When are the Democrats going to start cracking some heads over those who have been egging them off the cliff called health care reform?

Answer: when they lose some elections.

Oh, they did lose elections in VA and NJ — only twice in the history of Virgina has the GOP taken all three top state positions, and this is one of those two times. And the exit polls show the independents voting for the GOP by a 2 to 1 margin in both NJ and VA.

After the Dems lost these elections, they barely passed health care reform out of the House. And still Sen. Reid and the White House and the House Leadership will not change their pass-health-care mantra.

What is ironic is the Dems have been down this road before, with President Clinton — and they somehow believe that a farther left reform with a government run health insurance plan is going to make everything politically better. But even in Ohio and Connecticut polls show that it is not going to be OK.

The Dems won’t discipline those who got them to this politically painful place because the Democratic party’s pursuit of health care reform is not politically rational. They are all collectively putting their hand in the flame, and will not pull it out.

Read More →

Paul Krugman is a respected economist and writer - and a Nobel Prize winner. He’s also the intellectual leader of the Democrats’ push for bigger government. From his perch at the New York Times, he pontificates on economics, politics, society, foreign affairs, and a whole host of issues.

But how much stock can you put in an ‘intellectual leader’ who seems to stifling dissent and refusing to admit when he’s wrong?

Yesterday Krugman wrote this on his blog:

It’s no secret that the reaction of a significant number of Republicans to the presidency of Barack Obama has been a bit, well, insane. And don’t start making false equivalences by talking about some video someone once posted on MoveOn’s web site, or some comment someone once posted at Daily Kos. Did any U.S. Senators compare the Bush administration to Germany on the eve of World War II? I don’t think so.

Read More →

Wow. This is just about the nastiest insult liberals can dish out:

I’m not too happy with the policy justifications we’re getting from the administration. It’s perfectly clear that the stimulus was too small; I think they know that too. But they’ve made a political judgment that (a) they can’t push another round through and (b) the thing to do right now is defend the policy they already have.

Maybe they’re right. But it does bring back unpleasant echoes of what I thought of as the Bush administration’s Vegematic approach to tax cuts: it slices, it dices, it purees! In other words, whatever policy they had been advocating in the past was still the perfect answer to whatever problems the economy faces now.

Krugman follows by asserting that ‘Obama is nothing like Bush.’ Right - except for trying to sell his preconceived spending agenda as the perfect answer for everything that was wrong with America, he’s nothing like Bush.

It’s worth noting the implicit criticisms Krugman levels: Obama either doesn’t understand the problems with the economy or lacks the conviction to address those problems. Chalk up one more case of buyer’s remorse.

The New Republic, under the leadership of Jonathan Cohn, has been the number one cheerleader for health care reform writ large.

His repeated exhortations for reform has had a similar effect to Paul Krugman of the NYT on the Democratic Party.

It is why this article from the New Republic is oh, so very, very important.

Stanley Greenberg was the pollster who lead the Democratic Party down the lose-56-seats-in-the-U.S.-House path of the spectacular failure of Hillary-care. OK, that is probably an overstatement, but, his polls had a whole lot to do with the Democratic Party pushing all their chips onto the table on Health Care Reform last time around.

Greenberg dusted off his memos to President Clinton and the poll questions he asked back then, and asked them again, now.

In an OH NO MR. BILL moment, the worst case scenario to the polling questions happened again, as Greenberg writes:

Read More →

(Via Sister Toldjah) We should never have let Paul Krugman fester behind that TimesSelect subscriber wall. It broke something inside of him:

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Now, I’m not one who would normally get into a man’s religious beliefs, but any faith that requires you to anathematize what was at last count 40% of the population* as ‘traitors to the planet’ seems to be a very silly faith for a pundit to have, or at least espouse openly. For extra irony? I’ll bet you that if and when Krugman gets muttering drunk, one of his favorite topics of slurred discussion is probably a tirade on the subject of the perfidy of fundamentalist Christians.

Moe Lane

PS: Sister Toldjah has more at the link on the topics on the peculiarities of Krugman’s faith, the sudden permissibility of defining dissent as treason, and this administration’s own War on Science.  No reason to reproduce her work.

Read More →

Naturally from our vantage point, Barack Obama is a left-wing terror as president. To name just a few things, he is turning our system from one of capitalism to one of socialism, he is attempting to undermine the Constitution by placing an activist on the Supreme Court, he is weakening our national security by frittering away the gains of the previous administration and by bending over backwards for our enemies while constantly flipping off our allies, he is looking to destroy our national healthcare system by introducing a disastrous single payer system, and he is attempting to give anti-business unions the power to destroy what is left of the business community that he himself hasn’t gotten around to crushing as of yet. We on the right are alarmed by his trip down the ruinous road that Europe has already well traveled to rueful results.

One would think that the American left (or the anti-American left as the case may be) would be thrilled that their most fantasized about social, political, and economic sledgehammers were being wielded by their Obammessiah. But, one might be surprised to see that the extremists on the left are beginning to rumble in seething anger over the fact that, to date, Obama hasn’t gone fast enough or far enough to the extreme left to suit them. One of these wild-eyed, bomb-throwers has even just called for his resignation.

So, are we beginning to see waning the far left’s love affair with The One? Might this disappointment turn into the sort of lefty outrage that it did with Lyndon Baines Johnson? Will Barack Obama’s left wing flap him to death?

Read More →

Paul Krugman blatantly misquoted Arnold Kling. The evidence is clear. It was shameful enough that Maureen Dowd was able to get away with her efforts at Dowdification. Krugman should not be allowed to get away with his sloppy writing and reporting–especially given the fact that the sloppy writing and reporting smeared Arnold Kling’s good name.

Pressure on this score should not relent until a correction is issued. As I write this, there is no correction either on Krugman’s editorial, or on his blog. Krugman makes it a habit to viciously attack the motives and honesty of his political opponents. The longer he goes without correcting the record and admitting that he misquoted and smeared Kling, the less standing he has–assuming that he ever had the standing in the first place–to give such lectures in the future.

From the diaries, by Erick.

Today’s New York Times features Paul Krugman continuing his role in Obama propaganda machine while pretending to be an Economist. In today’s installment of “I have a Nobel, so I must know Economics”, Krugman lashes out at “The Destructive Center”.

Before I spend a few paragraphs taking issue with Krugman’s direct points, I think we first have to reflect on how far we’ve come as a country. Just one decade ago, it was a “vast right wing conspiracy” that was the enemy of the left, the only thing holding them back from a collectivist utopia. Today, the “destructive center” is thwarting their attainment of nirvana. These poor guys just can’t seem to catch a break.

Read More →

The Economist notices the hypocrisy of Krugman & Co. After eight years of denouncing the “bitterness” and “polarization” and “divisiveness” that supposedly came down the pipeline from 1600 Penn. Ave., Krugman & Co. now want more of it.

The Internet has a long memory and eventually, the electoral worm will turn. When it does, Krugman’s words may well be remembered by those who currently “huff and puff.” Of course, one naturally expects that by then, Krugman will rediscover the sweet, sweet joys of bipartisanship and decry as “bitter,” “polarizing” and “divisive” the Republicans who would act the way he is encouraging the Obama Administration to act now.

I suppose that this kind of hypocrisy must really be blatant if the mainstream media has picked up on it so quickly and is so eager to denounce it. The hypocrites in question are really pieces of work, aren’t they? One almost thinks that they believe Google does not exist and some form of mass contagion has wiped out the memory of just about every person in the country.

Matt Yglesias has a very good post on Robert Barro’s latest.  Brad DeLong seems to agree with Matt.  Paul Krugman uses the word “boneheaded” to describe the Barro piece.

This exchange is a good micro-cosm of how the stimulus debate has proceeded.  A highly respected anti-stimulus economist puts up some anti-stimulus evidence in a highly imperfect test (in Barro’s defense, he did cover more than just WWII).  The anti-stimulus economist is attacked by pro-stimulus economists.  But the pro-stimulus proponents are focused on attack.  They are not putting up comparable empirical evidence of their own for the efficacy of fiscal policy and there is a reason for that, namely that the evidence isn’t really there.

I fully admit that I don’t trust the oft-cited evidence that tax cuts are 4x better stimulus than government spending boosts; I think the result is a mirage from underspecified models.  Overall we simply don’t know how well the proposed stimulus will work — if at all (is aggregate demand always the relevant war?).  It’s a kind of Hail Mary pass, an enduring belief in aggregate demand macroeconomics at the theoretical level, even in light of broken banks, sectoral shifts, and nasty, failing expectations, all mixed in with hard to spend well, slow to come on line, monies.  Yes it could work but our agnosticism should be strong rather than just perfunctory.

–Tyler Cowen. Go to his post for pertinent links. Cowen asks for evidence that the stimulus will work since he assumes that one will pass. I don’t think that he will get it; DeLong, Krugman and all the rest are content to launch calumnies against anyone and everyone who speaks out in any way against the stimulus. It’s a lot easier than putting forth a cogent argument, after all.

(Via Tom Smith.)