Heh.

News photos of President Barack Obama bowing to Japan’s emperor have incensed critics here, who said the US leader should stand tall when representing America overseas. …

<snip>

“I don’t know why President Obama thought that was appropriate. Maybe he thought it would play well in Japan. But it’s not appropriate for an American president to bow to a foreign one,” said conservative pundit William Kristol speaking on the Fox News Sunday program, adding that the gesture bespoke a United States that has become weak and overly-deferential under Obama.

Another conservative voice, Bill Bennett, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program: “It’s ugly. I don’t want to see it.”

“We don’t defer to emperors. We don’t defer to kings or emperors. The president of the United States — this coupled with so many apologies from the United States — is just another thing,” said Bennett.

Best response to this was the comment over at Reddit:

Memo to the conservatives who are blasting Obama for bowing to the Japanese emperor: It’s called diplomacy. You should try it sometime. It helps you get what you want without having to shoot people.

I don’t think you understand. Manly men shoot people!

Ilargi on our twisted priorities:

Still, before any of these developments had even started, back in 2008 49.1 million US citizens had trouble finding enough food to eat. That probably means 15-20 million children. And don’t forget that if they could have fed themselves, much of the food would have been of an inferior quality, since in most poor areas of the country, there’s a hell of a lot more cheap burgers available than vegetables. Perhaps luckily for them, they couldn’t even afford no high-fructosed whoppers.

But that was last year. In 2009, how many more hungry children did we add to the tally? Whatever their number, Obama and his administration chose and choose to ignore them. For Washington, saving Wall Street institutions is much more important. First you save the banks, and if there’s anything left afterwards, you may -or may not, depending on what the polls say- look at the 30-some million unemployed and the 20-odd million undernourished children.

The money used to prop up the banks has led to the illusionary notion of actual profits being made. Which in turn is all the excuse that’s needed to pay out bonuses, which in 2009 are set to reach new record levels. 20 million hungry children could be greatly helped with $1000 a year each for food. That would cost $20 billion, and still leave more than enough to pay some kind of bonuses. Or even better, dare we say it, pay back the government loans.

Where I come from, the description of a nation that leaves its children behind in hunger while showering its upper classes with lavish amounts of more luxury than they know what to do with evokes pictures of present-day Somalia or latter-day Rome and the let-them-eat-cake France of Marie Antoinette. Not of a socially and politically highly developed society of the 21st century.

But how developed are we? The people who are making this money think they’re doing God’s work. The people rallying in the streets would never use the money to feed the poor anyway, because that’s Teh Sozialism.

However developed we are, we’re regressing - both economically and morally.

Punking the teabaggers. Hilarious and - surprise! - not real hard, either.

Via Atrios, Media Matters serves up your daily slab o’ wingnuttery, in the form of Wesley Pruden’s column about Obama’s overseas sojourn:

He established a new precedent for how American presidents should pay obeisance to kings, emperors, monarchs, sovereigns and assorted other authentic man-made masters of the universe. He stopped just this side of the full grovel to the emperor of Japan, risking a painful genuflection if his forehead had hit the floor with a nasty bump, which it almost did. No president before him so abused custom, traditions, protocol (and the country he represents).  …

<snip>

This is not the way an American president impresses evildoers that he’s strong, tough and decisive, that America is not to be trifled with.

These people live in a cartoon.

It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

Translation: Bring back George W. Bush.

What an awesome manly president he was.

Update: And here’s Mark Shields making a similar point, by being sacastic. I think.

We have a president of real intellectual horse power who is cool, detached and analytical and if anything you can watch the emotional side of him emerge in this whole process. … There’s an emotional aspect, the comforter in chief as well as the commander in chief. Both roles. And I think it makes me nostalgic for those days when we had a manly man in the White House who could say, “Let’s kick some tail and ask questions afterwards” you know? That’s what we really need instead of any reflection.

Funny. So the AP takes a look at Palin’s book and decides that she’s “Going Rogue” on several facts. You know, stuff like this:

PALIN: Boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations and turned back large checks if her campaign perceived a conflict of interest.

THE FACTS: Of the roughly $1.3 million she raised for her primary and general election campaigns for governor, more than half came from people and political action committees giving at least $500, according to an AP analysis. The maximum that individual donors could give was $1,000; $2,000 for a PAC.

Which, via Sullivan, Palin responds to on her Facebook page like this:

“They’re now erroneously reporting on the book’s contents… “

And Sullivan blows a gasket, pointing out Palin’s consistently troubled relationship with the facts, and challenging Palin to rebut any of the 32 Palin lies he’s documented on his site.

But why?

Look, neither Palin nor her fans - especially her fans - have any interest in empirical truth; not in the least. If Palin says it, whatever “it” is, it’s true. They so identify with her culturally, especially in the classic movement “I’m oppressed by the media!!!” sense, that media scrutiny of her claims that find them to be false are just further evidence of their validity.

Because Palin said it, it’s true. And if it’s not factually correct, it “feels” true in their “gut” - and that is truth, truth in the religious sense, “true” the same way people “know” their faith to be true. You don’t need empirical evidence; all you need is faith in the person, or the scripture, telling the tale.

This is the fallout from our most recent Great Awakening, which has now concluded but the remnants constitute an entire political movement based on faith this way.

Palin said most of her donations were from the little guy and so how dare you point out that most came from PACs and people giving at least $500 Don’t you get it?

Yeah, I get it. I’ve gotten it all along.

Good piece by Bruce Bartlett:

The only thing holding this country back from having a welfare state as large as Europe’s, conservatives argue, is the low level of taxation that most Americans are loath to abandon. Thus in their own minds, conservatives believe that holding the line on taxes, no matter how large the deficit, is the essential prerequisite for the preservation of liberty.

The only problem with this analysis is that it has no factual basis whatsoever. If Hayek were even remotely correct, all of Europe would be one huge gulag by this time. At the very least, Europe would be mired in poverty, growth nonexistent and freedom hanging on by the thinnest of threads.

Of course, that is not the case at all. According to Freedom House, virtually every country in Europe has just as much political freedom as we do. Even organizations like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which seem to think that the tax burden is the single most important measure of freedom, concede that many European countries with tax burdens that would be considered confiscatory by all conservatives and probably most Americans are in fact just about as free as we are.

This is the great lie of our time, that a government structure similar to that in Yurp would be the death of freedom!

At a minimum, I think it’s safe to say that Hayek was wrong about the inevitability of totalitarianism arising from growth in the size of government. The collapse of communism is proof enough of that. Nor does it appear that the welfare state necessarily erodes freedom or places a crippling burden on the economy. As Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs recently wrote, “In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness.”

But the ideology says this cannot possibly be true. Which is why some of us recognize a difference between ideology and reality.

I see the bowing thing is driving right-wingers crazy. Good.

After eight years of a president who thought the world should bow down to him, we’ve actually got a president who realizes the importance of tact and displomacy and showing respect to our allies - instead of expecting them to fall in line and pronto because we rule the roost!

This goes a long way toward convincing the globe that the United States wants to be a partner, rather than dictating terms.

Which, of course, is exactly why the wingers hate it.

Via Atrios, Bob Herbert gets it exactly right.

If Democrats get crushed in the 2010 elections, it won’t be because America has suddenly rediscovered its conservative roots! though wingers like Rush and Glenn Beck will certainly claim this. It will because the jobs situation for a huge chunk of the country sucks, and the Democratic Party - supposedly the party of working people - hasn’t done anything to remedy it.

If the elites are correct, if the Great Recession really is over, then these core supporters of the president are being left far, far behind — as are blue-collar workers of every ethnic and political persuasion. Nobody wants to talk seriously about class in America, but the elites are smiling and perusing their stock portfolios while the checklist of Americans locked in depressionlike circumstances just grows and grows: construction and manufacturing workers, young men without college degrees (especially young black and Hispanic men), teenagers, and those who were already poor when the recession began.

The economic environment for all of these groups is an absolute and utter disaster.  …

<snip>

Mr. Obama announced this week that he would convene a jobs summit at the White House next month to explore ways of putting Americans back to work. It remains to be seen whether the summit will yield anything substantial. But it’s fair to wonder why the president and his party have not been focused like fanatics on job creation from the first day he took office.

It was the financial elites who took the economy down, and it was ordinary working people, the longtime natural constituents of the Democratic Party, who were buried in the rubble. Mr. Obama and the Democrats have been unconscionably slow in riding to the rescue of those millions of Americans struggling with the curse of joblessness.

Vid of the week is up.

Really? We’re going to go this far, really?

The Danville, Virginia Tea Party organization has announced a “Fired Up for Freedom” rally at which they’ll burn Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) in effigy, along with Speaker Pelosi.

No end to the crazy.

I’m so old I can remember when ritualized symbolic execution of public officials wasn’t cool.

Do the right-wingers realize that they’re moving the goalposts, and that if they ever get in power again - we will see conservative leaders burned in effigy?

And if you’re willing to go this far - might you not be interested in burning more than effigies?

Sullivan on Hannity and Fox News:

At the core of real conservatism is a distinction between theory and practice, a deep resistance to ideology, a respect for free inquiry and the philosophic spirit, a respect for social stability and coherence, a moderation in governance and a deliberation in action.

It is really time to point out that what Hannity represents, what much of Fox News represents, is not a defense of conservatism but one of conservatism’s deepest, most vicious and most pernicious enemies. I am sick and tired of having this political tradition coopted and vandalized in this manner.

Conservatism will not recover as a coherent governing philosophy until it takes this monstrous propaganda on. Conservatism will not somehow emerge through the wreckage of this current moment, until it finds the courage to note that what it has become is not some variant on its tradition rightly understood, but its conscious, active, pernicious nemesis.

And when actual conservatism does emerge - those who shout the loudest about how “conservative” they are will be its greatest enemies.

Now, if you were a Republican who opposed abortion and you donated money to the Republican National Commitee, wouldn’t you be OUTRAGED!!! if you found out that the RNC, in fact, offered its employees health insurance that included coverage for… abortion?

But wouldn’t you also want to know if any RNC employees - loyal Republicans! - had had abortions on your dime?

Interesting. Krugman has a column today wondering aloud (in print?) why it is that Germany is weathering the downtown so much better than we are:

Consider, for a moment, a tale of two countries. Both have suffered a severe recession and lost jobs as a result — but not on the same scale. In Country A, employment has fallen more than 5 percent, and the unemployment rate has more than doubled. In Country B, employment has fallen only half a percent, and unemployment is only slightly higher than it was before the crisis.

Don’t you think Country A might have something to learn from Country B?

Not if Country B is Teh Socializm!!!

Germany’s jobs miracle hasn’t received much attention in this country — but it’s real, it’s striking, and it raises serious questions about whether the U.S. government is doing the right things to fight unemployment. …

<snip>

 Germany came into the Great Recession with strong employment protection legislation. This has been supplemented with a “short-time work scheme,” which provides subsidies to employers who reduce workers’ hours rather than laying them off. These measures didn’t prevent a nasty recession, but Germany got through the recession with remarkably few job losses. …

<snip>

Now, the usual objection to European-style employment policies is that they’re bad for long-run growth — that protecting jobs and encouraging work-sharing makes companies in expanding sectors less likely to hire and reduces the incentives for workers to move to more productive occupations. And in normal times there’s something to be said for American-style “free to lose” labor markets, in which employers can fire workers at will but also face few barriers to new hiring.

But these aren’t normal times. Right now, workers who lose their jobs aren’t moving to the jobs of the future; they’re entering the ranks of the unemployed and staying there. Long-term unemployment is already at its highest levels since the 1930s, and it’s still on the rise.

Yves Smith jumps in:

Krugman does Germany an injustice by failing to contest US prejudices about European (particularly German) labor practices. If German labor practices are so terrible, then how was Germany an export powerhouse, able to punch above its weight versus Japan and China, while the US, with our supposedly great advantage of more flexible (and therefore cheaper) labor, has run chronic and large current account deficits? And why is Germany a hotbed of successful entrepreneurial companies, its famed Mittelstand? If Germany was such a terrible place to do business, wouldn’t they have hollowed out manufacturing just as the US has done? Might it be that there are unrecognized pluses of not being able to fire workers at will, that the company and the employees recognize that they are in the same boat, and the company has more reason to invest in its employees (ignore the US nonsense “employees are our asset,” another line from the corporate Ministry of Truth).

The reality is that a country like Germany is better able to manage its economy than we are. This “management” sacrifices both extremes - boom times aren’t as flush; bad times aren’t as bad.

This “management,” which produces a more stable society, does involve erecting government superstructures where none existed before. Which is why we could never do it - the likes of Glenn Beck will shout about Teh Freedum!!!

So while it’s nice to muse about what other countries are doing right, it’s also a waste of time - because those who love America like an obsessive, jealous lover insist that the existing American system is unquestionably the best, by virtue of the fact that it’s American; whatever the Deutsch are doing, it’s necessarily inferior.

I bet the Germans think that hilarious. Or just sad.

Hey, did you know Sarah Palin read wrote a book?

Responding to a conservative blogger who writes about Obama’s supposed lack of love for America, Daniel Larison pens something about Bush that I think is applicable to the broader conservative movement which we’ve battled here for the past however many years:

Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.

Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive, arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush’s love of country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another context “zeal not according to knowledge.” The man was actually overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid, jealous lovers, not more.

Funny/interesting:

Beer is locked up in Pennsylvania and needs to be freed from archaic state liquor laws, Sheetz Inc. officials said Wednesday.

The Altoona-based company, with about 200 locations in Pennsylvania, has started the Free My Beer campaign, an online and paper petition effort to urge lawmakers to allow beer sales at grocery and convenience stores.

The company and others have tried traditional lawmaker lobbying to change the laws, but it hasn’t gotten the General Assembly’s attention, so it’s time to take the effort to the people, 70 percent of whom want expanded beer sales, company president and CEO Stan Sheetz said.

“The sign-ups match the polls,” he said. “They’ll say yes. This is not rocket science. They just want to be able to buy beer in Pennsylvania where they want. Why is beer locked up like this? Nobody has a good reason for this.”

Come on! Liquor is sinful! That’s the reason, isn’t it?

This is an obvious ploy by Sheetz, they’d make a killing selling six-packs. But at the same time - yes indeedy, beer drinkers want to buy beer where they want to buy beer. This beer drinker would love to see 12-packs sold at the distributors - because sometimes you don’t want a whole case of porter, you’ll never drink it, but you would drink a 12.

The taverns oppose such changes. Distributors aren’t real keen on anything that mucks with the existing formula, either. It might be a losing battle, though - Pennsylvania’s liquor laws are slowly being liberalized, and that’s likely to continue, especially if it generates more state revenue.

After being nailed by Jon Stewart, for showing footage to suggest last week’s “Super Bowl of Freedom” was better attended than it was.

Will Bunch on why it’s important:

For Fox News, which has stepped up its partisan cheerleading for the right wing since Barack Obama became president, size — of anti-administration protests, that is — matter. And when they run misleading footage to make a conservative rally appear to be much, much better attended than it really was, that accomplishes several things. It fires up the right-wing base — the people that GOP wants to get rowdy at town hall meetings or flood congressional phone lines. And the bogus report also pressures wavering lawmakers, especially those centrist Democrats looking for any excuse not to support health care reform. Using doctored footage to make a point is not news. It’s propaganda, and in America that makes it a serious matter, indeed.

“Lie” would be a better word than propaganda. I suppose it’s both, which is why it’s nice to see Hannity fess up - but now way do I believe that this was an “inadvertent” error.

This was absolutely intentional, and not just - as Bunch writes - to create an impression amongst the base and the lawmakers. It’s designed to create an impression amongst Americans in general - look how big this movement is! Isn’t it time you joined?

Bottom line - Fox is always going to inflate the tea party numbers, for ideological purposes. Count on it.

Sullivan gets a letter:

The teacher asked if there were a person I’d like to write a book about, and I told of a very successful Japanese-American man I know who came of age during World War II, enduring all sorts of unpleasantness because America was at war with his ancestral home. One of my daughter’s classmates is the son of two Iraqi immigrants, and he’s the sweetest, most engaging kid. Without any sense of self-pity, he said “I think I understand how that man felt.” 

Last night, I was back at school as the third graders saluted America in song, and that same boy was on stage singing his heart out. During the same program, a Muslim girl born in Turkey played the part of the Statue of Liberty and gave the “tired, poor, huddled masses” speech. Her mother, a naturalized citizen, was in tears. That boy, that girl and that mom love America. They are Americans, and they are patriots. And any line of thought that tries to marginalize them is as un-American a thing as I can imagine.

I don’t think you understand. Several Muslims have murdered Americans, so all Muslims hate America and are guilty until proven innocent. It’s the American way! Unfortunately.

…is how long before Lou Dobbs shows up on Fox News?

The last of the original CNN hosts, Dobbs told viewers on Wednesday that he was quitting his nightly show — effective at the end of the hour — to pursue new opportunities.

What those are is still unclear, though he vowed to be a leader in the “national conversation” to restore “inspiration to our great free society and our market economy.”

I give him two weeks.

Good piece by Maureen Dowd:

The saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. Now, it’s whatever happens, the bankers win.

Under pressure from regulators, who were trying to ensure that long-term performance was rewarded, the banks agreed to award more in stock, deferring cash payments.

But as The Times reported this week, the Goldman executives who got stock options instead of bonuses last year, at market lows, got a windfall — so it had nothing to do with bank employees’ performance.

“The company gave its general counsel, for example, 104,868 stock options and 14,117 shares in December, when the bank’s stock was around $78,” Louise Story wrote for The Times. “Now the bank’s shares have more than doubled in value, making that stock and option award worth nearly $12 million.”

As one former Goldman banker told Arlidge, the culture there is “completely money-obsessed. … There’s always room — need — for more. If you are not getting a bigger house or a bigger boat, you’re falling behind. It’s an addiction.”

It’s an addiction that Washington has done little to quell. President Obama has not been strong on the issue, and Timothy Geithner coddles the wanton bankers whenever they freak out that they might not be able to put in their new pools next summer.

The bankers try to dismiss calls for regulation as populist ravings, but the insane inequity of it cannot be dismissed.

But most fortunately for Goldman, the people who in the past would have been sharpening the pitchforks are all worked up about ACORN instead.

Priorities!