The Open Thread for Thursday, July 25, 2013

Kudos to former President George H.W. Bush, pictured above with the 2 year old son of one of his security detail. Bush, and his entire security detail, shaved their heads in support of the child, who is going through chemotherapy treatment for leukemia. This is a kind and classy move.

I got this from Daily Kos’ Bill in Portland Maine, who got it from someone else, and I am sharing it because it made me laugh, and it has the added virture of being completely true:

Before Black Presidents

• The debt ceiling was raised SEVENTY-FOUR times without incident. SEVENTY-FOUR TIMES.
• A POTUS could tax the rich at 91% and be called a Republican—not a socialist!
• Middle names were irrelevant.
• “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was law and pre-existing condition exclusions were here to stay.
• Deliberately sabotaging economic recovery was not considered a legitimate option for the opposition party.
• No one screamed “You lie!” at the president during a speech to Congress.
• People with 3rd grade educations didn’t constitute a political movement.
• Being a community organizer was noble and honorable.
• If you tried to bring the U.S. to its knees you were a terrorist. Now you’re just Republican.
• Filibusters were the exception. Not the rule.
• Exercise was good and we got medals for it but now exercise is an evil, socialist plot.
• Presidents did not have to show the their birth certificate to Donald Trump.

Jonathan Chait: “The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses–partisanship, obstruction, gridlock–don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.”

“And the worst is not behind us.”

Greg Sargent: “President Obama’s speech on the economy [yesterday] was best understood as an opening shot in what he promised will be a sustained campaign to break the austerity curse that has gripped Washington ever since the 2010 elections persuaded Obama and Dems to enter into a defensive crouch in the big arguments over government spending and the economy.

As Ezra Klein notes, [yesterday’s] speech was short on policy. It wasn’t a policy speech. It was a set up to something much longer. But that much longer thing could prove important. Obama said he’d be taking his case on the road in coming days in a series of speeches and appearances, and vowed to “engage” the public in an argument over the true nature of our short and long term economic challenges. Indeed, this speech was more of a template for what’s to come — a sustained argument against the prevailing pro-austerity prejudices that continue to hold sway in Washington and for a robust government role in creating jobs and securing long term middle class security.