Friday Mashup (11/13/09)

Baby Newton Leroy Gingrich informs us of the following over at the AEI blog (here)…

In an interview with CNBC in January, the president promised the stimulus bill would keep unemployment at 8 percent and new jobs would be created. Yet since the passage of the $787 billion stimulus in February, America hasn’t reduced unemployment. In fact, we have lost 3.2 million jobs.

President Obama argues that although jobs have been lost, the stimulus has “saved or created” one million jobs. But what is going to happen when the stimulus money dries up? Those jobs will be lost. In effect, the stimulus bill will have lost over four million jobs. This is inexcusable.

As Media Matters tells us here, the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that job losses that began in 2007 are slowing, albeit very gradually (necessitating the need for some kind of stimulus for job creation IMHO, but that’s a bit off-topic for here). So as usual, Gingrich is misreading the data here.

So what would Gingrich consider to be an effective job creation measure (or two)?

Well, Think Progress tells us here that he wants to cut the corporate tax rate from about 35 to 12 percent, eliminate the estate and gains taxes (of course), and implement a two-year, 50 percent payroll tax reduction (basically, as TP tells us, “Gingrich’s plan amounts to throwing money to mainly the well-off and hoping that it will have some positive effects. That’s not what is needed to get the country out of its economic rut.”)

Aw, c’mon Newt! You can do better than that. How about putting people to work building that spaced-based air traffic control system of yours, as noted here (and the answer to the question is no – I’m never going to let Gingrich forget that dunderheaded idea).

Also, David Brooks has appointed himself as the one-man publicity service for South Dakota Repug U.S. Senator John Thune (here), telling us the following…

Republicans are still going to have to do root-and-branch renovation if they hope to provide compelling answers to issues like middle-class economic anxiety. But in the meantime, people like Thune offer Republicans a way to connect fiscal discipline with traditional small-town values, a way to tap into rising populism in a manner that is optimistic, uplifting and nice.

Oh, I’m sure it was “optimistic, uplifting and nice” of Thune to tell us here that “government jobs don’t stimulate the economy,” although CBO director Douglas Elmendorf begged to differ there.

And I’m sure it was also “optimistic, uplifting and nice” of Thune to write language into a transportation bill expanding the pot of federal loan money for small railroads, enabling a former client (Thune was a lobbyist before he was a senator) to apply for $2.5 billion in government financing for its project. The loan (had) yet to be approved; Mr. Thune said he was trying to promote economic development in his home state.

And was it “optimistic, uplifting and nice” for Thune, who benefited from the antics of Jeff Gannon during Thune’s 2004 campaign, to say that a gay Supreme Court justice would be “a bridge too far”?

Seriously, BoBo, this is embarrassing. You were right about Sarah Palin here (more on her in a minute), even if you kept your mouth shut for too long (worked out well for the election, though). But trying to re-establish your right-wing “bona fides” now by paying homage to a weasel like Thune only makes you look like more of a shill than you are already.

Update 11/14/09: And I'll let you, dear reader, decide whether or not Thune's vote here was “optimistic, uplifting and nice.”

Update 12/2/09: More from "Looney Tune Thune" here...

And finally, have I got some Grade A wankery today, my fellow prisoners.

Matthew Continetti, in the midst of some full-on Palin puffery at the Murdoch Street Journal here, inflicts the following upon us…

…other Republican politicians have profited when they exposed received wisdom about them as false. In 1980, Democrats portrayed Ronald Reagan as a dim-witted ideologue bent on starting a nuclear war.

Then Reagan debated President Jimmy Carter. The public watched as a conservative pragmatist with a puckish wit unmanned a self-important, humorless liberal. Suddenly, Reagan was no longer the "dangerous" choice. He won handily.

Could Ms. Palin follow Reagan's example?

Uh, I don’t think so, though I’ll admit anything is possible, given that the country will be trying to recover from the damage inflicted upon it by another Republican president who was nothing but a pretender for years to come (and I don’t want to say anything about Palin, since any publicity, good or bad, will be spun by our media in her favor anyway).

But the real “takeaway” for me is the Reagan-Carter stuff; in his 1984 run for the presidency, Walter Mondale ended up not doing too many things the right way (he faced long odds from the start, though), but he absolutely nailed The Gipper once in one of the debates, as follows (here)…

MONDALE: … Now, Mr. President, you said: ''There you go again.'' Right. Remember the last time you said that?

REAGAN: Um hmm.

MONDALE: You said it when President Carter said that you were going (to) cut Medicare. And you said: ''Oh, no, there you go again, Mr. President.'' And what did you do right after the election? You went out and tried to cut $20 billion out of Medicare. And so when you say, ''There you go again,'' people remember this, you know. And people will remember that you signed the biggest tax increase in the history of California, and the biggest tax increase in the history of the United States. And what are you going to do? You've got (a) $260 billion deficit. You can't wash it away. You won't slow defense spending; you refuse to do that.

(I'll never forget how befuddled Reagan looked at that moment; didn't happen often though, I'll admit, until Iran-Contra, that is.)

And as Paul Krugman reminds us here…

For many middle- and low-income families, this tax increase (from the Social Security Reform Act of 1983) more than undid any gains from Mr. Reagan's income tax cuts. In 1980, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, middle-income families with children paid 8.2 percent of their income in income taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. By 1988 the income tax share was down to 6.6 percent — but the payroll tax share was up to 11.8 percent, and the combined burden was up, not down.

Given all of this, I’ll trade an amiable dunce with a “puckish wit” for a “humorless liberal” any day of the week.