I do recall a lot of disrepect for our previous President that also got a pass by mainstream media. I think everyone shoud respect the office of the President, regardless of your political affiliation.

Everyone should respect the office and this includes pointing out the reality that the disrespect this President has received far outweighs any previous disrespect in recent history. There is no comparison between the number of Republicans who don't even believe this President is an American and the number of Democrats who don't believe President Bush is an American. Part of respecting the office includes holding it responsible for its actions and most of the opposition to President Bush was based on obvious failures in leadership and directed at these policies and results including 9 million jobs lost, $11 trillion deficit, Karl Rove's divide and conquer strategy for political discourse and two wars that because of poor leadership cost us dearly in blood and treasure. President Obama has created 5.2 million jobs, has a balanced approach to reduce the deficit, despite unprecedented obstruction continues to compromise even to the point of upsetting the left and after only four years has shown what our brave soldiers can do when they have a commander-in-chief who can direct these resources on target. Comparing these two records it becomes obvious that the level of disrespect President Obama receives goes beyond the pale and demonstrates it has barely any basis in policy or results.

Poor skippy just doesn't understand criticism for ones actions and attacks made up based on lies. GWB earned his criticism all by himself, 99.9% of Obama's criticism is based of Fox news false information.

Trump a surrogate??? Seriously, if you make that stretch, you could make a claim of Chavez as a surrogate for Obama.

Trump is a joke. Everyone knows it (except for those few rich-folk who bailed him out and rebuilt him after his his bankruptcy). Don't dwell on anything he says. Watch his shows and turn the channel.

I can hardly believe I am saying this, but I think at this point I have an equal amount of disdain as pity for Wrongney. He is making such an ass out of himself, I am starting to feel sorry for him. He is trying soooooooooo hard to keep the focus on the economy, which by the way, his "plan" or no plan rather is a farce. The only "jobs" are going to be cleaning the yachts of the 2%, shine their smelly shoes at 1.00 per hour, OR go to China and get a jobl Remember, Bain is a company that is making BILLIONS (oh yeah, Wrongney owns 51% interest in BAIN and he shut down the profitable plant in Illinois-American jobs, and shipped them all to China. This in not ancient history, it is happening NOW. That is why all those people at Sensata are PROTESTING against Wrongney. (Google Sensata on the internet) So, Wrongney is trying so hard to focus on the economy, banking on the fact that maybe people won't hear about Sensata, Maybe they won't look at his jobs record when he was Governor of Massachusetts and had the worst jobs record in the country,,,,,,,,,,,,so, for some reason, he is trying to harp on the economy but EVERY day, his dumb ass right wing wacko hate machine cronies, say bat @!$%# crazy stuff about women ie. Aikin, Murdock, oh, and racist bigot crap from
Sununu, Trump,, Rush, Coulter SO, the focus is on these idiots and their campaign of hate and it is not going unnoticed and it is backfiring big time on them, as it should. It is absolutley HILARIOUS that the right wing wackos are enraged by the clever commercial about get out to vote that is out now. That bloated drug addict Rush said, and I quote, "If I were a women I would be insulted" LMAO, this is what a women should be insulted by, REALLY? The assault on women by Aiken, and Murdock Lying Ryan- those despicable comments are A OK, right Rush?
Wrongey's whole campaign is despicable and shameful. Wrongney should stop campaigning and start on his apology tour

Hannity answered: “I don’t think that it’s ever funny to make fun of, like your buddy [Bill] Maher did, the children of Rick Santorum or Gov. Palin in the manner he did."

Coulter replied: “That’s right, and they do go after the children. I just say that going after the children generally ought to be off limits. It has not been off limits for Republicans, though, conservatives have taken the Obama children off limits.”

“So maybe it’s time to start imitating liberals in another way and go after the Obama children. By the way, that has been done grotesquely and viciously over the years by the left.”

Another Republican who demonstrates both the truth of the old Texanism, "She needed killin'!" And my Great-grand-uncle's rule for determining if one is or is not a "good" Republican: "the only 'good Republicans' are pushing up daisies."

One hopes Annie the Trannie becomes a "good" Republican soon.

I see poor Ann has selective memory again. It wasn't the "left" that made ugly comments about Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton.

So Coulter's argument is that liberals are evil....therefore conservatives should do the same thing and become equally evil?

Fantastic reasoning there

If only they weren't such easy targets: you know, family values Palin's daughter Bristol, out-of-wedlock mother; Tagg Romney, wanting to assault the President, Bush's daughters arrested for alcohol charges, Jeb's daughter for faking prescriptions. Flip side of the coin, Reagan's children running as fast and far away as they could.

Speaking of Tagg, who can say what fictional character he shares the full version of his name with?

Because Ann coulter's OPINION is totally irrelevant to picking the President, congressional or local leaders of government. It's getting harder and harder to split the spin from the fact.

I guess I should have offered a prize. Tagg's full name is Taggart, shared by Ayn Rand's heroine Dagny Taggart.

Where's your Nobel Prize in Economics, blanky?

F**K U.

Shooter- you are only a teenie tiny bit correct. The actual job creation comes from two major items-

1) an increase in demand for a company's product

2) consumers with fat wallets

Anything else is pretty-much dreaming....

Have a nice day, and if you are in the east- stay warm- looking like a bad week coming

And you sure can't make any profits if your customers don't have any money. But realizing that takes more thought than just repeating a talking point.

Yep, you have to admit that Krugman -- one of the few economists, along with Brad Delong, Dean Baker, and other Keynesians -- being correct about the Great Recession and correct how policy would affect it on interest rates, inflation, employment, etc., couldn't be anything other than an ignoramus. After all, some good-haired idiot on Fox said so.

What a fu king idiot Airball is. Airball couldn't explain IS-LM if his life depended on it but thinks he's got the goods to be a referee on economic intelligence. Whatever it is that infects a mind to become a libertarian, it sure is nasty.

Oh, and Airball is just completely wrong in what he asserted. But what's the point in explaining it. Wallow in your ignorance, you libertarian buffoon.

Krugman is 100X more intelligent than you'll ever be.

shooter is pissed cause Paul has forgot more then he will ever know or understand.

LOL yes at you tea shooter

So basicly RBNoah, if Romney wins, I need too:

1. Build a better mousetrap.

2. Release mice on rich-peoples property.

Thanks!

The one new idea to come out of the Industrial Revolution was to produce goods by machinery and not prevent that production by legislation that protected guilds, etc. The New Deal, much as I like what was done, basically enacted the Progressive platform - twenty years after "progressivism" as a political force had expired.

Corporate leaders have shown their inability to think beyond what's good for them and what's good for corporate leaders tends to be limited to the next quarter's earnings statement. High marginal rates force those in charge of corporations to look beyond that, I don't know what else can or will.

In my opinion, the one thing that would most likely help the middle class the most; ie, re-instituting 70+% marginal tax rates on all incomes over $2 million (approx), is not something I expect to see again in my lifetime.

Pity...

France has such a redistributive tax policy, and though the income inequality is not as ridiculous as ours, their middle class is sinking as well.

So though I think such tax rates would be good as an additional tool, it provides only additional assistance, it is subtractive after the act of damage is committed. It does not directly address the central dynamic to prevent the damaging activity from being economically attractive.

Romney's 12 million job creation came after this:

The Congressional Budget Office is required to consider the effects of the so-called “fiscal cliff” if a year-end budget deal is not reached, which many experts believe would push the country into a recession. But even with that caveat, the nonpartisan agency assumes 9.6 million jobs will be created in the next four years. (This is a revision downward; CBO had estimated 11 million in
January.)

But Moody’s Analytics, in an August forecast, predicts 12 million jobs will be created by 2016, no matter who is president. (See page 51.) And Macroeconomic Advisors in April also predicted a gain of 12.3 million jobs. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/08/30/factchecker-romneys-12-million-job-promise/

So where is ROMNEY's job creation plan?

At this point in history, the left doesn't need anything to replace the idea of stimulus during a depressive economic interval. New ideas will only be needed when the idea of a society where many/most don't have to work in order to provide necessities is no longer necessary. We are not there yet. Not even close.

John wasn't arguing in favor of Romney. John is arguing the progressive side of the situation. President Obama has been and will continue to be a economic conservative, a social moderate, and a conservative/neoconservatie centrist on foreign policy. That isn't an attack on Obama as president or even to say that Obama has necessarily been a bad president; it's just the positions that he holds. The problem is the term "conservative" "progressive" and "liberal" get thrown around to the point that those terms no longer reflect their appropriate political science definition. Romney, by standard political science terms, is an economic and social reactionary and a neoconservative on foreign policy. This means that he is very far to the right of Obama socially, to the right of Obama economically, and slightly further to the right on foreign policy.

The point being that there isn't a true progressive or liberal running no matter how much Republicans want to paint it as being so. John- from what I can tell of his posts- likes to point out the juxtaposition from Obama's more central point of operation and Romney's extreme right point of operation with that of what the more progressive point of operation would be. It's not an insult to the president's way of governing (or even Mitt Romney's), but rather showing what the more genuine left position would be. He's giving a different dialogue than the one that gets presented in the main stream conversation.

I know.

I'm not a fan of Obama's economic "vision" because I don't think he really understands economics. That's not a big knock on Obama because I think maybe 4 or 5 people in Washington understand economics. Obama is captive to the Clinton style economics that prioritizes deficits being a problem too much and has listened to a few very wrong people, the worst of which is Tim Geitner. If I had to choose one person responsible for the political problems, unrelated to Obama's congenital tendency to timidness with vicious aggressiveness of Republicans, it would be Tim Geitner. Can't stand the guy. With a passion.

Just occurred to me that maybe I should explain. When you say someone is a "centrist" what you are saying is that this person is politically in the center of whatever policies are being discussed. So when I say Obama is a conservative/neoconservative centrist what I mean is that he's in the center of those two positions in terms of standard political science ideology. A moderate, just since I see the two confused so often, is a person at the central of the political science spectrum and generally favors policies from across the left and right, but most notably from both liberals and conservatives. Most Americans are moderate and in reality it's nearly impossible to find people who are truly conservative or truly liberal (most who are truly liberal or conservative are actually single issue voters). Part of what surprises me about the trolls who blog here is that they seem to belong to that estimated 10% or less of the nation believed to actually be defined as conservative or liberal. It's kind've scary when you think about how extreme that is..

He agrees with the more neoconservative positions of expanded government data collection on US citizens and spying, but disagrees on pre-emptive warfare, torture, and black site prisons. So he's not full blown neoconservative like the Bush Administration. He has dialed back a great deal many of those policies. However he has also kept some of those extreme right policies in place and by signing into law the NDAA and by executing foreign US citizens overseas he's decidedly prevented himself from ever moving further left than centrist conservative/neoconservative.

To be fair to Obama the NDAA was going to pass regardless if he signed it into law (this was the ONE bill passed through our US Congress where there was enough support to actually override a veto). If he didn't sign the bill into law then that would've severely compromised his ability to adjust enforcement of the bill. If he did sign it into law he at least was able to give the executive signing statement and several orders in addition to amend the extremeness of the bill's implementation. Additionally Obama was coming down from an administration that was full blown neoconservative which means that any time he tries to move to the left away from those policies he gets roundly hounded by the media and people freak out. The centrist position he currently holds is likely the farthest left he can go without facing severe repercussions from within his own party in the US Senate.

If you're talking to me, I'm only talking economics here.

But as for what defines the poles and center politically, I don't take them to be what they happen to be at any particular instant in time. I tend to factor in some hysteresis so that momentary passions causing the whole thing to shift one way or the other are not weighted as strongly as what I think most do. So I still consider the true center to be something like it was in the 90's before the outstanding events of the aughties took place.

Whatever. I'm vaporing for no real reason. And I agree he probably can't get much to the left of where he is; the question is, is Obama, as a political thinker, even to that left? My guess is slightly so, but I sure have no real concrete evidence to present to justify my guess.

At this point in history, the left doesn't need anything to replace the idea of stimulus during a depressive economic interval.

I really really wish that were true, but it isn't. Middle class wealth has been contracting for the last 40 years. This is not simply a momentary downturn but part of a very long term trend.

This is backed up by study after study which demonstrate that the quality of jobs are declining substantially. MIT economist David Autor in particular has compiled data from 1980 to 2005 demonstrating that middle class jobs are cratering due to outsourcing and automation. (source)

12 million jobs is not exciting. What kind of jobs? And keep in mind that we need 150K jobs per month just to keep pace with population growth, so that 12 million is a net 4.8 million new jobs. 3.5 million jobs were lost during the meltdown, so that is actually a pretty depressing projection.

DWA, you simply are quite mistaken about the nature of the challenge facing the US middle class. If you have some factual information to back up your point of view, let's see some citations.

@disgusted: no I wasn't commenting to you specifically in my second post. I was just clarifying my first post in general because I thought I had left too much ambiguity in what I said. Sorry for the miscomm

I'd think that the concept of cramming capital to the consumers stimulate demand is crap because so much of what's in demand is now produced OUTSIDE of the US. Fuel from your car is pumped from US waters by foreign companies, refined in the coastal US, loaded on a tanker and sold back to us. The pieces and parts of Apple's latest toy is built in China, Japan and Korea. Much of the consumer-capital is being used to cover taxes and tariffs.

What's needed is to US source the next product that the world can't live without. To date, that's only been military-technology or food, and we seem to have resorted to giving that away.

P.S. I haven't read-every post of the previous economic-theory discussion.....so don't beat me, just calling it like I see it.

I know all that John. Very, very well, believe me. And we very definitely need the policies of the last 30+ years to change. One of the tragedies of the Obama years is that the political thinking on economics didn't reflect back on just how much the failed conservative economic ideas (deregulation and supply-side stupidity) had caused the problems that resulted in the housing bubble, the financial crisis, the Great Recession, the income inequality, the income class immobility, and more. You didn't really understand the level at which I was talking, but that's probably my fault. (Tired, and hey, it's just a blog comment section.)

What I meant is that, even with the primitive state-of-the-art of economic understanding, we don't need any more understanding of economics to solve the problems we have RIGHT NOW. Our primitive understanding of how the economy works suffices. We don't have a deficit in that. What we have is a political problem. Intellectually speaking, this is all small bore. We have the intellectual infrastructure to solve the problems, right now.

There's a reason we didn't. Republicans had a choice in 2009: admit their ideas and policies are the cause of the mess (and it is) or pitch in and help to solve the problems their ideas and policies caused (and very likely suffer political near-extinction for two generations). They chose to double down, blame things on Democrats, and carry even bigger pitchforks to lance the 20th century from history. If you would have told me that would have been their strategy in 2009, you would never have been able to convince me it would work. I would have said Democrats certainly, even with their famed spinelessnes, wouldn't let them get away with it. I would have said the press, even considering the contempt I have for their incompetent mediocrity, would understand the problems and call it out.

Well, I am the fool.

Obama, with Geitner's advice, allowed the bankers to run all over him. Democrats couldn't even take up for their own health care bill in 2010 and allowed Republicans to lie about it. (I don't really fault Obama for being lead around by polluted economic ideas that Democrats had made the habit of ascribing to because hey, he's just not an economist. So he didn't even know he needed to use his position as a leader to make a political case. The problem there is the gradual ceding of intellectual ground by Democrats over the last at least 20+ years.) My contempt for Democratic cowardice and political stupidity can't get any higher. I don't a give a p-huck what focus groups, blah, blah, blah are telling the morons charged with messaging, Democrats simply refuse to stand up to bullies and liars. If they did, we wouldn't be in the dangerous spot we are.

Be I reserve my most seething hatred for the press. It would take me too long to come up with don't have the words to accurately characterize my intellectual conception of and visceral disgust for the press. It's the overall mediocrity, the incorrigible and implacable unchanging inertia of their approach to portraying reality to its readers, the massive transparent technical incompetence on subjects they're charged with covering, its willingness to be lead around by the nose, the fake-balance, and the false-equivalence. And then there's the cowardice brought about by financial concerns.

If you saw the giddiness on display on Charlie Rose after the first debate when those fu king mediocrities realized they had a "Romney Comeback" story they could squeeze for all its worth so that the next five weeks of their lives would be a little more interesting than they otherwise would have been, and were not disgusted to the point of vomiting, then you ain't hooked up right. They didn't give a damn that they had just been lied to with fierce, false conviction. Nope, they had them a narrative to wring out for the history books. Sickening.

If you have to choose the biggest scandal in this country, it is the press. None of the problems we have could exist if there was a competent press performing its societal function.

And I'm just talking about the NYT!

How can you even begin to lay out the malignancy that is the Right Wing Noise Machine.

How in the world could this happen? Stupidity. Stupidity of the American people.

Well, I really got off on a tangent didn't I.

@stknmov: stimulus just to get America infrastructure up to snuff would do the trick.

There is ample stupidity among the exceptionally gifted as well, right?

Your comments only give the appearance of the tangential because there is an appeal of the fundamentalism of a particular analytical reduction about why an event is actually taking place. Within the politics of a large high tech corporation, as a mid level "executive" I saw constant failure due to a fatal under appreciation of one or more of the levels. There were three essential ones: engineering realities, power/ self interest relationships, and lastly the romance/literature/vision level at which decision makers were convinced of the rightness of a direction.

I entered the workforce as a business analyst at Levi Strauss in the 80s, and have a history of experiences in business but I fully admit I understand nothing about macro economics. So I have to take you at your word that we have all the tools we need to tackle out immediate problems. That is the technical- rational level. In my field, I go into the lab, demonstrate the algorithm's statistical effectiveness- and among my technical peers, there is no denying the facts. My particular company was awash in excellent technical ideas that were never executed, and this was very baffling to these unusually brilliant software engineers. They really were world class in their fields but they were fundamentalists. They were nerds without appreciation that the world is multilevel, and the other layers could not be ignored.

Right? So there were plenty of economists- prominent ones like Krugman, Stiglitz and Zandi saying in the spring of 2009 that a second big stimulus was necessary. That was the technical level- they were right. But the problem was the power relationships: Summers-Geithner may have been wrong, but due to inertia from the Clinton era credibility on economic issues they had the ear of the President. Pelosi understood the danger of the mid terms and that if there was over reach, that the Dems could lose control. So she was cautious about pushing her caucus. There is being technically right and being dead right. Those that ignore the power realities become the Dead Right.

So, in my field I am running around in the company finding people in the late 80s to get behind hypertext browsing, or in the early 90s to get behind search engines. My tales of Microsoft internal struggles are not unique coulda woulda shoulda reminiscences. Plenty of technical guys like me in several companies saw how the market would develop, and the decision makers in those companies were not stupid people. In fact those I came in contact with were exceptionally bright- best schools- amazing acuity and perceptiveness. Even though we knew the truth, had fire in out bellies, could make the rational arguments to a very intelligent audience- we failed because at the power level we were unable to find people whose career would profit and product group would get substantial revenues from those technologies.

Lastly, you could have both the technology and some greedy powerful bastards who were willing to take a risk to make a pitch to get backing. But you could still get wiped out if there was little romanticism behind the initiative.

Both Gates and Jobs were convinced to make big bets on initiatives because there was some insanely cool thing they wanted to do. The romance may be difficult to relate to, but in my case, it was not difficult to see what fired their imagination because you could see their names on the routing lists for various publications they were reading. I was surprised by the anomalies- which journals for example were not being read, that I expected would be consumed. It was an empirical matter of comparing the articles in those journals to the things that were mentioned in speeches in various conferences. So I got a bead on the literature that was motivating the source of the funding.

That source of funding in the public sphere is the electorate. Their imaginations must be piqued in order to re elect the people who are voting on the second stimulus and so forth. In my case it was particular individuals not always the CEO and often not the obvious person in the chain of command who were the decision makers. So there is a lot of guess work in the public sphere too about which voter blocks will really show up at the polls.

So you can have people brilliant in forming power blocks to get legislation through, but are not so good at telegraphing the emotional sense of rightness about what they are doing. Pelosi's brilliance at legislation was demonstrated in the 2008-2009 Congress. She was good about fending off Charlie Rose's confirmation bias towards accepting Woodward's account that Boehner's House really wasn't being obstructionist.

I'd like her to run in 2016, but I can see that her appreciation of the literary is not as strong as Obama's. Take "Mittology" versus Romnesia. I mean, yeah ok this level may seem really obnoxiously stupid, but one captures the imagination of the people you are trying to convince of something, and one doesn't. I personally think it is perfectly intellectually defensible to present literary presentations of a principle so long as the underlying proposition you are presenting is the one you honestly hold, and is rationally and factually sound. Many fundamentalists of the rational layer are sickened by this, characterizing this as emotional pandering- Hayes' opening segment on Up went into the advertisement by the Obama campaign which compared voting for Obama as their choice of man to sleep with first. It was pointed out that the Kerry campaign never would have made that sort of Ad. To many it is insulting that people should be motivated at that level.

People are. Anyway, you will run into fundamentalists who state that if you focus on their favorite level, that everything will fall into place. They complain about about how stupid or disgusting it is that the other levels have any weight.

I don't know. I am an old guy and I prefer to be practical and do what works. But don't listen to me. If my brilliant analysis were correct, it would have been Microsoft that created an SGML based internet browser long before Netscape did, and Microsoft would have dominated internet search long before Google showed up. I made the case we should buy Altavista for a few hundred million but the scoffers won. Now they have spent billions after waking up.

Tough break for Microsoft elites. Coulda woulda shoulda.

So there is my tangent. I think the trick is to treat these multiple layers with equanimity. It is a style of consciousness that is not so much brutally pragmatic as it is kaleidoscopic about points of view.

What? Can you point to a sample ballot, or scan one and up on tumbler or flickr somewhere?

I'd venture a bet that voting straight Rethug does select Rmoney as your presidential choice. Unfortunately youve already voted and cant test that theory.

No matter how you fill out your ballot in North Carolina,
you must mark your preferences for president and vice president. If you prefer
one straight-party vote for all Republicans or all Democrats, you still must
vote for president and vice president separately. It says so on the ballot.

Learn to read.

Melissa Perry Harris grew up in Virginia if I am not mistaken. Thus she might just know something about politics and demographics there....

Anyhoo, she is one of the few opiners that make any sense these days imo. She is frank, forthright, fearless and fiesty and thankfully she 'will not and does not tolerate fools gladly' as the saying goes.