Last week, Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) received a fusillade of criticism when he took to the Senate floor to declare that abortion was "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." That criticism soon turned to ridicule after his office responded by releasing a statement that said that "his remark was not intended to be a factual statement." Everyone has been making fun of him on Twitter and on late night comedy shows, and it really hurt his feelings. So now, Kyl is "clarifying" himself once again.

Asked if he regretted the flap, Kyl said Thursday: "I misspoke when I said what I said on the floor - and I said so."

But what about the claim that it was "not intended to be a factual statement" when Kyl said 90 percent of Planned Parenthood's services were abortion related?

"That was not me - that was my press person," he said.

Got it. See, when Jon Kyl said a bunch of things that were not true, he obviously had some sort of malfunction in the speech center of his brain. Clearly, what he meant to say was "Three percent of Planned Parenthood's activities are related to abortion, and now that I'm saying this out loud, I forget why I was making such a big deal about it in the first place, so I yield the floor." But an episode of some kind of dysphasia caused him to form entirely different syllables, so while it looked to the world like he was absolutely speaking with perfect clarity of voice and thought, it was all really just a mangled mistake. That observers couldn't see that he was misspeaking is just a terrible coincidence.

Oh, and then some idiot -- "my press person" -- said some even dumber things to CNN, but why was anyone in the news taking the things Jon Kyl's "press person" says seriously, as if his "press person" was somehow authorized to speak to the press, on Jon Kyl's behalf?

So, really, this was everyone else's fault.

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As you know, we're very patiently waiting for the Florida legislature to finally pass their long-awaited anti-bestiality law. In the meantime, what are those cats up to? Oh, hey, it says here that they are going to require homeless people to carry a permit to panhandle. Wait. What now?

It all goes back to SB 1180, a transportation bill that has a bunch of new regulations and rules. It was recently passed out of the Florida Senate's Budget Subcommittee on Transportation, Tourism, and Economic Development Appropriations by a unanimous vote. Yet somehow, panhandling got all mixed up in it. Here's Brett Henzi, at the Florida Tribune:

But one part of the bill that came under fire on Wednesday would require a permit to panhandle and would authorize fines for people who don't have one and fraudulently panhandle. Local governments, however, would be able to opt out by a majority vote.

Great, because what Florida definitely needs right now is robust government oversight over "fraudulent panhandling." What is that exactly? Does that mean the government is going to rigorously patrol the claims made by panhandlers as they appeal to people for sympathy? Actually, that's exactly what it means.

Sen. Jack Latvala, R-St. Petersburg and whose district has had an ongoing battle in dealing with panhandling, said the proposal is not meant to hurt the homeless. He said it is an attempt to go after those people who lie and are in fact financially stable, but choose to panhandle.

"If you say that you're pregnant, you better be," said Latvala. "If you say you're homeless, you need to be. If you say you are a veteran, you darn well should have been."

That's an interesting proposal, to say the least. I have to say that I agree with GOP strategist and blogger Liz Mair when she calls this "a pretty epic small government #fail."

For starters, this is exactly the kind of thing that state government should keep its nose out of and leave the issue to localities (which this legislation apparently recognizes is to some degree smart because it allows "opt-outs," though it still proceeds with a bad idea nonetheless).

But beyond that, it's also likely to prove ineffectual and pointless. Who wants to make a bet with me that basically no one who currently panhandles, whether genuinely in need and homeless or not, is going to go apply for this permit, whether they make it free or not?

And to finish off, let's just stipulate that the number of people out there who think this is a good use of legislative time can probably be reduced exactly to Jack Latvala and his chums in the legislature. Cut spending and rein in idiotic, excessive regulation exactly like this? Nah... Jack Latvala says, let's do more that's nonsensical, especially since we live in a state racked by foreclosures where it's likely some much more consequential types of fraud have occurred than some lady on the corner taking you for fifty cents because she said she was preggers. OMG!!!

I'm going to guess that if anyone applies for this permit at all, 100% of the people who do will attempt to qualify for a hardship waiver. But hey, it's a great way to catch all of the affluent Flordians who are out doing "hobbyist panhandling" in this super-effective fraud dragnet.

(Maybe some lawmakers could come up with a plan to just ameliorate the homelessness problem, though? This is just an idea I had.)

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The thing about legislative compromises is nobody gets everything they want. That's a fact of life for the 435 members of the House of Representatives and the 100 Senators who occasionally find themselves having to craft a deal that will get the President's signature. Sometimes it works out that they're left with something that most people will vote for, and sometimes it doesn't, but most legislators handle it with at least a dollop of dignity and grace. And then there's Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Lindsey Graham has styled himself as the Senate's great dealmaker -- the guy who will shepherd your measure through the partisan thicket and make sure it passes. All you have to do is do everything precisely the way Graham imagines it needs to be done, and you'll be fine. But the moment you hit one of his cryptic procedural tripwires -- ones you often didn’t know were laid in the first place -- Graham goes into full-on snit-fit mode, and vows to use whatever means at his disposal to shut the whole process down.

He's doing it again over the budget deal that was wrought April 8, because it cut an allocation that was to be used to fund an Army Corps of Engineers project that would have deepened the Port of Charleston. As Susan Crabtree at Talking Points Memo reports:

Graham started a string of angry tweets about the omission early Tuesday. By the end of the day, he had held a press conference on the issue in Charleston, S.C., and was blaming the Obama administration for failing to include the funding in its budget proposal released in February, arguing that 260,000 jobs are tied to the port.

"Obama Admin made a bad mistake not putting money for CHS port in their budget proposal," he wrote.

"No nominations go forward in Senate until we address CHS port," he tweeted, noting that the provision was not an earmark and applied to a dozen ports across the U.S.

That's right. Graham was seemingly happy to participate in the wide-ranging debate on the need to drastically reduce spending, until the scalpel fell on something he wanted. And now, he's going to hold up future nominations until he gets his way.

By the way, as Crabtree's colleague Benjy Sarlin points out: now Lindsey Graham wants to argue that government spending creates jobs?

"If you're a Republican and you want to create jobs, then you need to invest in infrastructure that will allow us to create jobs," he said at a press conference with Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee on Social Security in response to a question from TPM. "Congress, Republicans and Democrats, talk about creating jobs. How can you create jobs by shutting a port down that 260,000 people depend on?"

In assailing everyone for cutting his port money -- the lone example of worthy government spending and the government's last best hope, apparently, at creating a single private sector job -- Graham has gotten it into his head that he has the full support of his South Carolina Senate colleague Jim Demint (R). Graham told reporters that "Jim's been helpful," and that "DeMint 'absolutely' supported the project to deepen the port."

None of that is remotely true. DeMint opposes the project, because it is an earmark and Jim DeMint hates earmarks, up to and including this one, which he personally killed.

Graham's antics are a matter that Alex Pareene has very fully documented at Salon's War Room:

The South Carolina senator fancies himself the authority on when bills should be considered, how long the amendment process should last, how many days of debate they should receive, and when it is politically "safe" to finally vote on the damn things. (Usually later. No matter the bill, it will usually be safe to actually hold a vote later.)

His tantalizing promise: If you listen to him, your bill will magically become bipartisan! What always happens, though, is that someone screws up -- says the wrong thing to Roll Call, schedules a procedural vote on the wrong day, decides to actually hold a vote instead of waiting forever -- and then Lindsey Graham gets mad and promises that nothing will ever be accomplished in the Senate again.

[...]

Legislation is entirely about feelings and deal-making for Graham. He'll join in apparently good-faith efforts to craft pragmatic solutions to complex problems, but the second anyone looks at him the wrong way he'll dive off the bandwagon and accuse everyone else of ruining the compromise by not following some bizarre script that exists solely in Lindsey Graham's head to the letter.

Graham is basically the legislature's version of Anthony Fremont, from the “Twilight Zone” episode "It's A Good Life," and his fellow lawmakers are the "family" he holds captive to his every whim.

Of course, I haven't yet told you the best part. The amount of the funding allocation that has Graham so incensed that he's threatening to shut down the already stalled nominations process is $50,000. That's five digits. Graham's net worth is estimated to be between $446,316 and $1,223,308 and he does a brisk trade with campaign donors of all stripes. He's also BFF with a guy who owns eight homes, so it seems to me that he could easily scare up the 50 grand on his own if it matters that much to him.

It's just that what matters more is that people do what he wants.

UPDATE: So, apparently this whole "can we fund this by other means?" question is one that a lot of folks are asking, and Andy Owens, the managing editor of SC Biz News has come through with an answer:

In covering this, we've asked the question of several local, state and national officials "Why not just pay for this port dredging study ourselves?" Many are able and willing, but we've been told by port officials, Sen. Graham and several others that if this is done outside the scope of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for example by the SPA itself, then that agency would be responsible for the entire deepening project, which is estimated to be around $300 million, not including ongoing maintenance.

So, my bad: Senator Graham and his donors are off the hook. Many thanks to Andy. If you've a yen to learn more about business development in South Carolina, please consider his Charleston Regional Business Journal, or SC BIZ Magazine.

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Wednesday, Politico offered President Obama some advice on how to approach his afternoon deficit speech in a piece titled "7 things Obama needs to do." And for some reason, MediaMatters' Simon Maloy actually read the damn thing, and was surprised to learn that the piece actually offered all sorts of conflicting advice -- almost as if Politico should maybe stay out of this whole "advice to presidents" game.

How conflicting was it? In the second paragraph, they advise the president to "signal to Republicans that he's open to compromise." In paragraph 5, they caution "no matter what Obama says Wednesday, he won't go far enough to satisfy most Republicans." Which would tend to make the whole "signalling an openness to compromise" part a pretty useless endeavor.

Then, beginning in paragraph 11, they specifically direct the president to beat up on Paul Ryan. By which I mean they title a whole section: "Beat up on Rep. Paul Ryan." "On his budget plan, at least," reads the caveat, lest anyone incur liability for encouraging the president to literally assault the chair of the House Budget Committee.

To Democrats, this is a no-brainer. Republicans want to privatize Medicare, the most popular government program around. It's already been incorporated into the campaign strategy books of Democrats around the country, including the president's.

So the president, who has said very little about the Ryan budget, needs to make the moral case for Medicare, Democrats said.

"It will be characterized as partisan, but he has to do that," said Stan Collander, a lobbyist and former Democratic Senate budget aide.

Okay, so, per Politico, Obama "had to do that," even if it was to be seen as "partisan." (Note to Politico: In the current environment, the GOP sees the mere act of disagreeing with them as "unfair.")

At any rate, Maloy offered a prediction: "I can't imagine how Obama pulls off this absurd trifecta, but if he does, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see tomorrow morning a Politico article on Obama's muddled message to Republicans."

I'll let Maloy tell you how that all worked out:

This morning, Politico's Glenn Thrush -- who shared a byline on yesterday's article -- and Manu Raju take the president to task for, as they put it, "beat[ing] up" the Republicans with "a fiscal olive branch."

Le sigh:

Obama's long-anticipated speech on the deficit at George Washington University was one of the oddest rhetorical hybrids of his presidency -- a serious stab at reforming entitlements cloaked in a 2012 campaign speech that was one of the most overtly partisan broadsides he's ever delivered from a podium with a presidential seal.

Ha! This is coming from the publication that specifically advised the President to perform an odd rhetorical hybrid. There's more!

But the combative tenor of Obama's remarks, which included a swipe at his potential GOP challengers in 2012, may have scuttled the stated purpose of the entire enterprise -- starting negotiations with Republicans on a workable bipartisan approach to attacking the deficit.

I guess after calling for a "combative tenor," they've thought better of it?

Today's piece actually contains this paragraph:

But if Obama's goal was compromise, he pursued it with uncompromising language, saving his harshest words for Ryan, who last week unveiled a plan to privatize Medicare and cut a third of funding for Medicaid health care services for the poor.

Surely that deserves some sort of disclaimer? Something like, "This is exactly what we told him he should do, actually, you can read all about it in this very same paper."

Whatever. It hardly makes a difference, because I'm really quite sure that the White House is not looking to Politico for advice.

RELATED:
Politico Faults Obama For Following Their Advice [County Fair]

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The women of the Senate Democratic caucus took to the Senate floor yesterday to rise in defense of reproductive rights, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) lined up a square shot at the guy everyone has been ridiculing for the past few days: Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

GILLIBRAND: For my friends and colleagues, this is a factual statement. Current law already prevents federal money from paying for abortions. This has been the law of the land for over 30 years. Shutting down the government for a political argument is not only outrageous, it is irresponsible. The price for keeping the government open is this assault on women's rights.

Gillibrand then went on to describe at length the numerous inequities women face in obtaining health care coverage. Watch the whole thing here:

To remind you what Gillibrand's "this is a factual statement" remark refers to, last week, Jon Kyl went on the Senate floor himself to claim that "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does" was provide abortions. The correct figure is actually closer to three percent.

Kyl then attempted to walk this back, telling CNN that his remark "was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions."

As the Daily Show's Wyatt Cenac pointed out, "What we just saw with Senator Kyl was a deft execution of a political maneuver known as 'lying.'"

UPDATE: Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is also having a good time at Kyl's expense, using the "#ISIntendedToBeAFactualStatement" hashtag on Twitter.

RELATED:
Gillibrand Jabs Kyl With A 'Factual Statement' [PolitickerNY @ New York Observer]

PREVIOUSLY ON THE HUFFINGTON POST:
Jon Kyl Is Sorry If He Gave Anyone The Impression That The Things He Says In Public Are Factual

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Over at the Daily Beast, Daniel Stone dives into a study on torture conducted by the American Red Cross. "Americans' opinions on torture seem to have fractured," the report said, "largely on generational lines."

So, who are the biggest supporters of torture? "A surprising majority -- almost 60 percent -- of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable," the study found. Overall, teens are "significantly more in favor of torture than older adults."

It's a dispiriting result, and Stone does a fine job taking on the reasons why these results came down in this fashion. As he relates, there's been a general uptick in the visibility of torture (er..."enhanced interrogation techniques") in the media. Along with that comes the effort undertaken by the Bush administration to normalize torture, despite its attendant lack of success as an intelligence gathering technique. Stone also notes that there are "societal influences that may be responsible for de-stigmatizing torture, including increasingly graphic media."

But the bottom line, he says, is that young people are just at a significant remove from the world of war and conflict:

The generational tip-toe back from humanitarian legal norms may say more about a nation increasingly removed from the costs of war. "For young people," says [Harvard constitutional law professor Lawrence] Tribe, "to put themselves in place of a soldier is a level of empathy that most people simply don't have anymore."

All of which makes (depressing) sense to me.

The only thing I'd add to this is that the Red Cross' study also found that a similar majority of young people deemed it unacceptable for "American troops to be tortured overseas." In that contrast, there's another factor worth considering: The youth of America seem to be following along with the way the media treats torture.

Let's recall that, back in the summer of 2010, a study from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government found that the way major newspapers addressed the issue of torture abruptly changed in 2004:

The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930's until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

Over the same time period, the same newspapers made it clear that, while it was okay for America to torture people, it was never okay for a non-American to do the same. Again, from the old Harvard study:

In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

It's the concept of "American exceptionalism" that transforms "torture" into "enhanced interrogation techniques." So sayeth our news media, anyway. As this new Red Cross report makes clear, older Americans who grew up at a time when this issue was tended to by the media with a distinct and consistent moral clarity have maintained that distinct and consistent moral clarity themselves. American teenagers diverge at that point, but what can I say? This is learned behavior.

And that's the price you pay when you elevate torture and torturers to one "side in a political dispute."

[H/T: Adam Serwer.]

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It would appear that once again, a Yes Men-style prank has caught us all napping. Earlier today, news broke that General Electric (GE) had agreed, amid public outcry, to "donate" the entirety of their $3.2 billion tax refund to the federal government. The Associated Press was the largest media organization to be taken in by the subterfuge, but they should feel not alone -- here's our own Sam Stein tweeting the "news," as well.

The Huffington Post spoke to satirical activist Andrew Boyd, who confirmed that this is the work of Yes Lab -- an incubator for ideas that dovetail with the Yes Men's stunts. According to the Yes Lab website:

In a typical Yes Lab project, an activist organization will come to the Yes Lab with a target--e.g. Monsanto, or war profiteers, or one of those "too big to fail" banks, or greedy health insurance companies, or a bad government policy--as well as a goal: to affect public debate, push for legislation, embarrass an evildoer, etc. Depending on ability, they will pay a fee to help the Yes Lab keep going.

We'll work with the group to develop the smartest, most effective plan to accomplish it. We'll help assemble the team from within the group as well as our mailing list, we'll train folks as necessary, and we'll check in on the project until it's successful.

This GE dupe fits that bill.

Here's the basics: A fake press release -- purporting to be from GE's "assistant director Samuel Winnacker," an -- went live this morning at www.genewscenters.com. The site, which has already been taken down, was a sophisticated and well-rendered fake of General Electric's actual website (which www.genewscenter.com -- one letter off the fake site address -- redirects to), and is similar to previous Yes Men efforts.

The hoax press release -- also removed, likely at the behest of GE -- read:

Fairfield, CT, 13th April, 2011 - GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt has informed the Obama administration that the company will be gifting its entire 2010 tax refund, worth $3.2 Billion, to the US Treasury on April 18, Tax Day, and will furthermore adopt a host of new policies that secure its position as a leader in corporate social responsibility.

"We want the public to know that we've heard them, and that we know many Americans are going through tough times," said GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt. "GE will therefore give our 2010 tax refund back to the public and allow the public to decide how to spend it."

Immelt acknowledged no wrongdoing. "All seven of our foreign tax havens are entirely legal," Immelt noted. "But Americans have made it clear that they deplore laws that enable tax avoidance. While we owe it to our shareholders to use every legal loophole to maximize returns - we also owe something to the American people. We didn't write the laws that let us legally avoid paying taxes. Congress did. But we benefit from those laws, and now we'd like to share those benefits. We are proud to be giving something back to America, and we are proud to set an example for all industry to follow."

Over the coming weeks, GE will conduct a nationwide survey to determine how the company's $3.2 billion returned refund is to be allocated. The survey will be conducted both online and offline, and will permit the public to weigh in on which of the recently-enacted budget cuts they would like to see reversed.

In tandem with the gift, the company is also announcing a host of new policies to restore public faith in the GE brand, including a commitment to keep American jobs in America, and to create one U.S. job for each new job created abroad. The ambitious plan will overhaul accounting systems to allow public transparency and phase out the use of tax havens in five years. "Given my recent appointment as President Obama's Chairman of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, it is no longer appropriate for GE to engage in practices that, whether by fact or perception, are at odds with the greater good of the nation," Immelt said.

Immelt outlined several concrete steps he would take to push for modernized tax policies that reflect the realities of the global economy. "I will personally ask President Obama to work with Congress to require country-by-country reporting by multi-national corporations of the sales made, profits earned and taxes paid in every jurisdiction where an entity operates. Instead of moving money via "transfer pricing," corporations ought to pay taxes in the jurisdictions where profits are actually made. If Congress is able to establish standard industry-wide solutions, GE will close our tax haven operations abroad, including our subsidiaries in Bermuda, Singapore and Luxembourg."

Further details on GE's new policy will be released in the coming weeks.

According to the Associated Press, it obtained this fake press release by email. The hoax came bearing a "GE logo" and including "a link to a website designed to look like GE's website," the AP said.

AP withdrew the story 35 minutes after it was published and released the following statement from Business Editor Hal Ritter: "The AP did not follow its own standards in this case for verifying the authenticity of a news release."

This is all obviously inspired by the Yes Men's approach to social activism. If satire exposes the distance between the world we live in and the world the satirist would prefer, the Yes Lab takes it a step further by closing that distance. In these pranks, the targets are depicted as behaving in the moral fashion they usually avoid, and take actions they normally wouldn't. Add to that this sophisticated fakery, and suddenly there's a news story about how GE is gifting their tax refund back to the taxpayer.

The effect is transportive. By briefly creating a world in which the possibility that GE might do such a thing, it instills an argument for that world and that sort of corporate behavior. And the friction caused by the prank itself helps to draw attention to to the issue at hand -- tax shelters, offshoring, and unemployment. (And let's remember, it's GE's Immelt who is supposed to be working with the White House to put us all back to work.)

And, on a practical level, these stunts have a material impact. Per Reuters: "GE shares slipped after at least two news organizations reported the hoax as fact."

I spoke this morning with "Samuel Winnacker," who was not willing to drop character even after I let him know that I was aware that Yes Lab was behind this bit of agitprop. The man posing as Winnacker told me that that GE was supposedly rejecting a "limited notion of self-interest" and that he saw the company's decision as "the patriotic thing to do." Hopefully, I'll hear back from Winnacker's alter ego after all the dust settles.

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
Confirmed: Yes Men Behind Prank Of Canada At COP15
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Jay Carney On GE's Zero Income Tax Payments: One Might Say 'What The Heck'

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Last week, Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) electrified the commentariat when he released the details of his budget plan.

Many of the essentials -- such as his plan to transform Medicare into a voucher program where the value of the vouchers, by design, fail to keep up with inflation in health care costs -- have been rattling around Capitol Hill corridors for some time. So it wasn't entirely surprising when word soon spread that the White House was going to use Ryan as its "foil": Ryan's Tybalt to Obama's Romeo, so to speak.

Only I'm not entirely sure the White House understands what a "foil" is! (For the record, it's "one that, by contrast, underscores or enhances the distinctive characteristics of another.")

Let's check in with all of the contrasts drawn and the distinctive characteristics enhanced by looking back on yesterday's White House press briefing:

Q: And without going into any details, of course, will the President directly or indirectly go after Paul Ryan's plan, and how will he do that?

MR. CARNEY: Well, I'm not going to preview the President's speech. Let's leave it at that.

Q: You're not going to say anything about -- how about Paul Ryan's plan independently?

MR. CARNEY: Well, what I have said and others have said is that the House Republican plan demonstrates a shared goal with the President, which is that we need to take serious action to address our long-term deficit and debt issues. What it doesn't demonstrate is the kind of balance that this President believes we have to employ as we address those long-term needs.

When the best you can do is suggest you are more "balanced" in pursuing a "shared goal," you are doing this whole "foil" thing wrong. Eventually Carney, after prompted by a reporter's question, got a smidge more aggressive by agreeing that the Ryan plan was "fundamentally unfair." As to what made it fundamentally unfair, he did not, on this occasion, offer much elaboration.

A week ago, Carney was willing to go further, but not by much:

Q: Thanks, Jay. Can you just expand on the President's response to the Ryan plan and how he may respond after this budget, current budget fight is over? On the entitlement reform, tax reform issue?

MR. CARNEY: Well, we are committed, as the President has said, to reducing America's long-term deficit, because it's essential to growing our economy and winning the future. Congressman Ryan is correct in identifying the fact that we cannot do that if we just look at 12 percent of our budget. A narrow slice of domestic spending, cutting that will not get us to where we need to get in terms of dealing with our long-term deficit. And that, I remind you, is what has occupied so much of our attention today and for the last weeks and months.

But while we agree on his ultimate goal, Congressman Ryan's goal, we strongly disagree with his approach, because any plan to reduce our deficit substantially must reflect American values of fairness and shared sacrifice.

We believe that Congressman Ryan's plan that he put forward fails that test. It cuts taxes for millionaires and special interests, while placing a greater burden on seniors who depend on Medicare or live in nursing homes; families struggling with a child who has serious disabilities; and workers who have lost their health care coverage.

The President believes, again, that the goal is important and he shares the goal, but he believes there is a more balanced way to achieve that goal, to put Americans on a path to prosperity, if you will.

All well and good, but it seems to me that if you've committed yourself to using Ryan as your "foil," now would be a good time to start talking about how his plan to phase out Medicare and Medicaid comes on the heels of the health care reform debate, in which opponents constantly demonized the White House for "raiding Medicare."

Or that the Ryan Plan raises taxes on the middle class while giving away money to Wall Street banks.

Or that the Ryan Plan included unemployment projections so batty that the Heritage Foundation had to revise them to something slightly less implausible. (Not that Heritage has ever managed to do employment models well in the first place.)

Here is how some famous comedy writers on the teevee pulled off "opposing the Ryan Plan."

By contrast, the White House's opposition to Ryan fails to advance in any meaningful way. Aside from some mild complaints about "balance" and "fairness," the emphasis is on the idea that everyone has a "shared goal."

That goal will apparently be advanced in a speech tonight, which, when announced, caught Congressional Democrats completely by surprise. (I guess the goal isn't as widely "shared" as people say it is!)

The speculation of the day, of course, is that Obama will largely embrace the plan laid out by the Simpson-Bowles deficit panel. That's problematic for a lot of reasons. As Ezra Klein points out, "if Obama is such a fan of this approach...why didn't he say more about it during his budget?"

More importantly, Simpson-Bowles isn't an authentic Democratic Party counterproposal:

The danger for Obama is that in endorsing Simpson-Bowles at the beginning of a process of compromise, he makes a centrist -- at best -- proposal the left pole of the debate, with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget serving as the right pole. That implies an outcome similar to the shutdown negotiations, where the Democrats ended up arguing for House Speaker John Boehner's cuts while the Republicans ended up arguing for the tea party's cuts, and the final deal was somewhere between the two. A debate between center and right will lead to a further right outcome than a debate between left and right.

So here's how this story is going to end: Obama will propose Simpson-Bowles as a counter to Ryan. There will be a big fight. If this runs like the health care reform debate did, Obama's presumed GOP allies (they're even calling themselves the "Gang Of Six"... AGAIN) will sell him out. Some House progressive will try to produce an authentic counter-proposal, but absent a bully pulpit, it will die on the vine. The eventual deal will be somewhere in the middle ground between the center-right Simpson-Bowles and the far-right Ryan plan. Getting the necessary Democratic votes for passage will be like pulling teeth.

The only good thing is that once it's over, the GOP will praise the Democrats for not being partisan and give them credit for being serious about curbing spending.

Ha ha, just kidding! None of that will happen at all! The GOP will continue to attack the Democrats for not "listening to the American people" and not "doing enough to get serious about the deficit."

By contrast, Romeo and Tybalt went at each other with swords.

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If you were anywhere near Capitol Hill last Friday night, or a teevee with cameras pointed at Capitol Hill last Friday night, or at a computer watching people tweet about the cameras that were pointed at Capitol Hill last Friday night, then you no doubt already know what topic consumed the political media.

Would there be a deal to avert the government shutdown? And what's in the deal? Do people like the deal? Will all parties agree to the deal? Deal deal deal deal -- my God, that word has lost all meaning, somebody please get me some Paxil!

Yes, long into the night, reporters camped out and waited for a sign from somebody that something was going to happen about the imminent shutdown of the federal government. Aides scampered, rumors flew, journalists checked for body language. Lawmakers thought to be part of the deal-making process confessed they were hoping someone in the news could tell them what was going on.

Speculation would build to a crescendo -- the end is in sight! -- only to turn dramatically on a dime -- there's not going to be a deal, everyone buy milk and toilet paper!

During a night of scurrying and waiting and ebbing and flowing, those watching the events unfold largely overlooked a key fact: you don't actually have a deal until all parties agree to something. So John Boehner was never walking back to meet with the House GOP caucus "with a deal in hand," he was just going through the negotiating process.

But by 9:30 p.m., everyone inside the Beltway was essentially jumping at the fall of an unexpected shadow. (I include myself in those ranks.)

Happily, Ben Craw is here to condense an evening of dire mystery and frantic wonderment into one five-minute recap that effortlessly communicates what it was like the Night The Lights Nearly Went Out On Capitol Hill.

[WATCH]

[Video produced by Ben Craw.]

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"Admit it," says Dave Weigel, "you were waiting for this." What, pray tell, is he referring to? He's talking about Rand Paul, quoting Ayn Rand at length at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. See, Rand Paul is hopping mad at the compact flourescent lightbulb for existing, because it represents the "boot heel" of the "collective." Let's go to the tape:

PAUL: Ayn Rand wrote a novel, Anthem...It's a dystopian novel where individual choice is banned and the collective basically runs society. There's a young man, and his name is Equality 72521. He is an intelligent young man but he is banned from achieving or reaching any sort of occupation that might challenge him. He is a street sweeper.

Over time he discovers a subway and he rediscovers the incandescent light bulb. And he thinks, naively, that electricity and the brilliance of light would be an advantage for society and that it would bring great new things as far as being able to see at night, to read, and the advancement of civilization.

He takes it before the collective of elders, and they take the light bulb, and basically it's crushed beneath the boot heel of the collective. The collective has no place basically for individual choice.

Now, I'm not suggesting that this collective body is against electricity per se, or for quashing individualism. But I am suggesting that we're against choice.

Here's Eric Kleefeld with the required literary analysis:

In that book, of course, the protagonist was attempting through his individual experimentation and achievements to advance his society past a more primitive technology, the candle. In this case, however, regulations are being used in order to move society forward to the next generation of technology, after the incandescent bulb, on the grounds that it would save energy.

I mean, you might as well be evangelizing against modernity. The Collective has forbidden trepanation, in favor of its neurosurgical witchcraft!

Look, here's a link you can use to purchase incandescent lightbulbs. Stock up for the wagon train to Galt's Gulch!

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Last week's near shutdown of the government occurred because we were supposedly having an intensely "serious" discussion about reducing the federal deficit. But when you look at both the components of the deal that were agreed to, as well as some of the matters that were on the table, it's hard to take these claims of seriousness very seriously.

As you already know, a lot of the eleventh hour debate concerned Planned Parenthood -- an issue that related more to pure partisan antipathy than to a serious attempt to save taxpayers money. That's not it, though. There's a slew of things in the deal, or in the discussion of it, that just have nothing to do with cutting the deficit. In fact, there's a fair amount of things that would actually add to the deficit.

Below are eight prime examples, including a note on whether they made it into the final agreement or not.

1. Budget Gimmicks Galore!

The $38 billion in cuts is already being reported as the largest single deficit reduction measure in history. But as the Associated Press reports today, both sides of the negotiating table indulged in a slew of budget tricks to arrive at that top line figure:

The details of the agreement reached late Friday night just ahead of a deadline for a partial government shutdown reveal a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially "score" as cuts to pay for spending elsewhere, but often have little to no actual impact on the deficit.

As a result of the legerdemain, Obama was able to reverse many of the cuts passed by House Republicans in February when the chamber approved a bill slashing this year's budget by more than $60 billion. In doing so, the White House protected favorites like the Head Start early learning program, while maintaining the maximum Pell grant of $5,550 and funding for Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative that provides grants to better-performing schools.

Instead, the cuts that actually will make it into law are far tamer, including cuts to earmarks, unspent census money, leftover federal construction funding, and $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can't be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused spending authority from a program providing health care to children of lower-income families.

[...]

About $10 billion of the cuts comes from targeting appropriations accounts previously used by lawmakers for so-called earmarks, those pet projects like highways, water projects, community development grants and new equipment for police and fire departments. Republicans had already engineered a ban on earmarks when taking back the House this year.

Republicans also claimed $5 billion in savings by capping payments from a fund awarding compensation to crime victims. Under an arcane bookkeeping rule -- used for years by appropriators -- placing a cap on spending from the Justice Department crime victims fund allows lawmakers to claim the entire contents of the fund as budget savings. The savings are awarded year after year.

STATUS: These tricks are part of how the deal's top-line figure was achieved.

2. Reduced IRS Enforcement

Everyone hates the taxman -- the GOP's Tea Party base, especially so. But in cutting a proposed increase in the budget for Internal Revenue Service enforcement, Republicans who pushed for the reduction were essentially calling for a straight up loss in revenue:

On March 1, House Republicans voted to cut $600 million from the budget of the Internal Revenue Service for the remainder of 2011, and they want even deeper cuts in 2012. Perhaps that doesn't surprise you: Republicans don't like spending -- at least when they're not in power -- and they don't like taxes. Why would they fund the IRS?

Well, as the Associated Press reported, "every dollar the Internal Revenue Service spends for audits, liens and seizing property from tax cheats brings in more than $10, a rate of return so good the Obama administration wants to boost the agency's budget." It's an easy way to reduce the deficit: You don't have to cut heating oil for the poor or Pell grants for students. You just have to make people pay what they owe.

I thought everyone wanted to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. Tax scofflaws are apparently not part of that equation. And the people who are primarily cheated by tax evaders are, of course, everyone who pays their fare share.

STATUS: The current agreement froze funding for the IRS.

3. No "Free Choice" in Obamacare

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has been doing a lot of unheralded work in taking the good faith opposition to the president's Affordable Care Act and crafting some compromise measures that might preserve the bill and enhance its standing with the GOP. One such provision is his Free Choice Voucher, which he described as a "foothold for choice and competition and a safety valve for Americans whose employers are already forcing them to bear more and more of their family's health insurance costs."

As part of the appropriations deal, the vouchers were unceremoniously killed off. As Matt Yglesias notes: "We don't really know who killed it, but it doesn't have any meaningful budgetary impact so it's not like this was a concession made in order to reach some target cut figure."

This move has nothing at all to do with budgetary concerns, it's just straight up hate for the Affordable Care Act. Ron Wyden has more here.

STATUS: Killed off.

4. A Bailout For For-Profit Colleges

The Department of Education has a "gainful employment" rule that precludes student loan and Pell Grant dollars going to programs that don't help students succeed. But a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House, acting as lackeys for the for-profit college industry, pushed for a rider that would prevent those accountability rules from going in to place, allowing profits (and loan defaults) to continue. HuffPost's Chris Kirkham explains:

Gainful employment rules would apply to career-focused programs at both for-profit and non-profit colleges, but the for-profit college industry has mounted an unprecedented lobbying campaign against the regulations. As drafted, the rules would track students after they leave college and evaluate them in two ways: whether they are paying down the principal on their student loans and whether they have attained an income that allows them to manage debts.

Far from sweeping, a draft version of the regulations would allow degree programs for-profit colleges and other vocational schools to remain fully eligible for federal aid money even if less than half of their students are repaying the principal on their loans. Some could remain eligible even if only a third of students are in repayment. Programs that fail to meet certain requirements could lose access to federal student loan and grant money -- crucial revenues for the for-profit sector.

And a crucial drain on government revenues.

STATUS: Good news: "The final deal will not include a measure that would have prevented the Obama administration from cracking down on certain schools," Kirkham reports.

5. Less Money for the NIH

The budget battle included a proposal that would enact $1.6 billion of proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which performs vital health research. As Choire Sicha points out: "It turns out that when legislators actually know what the NIH does, they want to give it more money, not less." What's more, the federal investment in the NIH offers a staggeringly high rate of return:

The federal government, mainly through the NIH, funds about 36 percent of all biomedical research in the United States. Nonprofit organizations fund about 7 percent, and private industry funds about 57 percent.

[...]

The economy-wide rate of return on publicly funded research [is] on the order of 25 to 40 percent a year. This finding agrees with estimates of the rate of return of privately funded research and development. By way of comparison, the average before-tax profits of nonfinancial corporations in the United States ranged from 8.5 percent to 14.3 percent in the most recent ten years for which data are available (1988 to 1997), and corporations often use an expected rate of return of 15 percent as the minimum for considering investments.

STATUS: In the final agreement, the $1.6 billion figure was reduced to $260 million.

6. Defunding Obamacare

One of the things that Obama's Affordable Care Act does is furnish grants that fund medical research -- research that spurs cost-cutting medical innovations. Let's consider one example, via Rick Ungar at Forbes:

For 50 years now, dialysis patients have had a plastic stent inserted under the skin as part of the process required to 'hook them up' to the dialysis machine. Once the little tube is in place, blood flows through the stent 24/7 - even though the average kidney patient experiences dialysis roughly ten hours a week.

This little tube is the source of some very big problems. Because the blood flows constantly through the alien device, patients experience all sorts of trouble including clot formations, gangrene, finger ulcers and circulation impairment.

As a result, the typical kidney patient is forced to undergo 10 to 12 operations over their lifetime in response to these complications. In fact, over 1 million of these procedures are performed each and every year.

And who do you think pays for this?

We do. You see, dialysis is one of the very few conditions that Medicare pays for regardless of your age. As a result, every patient in America who requires the procedure is entitled to payment from the government up to a maximum of $75,000 a year with $15,000 of that money typically spent on the surgeries to deal with the complications resulting from that little tube.

As the article goes on to relate, a South Carolina vascular surgeon named Steven Cull came up with an idea: "A valve that would close off the blood flow through the tube except for when the patient is undergoing the dialysis treatment," as Ungar describes it.

The potential upside? "Should the valve work, it would effectively end the complications that are costing the Medicare program $15 billion a year," he writes. Go read the whole thing to get the full story of how Cull had to battle his way around Tea Party hero Jim DeMint, the junior Sen. from S.C., to finally secure funding under the Affordable Care Act.

The bottom line is that defunding the implementation of these sorts of grant programs keeps deficits unnecessarily high.

STATUS: As part of the agreement, GOP legislators will be allowed to hold a separate vote on defunding the Affordable Care Act.

7. Climate Change Contrarianism

A lot of the GOP's war on the environment didn't make it into the final deal: policy riders that would restrict various environmental regulations were dropped, and Republicans budged somewhat on the cuts they wanted to impose on the Environmental Protection Agency ($1.6 billion, down from $3 billion). But they continue to deny the existence of climate change, and cuts reflecting that belief made it into the bill. Per The Hill:

The bill cuts funding for climate change-related programs by $49 million when compared to enacted fiscal 2010 levels. This includes blocking funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's [NOAA] climate service and eliminating President Obama's energy and climate change adviser, or "climate czar." Carol Browner, who previously held the position, has left the White House.

The upshot? Over the long run, this could cost the government a lot of money. As Christine W. McEntee warned before the budget deal, these cuts "will limit access to a wide array of scientific data and information about climate, extreme weather events and seasonal forecasting, including the ability to leverage international knowledge and research, all of which could help inform mitigation and adaptation strategies worldwide." Here are a few of the items potentially affected by the budget deal:

• Without satellite data provided by NOAA, precipitation rate predictions in the southern U.S. could be off by as much as 50 percent. For the February 6, 2010 storm that paralyzed DC and the Mid-Atlantic coast ("Snowmaggedon"), the snow would have been under-forecast by at least 10 inches.

[...]

• Polar satellites provide weather forecasting for the $700 billion maritime commerce sector and provide a value of hundreds of millions of dollars for the fishing industry. The satellites save some $200 million per year for the aviation industry in volcanic ash forecasting alone and provide drought forecasts worth $6-8 billion to farming, transportation, tourism and energy sectors.

Economic vitality, national security, public health and environmental sustainability all depend on making the best use of science in formulating public policy, including climate science. If political pressure squelches scientific research, climate change will not magically disappear, but the objective knowledge needed to inform good decisions will.

STATUS: These climate research funding reductions are part of the agreed-to deal.

8. Cuts To Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention Programs

As a part of the final deal, HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis, and STD prevention takes a $1.1 billion hit. That's too bad because, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention writes, this has long been shown to have a high rate of return for the investment:

Three CDC studies show how federally-funded efforts to prevent sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) have dramatically reduced STDs and their associated health costs.

The first study provided evidence that funding for STD and HIV prevention has a discernable impact on new cases of STDs. The authors found that greater amounts of federal STD and HIV prevention funding in a given year are associated with reductions in reported gonorrhea rates at the state level in following years. Results suggest that each dollar of prevention funding (per capita) is associated with a later decrease in gonorrhea of up to 20 percent. Because gonorrhea is a marker for risky sexual behavior, the findings are likely generalizable to other STDs, including HIV.

The second study examined the impact of federally-funded STD prevention efforts over the past 33 years, estimating that approximately 32 million cases of gonorrhea were avoided from 1971 to 2003 as a result of prevention efforts. The study demonstrated that STD prevention programs paid for themselves. Savings realized by preventing gonorrhea exceeded the STD prevention program expenditures by more than $3.7 billion during the 33-year period. If other benefits were considered (such as the prevention of other STDs), the estimated effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of STD prevention in the United States would be even greater.

In the third study, researchers estimated that reductions in new cases of gonorrhea and syphilis from 1990 to 2003 saved $5.0 billion in direct medical costs. This estimate was based on reported cases of the two diseases in the United States, coupled with published estimates of direct medical costs per STD case. Authors calculated that the total direct medical cost of gonorrhea and syphilis was $3.8 billion over the 14-year period, compared to $8.9 billion if STD rates had remained at their 1990 levels. Because gonorrhea and syphilis infection are known to increase the risk of HIV transmission, a significant portion ($3.9 billion) of the total savings ($5.0 billion) reflected HIV infections that were averted due to reduced gonorrhea and syphilis rates.

STATUS: Cut in the negotiated deal.

The list could go on to include $78 million cut from research on health costs, quality and outcomes or $9 million taken from the Department of Energy Inspector General's office. The Energy Innovation Fund, Energy Efficiency Grants, and Green Jobs Innovation Fund are also being slashed. None of these moves exactly scream, "This has potential to pay off handsomely for taxpayers or contribute mightily to deficit reduction."

But these sorts of measures -- ones that fail to impact the overall budget picture or, worse, threaten to spur deficit increases -- seem be hardwired into the deal, not bugs. All this was supposed to be part of a serious discussion to reduce the national debt? Could have fooled me!

Ryan Grim, Corbin Hiar, and Nick Wing contributed to this report.

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For as long as I can remember, social conservatives have been at war with the "gay agenda" -- whatever that is. Probably just the notion that members of the LGBT community are actual human beings, or something.

Over time, however, they've been losing this fight. As it stands, a majority of Americans "say it should be legal for gays and lesbians to marry," according to a recent poll from ABC News and the Washington Post. Even self-styled opponents of gay marriage are meeting gay people for the first time in their lives and realizing that they aren't monsters. And Republicans are starting to edge toward favoring this position, themselves. Why, there's even an openly gay Republican running for President of these United States.

So, social conservatives are asking themselves, how do we reverse these trends? Honestly, the only way to accomplish that would be by making very old Americans immortal while simultaneously preventing new Americans from being born.

Absent the ability to do that, why not just start using some different words? Here's Sofia Resnick of the American Independent, reporting on this cunning new stratagem:

The first step for Christian conservatives to win the war against the gay movement is to rebrand the terms, said a few panelists at this weekend's The Awakening conference at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va.

"'Gay' is a left-wing socio-political construct designed to create grounds for fundamental rights [based on] whimsical capricious desires," said Ryan Sorba, chairman of the Young Conservatives of California. "Gay identity does not exist."

So the trick here is to invent a new term that steals away from the positive connotations of the word "gay," I guess. We pretty much already know the word they'd like to use, if they had their druthers. But this is all about "rebranding," so here are some of the proposed terms these panelists think might hit all four quadrants:

Sorba proposed alternatives to the word "gay," which received approval by a unanimous show of hands by the 40-some audience members:

- "Same-sex attraction"
- "Same-sex intercourse"
- "Sodomy"
- "Unnatural vice"

Later in the discussion, it was suggested that gays should also be referred to as "anti-Christian."

Of course, these new terms are rife with semantic difficulties. "Same-sex attraction" and "same-sex intercourse" are basically clinical descriptors that aren't loaded with negative connotations. "Sodomy" is a term that, when used, also catches most of your skilled heterosexuals up into the same net. "Anti-Christian" may as well be a term for everything this group already stridently opposes. And I, for one, am only too curious to find out what a room of social conservatives considers to be a "natural vice."

But hey, this group is in desperate need of some sort of game-changer, because they're all still talking about their beef with homosexuality in the same way they have for decades. "If you had all the facts, you wouldn't choose to be gay," said Greg Quinlan, an "ex-gay" who serves as the president of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (the acronym for which is, oddly enough, PFOX).

Hey, you know, based on the facts I have at my disposal, I wouldn't choose to have an egg allergy -- huevos rancheros look delicious! -- but here's the thing: I don't actually have a choice in the matter.

Anyway, go read the whole report. I especially love the guy who says that "promoting gays in the military presents a national threat" because it all "comes down to the soldier who 'has your back or the one who wants to rub it.'" This only reinforces my belief that the best military-themed slashfic is written by homophobes.

Here's the full American Independent article and below is video of the full commentary from Sorba, the chairman of the Young Conservatives of California.

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Over the weekend, the White House averted a government shutdown by largely agreeing to the GOP's terms on discretionary spending. In return, Democrats were allowed to let Mike Pence's desire to defund Planned Parenthood die a legislative death either in Harry Reid's Senate or at the end of President Barack Obama's veto pen. This led Ron Brownstein to remark on this Sunday's edition of ABC's "This Week" that the Democrats had conceded the argument that "austerity is acceptable in a time of unemployment."

If you cast your mind back to December's lame duck session -- the last time the Democrats and the White House had to face down some GOP "hostage taking" -- they were conceding that jobs could only be created by extending massive tax cuts on the wealthy.

One might see this as a bad thing, but not the White House -- officials have been trumpeting this past Friday's eleventh hour deal as an historic accomplishment. That the White House has cut a sizable portion of discretionary funding isn't the sort of thing that's going to get them relief from critics -- the House GOP are more than ready to reset their "the White House isn't serious about the deficit" argument as the budget battle shifts down the calendar.

Nevertheless, adviser David Plouffe was on the air this weekend, linking Friday's capitulation with their lame duck capitulation as a great example of a governing strategy, where everyone "comes together" and more or less agrees to what John Boehner wants to do.

Ezra Klein senses that the White House is attempting to cut-and-paste the veneer of the Clinton administration, and wear it as a talisman into 2012 (when we'll have a fight over the Bush tax cuts again, by the way!):

The Obama White House is looking toward the Clinton model. After all, Clinton also suffered a major setback in his first midterm, Clinton also faced down a hardline Republican Congress, Clinton also suffered major policy defeats, and yet Clinton, as the story goes, managed to co-opt the conservative agenda and remake himself into a successful centrist. The Obama administration has even hired many of Clinton's top aides to help them recapture that late-90s magic.

That story misses something important: Clinton's success was a function of a roaring economy. The late '90s were a boom time like few others -- and not just in America. The unemployment rate was less than 6 percent in 1995, and fell to under 5 percent in 1996. Cutting deficits was the right thing to do at that time. Deficits should be low to nonexistent when the economy is strong, and larger when it is weak. The Obama administration's economists know that full well. They are, after all, the very people who worked to balance the budget in the 1990s, and who fought to expand the deficit in response to the recession.

In attempting to recreate this magic, the White House is going full sail, and have even apparently picked their foil, in the form of Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). (Presumably, this is because Clinton's foil, Newt Gingrich, has not aged well.) As Glenn Thrush points out, "Obama has prospered most when he's had an obvious antagonist." Which is all well and good! But it makes you wonder why, thus far, White House push-back on Ryan's budget plan has been anemic. Through Jay Carney, Obama has expressed his opinion that Ryan's plan isn't "fair," but there are big elements to Ryan's budget that have been rattling around DC for months. Responses to Ryan's plan to voucherize Medicare should have been immediate. And the White House has largely passed on both rounds of Ryan's Heritage-enabled pie-in-the-sky unemployment numbers.

We obviously can't know what Bill Clinton might have done in this situation, but something tells me that he might have, at some point, "attempted politics." Matt Yglesias lays out an example of such a tactic -- a good plan for how to fight the debt-ceiling fight. Step one is basically "stop making concessions." Here's step two:

This isn't a sudden "shutdown." Nor is is true that we have to default on obligations to our bondholders. Rather, it means that government outlays are now limited by the quantity of inbound tax revenue. But for a while, the people administering the federal government (to wit Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner) will be able to selectively stiff people. So the right strategy is to start stiffing people Republicans care about. When bills to defense contractors come due, don't pay them. Explain they'll get 100 percent of what they're owed when the debt ceiling is raised. Don't make some farm payments. Stop sending Medicare reimbursements. Make the doctors & hospitals, the farmers and defense contractors, and the currently elderly bear the inconvenient for a few weeks of uncertain payment schedules. And explain to the American people that the circle of people who need to be inconvenienced will necessarily grow week after week until congress gives in. Remind people that the concessions the right is after mean the permanent abolition of Medicare, followed by higher taxes on the middle to finance additional tax cuts for the rich.

That sounds good to me! Think the White House will pursue that kind of strategy? Not as long as they believe they are making "history" by "coming together." (It should be pointed out, it's not like congressional Democrats have covered themselves in glory, either. They've passed on many a fight as well. They had their reasons; they were stupid ones.)

UPDATE: Let's bring in some key insight from Greg Sargent, who remembers the Clinton White House's successes as something more than simply co-opting their ideas while the economy was doing awesome -- it also included taking actual principled stands:

I just got off the phone with Michael Waldman, who was Clinton's chief speechwriter throughout much of that battle, and he told me that a crucial piece of the historical record is being lost. While Clinton, a New Democrat, did push for welfare reform and call for a balanced budget to restore his fiscal credibility, the former president pivoted from there to a major, protracted public fight over Medicare -- and an unabashed defense of a liberal role for government -- that was crucial in restoring his public standing.

Few remember this part of the story, but Waldman notes that Clinton seized on the Medicare standoff to reaffirm his support for the social contract as embodied in Lyndon Johnson's Medicare promise to America, frequently referring to proposals to cut Medicare as an affront to our "values." Clinton even used Johnson's pen to veto the GOP's budget.

Go read the whole thing.

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Most of last week's news cycle was consumed with the last minute averting of a government shutdown. But did you know that while all of this was happening, Maureen Dowd was yelling at Bob Dylan for blowing our best chance to finally shame China into doing something about its terrible record on human rights? It's all shocking and true.

This past Saturday, Maureen Dowd complained [MEMO TO LEGAL: Does the phrase "Maureen Dowd complained" infringe on a New York Times copyright?] that American folk hero Bob Dylan -- who had previously delivered the most haunting Victoria's Secret commercial ever made -- was a straight up "sell out." Dylan's misstep? He performed two concerts in China and utterly failed to play "The Times They Are a-Changin'" and "Blowin' in the Wind" -- two songs whose radical use of the dropped-g form of the present participle would have touched off a human rights revolution throughout China. According to a similar report, the shows were attended by "a large percentage of foreigners, members of Beijing's expatriate community and many of them baby boomers who grew up with Dylan's music," but who evidently have not done a good job themselves taking Dylan's message out into the hinterlands to reform China from within.

So it fell to Dylan himself to take his message to those few Chinese that were in attendance, no doubt to be further indoctrinated by the Chinese government, subliminally, through the song "Tangled Up In Blue." Per Dowd:

Iconic songs of revolution like "The Times They Are a-Changin,'" and "Blowin' in the Wind" wouldn't have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.

Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or "harmonizing," as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird's Nest, Beijing's Olympic stadium.

Dylan said nothing about Weiwei's detention, didn't offer a reprise of "Hurricane," his song about "the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done." He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.

The power of these two pieces of music can not be understated. Just last year, the hand-written lyrics of "The Times They Are a-Changin'" were bought at auction for $422,500 by a hedge fund manager, and I think we can all agree that the subsequent viral reforms of the financial industry were near-instantaneous.

So, Dylan: what an a-hole, right? Well, not so fast. I'm nobody's example of a Dylanologist, but my limited experience has taught me that it's impossible to believe that you can remove the essential Dylan-ness from an hour of his music. So the first thing I did was check in with an actual Dylan fan, Peter Feld, who sent me off to James Fallows, and what do you know? It turns out that Dowd basically doesn't know what she's talking about:

Many of my Chinese and Western friends, writing from Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Nanjing, are wroth about Dowd and what they call her misunderstanding of Dylan, China, and the current alarming wave of crackdowns there [...]

Jeremiah Jenne, a Chinese-speaker and long-time resident of Beijing who covered the actual "Jasmine Protests" in Beijing in a stint as guest blogger here, says in his Jottings from the Granite Studio that "there has been a rash of increasingly unrealistic drivel [about Dylan] from the foreign press, culminating yesterday in a truly moronic piece by Maureen Dowd." Jenne pointed out that one of the numbers Dylan sang in Beijing, "a corrosive version of All Along the Watchtower, ain't exactly bubble gum pop. Coming on the heels of an epic Ballad of a Thin Man (in which Bob stood in a yellow spotlight at center stage, staring down the crowd like a carnival barker at the gates of Hell, literally snarling lyrics like "But something is happening here/But you don't know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?") it's hard to complain that Bob was toning it down."

Go read that whole thing if you want to see the value in knowing the actual lyrics to Bob Dylan's actual songs. And then go read Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker, who evidently attempted to convince Dowd that she was making a huge mistake:

I don't know exactly what Dylan did or did not agree to. (I don't think Dowd does, either.) But whatever the facts are, Dylan knows very well -- as I tried to tell Dowd when she interviewed me for her column -- that his music long ago became uncensorable. Subversive thoughts aren't limited to his blatant protest songs of long ago. Nor would his political songs from the early nineteen-sixties have made much sense in China in 2011. Dowd, like Mr. Jones in "Ballad of a Thin Man," is as clueless about all of this as she is smug.

What can I say? I guess some people just want to hear the hits.

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