In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress website, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira presents some numbers deregulation-loving conservatives are not going to like. Says Teixeira:

Conservatives love to interpret the current sour public mood as rejection of the government’s role in the economy. In reality, that public sentiment is primarily traceable to the poor economy and has little to do with an embrace of conservative ideological views on government.
…A recent CNN poll asked the public whether it supported or opposed the new financial regulation reform bill, which it explicitly described as increasing “federal regulation over banks, Wall Street investors, and other financial institutions.” The public said it supported the new bill by a strong 58-39 margin.

Asked if they approve or disapprove of government regulation of business in the same poll, respondents said they approved of government regulation of business by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent, adds Teixeira.
So much for the myth that a majority of Americans support Republican policies about government regulation of banks and business. As Teixeira puts it, “Conservative claims that the public is embracing their antigovernment ideology should be taken with a grain of salt — in fact, a whole cellar full.”

Would-be U.S. Senator Charlie Crist of Florida is going to have a very long nine weeks until election day. As the probability of Republican control of the Senate increases from “remote” to “long-shot,” interest in Crist’s partisan alignment is naturally increasing as well, and it’s already clear he can’t just kick the can down the road until November 3, much as he likes to say that he intends to “caucus with the people of Florida.”
During a CNN interview yesterday, the permatanned exile from the Florida GOP was extraordinarily frank in making not only his future party affiliation in the Senate but his views on the issues of the day strictly contingent on determining what it takes to get elected:

“No. 1, this is a moot question unless I win, so I’ve got to work very hard to make sure I achieve the trust and support of my fellow Floridians to continue to be a public servant for them,” Crist said. “I think they know the way I’m going to go: I’m going to go the way that’s best for them, and I sincerely mean that — and that’s very important. I don’t have to say whether I’m going to caucus with the Democrats or Republicans.”

By way of illustration of what he means by “caucusing with the people of Florida,” Crist indicated he opposed the Senate’s health care reform legislation, but would work to “fix it.” I’d bet the farm, if I had one, that Crist’s “independent” stand on this subject can be boiled down to support for the popular elements of health reform (e.g., bans on preexisting condition exclusions), and opposition to the unpopular parts (e.g., cost controls and coverage mandates). To “fix” health reform by deleting the unpopular measures would, of course, create an incoherent mess of a non-system in which health care costs would truly skyrocket for everybody, including the federal government.
In any event, the Florida (and perhaps DC) Democrats who are keeping Crist’s candidacy afloat need to understand that today’s GOP is simply not going to tolerate a Senate Caucus member of truly independent views on anything of major national importance. Perhaps Crist could shake down Mitch McConnell for some personal perks and privileges in exchanging for making him Majority Leader of the Senate, but anyone who remembers the joy with which conservatives greeted the 2009 party switch by Arlen Specter should realize that significant ideological diversity is no longer on the table for Republican senators. If Crist wants to set himself up as some sort of weathervane for public opinion in Florida, or secure significant public spending commitments for his state, his only avenue is to caucus with the far more tolerant Democrats. He might as well be forced to admit that right now, or instead admit that his “independent” status is no more than a ruse to get a second conservative Republican candidate on the ballot this November.

It is difficult not to contemptuously dismiss Glen Beck’s attempt to co-opt Martin Luther King into a supporter of right-wing conservatism as just one more piece of evidence for his lurid concoction of delusional megalomania, clinical paranoia and boundless self-pity. But, unfortunately, many Americans too young to remember the 60’s only know three or four sentences from King’s “I have a dream” speech and can therefore easily be cynically manipulated into believing virtually any nonsense imaginable about King’s outlook and philosophy.
But what did King actually think about the right-wing conservatives like Glen Beck of his own era? Well, for a start, here, taken from chapter 23 of his autobiography is what Martin Luther King said about Barry Goldwater during the 1964 election:

It was both unfortunate and disastrous that the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater as its candidate for President of the United States.
In foreign policy Mr. Goldwater advocated a narrow nationalism, a crippling isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude that could plunge the whole world into the dark abyss of annihilation.
On social and economic issues, Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century. The issue of poverty compelled the attention of all citizens of our country. Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated.
On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand.
In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.
While I had followed a policy of not endorsing political candidates, I felt that the prospect of Senator Goldwater being President of the United States so threatened the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that I could not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represented.

If there was ever a fine opportunity for progressives to make Glen Beck’s followers stop and think for a moment, it would be to upload this quote to every Tea Party discussion site in the U.S. and watch them try to figure out a way to reconcile the absurd mass of contradictions into which Beck’s cynical distortion of history has plunged them.
Martin Luther King’s philosophy — easily available in his five books and dozens of collections — is the most powerful and majestic refutation of right-wing conservatism penned in 20th century America. If only — if only — conservatives would really stop and read what that great man actually said. That, indeed would be a magnificent “Dream” for today.

Just in case you missed it, CBS hired an aerial photography company to take aerial pictures of the Beckapalloza and then give the photos to three different photo analysts to do independent crowd estimates.

The firm came up with a consensus estimate of around 80-90,000 people which is a great deal less than a simple glance at the Washington Post crowd photos would suggest. The difference may be accounted for by the fact that a substantial number of the people at the event were sitting in lounge chairs or otherwise picnicking, which would create a much more spread out crowd along the sides of the mall than a packed in, everybody standing event. This would not be easily detected in standard long-distance crowd photos but would be visible in large scale blow-ups with magnifying glasses and grid lines.

In any event, the organizers only pulled a permit for 300,000 people which suggests that they knew from the number of busses Freedomworks had chartered and other sources that the attendance would be unlikely to actually come close to that number — not to mention the 500,000 to a million numbers conservative boosters are now bouncing around (in fact, if the number of chartered busses and parked cars yesterday indicated that three to four hundred thousand people had been wandering around D.C., you can bet your bananas we would have heard about it by now)  

The significant fact is that CBS estimated attendance of slightly less than 100,000 is not substantially different than the number that it was estimated showed up last September for the 9/12 rally. It suggests that while the Freedomworks/Fox machine has clearly succeeded in creating a reliable, rotating cadre of demonstrators it can pull out for events, it has not been able to generate a steadily growing army.

The people who came to yesterday’s rather peculiar revival meeting/pep rally are likely to be a somewhat different group than those who would have come to another raw-meat anti-Obama- fest like last Septembers’ protest. But it’s beginning to appear that that with both kinds of conservative audiences, Freedomworks/FOX may have reached a plateau in the numbers it can currently pull for either kind of hootenanny.

There are two more big conservative events scheduled for later this fall. The attendance at those events will help to clarify the picture.

In the welter of confusion and misinformation that has characterized the “ground zero mosque” brouhaha, it’s kind of important to isolate the extent to which Americans actually seem to hate Muslims.
That’s what Ron Brownstein’s done in his latest column, and it’s pretty clear there’s a partisan and ideological split at play here:

In a national Time magazine poll released last week, just under half of all Americans agreed that Islam is more likely than other faiths to promote violence against nonbelievers. But that number rose to 70 percent among Republicans and nearly three-fourths among conservatives. Fully 55 percent of all Americans said they believed that most U.S. Muslims are patriotic; but only 42 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of conservatives agreed. Perhaps most strikingly, 43 percent of conservatives and a 48 percent plurality of Republicans said Muslims should not be allowed to run for president. Only about one-fourth of Democrats and independents agreed.

Muslims should not be allowed to run for president?
Then again, this is the same Time poll in which a plurality of Republicans said Barack Obama is a Muslim. So I guess in their view you can’t have the First Amendment interfering with the God-given constitutional right to conservative rule.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Average Americans are noticing what wise economists have been arguing for quite some time: Bubble-driven economic downturns differ qualitatively from standard business-cycle recessions. Not only do they go deeper; GDP takes longer to rebound, and job creation proceeds more slowly.
The mechanism is straightforward. As the value of assets used as collateral collapses, so does borrowing. This depresses consumption, and the real economy dips, making it much harder for businesses and households to service the debts incurred during boom times. Household consumption remains sluggish until debt is reduced to a level that can comfortably be serviced out of current income, a process that cannot proceed without an increase in the household savings rate. The larger the debt overhang, the longer it will take to work off the excess.
As recent as the late 1990s, total household debt stood under $5 trillion, roughly 90 percent of disposable income. After a decade-long borrowing binge, debt peaked in late 2007 at about $12.5 trillion–a stunning 133 percent of disposable income. According to the latest report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the total had declined to $11.7 trillion by the first quarter of 2010, a reduction of $812 billion (6.5 percent) from the peak. During the same period, not surprisingly, the household savings rate rose from 2 percent to more than 6 percent.
While these are sizeable changes, there is good reason to believe that the process of household debt reduction is still in an early stage. Writing for the Center for American Progress, Christian Weller points out that total debt now stands at 121.7 percent of disposable income, still higher than at any point before the second quarter of 2005. In an analysis published in May of 2009, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggested that the household debt/disposable income ratio might well have to fall much farther, to around 100 percent, a process that could take much of the decade, even if the household savings rate were to rise to 10 percent.
This extended deleveraging would have a substantial effect on the economy. The FRBSF estimates that it would reduce annual consumption growth by three-fourths of a percentage point from the stable-savings baseline, which would “act as a near-term drag on overall economic activity, slowing the pace of recovery from recession.”
This is exactly what we’re now seeing. In a superb piece, the Washington Post’s Neil Irwin gets outside the Beltway and beyond its stale arguments to probe the real reasons companies aren’t hiring. His conclusion is worthy of extended quotation:

Many Democrats say the economy needs more stimulus. Business lobbyists and their Republican allies say it needs less regulation and lower taxes.
But here in the heartland of America, senior executives say neither side’s assessment fits.
They blame their profound caution on their view that U.S. consumers are destined to disappoint for many years. As a result, they say, the economy is unlikely to see the kind
of unbroken prosperity of the quarter-century that preceded the financial crisis. . . .
They see Americans for years ahead paying down debts incurred during the now-ended credit boom and adjusting spending to match their often-reduced income.
“It’s a different era,” says Daryl Dulaney, chief executive of Siemens Industry, which has 30,000 U.S. employees who make lighting systems for buildings and a wide rnage of other products. “Our hiring and investment decisions have to be prudent and reflect that.”

A different era … How long will it take our policy makers and political parties to absorb the implications of that stark, undeniable phrase? When they do, they will realize that we have only two strategic options: Either we accept years of sluggish growth and high unemployment, or we shift to a new model that mobilizes the record level of private capital now sitting on the sidelines for public investments that will boost economic activity and employment in the short term, and economic productivity and growth in the long term, while generating rates of return sufficient to interest investors.
This is why we need a national infrastructure bank as the linchpin of a public investment strategy driven by economic analysis rather than congressional politics. Rather than bridges to nowhere, we need a bridge to the future. It’s time for hide-bound appropriators to get out of the way.

As might be expected The Washington Post is leading the print rags with insightful opinion writing concerning Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally, a poorly-disguised attempt to exploit the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in service to the wingnut agenda. On Wednesday, King’s son, Martin Luther King III had a widely-read op-ed and today, the Post’s Eugene Robinson leads with “Even Beck Can’t Mar King’s Legacy,” which offers some astute observations, including:

…Glenn Beck has every right to hold his absurdly titled “Restoring Honor” rally on Saturday…But the rest of us have every right to call the event what it is: an exercise in self-aggrandizement on a Napoleonic scale. I half-expect Beck to appear before the crowd in a bicorn hat, with one hand tucked into the front of his jacket.
That Beck is staging his all-about-me event at the very spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech — and on the 47th anniversary of that historic address — is obviously intended to be a provocation. There’s no need to feel provoked, however; the appropriate response is to ignore him. No puffed-up blabbermouth could ever diminish the importance of the 1963 March on Washington or the impact of King’s unforgettable words.

Robinson goes on to expose Beck’s distortion that the Civil Rights Movement was about equal justice, as opposed to “social justice,” and adds,

…Beck’s version of history is flat-out wrong. The full name of the event at which King spoke 47 years ago was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Among its organizers was labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a vice president of the AFL-CIO, who gave a speech describing the injustice of “a society in which 6 million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty.”
…From the beginning, King’s activism and leadership were aimed at securing not just equal justice but equal opportunity as well. When he was assassinated in 1968, King was in the midst of a Poor People’s Campaign aimed at bettering the economic condition of all underprivileged Americans, regardless of race.

Robinson notes that the rally is likely to draw some racists, along with some people with legitimate discontents, whose “concerns deserve to be heard. Instead, their anxieties are exploited by hucksters who see fear and anger as marketing tools.”
No doubt the Republicans are hoping the Beck rally will provide more fodder for their Democrat-bashing. Not too worry, as Robinson concludes,

Saturday night, when the event is done, the Lincoln Memorial will still be the place where King gave one of the most memorable speeches of the 20th century. People who came to the rally in search of answers will still be looking. And Glenn Beck will still be a legend in his own mind.

Beck’s ego-trip may end up fattening his bank account. But it’s not likely to do much to return the keys to the guys who drove the economy into the ditch.

I somehow missed noticing until today that Glenn Beck is holding some sort of monster Tea Party event in Washington this weekend, on the anniversay and the specific site of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech back in 1963. Sarah Palin will be there too.
Beck claims he didn’t intend any parallelism with Dr. King:

Beck said in a recent broadcast that he did not intentionally choose the “I Have a Dream” anniversary for his rally – but that he believes the coincidence is “divine providence.”
“Whites don’t own Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King. Those are American icons, American ideas, and we should just talk about character, and that’s really what this event is about. It’s about honoring character.”

So the man was too ignorant to know he was planning a major event on the exact date and the exact location of King’s defining event, but now that he knows about it, well, he’s happy to co-opt MLK into his bizarre take on American politics as well.
Get ready for some truly outrageous profanation, folks. Beck has clearly lost any sense of proportion or perspective about himself.

As I’ve noted on occasion lately, one of the under-discussed contributors to voter cynicism is the practice of primary candidates calling each other lying scum-suckers one minute and then, the moment the polls close, embracing like old friends.
This does not seem to be happening in Florida right now, according to an AP story:

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has ceded the Republican gubernatorial nomination to Rick Scott. But it’s going to take more than that for Scott to win McCollum’s support in the November election.
McCollum on Thursday wouldn’t even rule out an endorsement of Democrat Alex Sink.
McCollum said they have policy disagreements, but he wouldn’t rule out endorsing either of those two, or even Bud Chiles — an independent son of former Gov. Lawton Chiles….
McCollum said he still has misgivings about Scott’s past. While Scott was CEO, the hospital company Columbia/HCA perpetrated one of the largest Medicare frauds in U.S. history. Scott left with a rich severance package, while the company repaid the government a record $1.7 billion.

You can sort of understand McCollum’s feelings. He’s spent most of his adult life toiling in the party vineyards, finally earning a gubernatorial shot this year. And then it was all ruined by Scott and his bottomless checking account. So why should Bill McCollum care about party unity right now? What good has it done him lately?
It’s possible, of course, that McCollum’s got some campaign debts that he’d like Scott to pay off, and won’t move a muscle on behalf of the ticket until such time as his vanquisher opens up his wallet. Or maybe Rick Scott’s about to find out that all’s not forgiven from his savage campaign against McCollum, and that in politics, as in life generally, money can buy you almost anything but love.

So Washington is abuzz today with curiosity about Joe Miller, the obscure and underfunded former judge who appears (subject to a possible reversal in absentee ballots) to have driven Lisa Murkowski out of the U.S. Senate in Tuesday’s primary in Alaska. Was his candidacy purely a vehicle for the vengeful manueverings of Sarah Palin, or just a bargain investment for the Tea Party Express (which spent over a half million dollars helping him with attacks on Murkowski)? Were the results the product of strange turnout patterns affected crucially by an anti-abortion ballot initiative?
Perhaps, but in any event, it’s worth taking a moment to assess Miller’s platform:

He wants to eliminate the Department of Education, believes the government shouldn’t pay for unemployment insurance and says of climate change on his campaign site that it “may not even exist.” Among the more mainstream GOP positions he’s taken: Miller would cut welfare; eliminate health care for the poor by scrapping Medicaid; and the Anchorage Daily News reported that he has has called for sweeping cuts to Medicare and Social Security with a goal of phasing them out entirely in favor of total privatization….
Miller is backed by the Family Research Council and opposes abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, a view far to the right of the mainstream of the GOP.

I dunno about this last assertion; I’d say absolute abortion bans are pretty much de rigour in Republican circles these days, judging by the enormous grief that Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Karen Handel got for supporting rape-and-incest exceptions.
But in any event, I’d say the abolition of Medicaid and the total privatization of Medicare and Social Security qualify as positions that remain controversial in much of the GOP, though a lot less than was the case quite recently, when George W. Bush’s SocSec partial privatization proposal sent Republicans running for the hills.
At what point, though, do such positions stop be treated as outliers? When five Republican Senators espouse them? Ten? Twenty? How about four-out-of-five conservative commentators?
We certainly don’t know whether Joe Miller is going to be a United States Senator; he doesn’t have the Republican nomination fully in hand yet, and he could definitely lose in November, even in Alaska, particularly if Murkowski finds some way to get on the ballot as a third-party candidate and split the GOP vote. But it’s getting to the point where being a policy wingnut is not a very lonely occupation in today’s Republican Party, or any sort of bar to winning primaries.