All my favorite soup mixes are out of business. First Aunt Patsy's and now Bean Cuisine. Today I'm trying to replicate the Bean Cuisine Thick as Fog Pea Soup from scratch. So far, so good, but I hate when things get discontinued.

In the new department, Facebook will be announcing its offering of e-mail through the domain FB.com on Monday. The reason: to compete with G-mail. Sunday, AOL is expected to launch their new e-mail, Project Phoenix, through phoenix.aol.com.I'm sticking with G-mail and AOL. FB is just so privacy invasive and they add things to your page you don't want and can't get rid of. Like chat with a photo gallery of your friends -- and events. I still prefer the AOL program to the web-based email, and I don't like having all my e-mails stored in "the cloud" but times change and we are forced to change with them. [More..]

One of the things I wrote a lot about early in the Obama Administration was political bargaining. Another theme was the role of activists. On both issues, the liberal blogosphere, in large measure, completely missed the boat in my estimation, choosing to largely defend the ineffectual political bargaining techniques of the Obama Administration and criticizing activists for not being sufficiently supportive of feeble Obama policy initiatives. I dubbed these folks the Beltway Bloggers in an attempt to separate them from the activist blogger. Unfortunately, many of the Beltway Bloggers, Ezra Klein in particular, like to play liberal activist on TV and MSNBC, Keith Olbermann in particular, let them play that role. It was a terrible mistake for all.

Digby writes about a TV segment that illustrates why:

Sam Seder went on to [say . . .] the left has been willing to compromise for a long time, while the right hasn't. [Conservative Matt] Lewis, grinning like a jack-o-lantern, ended with this sage observation:

Well I think the real world implication here Dylan, is that if the Republican base does not want to compromise and the Democratic base is willing to compromise Republicans are going to win more public policy battles than they lose.

What can you say to that?

That he's right, that's what you can say. The question then is what do you do to try and change that? That's the question for progressive activists.

Speaking for me only

Taibbi writes about the foreclosure due process crisis in the United States (repeated disclosure, I work in this area for distressed homeowners) and gets to the nub of the macro issue underlying it all:

[I]t's the unpaid bills that are incidental and the lost paperwork that matters. It turns out that underneath that little iceberg tip of exposed evidence lies a fraud so gigantic that it literally cannot be contemplated by our leaders, for fear of admitting that our entire financial system is corrupted to its core — with our great banks and even our government coffers backed not by real wealth but by vast landfills of deceptively generated and essentially worthless mortgage-backed assets.

You've heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can't admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn't be, but often are, closed.

(Emphasis supplied.) A co-conspirator in this massive fraud and scandal is the United States Treasury Department led by the incompetent and corrupt Tim Geithner. When the history is written on the Obama Administration, this could well be the lede.

Speaking for me only

I like a lot of games today. One game I really like, Auburn (-7) over Georgia, is now off the board because Cam Newton may not play due to potential NCAA violations. It's going to cost him the Heisman and maybe Auburn's chance to play for the national championship. FTR, I think college players should be paid. A lot of people are making a lot of money on college football and most of the players are not. I also want a college football playoff and hope the season produces a mess in order to increase the pressure for a playoff.

I'm 65-69 for the season. I like a lot of games today, some more than others so I will include my units (1 unit play unless otherwise indicated) in the picks as well so you can follow along with my monetary results today.

Cincinnati (+5.5) over West Va., Ga. Tech(+3) over Miami, Northwestern (+10) over Iowa, Indiana (+22) over Wisconsin, South Florida (+3) over Louisville, Ole Miss (+3) over Tenn (2 units), Kentucky (-15) over Vandy (3 units), Iowa State(-2.5) over Colorado (3 units), Army (+1.5) over Kent, Notre Dame (+7) over Utah, Syracuse (-3) over Rutgers, Texas Tech (+15) over Oklahoma, Texas A&M (-3) over Baylor (5 units), Miss State (+14) over Alabama (2 units), Cal (+21) over Oregon, Ariz. St (+6) over Stanford, Arizona (-4) over USC, and Nevada (-8) over Fresno State.

Go Gators!

Open Thread.

The expected merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast was confirmed today. Newsweek online will no longer exist, but be folded into the Daily Beast. Here's how it will work. Tina Brown will be Editor in Chief of both, and the new name is the Newsweek Daily Beast Co. Tina has more here. Howard Kurtz adds this comment from Tina in his column, which I think is absolutely right. Reading a weekly magazine for news is obsolete:

The effort to keep on persisting with something called a newsmagazine is probably outdated at this point,” Brown says. “Magazines are great venues for predictive and reconstructive journalism, for cultural journalism, for narrative journalism, for profile journalism. All these things can be done online, but do work better with the rhythms of print.”

With Newsweek's print edition to morph into something other than news, it leaves Time Magazine as the sole survivor in the newsweekly print market, since U.S. News & World Report also announced recently it would cease print publication and just publish digitally.

Why do weekly magazines like People still thrive? Is it the photos? Is it that readers don't follow celebrities on a daily basis the way they follow the news, so enough of the material is still news to them a week later? And does anyone subscribe to either, or just pick them up in airports and at the hair salon or doctor's office?

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

I always refer to my self as a Centrist, in part because I think it is expedient, but really, I think I pretty much am a Centrist, in the sense that my views fall pretty much in the middle of opinion in the country. In the Beltway, probably I would be Left, but the Beltway is a bubble all its own.

I tell you this as a preface to commenting on this from Matt Yglesias:

Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals by a large margin and moderates are a much bigger force in the Democratic coalition than in the Republican one. So if you want a deal, appointing an orthodox conservative Republican and a moderate Democrat from North Carolina makes a lot of sense.

This is fun with labels nonsense. The Catfood Commission's proposals are filled with proposals that not only are bad, they are far outside the mainstream of what Americans want, and, more relevantly, what Congress will ever approve. I mean really - eliminate the mortgage interest deduction is going to happen? Cutting Social Security benefits is going to happen? Never. Ever. The Catfood Commission proposal is unserious and unSerious. What might it be about? I dunno, but Yglesias' post is silly.

Speaking for me only

Speaker Pelosi:

[O]ur position in the House has been we support the tax cuts for the middle — for everyone, but not an additional tax cut at the high end. It’s too costly. It’s $700 billion. One year would be around $70 billion. That’s a lot of money to give a tax cut at the high end. And I remind you that those tax cuts have been in effect for a very long time, they did not create jobs.

The advantage of having Speaker Pelosi continue as Dem leader in the next Congress would be precisely to articulate the liberal position. If in 2012, Dems decide to choose another image for the election, they can retire Pelosi. For now, the reality is Dems will have no say in what legislation comes out of the House the next two years. But they can distance themselves from policies that they disagree with. And of course, lame duck Speaker Pelosi can basically say no to all the bad ideas floating around now. Let President Obama and Speaker Boehner pass their bad policies in the next Congress, if they can.

Speaking for me only

Matt Bennet of the dishonest Right Wing Third Way:

"I don't think Russ Feingold lost because he wasn't liberal enough," said Matthew Bennett, a vice president at Third Way, a group that urges Democrats to focus on such issues as deficit reduction.

If Russ Feingold had been more conservative, he still would have lost. And Blanche Lincoln, Gene Taylor, Travis Childers, Jim Marshall, Walt Minnick and all the rest of the Blue Dogs who lost did not lose because they were too conservative. They all lost because the economy sucks.

A good, honest, constructive discussion of policy and politics would be healthy for the Democratic Party. But The Third Way is not interested in that. They are interested in dishonestly pushing their Right Wing agenda.

Speaking for me only

Matt Yglesias writes:

I think that where a lot of progressive political junkies go wrong is that they think “blame Republicans for failing to pass plan to fix the economy” is a close substitute for “fix the economy.” In reality, the evidence that fixing the economy would help Democrats politically is overwhelming, while the evidence that the plan/block/blame strategy would work is non-existent.

I don't know what "progressive political junkies" Yglesias is referring to, but most progressives critical of the Obama economic policies argue that Obama should have fought for better policies, because, you know, maybe he would have gotten them. A lot of folks are pretending the inadequate stimulus and the utter failure of a housing/foreclosure policy implemented by the Obama Administration was not what they wanted. In fact, it was. Was it the best they could do? No one knows because they didn't try to do better.

In the bad old days of Clinton Triangulation, the Clinton Administration enacted a policy they thought was best, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. That bill passed in the House by 218-216 and with Vice President Gore casting the tiebreaking vote in the Senate. The Obama Administration, with a less conservative Congress, did not fight as hard for a better economic policy. That is what I criticize.

Speaking for me only

This DKos diary, a classic in the "Leave Obama Alone" genre, does raise the question of what precisely can President Obama do regarding the Bush tax cuts.

First, it is true that the President himself can not enact legislation - he either signs or vetoes whatever the Congress passes. But therein lies the point - the Congress cannot enact legislation without the approval of the President (excepting of course the extremely unlikely possibility that legislation would pass with veto-proof majorities.) Second, if no legislation is passed, the Bush tax cuts simply expire. To wit, the President CAN end the Bush tax cuts by refusing to sign legislation extending the Bush tax cuts. Third, the President and most Democrats in Congress want to enact new middle class tax cuts (in essence the middle class tax cuts portion of the Bush tax cuts.) The GOP and Evan Bayh Democrats are adamant that they will hold the middle class tax cuts hostage to tax cuts for the rich.

So what's the President to do? He clearly has two choices here - (1) hold his ground and veto any legislation that cuts taxes for the rich or (2) capitulate and embrace the Bush tax cuts. There is a possibility in theory of a "decoupling" compromise, where middle class tax cuts are made permanent and the tax cuts for the wealthy are made "temporary." In my view, the GOP will not bite. They will not permit decoupling. So the reality is the President has to decide if this is worth fighting for. My view is, if not this, then what? Contrary to the view expressed in the "Leave Obama Alone" diary, this issue really is about Obama and what he is going to do. For better or worse.

Speaking for me only

Surprisingly, it's Eugene Robinson:

Making the tax cuts permanent for the wealthy would increase the deficit by $700 billion over the next decade. Which party claims to be urgently, desperately concerned about the deficit? The Republicans, of course. So which party is prepared to bust the budget, if that's what it takes, to serve the interests of the rich? The GOP. And which party, to get its way, refuses to approve desperately needed tax relief for the bruised and battered middle class? Once again, the Republicans.

Now, which party holds the presidency and, until January, ample majorities in both houses of Congress? That would be the Democrats. Which party can point to public opinion polls indicating that Americans support its position that the Bush tax cuts should be extended only for the middle class? That, too, would be the Democrats. And finally, which party somehow appears to be looking for a way to lose this argument and capitulate? Incredibly, the Democrats.

(Emphasis supplied.) It's incredible that the Obama Administration and its Catfood Commission can play this dishonest game about the need to destroy the social safety net at the same exact time they are about to permanently extend the irresponsible Bush tax cuts.

Speaking for me only

Krugman:

[H[ow, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates [. . .]?

[. . . W]hat the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.

[. . . T]his proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction? [. . . C]an’t we say that for all its flaws, the Bowles-Simpson proposal is a serious effort to tackle the nation’s long-run fiscal problem? No, we can’t. [. . .] It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

(Emphasis supplied.) Yep. Speaking for me only