The things your librul media gets worked up about? Golf. Via Kevin Drum:

Over at Politico, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen have a long piece today about press corps unhappiness with their access to President Obama. Their timing is unfortunate, coming just a day after the press corps embarrassed itself by coming completely unglued over.....

.....their lack of access to Obama's golf date this weekend with Tiger Woods. Seriously:

The frustrated Obama press corps neared rebellion this past holiday weekend when reporters and photographers were not even allowed onto the Floridian National Golf Club, where Obama was golfing. That breached the tradition of the pool “holding” in the clubhouse and often covering — and even questioning — the president on the first and last holes.

Yep. They "neared rebellion" not over OLC memos or drone strikes or FOIA tardiness or leak prosecutions, but over their inability to ask Obama questions—tough ones! penetrating ones!—before and after he hit the links. Sheesh.

I wish I knew what to think about this. Does Obama keep a very, very tight rein on press coverage? Yes, he sure seems to. In fact, every president seems to keep a slightly tighter grip on the reins than the previous one. I'm not very happy about that.

At the same time, the reporters interviewed for this piece seem to be weirdly upset over the fact that the Obama White House uses Twitter and Facebook and releases lots of its own photos. Why is this a problem? It's 2013, guys. Why shouldn't a president communicate with the public using whatever mediums the public happens to consume? Over the past century, that's evolved from whistle-stop tours to radio to TV to Facebook, but so what? Why should reporters be unhappy about this?

They also complain that although the president gives lots of interviews (674 in his first term compared with 217 for George Bush), they're mostly with local outlets, not with the national reporters "who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions." I'd have more sympathy for this if national reporters really did ask lots of tough, unpredictable questions, but I'm afraid I'm mostly on Obama's side on this one:

The president’s staff often finds Washington reporters whiny, needy and too enamored with trivial matters or their own self-importance....Obama and his team, especially newly promoted senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, often bemoan the media’s endless chase of superficial and distracting storylines.

For evidence of how true this is, check out John Cook's serial tweeting of every inane question that Mike Allen lobbed at President Bush during a May 2008 interview. Start here and work your way down. It's not a pretty sight.

I remember many, many years ago when my dad decided to buy an old house for the rental income. The house itself was built at the turn of the last century and had originally been the servants quarters for a much larger house down the street. It was a charming little cottage, but required a lot of renovation before my dad could lease it out. But the one thing that my dad didn't count on was his largest expense: lead paint removal. The entire house, inside and out, was painted using lead paint. The contractor warned my dad that this 50 year old paint job could be killing us as we stood there, with lead dust flaking off the walls and into our lungs. That was all it took for my dad to remove my brother and I from the site and to sigh that his investment didn't seem as smart as it did at first.

I was reminded of that event when I read Kevin Drum's article this week in Mother Jones' on the correlations of lead toxicity and violent crimes, lower IQs and even ADHD.

The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades

Amazingly simple and yet compelling evidence. Rick Nevin has written a similar piece showing the same correlations in other countries. Per Drum, Nevin forecasts:

• The USA violent crime rate is now down about 50% from its peak in 1991, and I expect that the violent crime rate in Western Europe will be down by about 50% from its peak over the next 20 years, with the largest part of that decline over the next ten years.
• Eastern Europe will follow the same trend, but will take a few years longer because they left gasoline lead levels quite high through the end of the Soviet era.
• Crime will also plummet over the next 10 to 20 years in Latin America, where leaded gasoline use and air lead levels fell sharply from around 1990 through the mid-1990s.

It would be interesting if we took a far more holistic approach to these issues, looking at environmental issues as much as punitive measures.

Ever since Bill Maher started fretting about how mean everyone is being to El Rushbo, I keep seeing these "Well, Limbaugh's awful, but ..." takes from people who are ostensibly on the left.

Here's Slate's John Dickerson, on the Political Gabfest (starts ca. 24:00):

JOHN DICKERSON: I like the whole thing because I hate bullies and Rush Limbaugh is a bully. And so it's good that he's getting beaten in the nose ... And if the advertisers are doing it, I think it's good. We feel so powerless in most of our lives to actually do anything to change the behavior of snotty bullies like Limbaugh. But I also, on the other hand, think its great that there are different kinds of voices, and he certainly speaks for a group of people — whether they have to agree with everything he says or not — who feel similarly powerless, who feel like they've been on the wrong end of the mainstream media for generations.

Yes, as we all know — white male right-wingers are just so powerless. Who will speak for them?

Good God, what nonsense. There's nothing "great" about a hate-spewing propagandist, who has made hundreds of millions of dollars peddling outright lies over the people's airwaves. For more than 20 years, he's been convincing people that up is down. He's a cancer on the body politic, and worse, he's metastasized into dozens of other bad actors, who also peddle hate and lies on the radio and on television on a daily basis.

As an aside, Limbaugh's worst feature isn't that he's a bigot or a bully — it's that he's a liar. Democracy doesn't function properly when people are misinformed, and Limbaugh — as Al Franken pointed out on a daily basis on his show — feed his audience a steady stream of lies on a daily basis.

Kevin Drum is similarly conflicted.

Limbaugh is getting what he finally deserves. I couldn't be happier about it. I just hope that down the road this doesn't turn into a preemptive boycott of every political gabber out there who has even the smallest chance of ever producing any national blowback. That runs the risk of turning every show into a bland marshmallow. It wouldn't make the world a better place.

Yes it would. Where is it written that we need politics to be presented as "shows"? That's one of the big problems with our country today: politics as entertainment. Policy is hard. Issues are complex. The country was better off when politics wasn't a "show," when the Fairness Doctrine required both sides of issues to be presented on the people's airwaves, when Vice Presidential candidates didn't get their own reality shows — and when shock jocks like El Rushbo weren't the de facto heads of one of the two major political parties in the U.S. and able to shape public opinion by incessant lying.

I'm not sure what these guys are thinking. Rush Limbaugh's professional demise would be a deliverance for progressives -- and the nation. The advertiser boycott that's crippling his show should be celebrated — not lamented.

Conservatives say they want to "bring back" the old USA, the one that existed during those decades of the twentieth century they only seem to see through a gauzy golden haze. Whatever its problems, that country was a place where Republicans and Democrats agreed on two simple principles: That the most fortunate among us should pay their fair share, and that our government must invest in the nation and its future.

When Rick Perry says he wants to bring back "the America I where I grew up," he's talking about the era when Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican President, built the Federal highway system. One of the reasons Eisenhower was able to do that is that the top tax rate was much higher than it is today. While today's highest marginal today is 35 percent and capital gains are taxed at only 15 percent, the highest tax bracket was 91 percent the year Rick Perry was born.

Whenever I talk about tax brackets I'm attacked by right-wingers who say I don't understand, that high taxes discourage job creators. They'll say things like "You hippies just don't get it! If taxes are too high rich people will stop working and investing. The Job Creators will go away!"

Well, I do get it. When I was spent a student year in Great Britain the top marginal tax rate was 102%. Once a person reached a certain level of income, they had to pay more in taxes than they earned. And a few years before that, George Harrison made a compelling case against the 95 percent tax bracket on the Revolver album by singing "Taxman." (The line is "that's one for you, nineteen for me." I make that a 95 percent marginal tax rate, but you can check my math if you like.)

So I'll come right out and admit it: Taxes can be too high. But that doesn't answer the biggest question of all: What's the ideal top tax bracket? Where can we set the percentage so that it provides the most revenue for the Federal government without discouraging high earners from making more money?

Thanks to a new and very thoughtful paper by economists Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, we have the answer: 76 percent. That's right. The most effective top tax bracket in this country, the one that will provide the most revenue for the Federal government, is 76 percent. Know what that means, ladies and gentleman of Washington DC ? That's the rate that will cut the deficit the fastest.

Continue reading »

Even Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum, who's been stuck to the 11th-dimensional chess theory for too long, is starting to suspect that much of the current deficit-cutting frenzy is by Obama's design:

Matt Yglesias points out that last December, when Democrats cut a deficit-busting deal with Republicans to cut taxes and increase stimulus spending, would have been a perfect time to raise the debt ceiling. But:

It didn’t happen. Obama said he trusted John Boehner. Harry Reid said he didn’t want the debt limit to be raised by the 111th Congress because he wanted to force the incoming 112th Congress to take ownership over it. The results of these decisions have been a disaster.

What’s more, not only was the disaster predictable but even once it was visibly on the horizon, the White House bungled it. There was a brief opportunity for the President to dig in his heels and simply refuse to compromise. Then the debate rapidly would have become “can John Boehner round up the votes in his caucus necessary to avoid a default.” Instead, the White House conceded the unprecedented point that even though Boehner and Obama agreed about the desirability of raising the debt ceiling that the White House should make concessions to the Speaker in order to obtain it. Consequently, you get what we have here this week.

For what it's worth, I continue to think that this probably wasn't a bungle. More likely, during his first two years in office Obama had gotten enough deficit religion from the likes of Peter Orszag and Tim Geithner that he actually welcomed the opportunity to put in place some long-term spending cuts. He couldn't very well admit that publicly, of course, since his base would go bananas, so instead he punted on the debt ceiling, knowing that Republicans would then use it to "force" spending concessions out of him. Mission accomplished: long-term spending is reduced, and Republicans get all the blame. Democrats mostly forgive him because everyone knows Republicans are crazy, and as a bonus, Republicans don't even get much of a boost from their own base out of this since any real-world spending cut won't come close to the demands of the tea party crowd.

How sure am I of this? Not very. Maybe 60%. But think of it this way: the kind of negotiating position Matt is talking about isn't rocket science. It's not even Negotiation 101. It's more like the fifth grade version. There's just no way that Obama and Reid and the rest of the Democratic brain trust were literally so stupid that they didn't understand this. A far more parsimonious explanation is that this is roughly what Obama wanted. He wanted spending cuts, but he wanted Republicans to be the ones to take the lead. And that's what happened.Bottom line: I don't think we should try to figure out what Obama "really" thinks about stimulus spending vs. deficit reduction. His actions suggest that he wants long-term spending cuts. Like it or not, that's the real Obama.

Yep. Look what Obama said back in December:

Q Just in the sense that they’ll say essentially we’re not going to raise the -- we’re not going to agree to it unless the White House is able to or willing to agree to significant spending cuts across the board that probably go deeper and further than what you’re willing to do. I mean, what leverage would you have --

THE PRESIDENT: Look, here’s my expectation -- and I’ll take John Boehner at his word -- that nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse, that that would not be a good thing to happen. And so I think that there will be significant discussions about the debt limit vote. That’s something that nobody ever likes to vote on. But once John Boehner is sworn in as Speaker, then he’s going to have responsibilities to govern. You can’t just stand on the sidelines and be a bomb thrower.

And so my expectation is, is that we will have tough negotiations around the budget, but that ultimately we can arrive at a position that is keeping the government open, keeping Social Security checks going out, keeping veterans services being provided, but at the same time is prudent when it comes to taxpayer dollars.

As Digby said all along, we're cutting spending because Obama wants to cut spending. Period.