Lobenthal.com

For The Wall Street Journal, I review Facts & Fancies, Paul Taylor’s new book, a compilation of short pieces.

According to Sahil Kapur’s reportage on Talkingpointsmemo.com, in his meeting with the House yesterday the President “phrased” his rationale behind his advocacy of cuts to Social Security in a highly dishonest way.  He claimed that cuts to benfeits would extend the program for 10 or 15 years—despite the fact that the surplus it now has will enable full benefits to be paid for the next 20 years—and would constitute simply  “a technical change.”

Somehow, however, this “technical change” will mysteriously take money out of the Social Security checks recipients have paid for-with their salaries—and, I might add, by the sweat of their brow as well.

In that case,  why don’t we apply that same “technical change” to Obama and the House members’ retirement pensions?  They certainly don’t work as hard as most of the Social Security recipients whose checks will be diminshed.

Sly guy that he is, Kapur also shames Nancy Pelosi by reiterating her descent into full-bore Orwell-speak late last year when she said that cutting benefits was “a strengthening of Social Security.”

Let’s put it this way, Nancy: at this rate, you ain’t ever getting that gavel back!

“Hundreds of Thousands Dead, Trillions Spent”

 Jon Queally at Commondreams.org describes the costs of our invasion of Iraq.

Saying there is no alternative between decimating Social Security the way the Republicans want to do, and chipping away at it the way that Obama prefers.

 Is she kidding?

 On the one hand, her duplicity is shocking, even for a pol, on the other, her political maladroitness is just as startling.  This is a woman who was born into politics back in practically the ward heeler days. Seventy + plus years old, she enables the trap set by the Republicans, who long ago sized up a President, who quite apart from a decided sympathy to Republican ideology, is a political rube with little governing experience prior to the White House.

It’s interesting that each calamitous fail by Obama then becomes justification for the next fall-on-their swords move by the Dems.  Obama screwed up the party so badly that we just don’t have any other choice!!

What Pelosi and, reportedly, Reid are doing amounts to political malpractice.  The backlash from voters will be ferocious; perhaps only then will it be possible to do what should be done forthwith: remove both Reid and Pelosi from leadership positions.

And Obama should have been primary-ed.

Greg Sargent in The Washington Post: 

“Dems know — or should know — that if they take ownership of the entitlement cuts Republicans say they want, GOP strategists will not hesitate to attack them again over them in 2014 and 2016. . . . they won’t be happy until they see him propose entitlement cuts in a way that will give the President and Democrats — and not Republicans — ownership of them.”

Last night I spoke to Sam Lefkowitz, Linda Gravenites’s widower.  I told him how I’m writing a chapter on Linda in my new book.  He told me how many of Linda’s clothing sketches, along with samples of his woodworking, are to be found at sonic.net/artisans.

Or is it just plain stupidity?

We’ll see exactly what’s at work among the President and his grifter handlers as his poll numbers tank over his insistence on implementing the Republicans’ agenda to cut Social Security, Medicare, and whatever other programs-that-benefit-people’s-lives he/they can get their hands on.

It has been, as Norman Solomon writes on Commondreams.org, an “austerity-crazed” White House.  Will it continue to be as the graphic evidence mounts that the obsession is destroying his presidency?

“We are not going to give up on destroying the health care system for the American people.” – Congressman Paul Ryan, March 12, 2013

The “pundits” told Elizabeth Warren what they tell every Democrat who actually wants to implement a Democratic platform that got them elected: sit on her hands and turn into another nice, passive, Democratic progressive-in-name only.   She demurred.

Sahil Kapur at talkingpointsmemo.com shows how.

On his obsessive, incredibly destructive deficit-reduction-detour from addressing the country’s actual problems?

 “The deficit is falling more rapidly than it has for generations,” reality-based-economist Paul Krugman writes in the Times.