The Commentariat -- April 18

The Attorney General should resign if he can't bring this case [against Goldman Sachs executives]. -- Elliot Spitzer

Eliot Spitzer, Matt Taibbi & Anderson Cooper discuss Goldman Sachs banksters. Via Susie Madrak at Crooks & Liars, who has a good comment to accompany the video:

     ... ** "Too Big to Prosecute." Madrak also recommends this article by William Greider in The Nation on "how Wall Street crooks get out of jail free." CW: so do I.

Paul Krugman offers a defense of Democratic values as expressed in President Obama's budget speech. In so doing, he eviscerates the Heritage Foundation, which provided Paul Ryan with his fake budget numbers. Krugman also takes down Republican claims that the 2010 election was a mandate:

But last year the G.O.P. ran against what it called the 'massive Medicare cuts' contained in the health reform law. How, then, can the election have provided a mandate for a plan that not only would preserve all of those cuts, but would go on, over time, to dismantle Medicare completely?

     ... Krugman's most important point is his disdain for what is being hyped as a "bipartisan solution":

... right now 'bipartisan' is usually code for assembling some conservative Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans — all of them with close ties to the wealthy, and many who are wealthy themselves — and having them proclaim that low taxes on high incomes and drastic cuts in social insurance are the only possible solution. ...

     ... Comments on Krugman's column are here.

... Steve Benen on the same subject: "By all appearances, Democrats in [the Gang of Six] are prepared to effective[ly] give up any hopes of progressive governance for a generation and give in to entitlement cuts, in exchange for tax increases that sane Republicans should consider a no-brainer anyway." ...

... But conserv-o-bot Ross Douthat of the New York Times says, really, the middle class must suffer. The comments are here. ...

     ... Joan Walsh of Salon: Ross Douthat, like so many conservatives, is afraid of "brown and beige" people. (See also Karen Garcia [#2] on this in the comments to Douthat's disgusting little column).

George Packer of the New Yorker on a few reasons Republicans win all the battles with President Obama: "... they’re willing to deploy legislative terrorism — threatening to shut down the government and to allow the United States to default on its debt — to get their way. In politics, the side with a fixed notion of ends and an unscrupulous approach to means always has the advantage."

The effective rate for the top 400 taxpayers has gone from 30 cents on the dollar in 1993 to 22 cents at the end of the Clinton years to 16.6 cents under Bush. So their effective rate has gone down more than 40 percent [CW: since 1993!]. The overarching drive right now is to push the burden of government, of taxes, down the income ladder. -- David Cay Johnston, tax expert ...

... Adieu, Noblesse Oblige. E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post: "If the ruling class were as worried about the deficit as it claims to be, it would accept that the wealthiest people in society have a duty to pony up more for the very government whose police power and military protect them, their property and their wealth."

Zachary Goldfarb & Perry Bacon, Jr., of the Washington Post: "President Obama will hit the road this week and forcibly deliver his message that a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes on the rich is necessary to rein in the nation’s rocketing debt — a high-stakes effort to rally public support ahead of a series of contentious budget battles in Congress.

From Yesterday's Ledes: The Hill: "Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner boldly predicted that Congress will vote to raise the debt ceiling next month, warning that failure to do so would bring 'catastrophic' consequences for the U.S. and global economies. Geithner, appearing on ABC's 'This Week,' said that if House Republicans were to push the vote to the brink or fail to raise the limit, it would 'make the last [financial] crisis look like a tame, modest crisis.'" ...

... Greg Sargent points out the money quote (literally) from Geithner's ABC News "This Week" interview:

They [the Republican leadership] recognize it, and they told the president that on Wednesday in the White House. And I sat there with them, and they said, we recognize we have to do this. And we’re not going to play around with it. -- Tim Geithner. Here's the video:

     ... Sargent supplies a response from Speaker Boehner's spokesman:

Boehner has been very clear: the American people demand that any increase in the debt ceiling be accompanied by spending cuts, and real reforms so we can keep cutting. They won’t accept another increase in the federal government’s credit card limit without action to address the underlying problem of runaway government spending. ...

... Meanwhile, Philip Rucker of the Washington Post reports that "Financial industry executives, business leaders and Treasury Department officials are visiting the [Tea Party] freshmen in their offices, briefing them in small groups and even cornering them at dinner parties. It’s all part of a behind-the-scenes campaign to school congressional newcomers in the economic stakes of Washington’s next big fiscal fight: over the debt ceiling.

On my watch, controllers will not be paid to take naps. We're not going to allow that. -- Ray LaHood, Transportation Secretary ...

... Joan Lowy of the AP: "Air traffic controllers will get an extra hour off between shifts so they don't doze off at work, but officials have rejected another proposed remedy: on-the-job napping....That's exactly the opposite of what scientists and the Federal Aviation Administration's own fatigue working group said was needed even before the five cases of sleeping controllers that have been disclosed since late March." CW: Ray LaHood is a Republican. Did you really expect him to believe scientists?

Eric Lipton of the New York Times: "For the past four years, the foreign companies that control the global Internet poker industry have helped bankroll an elaborate lobbying campaign here, seeking to keep the United States from shutting their American operations down. Former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, Republican of New York, has been the public face of the effort, which has included ... hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to a disparate assortment of lawmakers, including Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada.... But late last week, the United States Department of Justice ... indicted top executives at PokerStars, FullTilt Poker and Absolute Poker, accusing them of fraud and money laundering. In doing so the government has taken on a politically powerful industry that for a while seemed like it might transform gambling around the world."

Right Wing World *

When Republicans are so fact-free that even Fred Hiatt -- the right-wing, warmongering editor of the Washington Post -- turns against them: Hiatt writes, "  The Republican self-deception that draws the most attention is the refusal to believe that Barack Obama is American-born. But there are Republican doctrinal fantasies that may be more dangerous: the conviction that taxes can always go down, but never up, for example, and the gathering consensus among Republican leaders that human-caused climate change does not exist."

In Right Wing World, Double-Talk Is Best, but Stonewalling Works, too. Igor Volsky of Think Progress: at a Tea Party event in New Hampshire, "exploring" Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty says he "generally" supports the Ryan budget plan, but he won't say whether he supports the Medicare cuts -- which are a central, defining element to the Ryan plan. Here's video of the Q & Not-A:

"Paul Ryan Shrugged." Karen Garcia examines the hypocrisies of Ayn Rand & of her political acolytes who have turned her inane novels into disastrous government policies & proposals: "Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan, the Brangelina of nihilistic free market capitalism, are both having career surges this weekend -- she with a movie premiere and he with another gala performance of 'Killing Medicare' on the Sunday morning talk show circuit.  So what if one of them is physically dead, and the other is an intellectual flat-liner?" ...

... In an op-ed comment (#7), Garcia noted that "Ryan" is an anagram for "Ayn R." But for a real Rand (not named for Ayn, which he can't even pronounce [see video in the April 13 Commentariat]), you might want to check out Rand Paul's appearance on CNN's "State of the Union" where he says a budget compromise is necessary. Here's Paul's idea of a compromise:

But the compromise is not to raise taxes.... The compromise is for conservatives to admit that the military budget’s going to have to be cut.... Liberals will have to compromise and will have to cut domestic welfare.... The compromise is where we cut, not where we raise taxes. The problem is if you give them more money in Washington, they're not to be trusted.

Donald Trump's Humility Tour, Con'd.:

I'm a much bigger business man and have (a) much, much bigger net worth. I mean, my net worth is many, many, many times Mitt Romney. I built a very big net worth and I’d like to put that ability ... to work for this country. -- Donald Trump, on CNN, the new go-to network for Republicans. With video.

... Andrew Leonard of Salon: How rich is Donald Trump, really? But "The more interesting question is just how good a businessman Trump is. His career has been full of wild swings and bankruptcies and desperate corporate restructurings." ...

... AND the Donald picks the "Worst President Ever." Again and again: Bush II, Carter, Obama, whoever.

* Where facts never intrude.

News Ledes

** Wow! Tucson Sentinel: "Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill Monday that would have required presidential candidates to provide their birth certificates to appear on the ballot, and another that would have allowed guns to be carried on school grounds. Brewer also vetoed a bill that would have directed the governor to set up an alliance with other states to regulate health care, in a challenge to the federal government."

Washington Post: President "Obama and his wife, Michelle, reported a gross income of $1,728,096 in 2010, according to their federal tax returns, which the White House released Monday. President Obama collects a $400,000 salary as commander in chief, but received the vast majority of his income from sales of his three non-fiction books: 'The Audacity of Hope,' 'Dreams From My Father' and 'Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters.' The Obamas paid $453,770 in federal taxes. The First Family donated $245,075, about 14 percent of their income, to 36 different charities. The largest gift was a $131,075 donation to Fisher House Foundation, a nonprofit that builds homes near military hospitals where family members can temporarily stay free of charge while a wounded service member recovers." You can link to pdfs of the Obamas' and Bidens' tax returns & tax receipts here (pdf's).

Washington Post: "A Cleveland air traffic controller and a manager were suspended by the Federal Aviation Administration this week after a movie soundtrack was heard playing over a radio frequency by the pilot of a military aircraft, the FAA said Monday night."

Wall Street Journal: "A blunt warning Monday from a credit rating firm about the U.S. government's mounting debt pushed stock markets lower and intensified political divisions in Washington about how best to tackle growing deficits. Both the Obama administration and House Republicans scrambled to gain leverage from Standard & Poor's changing its outlook on U.S. Treasury securities to 'negative' from 'stable.'" New York Times story here.