In a purely Ivory Tower sense, I thought this was an interesting exchange between Yglesias and Atrios. Yglesias initially posited:

Traditionally raising the Medicare eligibility age more than a teensy bit would be unthinkable, since absent Medicare an elderly person would be totally uninsurable. But under ACA that�s not the case. Of course subsidies will be needed for most retirees, but a workable highly progressive system would be in place to ensure that nobody has to go without access to health coverage.

The "workable highly progressive system" Yglesias is talking about are the vaunted exchanges. Representing those of us who disagree with the idea that the exchanges are a "workable highly progressive system" was Atrios:

Your Monday Krugman:

Mr. Obama still has immense power, if he chooses to use it. At home, he has the veto pen, control of the Senate and the bully pulpit. He still has substantial executive authority to act on things like mortgage relief � there are billions of dollars not yet spent, not to mention the enormous leverage the government has via its ownership of Fannie and Freddie. Abroad, he still leads the world�s greatest economic power � and one area where he surely would get bipartisan support would be taking a tougher stand on China and other international bad actors. But none of this will matter unless the president can find it within himself to use his power, to actually take a stand.

Open thread.

Pro Publica and the Washington Post have a new report on the Mumbai bombings of 2008, focusing on Sajid Mir, aka Sajid Majid, who allegedly was put in charge of the attacks by Lashkar-i-Taiba. A second installment will be published tomorrow. According to the report, Mir trained David Coleman Headley for two years prior to the attack, and both active and retired Pakistani military officials were involved.

Mir and his victims are at the center of a wrenching national security dilemma confronting the Obama administration. The question, simply put, is whether the larger interests of the United States in maintaining good relations with Pakistan will permit Mir and other suspects to get away with one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in recent history.

[More...]

Via Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice, I just proved I am a Very Serious Person by putting the federal budget in surplus by 2015. Here is the NYTimes gizmo.

How I did it - 71% in revenue increases and 29% in spending cuts. What I raised - the estate tax to Clinton era levels (raised $50 billion), added a bank tax (raised $73 billion), added a millionaire's tax (raised $50 billion), let the Bush tax cuts expire (raised $226 billion), raised the FICA ceiling (raised $50 billion). For spending cuts I adopted these proposals - reduced Social Security benefits for high earners (saved $6 billion), enacted medical malpractice reform (saved $8 billion), reduced the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 by 2013 (saved $86 billion), made defense spending cuts (saving $57 billion), eliminated farm subsidies (saved $14 billion) and "earmarks" (saved $14 billion.)

I did not even use the "close tax loopholes" option which could have saved $136 billion. The reason I did not is because that more than ever is the phoniest nonsense of all. "Tax loopholes" never go away. Ever. And I still do not get how eliminating "earmarks" saves money. Anyway, so how "serious am I? I put the federal budget into $248 billion surplus by 2015. With bipartisan ideas even. Name me budget czar!

Speaking for me only

In a reprise of the Irrelevant Presidency theme, folks are again trotting out the poor Obama, "if only people had President Obama's back" line. Earlier this week, it was about Obama's powerlessness regarding the Bush tax cuts. Today, Balloon Juice argues the Obama Administration can't try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in a federal court in New York because Governor-Elect Cuomo won't like it. (I actually do not care if KSM is tried in federal court in New York but that is another issue.)

These "defenses" of Obama are not helpful, to the discourse or to Obama. As I previously wrote:

Disheartening news, to say the least. The Washington Post reports:

• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other 9/11 detainees are unlikely to get a trial in federal court or by military commission before the end of President Obama's first term. Instead, they will remain in indefinite detention at Guantanamo.
• Guantanamo will not close in the forseeable future.

The explanation:

The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.

Like indefinite detention won't alienate us? [More...]

All my favorite soup mixes are out of business. First Aunt Patsy's and now Bean Cuisine. Today I'm trying to replicate the Bean Cuisine Thick as Fog Pea Soup from scratch. So far, so good, but I hate when things get discontinued.

In the new department, Facebook will be announcing its offering of e-mail through the domain FB.com on Monday. The reason: to compete with G-mail. Sunday, AOL is expected to launch their new e-mail, Project Phoenix, through phoenix.aol.com.I'm sticking with G-mail and AOL. FB is just so privacy invasive and they add things to your page you don't want and can't get rid of. Like chat with a photo gallery of your friends -- and events. I still prefer the AOL program to the web-based email, and I don't like having all my e-mails stored in "the cloud" but times change and we are forced to change with them. [More..]

One of the things I wrote a lot about early in the Obama Administration was political bargaining. Another theme was the role of activists. On both issues, the liberal blogosphere, in large measure, completely missed the boat in my estimation, choosing to largely defend the ineffectual political bargaining techniques of the Obama Administration and criticizing activists for not being sufficiently supportive of feeble Obama policy initiatives. I dubbed these folks the Beltway Bloggers in an attempt to separate them from the activist blogger. Unfortunately, many of the Beltway Bloggers, Ezra Klein in particular, like to play liberal activist on TV and MSNBC, Keith Olbermann in particular, let them play that role. It was a terrible mistake for all.

Digby writes about a TV segment that illustrates why:

Sam Seder went on to [say . . .] the left has been willing to compromise for a long time, while the right hasn't. [Conservative Matt] Lewis, grinning like a jack-o-lantern, ended with this sage observation:

Well I think the real world implication here Dylan, is that if the Republican base does not want to compromise and the Democratic base is willing to compromise Republicans are going to win more public policy battles than they lose.

What can you say to that?

That he's right, that's what you can say. The question then is what do you do to try and change that? That's the question for progressive activists.

Speaking for me only

Taibbi writes about the foreclosure due process crisis in the United States (repeated disclosure, I work in this area for distressed homeowners) and gets to the nub of the macro issue underlying it all:

[I]t's the unpaid bills that are incidental and the lost paperwork that matters. It turns out that underneath that little iceberg tip of exposed evidence lies a fraud so gigantic that it literally cannot be contemplated by our leaders, for fear of admitting that our entire financial system is corrupted to its core � with our great banks and even our government coffers backed not by real wealth but by vast landfills of deceptively generated and essentially worthless mortgage-backed assets.

You've heard of Too Big to Fail � the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can't admit to it � and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn't be, but often are, closed.

(Emphasis supplied.) A co-conspirator in this massive fraud and scandal is the United States Treasury Department led by the incompetent and corrupt Tim Geithner. When the history is written on the Obama Administration, this could well be the lede.

Speaking for me only

I like a lot of games today. One game I really like, Auburn (-7) over Georgia, is now off the board because Cam Newton may not play due to potential NCAA violations. It's going to cost him the Heisman and maybe Auburn's chance to play for the national championship. FTR, I think college players should be paid. A lot of people are making a lot of money on college football and most of the players are not. I also want a college football playoff and hope the season produces a mess in order to increase the pressure for a playoff.

I'm 65-69 for the season. I like a lot of games today, some more than others so I will include my units (1 unit play unless otherwise indicated) in the picks as well so you can follow along with my monetary results today.

Cincinnati (+5.5) over West Va., Ga. Tech(+3) over Miami, Northwestern (+10) over Iowa, Indiana (+22) over Wisconsin, South Florida (+3) over Louisville, Ole Miss (+3) over Tenn (2 units), Kentucky (-15) over Vandy (3 units), Iowa State(-2.5) over Colorado (3 units), Army (+1.5) over Kent, Notre Dame (+7) over Utah, Syracuse (-3) over Rutgers, Texas Tech (+15) over Oklahoma, Texas A&M; (-3) over Baylor (5 units), Miss State (+14) over Alabama (2 units), Cal (+21) over Oregon, Ariz. St (+6) over Stanford, Arizona (-4) over USC, and Nevada (-8) over Fresno State.

Go Gators!

Open Thread.

The expected merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast was confirmed today. Newsweek online will no longer exist, but be folded into the Daily Beast. Here's how it will work. Tina Brown will be Editor in Chief of both, and the new name is the Newsweek Daily Beast Co. Tina has more here. Howard Kurtz adds this comment from Tina in his column, which I think is absolutely right. Reading a weekly magazine for news is obsolete:

The effort to keep on persisting with something called a newsmagazine is probably outdated at this point,” Brown says. “Magazines are great venues for predictive and reconstructive journalism, for cultural journalism, for narrative journalism, for profile journalism. All these things can be done online, but do work better with the rhythms of print.”

With Newsweek's print edition to morph into something other than news, it leaves Time Magazine as the sole survivor in the newsweekly print market, since U.S. News & World Report also announced recently it would cease print publication and just publish digitally.

Why do weekly magazines like People still thrive? Is it the photos? Is it that readers don't follow celebrities on a daily basis the way they follow the news, so enough of the material is still news to them a week later? And does anyone subscribe to either, or just pick them up in airports and at the hair salon or doctor's office?

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

I always refer to my self as a Centrist, in part because I think it is expedient, but really, I think I pretty much am a Centrist, in the sense that my views fall pretty much in the middle of opinion in the country. In the Beltway, probably I would be Left, but the Beltway is a bubble all its own.

I tell you this as a preface to commenting on this from Matt Yglesias:

Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals by a large margin and moderates are a much bigger force in the Democratic coalition than in the Republican one. So if you want a deal, appointing an orthodox conservative Republican and a moderate Democrat from North Carolina makes a lot of sense.

This is fun with labels nonsense. The Catfood Commission's proposals are filled with proposals that not only are bad, they are far outside the mainstream of what Americans want, and, more relevantly, what Congress will ever approve. I mean really - eliminate the mortgage interest deduction is going to happen? Cutting Social Security benefits is going to happen? Never. Ever. The Catfood Commission proposal is unserious and unSerious. What might it be about? I dunno, but Yglesias' post is silly.

Speaking for me only

Speaker Pelosi:

[O]ur position in the House has been we support the tax cuts for the middle � for everyone, but not an additional tax cut at the high end. It�s too costly. It�s $700 billion. One year would be around $70 billion. That�s a lot of money to give a tax cut at the high end. And I remind you that those tax cuts have been in effect for a very long time, they did not create jobs.

The advantage of having Speaker Pelosi continue as Dem leader in the next Congress would be precisely to articulate the liberal position. If in 2012, Dems decide to choose another image for the election, they can retire Pelosi. For now, the reality is Dems will have no say in what legislation comes out of the House the next two years. But they can distance themselves from policies that they disagree with. And of course, lame duck Speaker Pelosi can basically say no to all the bad ideas floating around now. Let President Obama and Speaker Boehner pass their bad policies in the next Congress, if they can.

Speaking for me only

Matt Bennet of the dishonest Right Wing Third Way:

"I don't think Russ Feingold lost because he wasn't liberal enough," said Matthew Bennett, a vice president at Third Way, a group that urges Democrats to focus on such issues as deficit reduction.

If Russ Feingold had been more conservative, he still would have lost. And Blanche Lincoln, Gene Taylor, Travis Childers, Jim Marshall, Walt Minnick and all the rest of the Blue Dogs who lost did not lose because they were too conservative. They all lost because the economy sucks.

A good, honest, constructive discussion of policy and politics would be healthy for the Democratic Party. But The Third Way is not interested in that. They are interested in dishonestly pushing their Right Wing agenda.

Speaking for me only

Matt Yglesias writes:

I think that where a lot of progressive political junkies go wrong is that they think �blame Republicans for failing to pass plan to fix the economy� is a close substitute for �fix the economy.� In reality, the evidence that fixing the economy would help Democrats politically is overwhelming, while the evidence that the plan/block/blame strategy would work is non-existent.

I don't know what "progressive political junkies" Yglesias is referring to, but most progressives critical of the Obama economic policies argue that Obama should have fought for better policies, because, you know, maybe he would have gotten them. A lot of folks are pretending the inadequate stimulus and the utter failure of a housing/foreclosure policy implemented by the Obama Administration was not what they wanted. In fact, it was. Was it the best they could do? No one knows because they didn't try to do better.

In the bad old days of Clinton Triangulation, the Clinton Administration enacted a policy they thought was best, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. That bill passed in the House by 218-216 and with Vice President Gore casting the tiebreaking vote in the Senate. The Obama Administration, with a less conservative Congress, did not fight as hard for a better economic policy. That is what I criticize.

Speaking for me only