Robert Parry on a newly-released document that spells out how President Ronald Reagan promoted genocide in Central America:

Soon after taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s national security team agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but their “civilian support mechanisms,” according to a newly disclosed document from the National Archives.

Over the next several years, the military assistance from the Reagan administration helped the Guatemalan army do just that, engaging in the slaughter of some 100,000 people, including what a truth commission deemed genocide against the Mayan Indians in the northern highlands.

Recently discovered documents at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, also reveal that Reagan’s White House was reaching out to Israel in a scheme to circumvent congressional restrictions on military equipment for the Guatemalan military.

In 1983, national security aide Oliver North (who later became a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal) reported in a memo that Reagan’s Deputy National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane (another key Iran-Contra figure) was approaching Israel over how to deliver 10 UH-1H helicopters to Guatemala to give the army greater mobility in its counterinsurgency war.

According to these documents that I found at the Reagan library – and other records declassified in the late 1990s – it’s also clear that Reagan and his administration were well aware of the butchery underway in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America.

The relaxed attitude toward the Guatemalan regime’s brutality took shape in spring 1981 as Reagan’s State Department “advised our Central American embassies that it has been studying ways to restore a closer, cooperative relationship with Guatemala,” according to a White House “Situation Room Checklist” dated April 8, 1981.

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What wingnuts find so utterly galling is that -- not only are the Obamas back in the White House for another four years -- they're immensely popular people. Which is why, much to wingers like Monica's chagrin, they tend to be invited to "national events."

But beyond the obvious correlation between "millions of Americans really liking you" and "getting invited to stuff" is the precedent for appearing at the Oscars set by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and Laura Bush in 2002.

But, you know, IOKIYAR.

(A scene from the debt ceiling battle.)

Progressive organizations based in DC have historically focused most of their attention and political muscle on fighting legislative fights, getting Congress and the President to get new legislation passed or stop legislation they don’t like from passing. That will of course need to be part of the progressive movement’s agenda over the next two years, especially when it comes to fiscal policy and immigration reform, but with the House in the hands of far right Republicans and the Senate rarely able to move at all, I believe that with a few exceptions, much more of our attention needs to be focused on pushing the President to use the power he has to use executive action to improve the economy and fight for the middle class.

Case in point: there was an important article on the front page of the Washington Post on the 23rd, an article about how several of the leading economists in the country had advised the President in the first term that the biggest reason the economy hadn't recovered as well as hoped was the overhang of unsustainable housing debt on homeowners because of the collapse of the housing bubble.

In a revealing sequence, the story describes how the President opened the meeting saying he wanted to hear their honest policy advice not bound by what they thought was politically feasible, that the gathered economic experts strongly encouraged him to do more to explore a far bigger mortgage debt forgiveness plan, and that Treasury Secretary Geithner immediately said nothing that ambitious was politically possible because you couldn't get a bill through Congress.

Although this particular meeting had not been reported before the WP piece on Friday, the recommendations by these top economists are hardly news: mortgage debt writedowns have been something that a wide range of economists from right to left have been pushing ever since the collapse of the bubble. The weakness of policy initiatives in this area is undoubtedly the biggest economic mistake the administration made in the first term.

But there is a bigger problem that the story of this meeting highlights as well. Throughout Obama's first term, according to administration officials and those economic policy people who have met with the administration that I have talked with, a variety of administration officials led by Geithner have been consistent voices of saying why things can't get done when it comes to policies that would be tougher on Wall Street banks and/or spur the housing market's recovery (which, not coincidentally, would also cost the biggest banks a lot of money at least in the short term). Sometimes Geithner's excuse, as it was reported to be in the meeting with top economists, is that nothing can't get through Congress; sometimes it is just that the administration lacks the power to act for a wide variety of other reasons.

Of course the first excuse doesn't explain why the administration did not lift a finger to help their closest Senate ally, Obama's mentor in the Senate Dick Durbin, pass the so-called "cramdown" bill, which would have made it far easier for judges to force banks to write down mortgage debt- the bill's failure prompting Durbin's famous complaint that "the banks own this place". And it doesn't explain Geithner and the administration's failure to support many of the strongest amendments on the Senate floor and in conference committee during the fight to pass financial reform. While it is true that there are plenty of things which will not pass Congress, when the administration had a legitimate shot at getting things done that would have helped the economy's banking and housing problems, the sad truth is that they just failed to do them too much of the time.

The second excuse is simply wrong, but unfortunately we are going to hear it a lot the next four years from conservative, pro-special interest Democrats in and out of the administration. The question in front of the President as he gets ready for his second term is whether he will be willing to ignore those voices and be willing to use the real powers of the executive branch to get things done to lift this economy and stand up to the wealthy special interests on Wall Street and elsewhere.

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From Tuesday's Rachel Maddow Show, it turns out that Mitt Romney, during a fundraiser in Montana on July 11th, told supporters of a conversation he had with Ronald Reagan's former Secretary of State James Baker. According to Romney, Baker told him how ... following a National Security Briefing on Latin America... The Gipper told Baker that he wanted "no more national security briefings for his first 100 days so that he could focus entirely on the economy."

Problem is, as the Conservative Weekly Standard and AEI point out, the story isn't true. Worse. Romney tells this story as if ignoring national security for the first three months of his presidency is something desirable (which should come as no surprise following his miserable performance in Debate-3 on National Security).

Not only can a president not "pick-n-choose" what parts of his job he can ignore for months on end, but the fact Romney was reciting this story as if it were something he might do should give us all pause.

In a doozie of a segment where Newt shrugs off birtherism as "no big deal" and says it's "part of the common culture," he also accuses Chris Matthews -- who did a fantastic job on Reince Priebus yesterday -- of being a "racist" fo calling out the GOP's race-baiting.

MATTHEWS: What's a food stamp president?

GINGRICH: A food stamp president's a guy whose policies are so destructive that he creates the longest unemployment [sic] since the Great Depression...

MATTHEWS: Why food stamps?

GINGRICH: ...and he puts more people on food stamps -- most of them white -- than anybody else. Why do you assume "food stamp" refers to blacks? What kind of racist thinking do you have, wait a second, you're being a racist because you're assuming (crosstalk) black.

MATTHEWS: Let me tell you why, because from the beginning of paying attention to politics, Ronald Reagan would talk about the "Welfare Queen" who was African American, he'd talk about the "Young Buck..."

GINGRICH: He didn't say that.

MATTHEWS: Yes he did. He talked about the "Welfare Queen" out in Chicago.

GINGIRCH: Who was African American?

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

GINGRICH: I don't believe he ever used the term "who was African American."

Sure, Newt. Everyone knows Reagan (who made the whole thing up, by the way) was talking about a white woman driving around in a Cadillac on Chicago's South Side -- and anyone who assumes otherwise is obviously a racist.

Similarly, those "strapping young bucks" buying steaks with their food stamps, goodness me, why would you assume that Reagan was talking about black men? You'd have to be a racist to think so.

You see, that whole Southern Strategy thing wasn't Nixon's brainchild at all -- it was made up by racist liberals like Chris Matthews (even though the former chairman of the Republican Party apologized for it.)

Along those lines, demanding that a black man with an African name produce his papers over and over again (even in the form of legislation) is all just in good fun, and anyone who doesn't think that birth certificate jokes hilarious is himself, racist.

Glad we cleared that up, Newt.

Poor Billo, he's so uncomfortable with the thought that his gazillion dollar salary could be taxed normally. He's so frightened that he says he'll shun the stock market. More zombie lies since under Obama they've seen excellent returns, but truth never enters into conservative thought. And when your side are made up of tea party whackos, just conjure up the ghost of Ronald Reagan to make them feel better.

BillO

Mr. Obama opened up a new front in his battle against Mitt Romney today by going back to the "tax the rich" mantra. The President trying to force Romney into defending wealthy Americans by opposing tax increases on them.

So, say hello once again to our little friend, class warfare. But here is an interesting side bar. The ghost of Ronald Reagan may be haunting President Obama. Thirty-two years ago, America was also in bad economic times. The incumbent President Jimmy Carter had expanded the federal government and lost control of the private sector. Unemployment and inflation were very big problems.The challenger, Ronald Reagan, took full advantage of that portraying Carter as incompetent; and of course, Reagan won the election. On January 20th, 1981, Ronald Reagan said this in his inaugural address. [..]

Look at this tax chart put together by the ISI group which invests money for institutions. It shows President Obama wants to raise the income tax rate for wealthiest Americans to 39.6 percent. Governor Romney wants the rate to drop to 28 percent like Ronald Reagan. Mr. Obama would tax dividends, stuff you get from savings, at 43.4 percent in the top bracket. Governor Romney would tax them at 15 percent.

President Obama would double the capital gains tax rate to 30 percent for everybody. Mr. Romney would keep it at 15 percent. Now, if you double capital gains that would prevent me, a private investor, from aggressively putting any money in the market. The risk reward is simply too great. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that thinking.

So let me ask you, if Ronald Reagan was successful in reviving the American economy by dropping the tax rates for everybody, why would anyone think President Obama can revive the economy by doing the exact opposite? By raising rates for investors and the affluent? It doesn't make any sense. But still the President is betting big on that vision.

The idea that today equals the era of Reagan is preposterous. He didn't have to dig out of a financial global meltdown fostered in by a name Bill never seems to mention: George Bush. Bush, Bush, Bush. There. If a conservative says it three times and clicks their heels they get transported to a jail cell in Gitmo; never to be heard from again. You can look up the Reagan record. Since he raised taxes almost ten times and put in the social security payroll tax to save the program, he'd never ever make it out of the GOP primaries in 2012 and beyond. So much hypocrisy and so many zombie lies. Oh and let's not forget about this.

Funny how Billo doesn't mention that after lowering taxes, Reagan had to raise taxes eleven times. Reagan's behavior might not pass muster with those voters today who insist their congressmen treat every proposed tax increase as poisonous to the republic.

"By today's standards, the Gipper would easily qualify for status as a back-stabbing, treacherous RINO [Republican in Name Only]," wrote Tax Analysts contributing editor Martin Sullivan, in an article for Tax Notes in May.

Thanks in part to the increases in defense spending during his administration, Reagan also didn't really reduce the size of government. Annual spending averaged 22.4% of GDP on his watch, which is above today's 40-year average of 20.7%, and above the 20.8% average under Carter.

And of course he became the linchpin for creating government debt:

After Reagan's first year in office, the annual deficit was 2.6% of Gross Domestic Product. But it hit a high of 6% in 1983, stayed in the 5% range for the next three years, and fell to 3.1% by 1988.

Read the NY Times article on Reagan called: The Great Taxer.

Taking a page from fellow GOP propagandist Grover Norquist, James Pethokoukis of AEI and CNBC wants everyone to forget about the calamitous economic record of the Republican administration that left office a mere 180 weeks ago, and focus instead on one that's nearly 30 years old.

Just how long ago was the "Reagan Recovery"?

In 1984, the USSR was boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics, Sarah Palin was named "Miss Wasilla," Nelson Mandela was in jail, only 15% of American children had access to a computer, the Dow was hovering around 1100, minimum wage paid $3.35/hour and adjusted for inflation, the 128K Apple Macintosh sold for around $5200.

Oh, and most inconvenient for James -- the top marginal tax rate was 50%.

2012 isn't 1984, wingnuts. Move on.

Among the myriad Republican myths about taxes, the most pernicious and demonstrably false - that "tax cuts pay for themselves" - is the mostly deeply held by the GOP faithful. As President George W. Bush famously (and erroneously) put it, "You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase." Now, a survey of leading economists conducted by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is just the latest shovelful of evidence to bury Arthur Laffer's zombie lie.

Earlier this year, as Congressional Republicans learned the hard way three weeks ago from CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, another Chicago Booth poll revealed that "80 percent of economic experts agreed that, because of the stimulus, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise." (As Elmendorf told the House Budget Committee, ""Only 4 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. That is a distinct minority.")

Now, the U of C is back with a new two-part survey on the Laffer Curve. In the first question, 35 percent agreed and another 35 percent were unsure that "a cut in federal income tax rates in the US right now would lead to higher GDP within five years than without the tax cut." (That response is unsurprising, given that one definition states that GDP equals consumption plus investment plus government plus net exports minus taxes.) But far more interesting are the results on the question that gets to the heart of Arthur Laffer's supply-side snake oil which has been Republican orthodoxy ever since Jude Wanniski sketched Laffer's curve on a cocktail napkin. In a nutshell, not a single one of the economists surveyed agreed that "a cut in federal income tax rates in the US right now would raise taxable income enough so that the annual total tax revenue would be higher within five years than without the tax cut."

In his comments, David Autor of MIT pointed out, "Not aware of any evidence in recent history where tax cuts actually raise revenue. Sorry, Laffer." Former Obama administration economist and current University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee put it this way:

Moon landing was real. Evolution exists. Tax cuts lose revenue. The research has shown this a thousand times. Enough already.

Of course, you don't have to take Goolsbee's word for it. Your own eyes will suffice.

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Here's Joe Scarborough on Wednesday morning, blaming President Obama for not paying down George W. Bush's and Ronald Reagan's tab fast enough.

SCARBOROUGH: Let's just talk straight. George Bush left him with a trillion dollar deficit. He has answered that by increasing the deficit for four years in a row. The biggest deficits ever. The fastest rate of growth ever. The biggest entitlement spending ever. The biggest defense spending ever. The biggest discretionary domestic spending ever. In every single category, there is not a close second...this guy makes George Bush look like Calvin Coolidge.

What was absolutely amazing about that remark and this discussion generally was the conflation by Scarborough and former Bush mouthpiece Nicole Wallace of deficits and spending. It shouldn't have to be pointed out that they aren't the same thing.

This is the little bait and switch Republicans have been pulling all along. The deficit isn't just a product of "spending" but of historically-low taxes and the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, which started in 2007, under their watch.

Question: who thinks President Obama was going to reduce the deficit with two wars in progress, the worst crash since the Great Depression and with historically low taxes?

Scarborough, who's not too big on facts these days, must not have Bruce Bartlett's column in the New York Times yesterday, which he clearly demonstrates that the bulk of the debt is due to George W. Bush and the GOP's policies.

Republicans assert that Barack Obama assumed sole responsibility for the budget on Jan. 20, 2009. From that date, all increases in the debt or deficit are his responsibility and no one else’s, they say.

This is, of course, nonsense – and the American people know it. As I documented in a previous post, even today 43 percent of them hold George W. Bush responsible for the current budget deficit versus only 14 percent who blame Mr. Obama. [...]

Republicans would have us believe that somehow we could have avoided the recession and balanced the budget since 2009 if only they had been in charge. This would be a neat trick considering that the recession began in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

They would also have us believe that all of the increase in debt resulted solely from higher spending, nothing from lower revenues caused by tax cuts. And they continually imply that one of the least popular spending increases of recent years, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, was an Obama administration program, when in fact it was a Bush administration initiative proposed by the Treasury Department that was signed into law by Mr. Bush on Oct. 3, 2008.

If he missed that, there was also the MarketWatch piece that showed that debunked the "Obama spending binge" myth -- not to mention all of the work Paul Krugman's done in exposing this Big Lie.

Under their hero Ronald Reagan, the debt nearly tripled, and under George W. Bush, it doubled. Republicans therefore have absolutely no credibility on the matter, and the appropriate response when they bring it up is to mock them dismissively, as Obama did.

This week, Rex Nutting of the MarketWatch caused a stir with his analysis correctly showing that federal spending has hardly budged under President Obama, rising at the slowest pace since the Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. Predictably, James Pethokoukis of the conservative American Enterprise Institute cited the jump in Washington's spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy to comically "prove" that "actually, the Obama spending binge really did happen." Comically, that is, because Pethokoukis conveniently ignores the staggering economic contraction resulting from the Bush recession, with GDP only last year having returned to 2008 levels. Even less surprising, the perpetual tax-cutters of the right neglected to mention that thanks to the steep recession and the Treasury-draining Bush tax cuts, total federal tax revenues as a percentage of GDP hit their lowest level since 1950.

On January 7, 2009, Reuters reported that President Bush was bequeathing a $1.2 trillion budget deficit to his successor. That record gap was fueled by Bush's $700 billion TARP program and plummeting tax revenue due to the shrinking American economy. As Reuters noted, President-Elect Obama "said he expects deficits around $1 trillion for years, forcing tough budget choices."

Which is exactly what came to pass. But even with the 2009 stimulus program and the necessarily growing outlays for Medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other safety net programs, those trillion deficits had less to do with Barack Obama boosting spending than the dramatic loss of tax revenue. As former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett explained in October 2009:

According to the Congressional Budget Office's January 2009 estimate for fiscal year 2009, outlays were projected to be $3,543 billion and revenues were projected to be $2,357 billion, leaving a deficit of $1,186 billion. Keep in mind that these estimates were made before Obama took office, based on existing law and policy, and did not take into account any actions that Obama might implement...

Now let's fast forward to the end of fiscal year 2009, which ended on September 30. According to CBO, it ended with spending at $3,515 billion and revenues of $2,106 billion for a deficit of $1,409 billion.

To recap, the deficit came in $223 billion higher than projected [in January], but spending was $28 billion and revenues were $251 billion less than expected. Thus we can conclude that more than 100 percent of the increase in the deficit since January is accounted for by lower revenues. Not one penny is due to higher spending.

Obama's own tax cuts, the ones contained in the February 2009 stimulus bill, "reduced revenues in FY2009 by $98 billion over what would otherwise have been the case."

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