Krugman is pretty ticked off at conservative historian-for-hire Niall Ferguson for a "plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers." He wonders if Newsweek will call for an apology. (Yeah, I'm sure it's coming right up.)

In the past, Krugman has called the Harvard professor a "poseur" who, when it comes to economics, "hasn't bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It's all style, no comprehension of substance."

I have to agree. Ferguson's area of expertise is history, but frequently opines on economics, and has a long-standing feud with Krugman. As anyone who follows his frequent pronouncements knows, Ferguson is frequently wrong - and I haven't seen an apology yet. (Fun trivia fact: The Times reports that Ferguson encouraged Paul Ryan to run for president!)

There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:

The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.

Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.

Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making — he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.

More than that: by its very nature, health reform that expands coverage requires that lower-income families receive subsidies to make coverage affordable. So of course reform comes with a positive number for subsidies — finding that this number is indeed positive says nothing at all about the impact on the deficit unless you ask whether and how the subsidies are paid for. Ferguson has to know this (unless he’s completely ignorant about the whole subject, which I guess has to be considered as a possibility). But he goes for the cheap shot anyway.

Good for him:

Newsweek columnist (and Newsweek International editor) and CNN host Fareed Zakaria announced he would return a prize from the Anti-Defamation League because he was upset by the group's decision to oppose the mosque proposed for Lower Manhattan. Zakaria said last night on his CNN show, "I have to say I was personally and deeply saddened by the ADL’s stand because five years ago, the organization honored me with its Hubert Humphrey Award for First Amendment Freedoms. Given the position that they have taken on a core issue of religious freedom in America, I cannot in good conscience keep that award."

The mosque, whose planned location two blocks from the World Trade Center site has ignited a national debate ripe for election year posturing and maybe even a discussion of religious tolerance. Zakaria elaborated in his Newsweek column in which he called the ADL's decision to criticize the mosque's location as "bizarre":

The ADL’s mission statement says it seeks “to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.” But Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, explained that we must all respect the feelings of the 9/11 families, even if they are prejudiced feelings. “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted,” he said. First, the 9/11 families have mixed views on this mosque. There were, after all, dozens of Muslims killed at the World Trade Center. Do their feelings count? But more important, does Foxman believe that bigotry is OK if people think they’re victims? Does the anguish of Palestinians, then, entitle them to be anti-Semitic?

Five years ago, the ADL honored me with its Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. I was thrilled to get the award from an organization that I had long admired. But I cannot in good conscience keep it anymore. I have returned both the handsome plaque and the $10,000 honorarium that came with it. I urge the ADL to reverse its decision. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain a reputation.

For their part, the ADL says they are “saddened, stunned and somewhat speechless” at the move.

And the ultimate for the "Et tu, Brute?" files, The Simon Wiesenthal Center also opposes the Cordoba House, saying it's a good idea, but a bad location. However, they have no problem building a Museum of Tolerance on a...wait for it...Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.

You know, for a party that likes to wrap themselves in the Constitution, they sure do seem to want to obliterate it. We had the "Tenthers" screaming about state sovereignty. And the Tea Parties have called for the repeal of the 16th and 17th Amendment and a new 13th Amendment.

Now, the Republicans have decided the key to electoral success this year is to take aim against the 14th Amendment. Let's just call them The Dred Scott Republicans:

First Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), then Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), now Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is calling for congressional hearings on rescinding part of the 14th amendment to prevent anyone who is born in the U.S. from automatically becoming a U.S. citizen. The intention of such a radical move is to block the American-born children of undocumented immigrants from becoming citizens.

Mitch McConnell initially openly supported this hearing and then backtracked:

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell sought today to characterize his push for hearings on birthright citizenship as an educational exercise aimed solely at a small subset of wealy parents who enter the United States for the express purpose of having a child -- a practice known as birth tourism.

In an interview with The Hill yesterday, McConnell said that a 14th Amendment provision granting citizenship to all infants born in the United States should be reviewed. "I haven't made a final decision about it, but that's something that we clearly need to look at," he said. "Regardless of how you feel about the various aspects of immigration reform, I don't think anybody thinks that's something they're comfortable with." An aide to McConnell confirmed this with the Huffington Post. But today, McConnell denied that he was talking about all children born in the United States.

Today, McConnell told reporters at his weekly press conference that his comments were interpreted too broadly. "I read an article in the, I think, the Washington Post just about the business that's been created overseas to acquire citizenship for newborns," he said. "And I think having a hearing on that would be a good idea. I don't know what the potential solution to it is. Obviously it's a rather unseemly business and I think we ought to...take a look at it."

Sure, Mitch. There's a huge, unchecked industry of "birth tourism" that's killing the country. Yeah, and if you believe that, I got a bridge to sell you.

Make no mistake, this is just more of the Republican tactic of pointing to some other victimized subset of the population as the reason why your life isn't all that it could be. Now those wicked little anchor babies--and not the Republican policies of corporatism, favoring the top 5% of the population, dismantling social safety nets, deregulated markets and union busting--are keeping you from magically being one of those elites who actually stand to gain from the elimination of estate and capital gains taxes. They are not just saying we need a re-examination of the fundamental idea of birthright - but a repeal of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution which includes our right to due process and equal protection. They truly do want to take us back to 1868.

And when Lou Dobbs thinks you've gone too far in your hate and suspicion against the Other to still be within the law, you have to know you're in real trouble.

UPDATED: Chuck Grassley of Iowa adds his name to the list of old white guys afraid of babies. And Alan Keyes says some things about the Republican Party are too crazy even for him.

This is just an odd story all the way round, but made odder by the notion that the failing Newsweek is actually being read at all. On a web-exclusive op-ed on April 26th, entertainment writer Ramin Setoodeh opined that while straight men could convincingly pass for gay in various entertainment projects, gay men are not convincing playing straight.

For decades, Hollywood has kept gay actors—Tab Hunter, Van Johnson, Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, etc.—in the closet, to their own personal detriment. The fear was, if people knew your sexual orientation, you could never work again. Thankfully, this seems ridiculous in the era of Portia de Rossi and Neil Patrick Harris. But the truth is, openly gay actors still have reason to be scared. While it's OK for straight actors to play gay (as Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger did in Brokeback Mountain), it's rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse. De Rossi and Harris do that on TV, but they also inhabit broad caricatures, not realistic characters likes the ones in Up in the Air or even The Proposal. Last year, Rupert Everett caused a ruckus when he told the Guardian that gay actors should stay in the closet. "The fact is," he said, "that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the ... film business." Is he just bitter or honest? Maybe both.

Most actors would tell you that the biographical details of their lives are beside the point. Except when they're not. As viewers, we are molded by a society obsessed with dissecting sexuality, starting with the locker-room torture in junior high school. Which is why it's a little hard to know what to make of the latest fabulous player to join Glee: Jonathan Groff, the openly gay Broadway star.[Nicole: shown in the video above dancing with co-star Lea Michele] In Spring Awakening, he showed us that he was a knockout singer and a heartthrob. But on TV, as the shifty glee captain from another school who steals Rachel's heart, there's something about his performance that feels off. In half his scenes, he scowls—is that a substitute for being straight? When he smiles or giggles, he seems more like your average theater queen, a better romantic match for Kurt than Rachel. It doesn't help that he tried to bed his girlfriend while singing (and writhing to) Madonna's Like a Virgin. He is so distracting, I'm starting to wonder if Groff's character on the show is supposed to be secretly gay.

Setoodeh also had some bitchy things to say about the newly openly out Sean Hayes in his turn as the male lead in Promises, Promises on Broadway, something his co-star, Kristin Chenoweth, took great umbrage at and wrote a slamming letter about. Ironically, Setoodeh is gay himself, which adds a particularly self-loathing aspect to the article. Understandably, people were upset at Setoodeh's article and wrote in vociferously, to which Setoodeh responded somewhat disingenuously:

Over the weekend, I became the subject of a lot of vicious attacks. I received e-mails that said I will be fired, anonymous phone calls on my cell phone and a creepy letter at my home. Several blogs posted my picture, along with a link to my Twitter feed. People commented about my haircut, and that was only the beginning. I was compared to Ann Coulter and called an Uncle Tom. Someone described me as a "self-hating Arab" that should be writing about terrorism (I'm an American, born in Texas, of Iranian descent).

But what all this scrutiny seemed to miss was my essay's point: if an actor of the stature of George Clooney came out of the closet today, would we still accept him as a heterosexual leading man? It's hard to say, because no actor like that exists. I meant to open a debate—why is that? And what does it say about our notions about sexuality? For all the talk about progress in the gay community in Hollywood, has enough really changed? The answer seems obvious to me: no, it has not.

Call me sensitive, but slamming gay actors for being "queeny" and "unconvincing" doesn't lend itself to a in-depth or enlightened discussion Setoodeh claims he wanted. Now Glee creator Ryan Murphy has called for a boycott:

The most recent addition to the carnage is from Glee creator Ryan Murphy, who has written an open letter calling for the boycott of Newsweek until an apology is issued. In it, Murphy says, “This article is as misguided as it is shocking and hurtful.” He condemns Newsweek as well for their publishing the article in the first place saying, “Would the magazine have published an article where the author makes a thesis statement that minority actors should only be allowed and encouraged to play domestics? I think not.” Murphy then extended an invitation to Setoodah to visit Glee’s writers room, see how they do things, and to take home a copy of Glee covering Madonna’s Open Your Heart , calling it “a song you should play in your house and car on repeat.”

Well, given that Newsweek's readership has fallen considerably, I'm not thinking the boycott will be a problem.

This is really heating up. Stay tuned for further developments as Congress is emboldened by the SEC civil fraud charges:

Washington is suddenly looking very unkind to the firm that used to be known as "Government Sachs." Now the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, is planning to focus hearings scheduled for next week at least in part on Goldman Sachs's role in the financial disaster.

Levin's staff has uncovered new documents "that link certain actions to specific people" at Goldman, according to a senior legislative official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official would not divulge the nature of the allegation but said that Levin believes it amounts to "another big shoe to drop on Goldman."

Spokespeople for Levin said they were not prepared to discuss the nature of the probe, but his committee has been conducting several weeks of hearings and one is planned for April 27 on "the role of the investment banks." "We expect to have some information tomorrow," spokesman Bryan Thomas said Monday.

Keep in mind that a win in the SEC case is by no means a slam dunk:

To a layperson, the case against Goldman may seem clear cut. After all, investors did not know some information about the product that they might have considered vital, and they lost $1 billion in the end. But the rules that govern these kinds of transactions are not so plain.

Several experts on securities law said fraud cases like this one, which focuses on context rather than content, are generally more difficult to win, because it can be hard to persuade a jury that the missing information might have led buyers to walk away.

They added, however, that the strength of the S.E.C.’s case is impossible to gauge until the agency discloses more of the evidence it has assembled. So far it has provided only a sketch.

The Villagers' favorite politician is making them all go back to their computers and rewrite their own stories that they've run for years, because in a Newsweek article about his recent campaign, he now refutes the idea that he was ever a Maverick at all.

Many of the GOP's most faithful, the kind who vote in primaries despite 115-degree heat, tired long ago of McCain the Maverick, the man who had crossed the aisle to work with Democrats on issues like immigration reform, global warming, and restricting campaign contributions. "Maverick" is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one. "I never considered myself a maverick," he told me. "I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities." Yet here was Palin, urging her fans four times in 15 minutes to send McCain the Maverick back to Washington.

Talk about political hackery. This ranks up there with the best of the best. Will the media start calling him Keating 5 McCain and be done with it?

The S&L scandal (The Keating 5) that he was involved with forced McCain to reinvent himself so he went the Mavericky route.

Steve Benen says it was a rebranding of McCain's image to the public because of how bad conservatives were viewed and I agree, but I believe he did this to survive politically in the eyes of the media after so many people lost their money and the government bailed out Lincoln's Savings to the tune of $2.8 billion.

Jonathan Alter made this point on Countdown during the general election:

ALTER: [Y]ou remember the Keating Five scandal that he was a part of, which, by the way, it's crazy but there's been very little about it in the press in the last few weeks. And McCain thinks he's getting a hard time, he's really getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last great financial scandal in our country.

John "Keating 5" McCain is been kicked around by JD Hayworth and it's shown the depths politicians will sink in order to keep their power. But you know the media will keep booking him on their Sunday Talk Shows. They're addicted to the Maverick. They think they are being "balanced." Oy.

Sally Quinn's column got the axe over her idiotic column, but she has no regrets.

Sally Quinn, whose first novel was titled “Regrets Only,” doesn’t have any second thoughts about writing of her “dysfunctional family” drama in The Washington Post last week.

“I have absolutely no regrets at all,” Quinn told POLITICO.

While Quinn isn’t sorry about writing it, others — from family members to online critics to the paper’s top editor — are.

Quinn said Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told her that if he’d seen it first, he wouldn’t have run the column explaining the “dueling weddings” of her son and stepson’s daughter and squabbles among family members. And now Brauchli has decided “The Party” — her irregularly appearing print column launched in November — is over.

But Quinn says she’s glad, because it was never intended to be a permanent column but, rather, to focus on holiday entertaining and “generosity of spirit” — the sort of spiritually inspired get-together that would also work in “On Faith,” the WashingtonPost.com site she co-moderates with Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham.

OK, sure. I'm sure nobody will miss it.

[Richard Mack at a Bellevue, WA, militia organizing meeting in February 1995. Photo by David Neiwert.]

The more we learn about the Tea Party movement as it evolves, the more disturbing a portrait emerges: One of a right-wing populist movement animated by cultural resentments and paranoia that previously were the domain of fringe conspiracy theorists and militiamen.

There were a number of important reports on the Tea Party movement this week that underscored and confirmed something we've been reporting at C&L (similarly confirmed in that report for Newsweek) for some time: That the Tea Party movement has been overtaken by right-wing extremists of the Patriot movement.

The most important of these was David Barstow's report in the New York Times describing the movement's evolution into a revival of the Patriots:

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

Loose alliances like Friends for Liberty are popping up in many cities, forming hybrid entities of Tea Parties and groups rooted in the Patriot ethos. These coalitions are not content with simply making the Republican Party more conservative. They have a larger goal — a political reordering that would drastically shrink the federal government and sweep away not just Mr. Obama, but much of the Republican establishment, starting with Senator John McCain.

One of the key figures in this takeover, as this story describes, has been Richard Mack, the '90s militia figure who has become a fixture on the Tea Party circuit, as we reported previously. Indeed, his December appearance in Spokane was one of the signal events in the NYT piece.

Mack, who I photographed in February 1995 while addressing a militia-organizing session in Bellevue, Washington, has been a key figure for the Patriot movement in "transmitting" its talking points and beliefs into the mainstream for a long time. But he is hardly the only Patriot figure heavily involved in the Tea Parties, as the NYT piece describes.

One of the people who sometimes accompanied me in the 1990s when I attended militia gatherings, Devin Burghart, now works for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, and he was at the National Tea Party Convention and attended its seminar. and speeches. He filed a detailed -- and revealing -- report for IREHR:

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Audio of John Yoo on what the president can do from 2005.

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

This is f*&ked up. We need an explanation from David Margolis as to why he changed the original findings on Bybee and Yoo:

For weeks, the right has heckled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for his plans to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City and his handling of the Christmas bombing plot suspect. Now the left is going to be upset: an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry...read on

There's plenty more to be disturbed about in this report.

Digby has more:

Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.

After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

That's excellent news. Now we know that all the president ever has to do is call in a legal functionary and have him write a memo legalizing whatever he wants to do and he's good to go. I feel safer already.

You know how I feel about Judge Bybee already and Margolis should have done the right thing. Did anyone order him to make these changes? And it sure pays to stack the OLC with your own flunkies for personal gain. Look what Bush and Cheney are getting away with because of these cronies.

The Villagers are giving this "Party Crashers" story the Anna Nicole Smith-type coverage, and it's been led by none other than the Washington Post's Sally Quinn. They seem to be the only people outraged over it, and good old Sally wants heads to roll. When Sally got on board with the story it was very predictable that she would finally come out and demand a human sacrifice at her Beltway altar, because D.C. is her hallowed grounds and to think some undesirables crashed "her" party is just too much for her to bear.

Sally was very upset when Hillary was the first lady because she was ignored and Sally will not be ignored.

Michelle Obama is now in Quinn's crosshairs and is being asked to pay a price to appease the Beltway Village Gods. Desirée Rogers is a close friend of Michelle's and so she must be taught a lesson by the Villagers.

Digby predicted this was coming too.

Just as Travelgate was about Hillary Clinton failing to respect the social pecking order by installing old Arkansas friends in a job in which the press had a personal stake, (Ryan's comments about "overshadowing" notwithstanding) I'm pretty sure this is about Michele and "her pal" somehow not respecting the pecking order and failing to understand just how sacrosanct are the invitation lists to the White House. (You'll recall that Michelle had a press avail the day of the state dinner and mentioned that she regretted not being able to invite everyone, which I thought was rather odd at the time.)

The lesson has long been clear. You do not mess with the Village tabbies. They have far more power than you might think.

Well guess what? The Queen Tabby made her move today:

Many in Washington wondered why the director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, did not resign over the state dinner security breach. At least Sullivan testified before Congress on the subject. White House social secretary Desirée Rogers came under fire after the Salahi scandal erupted. From the start, Rogers was an unlikely choice for social secretary. She was not of Washington, considered by many too high-powered for the job and more interested in being a public figure (and thus upstaging the first lady) than in doing the gritty, behind-the-scenes work inherent in that position. That Rogers stayed and that the White House refused to allow her to testify before Congress reflected badly on the president. He, not a member of his staff, ended up looking incompetent. Although it has emerged that a State Department protocol error is to blame for the presence of a third uninvited guest, both Rogers and Sullivan should step down.

The administration's problem extends beyond these failings. When White House counsel Greg Craig was fired over disagreements about the timing and publicity of closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, many Obama supporters were troubled. Craig was one of the most admired and trusted men in Washington. His firing was a turning point for a lot of people, who began to question the president's judgment.Whether or not the Craig decision was the president's idea, somebody else should have taken the hit for it... Emanuel, the most political animal in this town, also should understand that keeping Rogers on as social secretary reflects upon the president's judgment.

Obviously, the Obamas have made a Big Social Mistake somewhere along the line and it's time for those who really run things to assert themselves. She put it in terms of "protecting" the president, but if you read the whole thing, it's quite clear that it's actually a threat: unless they straighten up and understand who's really in charge, right quick, this could get ugly. Sally says heads must roll ... or else.

Let the games begin.

I imagine Quinn will be appearing with Bill O'Reilly soon to demand that a sacrifice be carried out.