Lobenthal.com

Maureen Dowd in the Times nails it on Obama’s defeatism and the way it’s robbed his Presidency of efficacy.

And, as she says, the President simply cannot/will not learn from past/ongoing failures and mistakes.

And–surprise!– it’s been based on bogus numbers.

Paul Krugman justifiably goes off in the Times on the way that “Our exaggerated fear of debt is, in short, creating a slow-motion catastrophe.”

While Richard Eskow at the Campaign for America’s Future blog lays out the way that the  “spreadsheet scandal” kicks the props out from the specious math used to justify  Obama’s proposal to cut Social Security.

And Eskow makes a welcome excoriation of Timothy Geithner’s seismically dreadful performance as Treasury Secretary.

The income now necessary to maintain what was a considered a middle-class existence in the 1950s-‘70s puts said existence beyond the reach of any below the bottom reaches of the one percent.  Job and retirement security, unions, all get eviscerated.  High-risk 401 (k) s replace defined-benefit pensions.  The pay gap between CEO and rank-and-file is now the highest in the entire world.  Former members of the middle class now are plunged into chronic economic insecurity and seemingly irrevocable decline.  And those who constitute what was the middle class and are now at the lower rungs of the one percent are themselves beset with constant financial anxiety.

I can only ask: where have your heads been these last forty years?

It’s been a combination of complacency, passivity, denial, somehow-learned helplessness that has kept the once-middle class from being able to take in, let alone do something about the way that the United States was being contorted into a two-class nation.

It’s extraordinary that, after the 1960s, what comprises today’s erstwhile middle-class, (both top and lower ends), seems to have in fact forgotten that they were living in a participatory democracy.  Their political withdrawal is astonishing.

I remember talking in the fall of 2002 to a long-term family friend: a retired school teacher, married to a lawyer, economically comfortable, liberal—but somehow lulled into a state of total political inertia.

She predicted quite rightly—this was even a few weeks before the Democrats caved to GW Bush’s demand for unilateral war-making powers—that the Republicans would exploit the threat of terrorism for electoral advantage. But “there is nothing I can do about it.”

We have learned the hard way that democracy is not a spectator sport—voting every two years is not enough.

I’m afraid that that is the crux of the Grand Bargain Obama continues to agitate for.   That’s not, however, what the majority of Americans want.  It is, however, exactly what not only Obama,  but a considerable amount of office-holders want.  This is a political class bought lock, stock and barrel by big money—including  the military contractors who benefit from an annual $1 trillion-plus military expenditure.

That military outlay is made possible by our taxpayer contribution, OUR largesse—we the people whom Romney and the Republicans mock as wanting things needlessly—wanting, in other words, something other than military engorgement in exchange for the hefty tax bites that WE, the non-rich, are socked with. Meanwhile, the rich and the super-duper rich  can continue to pay the lowest rates they’ve enjoyed in eighty years.

Not a pretty picture, is it?  And of course, there’s the megaphones supplied by a punditry class who carry water for the big-money.

Contrary to what the Baroness told us, there IS an alternative.

Robert Naiman, policy director at Just Foreign Policy, describes push back against this obscene situation that will take place April 25.

In yesterday’s Times, Leslie Kaufman wrote about the state of  self-publishing.  I was startled to read that fully one quarter of the books on Amazon’s best-seller list are now self-published.

Kos on Daily Kos mocks the spectacle of the Dems, you know, the ones who’ve worked so strenuously to hamstring themselves and their purported legislation by maintaining the filibuster, now letting out out a few petulant whimpers about it after gun control legislation goes down to defeat—natch.

Has any political party actively pursued defeat like today’s Democrats?

Are they moles?  Are they being paid to take a dive?

At Talkingpointsmemo.com, Igor Bobic reports: “McConnell’s Facebook Page Mocks Reid Moments After Gun Bill Fails.”

And there’s the lather of manufactured outrage from McConnell, who’s hell bent on distracting attention from his scurvy election strategizing!

And will the “mainstream” news  media assist in the politics of distraction.  Well. . .

At least the Lousville Courier-Journal has McConnell’s number:  “Mr. McConnell has masterfully diverted public attention from the offensive content of the tape — which is the real story here — to his outrage over how it was obtained.”

If the Democratic Party was functional, McConnell’s bait-and-switch would be mocked from every hilltop.

I knew they were represented the future of healthy journalism, when I came across them several months ago.  Now they’ve won a Pulitzer!

Common Dreams.org gives props and highlights their prize-winning investigative journalism on “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of.”

And the piece is available as an e-short from Amazon.

Still on that paper-reduction treadmill, I found a Playbill interview with Anne Meara from the mid-1990s, relevant to what took place over the last thirty-plus years in publishing and the media, the fashioning of media product catch-all composites, wherein the guiding principles are no-stone-unturned and lowest-common-denominator.

Meara:

“I think it’s very difficult to try to guess what everyone out there will like and try to please them.  Which is why the networks are in trouble.  I know it myself from the few times I’ve tried to write for television.  Something for you, something for you, something for YOU—until there’s nothing left.”

Obama’s shameless budget lieutenant, Gene Sperling, long a relentless advocate for cutting earned-benefit programs, went to Capitol Hill to make the White House’s customary “Don’t blame us-we’re only the Executive Branch of the United State of America” defense of its proposed cuts to Social Security.

The spiel didn’t go over so well with the rank and file, according to The Hill.

If Obama and his team had any political smarts they would have dropped this thing by now.