I had to participate in an unrelated conference call in the middle of their segment, so I missed most of it. But the part I did catch was eye-opening.

Mann and Ornstein have been around forever, and they’ve played the ‘both sides do it’ and the ‘why can’t politicians be more like us sensible Washington insiders and cooperate more’ cards plenty of times before.

For this outing, though, these ‘sensible centrists’ have finally called bullshit on the Republican party.

Diane Rehm, bless her ‘sensibly centrist’ heart, sounded flabbergasted. It was as though she wanted to say “but Tom, but Norm, you guys are one of us. We don’t say these kinds of things!”, but knew she couldn’t.

I wish I didn’t have to be on that call.

(For lots of other reasons too, but missing Rehm’s sputtering really hurt.)

Seriously, though, the GOP has been claiming that reducing spending (mixed with, what, Unicorn farts?) would bring the economy back around for months now. Why the shift? Oh, right, because cutting spending has done the exact opposite. It is, like, actual economics or something.

Normally it is just one side of the debate that insists on being ignorant of economics and history, and, when the idiotic side wins, everyone can look back and say “boy, what were we thinking. Those other guys were right the whole time!”

Well, we had that chance in 2008, but we elected a Democrat as President who seems not to have learned anything from the disaster that was 2000-2008. Nope. He’s just piling on.

Do you remember the collective exhale we enjoyed back in November 2008? That was premature. We’re still on the same carnival ride (to hell).

We had a chance to whip out the public credit card and put the economy back on a sane footing, but we’re going to bury it instead. We had a chance to say “unregulated banking and finance leads to disaster after disaster that we end up having to pay for (and the malefactors always walk away rich)”, but that ain’t gonna happen. We had a chance to enforce the rule of law, but someone (hint: his initials are Barack Hussein Obama) didn’t wan’t to seem ‘petty’. Etc.

We are, I’m sorry to say, fucked.

The oligarchs have captured the system, and they’re not gonna want to give it up anytime soon.

They think that history will somehow prove them to be prescient. They think that the Democratic party’s approach to economic problems will leave the US in a ditch (and that the voters will blame the Democrats for getting us there).

The problem they are going to have with that is that their economic ‘plan’ is a dishonest one, and only works politically, not economically. They claim that cutting taxes and spending lead to a great America, but history (and textbook economics) disagrees.

We’re in a ditch now because Reagan’s Big Ideas (which Reagan was lucky and/or smart enough not to force into law) were actually forced into law by George W. Bush. And here we are.

If we can, now, increase spending enough to get the economy going again, we will, later, be in a position to balance the books and get on with things.

(Which, historically, is when the Republicans will come back and screw everything up again.)

The gist of what McConnell is saying: ‘We [Republicans] can’t get you to see this our way, so you can have your stupid debt ceiling raised. But we’re warning you: you’ll have to face the consequences!’

The funny part is that they think government spending is actually the problem, and that if America doesn’t control spending right now, everything is going to go to hell — and that voters will blame the Democrats.

The reality is that reducing government spending right now will only make things worse. They are actually just saving themselves from ending up holding the bag on that possible extremely likely disaster.

This could end up OK, which wasn’t my predicted outcome as recently as, oh, lunchtime today.

Josh Marshall sums it up nicely:

At the end of the day though, McConnell’s “evil genius” move seems like all it does is make the Democrats go to the public with what they believe is best for the country and be accountable for it. I have a hard time seeing that as being a meaningful threat. Since that’s what people who are given the power to govern are supposed to do.

UPDATE: Apparently it was the Democrats who were holding the debt ceiling hostage. Who knew? Seriously, if you hear this meme getting any traction in the media-sphere, immediately cross the person pushing it off of your list of credible sources.

Now we’ve learned that there is a third reason that the $2 trillion gambit is ridiculous: They haven’t found $2 trillion to cut. It’s just a made-up number. If they had an actual plan, we could ask them: “OK, which things are we going to cut to get $2 trillion out of the budget?” They don’t have an actual plan.

Fuckers.

Today, I cleaned the bathroom and got through about 3.72% of The Third Reich at War. I’m proud of the fact that I read Richard Evans’ two previous books, but that dude freaking wrote them, and that while, probably, cleaning his own bathroom now and again, and then wrote the third volume.

Read more books, y’all. It is, literally, the least you can do. If you’re ambitious, write one (or two or three).

I am a voter, and, theoretically, my vote matters. Practically, and currently, my vote doesn’t seem to matter anymore. This is depressing.

The thinking (arguably naïve on my part, I realize) behind not voting would be that another politician might come along and notice that there were voters out there who could be drawn back into the process by a more credibly liberal politician. (Obama did well with this group back when he was credibly liberal, and that turned out pretty well for him.)

My actual expectation is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will spend eleventy billion dollars that will do a lot more to determine the outcome of the next election than my pathetic principles.

Sad.

(This was originally written as a comment on a Nate Silver blog post. I don’t know if nytimes.com approved it)

Obama’s plan to reduce the FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) contribution.

This is money that is separate from your income tax and is the money that is intended to pay for your Social Security benefits.

Republicans have a long history of hating Social Security and hoping that it would go away. One of their favorite tactics is to publicly complain that the FICA money isn’t enough to cover the benefits, and that Social Security has to change to stay viable. (One of the reasons the FICA money is always in trouble is that Republicans have a long history of raiding it to pay for things they like, like tax cuts.)

Funnily enough, most Republican plans to ‘fix’ Social Security would end up compromising the whole enterprise, which would probably lead to it being curtailed or scrapped.

Now President Obama has this neat-o idea to lower all of our FICA contributions enough to allow most Americans to bank an extra $1-2,000 in 2011. With this additional spending the economy, supposedly, would be all better and we could put FICA back where it was.

This is naïve. Ridiculously naïve. The end of 2011 will roll around and the economy, no matter how much it does improve, will be presented as too weak to be able to survive a FICA ‘tax hike’, and there will be a lot of pressure (from cynical politicians and their usual enablers, mostly) to make the cuts permanent.

And then the Social Security ‘lock box’ (as it was memorably called by the last politician to talk sense about Social Security to Americans — over 10 years ago) will run out of money, and the Republicans will get their wish.

Please, Mr. President, drop this cockamamie idea. Don’t hurt America.

PS – There isn’t a single thing in the rest of the plan I would fight for (even my own tax cut), and plenty of things besides this FICA nonsense that I would actively fight against.

What is the power of the internet? (Broadly, and, perhaps, less obviously): The ability to collect (‘capture’) information from people who, for the most part, don’t realize that by adding information to other information (technically: meta-data), they are adding value to the Internet.

The neat thing about this is that people who use the Internet (at least nowadays) don’t realize how much meta-data they add to the Internet just by using it.

Google realized this (or some form of this) a long time ago. Amazon did too, but almost by accident (they thought, at first, that they were just selling stuff).

Facebook succeeded in being popular when being popular was the whole point, and are now realizing that capturing all the data and meta-data that their users are entering (for free!) is the thing to do.

Jimmy Wales, as odd a fish as he may be, may be saving the Internet from over-commercialization by hosting the ultimate user-entered meta-data collection site out there: Wikipedia. Amazon, Google and Facebook are collecting users and information furiously, but I have a feeling that they are in it for (warning: Shocker!) the money.