wife’s a Deacon there and we’ve gone there ever since we came to town. I see that Christianity and values is the basis of our society. . . . 98% of us won’t murder people, won’t steal, won’t break the law and it helps a society to have that religious underpinning. You still need to have the laws but I think it helps to have a people who believe in law and order and who have a moral compass or a moral basis for their day to day life.

Although Paul attends a mainline Protestant church, in his comments one might hear an echo of Christian Reconstructionism. RD contributor Julie Ingersoll, an expert on Christian Reconstructionism, once described it to me this way: "Reconstructionists claim to have an entirely integrated, logically defensible Christian worldview. Reconstructionism addresses everything you have to think about." In other words, as a society we should follow (preferable) biblical law, and dispense with all but a small handful of civil laws.

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Thank you, Jonathan Chait, for this awesome NYMag article telling us how to count the ways Paul Ryan is the Great American Hero. What would I have ever done without being enlightened in such an obsequious way, beginning with the title: The Legendary Paul Ryan?

Legendary, really? Legendary in the way that Lizzie Borden is legendary, perhaps? Alas, no. Take this circle jerk, extraordinaire:

To find a parallel to the way Ryan has so thoroughly seized control of the Republican agenda and identity, you have to go back at least to Gingrich in his nineties heyday, or possibly to Reagan. Yet Gingrich and Reagan rose to the national scene while cultivating an image as radicals—it was their battle scars, inflicted by the mainstream political Establishment, that lent them the credibility to speak for the conservative base. Ryan, by contrast, has achieved something much stranger: He has ascended to his present position aloft a chorus of acclaim from the corners of the Establishment that once greeted Gingrich and Reagan with loathing. He is the only politician revered as much by the mainstream media as by the tea party. By some measure, he’s the most popular guy in Washington.

Pardon me while I knock back a couple of Maalox. I'm certain our Founding Fathers worried on a daily basis about whether newspapers pro and con "revered" them, aren't you? This is the stuff of Villager politics. Forget what politicians stand for as long as they're "revered" by the media covering them. Popularity, yay!

And then there's the self-effacing "I'm not ambitious at all, no sir!" claim that Chait reinforces:

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