In case you haven’t been following it…Time Magazine, courtesy of its columnist Joe Klein, has been giving the nation a textbook example of the problem with American corporate journalism.  Some days ago Time columnist Joe Klein huffed that, basically, the democrats were once again coddling terrorists. 

Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.

Note that this verbiage has now been…altered…on their website since the netroots started blasting Klein and Time over the original text’s blatant, in-your-face-falsehood.  In fact, the bill did no such thing as even a child with third grade reading skills could clearly comprehend.  Glenn Greenwald has been on it relentlessly since Klein’s bullshit column hit the newsstands…

"Well beyond stupid" is a good description for what Klein wrote here. "Factually false" is even better. First, from its inception, FISA did not "protect the rights of U.S. citizens only." Its warrant requirements apply to all "U.S. persons" (see 1801(f)), which includes not only U.S. citizens but also "an alien lawfully admitted [in the U.S.] for permanent residence" (see 1801(i)). From 1978 on, FISA extended its warrant protections to resident aliens.

But Klein’s far more pernicious "error" is his Limbaugh-copying claim that the House bill "require[s] the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court." It just does not.

The only reason why Congress began considering amendments to FISA in the first place was because a FISA court earlier this year ruled that a warrant was required for foreign-to-foreign calls incidentally routed through the U.S. via fiber optics. Everyone — from Russ Feingold to the ACLU — agreed that FISA never intended to require warrants for foreign-to-foreign calls that have nothing to do with U.S. citizens, and thus, none of the bills being considered — including the bill passed by the House — requires warrants for such foreign-to-foreign calls. Here is Rep. Rush Holt, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and one of the key architects of the House bill, explaining what the House bill actually does:

* Ensure that the government must have an individualized, particularized court-approved warrant based on probable cause in order to read or listen to the communications of an American citizen. . . .

The RESTORE Act now makes clear that it is the courts — and not an executive branch political appointee — who decide whether or not the communications of an American can be seized and searched, and that such seizures and searches must be done pursuant to a court order.

Under the House bill, individualized warrants are required if the U.S. Government wants to eavesdrop on the communications of Americans. Warrants are not required — as Klein falsely claimed — for "every foreign-terrorist target’s calls."

While the government (in order to prevent abuse) must demonstrate to the FISA court that it is applying its surveillance standards faithfully, the warrant requirement is confined to the class Rep. Holt described. Klein’s shrill condemnation of the House FISA bill rests on a complete falsehood (that’s not surprising; the last time Klein wrote about FISA, he said that "no actual eavesdropping on conversations should be permitted without a FISA court ruling" and then proceeded to defend a FISA bill which, unbeknownst to him, allowed exactly that).

What Time Magazine did, essentially, was smear the democrats as terrorist coddlers in the minds of millions of Time Magazine readers, and if you think that was accidental or merely a case of slipshod journalism you are not paying attention.  

Klein’s broader point is even more odious. Along with most of the "liberal" punditocracy, Klein has been singing the same song for years and years and years now. The salvation for Democrats lies in following Republicans on national security issues. He’s been warning Democrats from the very beginning of the NSA scandal that they had better stop condemning Bush’s illegal spying on Americans or else they will justly suffer the consequences, and he issues similar lip-quivering warnings about Iraq: Democrats better stop opposing the Leader’s War or else they will lose.

The big joke here you have to realize, is that Klein is Time’s Liberal columnist.  The corporate news media has been playing this game for decades…dragging the American political dialogue ever further and further to the right, by pitting hard core movement conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and outright lunatics like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter against ersatz liberals like Joe Klein. Democrats and progressives are never represented in the corporate news media dialogue, and indeed are usually portrayed as extremists, while the likes of Ann Coulter are given plenty of time to spread their venom in the name of "Balance". 

And in that environment, where the playing field is relentlessly tilted toward the right, actual policy differences between the republicans and the democrats have been consistently represented in a "he said, she said" format, where actual facts are never discussed, never even sought.  For years now, the republicans have been able to push any damn lie they wanted into the public discourse, with absolutely no fear of being contradicted by the press.  And this latest Joe Klein column has been a perfect example of how that not only works, but how the corporate news media remains doggedly determined to keep it working that way.  After days and days of being raked over the coals for the blatant in-your-face factual inaccuracies in the Klein column, Time Magazine finally prints a…correction…but not…

Time Magazine has done a superb service for the country by illustrating everything that is rancid and corrupt with our political media. After I emailed Time.com Editor Josh Tyrangiel asking why the online version of Joe Klein’s column remains online uncorrected given that — as Managing Editor Rick Stengel now says — the article contains a "reporting error," this is the "correction" Time has now posted to the article. Seriously — this is really it, in its entirety:

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.

Leave aside the false description of what Klein wrote. He didn’t say "that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets." He said that their bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court" and "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." But the Editor’s false characterization of Klein’s original lie about the House FISA bill is the least of the issues here.

All Time can say about this matter is that Republicans say one thing and Democrats claim another. Who is right? Is one side lying? What does the bill actually say, in reality?

That’s not for Time to say. After all, they’re journalists, not partisans. So they just write down what each side says. It’s not for them to say what is true, even if one side is lying.

In this twisted view, that is called "balance" — writing down what each side says. As in: "Hey – Bush officials say that there is WMD in Iraq and things are going great with the war (and a few people say otherwise). It’s not for us to decide. It’s not our fault if what we wrote down is a lie. We just wrote down exactly what they said." At best, they write down what each side says and then go home. That’s what they’re for.

That our typical establishment "journalist" conceives of this petty clerical task as their only role is not news. But it is striking to see the nation’s "leading news magazine" so starkly describe how they perceive their role.

After watching our corporate news media passively allow the election of 2000 to be stolen by the republicans, after watching them cheer Bush on as he lied this nation into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, ruined our economy, and thoroughly trashed our moral capital, after watching them help Bush cover up the outing of one of our CIA agents in an act of cold, calculating political retribution, none of this should surprise anyone.  Journalism is dead and rotting in America, everywhere but in the alternative press, and on the Internet, which, not coincidentally, is the one place corporate America cannot dictate the rules of the game.

You should go read Glenn Greenwald’s evisceration of this whole sorry episode, starting Here, and then moving on Here, Here, Here, and Here.  You need to see, all Americans need to see, how the news media many of us grew up reading and watching, has bellyflopped itself into the gutter.

I saw this tag on a comment over at Daily Kos and tried looking up the source, but it seems it’s original to the commenter, who goes by "Slowheels"…

Abandon ideology. Instead, tell the truth. Always.

That’s pure gold.

Via This Modern World…   How our corporate news media covers the Writer’s Strike…

Atrios catches some anti-WGA strike bias on CNBC, a network that prides itself in catering to “business executives and financial professionals that have significant purchasing power”. The chyron reads :

WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR?

4,434 Hollywood guild writers worked full-time last year.

Average salary: $204,000

Many earned $1 million or more

Well, to answer CNBC’s question, they aren’t fighting for “significant purchasing power”. They’re fighting for the financial security that would allow their members to remain in the middle class.

Middle class? Two hundred grand sounds like a good deal, but remember that’s the average salary. This number was chosen specifically because CNBC and the studios on whose behalf they’re arguing want you to believe that most writers are spoiled brats whining about their six-figure incomes. But in a case like this in which a deliberately-vague “many” WGA members earn over $1 million, the “average” income is misleading. A much more important measurement of writers income is the median.

For a good illustration of the difference between “average” and “median” incomes, let me refer you to this graph from the classic book “How to Lie With Statistics” (used without permission. go buy it now!) :

If you add up all of the salaries and divide it by the number of employees, you come up with an “average” that is a poor indicator of an ordinary worker’s income. After all, Mr. Moneybags at the top brings home more than twenty times what the dozen peons at the bottom of the graph make. And this “average” income is only earned by one person, who earns more than 20 of the 24 employees on the chart. While the “average” in this case is mathematically correct, it doesn’t represent the typical income. Or to use an oft-cited example, if Bill Gates walked into a homeless shelter, the “average” income would skyrocket, but it wouldn’t change the fact that everyone else is poor.

Now let’s go back to the WGA strike. Thanks to our friends at CNBC, we know that the “average” WGA member makes $200K, but what’s the median income? According to an LA Times op-ed written by a WGA board member :

“The median income of screen and television writers from their guild-covered employment is $5,000 a year, in part because almost half our members don’t work in any given year.”

Five. Thousand. Dollars. Now keep that figure in mind when you see these CEOs gush about how much money they’ll be making :

In summary…the big media moguls are waving the high dollar salaries of a few writers who’ve hit the big time in everyone’s faces, so they can suck dry the vast majority of other writers who are barely earning a living at their trade.  And our corporate news media is happy to be of service.

So I see Rex Wockner, and Andrew Sullivan are in agreement with John Aravosis that transgendered people have basically hijacked the gay rights movement.  Dan Savage is at least on board with the transgender free Barney Frank/HRC bill that just passed the house.  Somehow, it’s…unsurprising…to see the "No Fems" contingent bellyaching that they just don’t get the transgendered.  Here’s Wockner giving it his best attempt…

I’ve been sitting here sort of picking my own brain and asking myself if gay and trans people do in fact have some crucial thing in common. I’ve read tons of opinion pieces and blog posts on the ENDA war in recent weeks, but none of them really opened my eyes. What do I have in common with a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts, become a woman and get married to a man? From where did this relatively new concept of "the LGBT community" come?

Any deeper then this and Wockner is in danger of getting his own reality TV series.   Wille.  Wille.  You know, not all transgendered persons go the sex reassignment surgery route, but I wouldn’t expect anyone in the "No Fems" crowd to have picked up on that.  Geeze…and I used to think I had a problem with things female, my libido and my emotions being so relentlessly polarized toward the male sex.  But the worst I ever was, was indifferent.  I didn’t dislike girls and I don’t now, they just don’t register on my radar like guys do.  I like guys.  I like being a guy.  I like being around guys.  I like being made sweet sweet love to by guys.  But there really are males, heterosexual ones too amazingly enough, who just get deeply anxious when confronted with anything even vaguely suggestive of femininity, and never more so then when it’s within another guy.  I guess they’re afraid of their own dicks falling off or something if they get too close.  Notice Wockner’s problem is with "a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts" and "become a woman".  Notice further that he’s saying this right after talking up Shannon Minter, born female, now living as a man.  

I do, in fact, count myself among those Americans who still don’t fully understand and "get" the whole concept of being born in completely the wrong body. I’ve asked Shannon for a personal, one-on-one crash-course the very next time we’re within range of each other on the national map.

Probably because Shannon is butching it up and Wockner can deal with that better then with a person born male but who considers themselves female.  Well let me say I don’t "get" what the goddamned problem is here.  Has Wockner, after all this time, never pondered what makes some people gay and others straight?  There is a mountain of evidence building now, that sexual orientation is innate, something in our biology, that draws us to mate to our own sex.  It’s not in our willies, but in our heads.  Is it really that hard to look at this, and consider then that gender expression may also work in some similar way?   And for Christ’s sake it’s not like issues of gender haven’t been animating American politics ever since…oh…the feminist movement.  I know that serious questioning of whether gender expression is more nature or nurture, biological or sociological, have been tracking alongside the same questions regarding sexual orientation since at least my own teen years and I’m older then any of these three deep thinkers (Aravosis doesn’t seem to be thinking about any of this at all so much as machine gun jerking his knee…)

I think my eureka moment came some decades ago while reading an article on boys who had been born with deformed or missing genitals and were, shortly after birth, surgically assigned a female gender and raised as girls.  Tragically, horribly, it didn’t work.  There was one boy in particular, who said he’d kept on reflexively trying to pee standing up all through his childhood.  That opened my eyes.  As it turns out, it’s not what we have between our legs that makes us masculine or feminine, it’s what we have between our ears. 

Here’s Sullivan trying to make heads or tails of the implications of that after a reader reminds him…

What T’s have in common with LGB’s is that primary opposition to all of you comes from your subversion of proper, binary, complementary gender roles.  You may be quite different from the inside, but from the outside you look similar.  I heard my southern baptist grandfather give a sermon in which one of the ills of the modern world was "men not wanting to be men."  I’m pretty sure he had gays in mind.

Surely you know this.

To which Sullivan reliably babbles… 

If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don’t conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?

Not to worry Andrew, a lot of gay folk don’t regard you as being part of our community either.  Not after you swooned over the man who vowed to veto any attempt to repeal the Texas sodomy laws because he thought they were a valid expression of the morality of the majority of Texans.   But, no you drooling moron, the entire point of anti-discrimination laws Is how other people view us, not how we view ourselves. 

Yes, yes…we’re all different from one another in so many little ways.  Men and women from other men and women.  Whites and blacks and Asians from other whites and blacks and Asians.  Gays from other gays.  How many different sub groups within that vast rainbow of humanity that are homosexual?  Bigotry on the other hand, ignorantly lumps people together.  Since when did prejudice ever make sense?  No, the color of your skin doesn’t say anything about the content of your character.  Neither does your sexual orientation.  Neither does your gender.  Neither does your gender expression.  And as for why ‘T’s are part of this movement too, well let’s let Jack Chick explain something you need very much to understand:

Now, look at that.  No…Really Look At It.  Anti-discrimination laws aren’t about how minorities see themselves.  What they address is how popular prejudices view and treat minorities.  Look At That Image.  This is what the bigots see, when they look at us.  They don’t see difference one between the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s you idiot.  They don’t even admit there is such a thing as sexual orientation. let alone something called transgender.  To them, it’s all sex perversion.  You’re a man and you’re having sex with other men and that means as far as they’re concerned, that you’re acting like a woman.  Never mind you don’t think you are.  It’s not about what you think.  Butch it up until you’re growing hair on your palms and it still won’t matter to them. They see a man making himself into a woman.  They see gender non-conformity.  In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1969, I was taught that as a literal truth: that homosexual men think they’re really women.  You’ll always be a fairy to the bigots Sullivan. 

None of us, the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s behave according to the gender expectations of the majority.  That’s why we’re discriminated against.  That’s the stinking rotten core of it, along with a healthy dose of misogyny.  Men rule, women serve men, wives gracefully submit to their husbands who are the head of the household and all is right with the world.  Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered people all throw that nice neat little "natural order" into question and they can’t deal with it.   But you need to understand that the problem from their perspective isn’t that you’re homosexual.  Many of them insist there is no such thing as a homosexual to begin with, merely damaged heterosexuality. Their problem is that you’re a man who, by having sex with other men, makes himself into a woman.  That’s the thinking going on here.  They see no distinction, zero, zilch, nada, between a transgendered individual and a homosexual.  None.

And this is why any anti-discrimination law that does not include gender expression in it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.  Incrementalism is fine I suppose, when it actually gets you somewhere.  Civil Unions before marriage.  Okay…I can dig that.  I don’t like it but I can dig it.  At least Civil Unions are a step forward; at least they’re something.  The EDNA passed last week is nothing but hot air and a bunch of preening politicans and HRC lobbyists patting themselves on the back for appearing to be doing something when all along they were too goddamned timid to actually fight for something honestly worthwhile because that might be risky.  You know…behaving like democrats always do these days.  Any bigot with half a brain can simply say they fired you because you weren’t conforming to their company gender norms, not because of your homosexuality.  And Barney Frank has given them the green light to do that, by insisting that the law Specifically omits gender expression as a protected catagory.  Lambda Legal has been all over this big honking loophole, and Frank and HRC (say…I thought you didn’t like them Andrew) went ahead and did it anyway.

But then…why someone who doesn’t believe in anti-discrimination laws in the first place is bellyaching about including ‘T’s, when he thinks ‘G’s and ‘L’s and ‘B’s shouldn’t be protected classes either is beyond me.  I guess you just have to jerk your knee at every fucking thing that liberals are for, or that you imagine they’re for.  The guy who once said that liberals might mount a fifth column against the war on terror is certainly no stranger to how bigots think is he?   And I see that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton has you back to nearly full time snarling at the Clintons again hasn’t it?  Jesus Christ you are one big fucking bundle of surly knee jerk reflexes aren’t you?

Instead of writing the transgendered out of EDNA, maybe Barney should have just written "No Fems…" into it.  That would have made you guys happy, wouldn’t it?

No fems please…we’re all manly cocksuckers here.  Hey…don’t get me wrong…I’m a big fan of Y chromosomes myself.  Just not the big stupid ones. 

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-Ben Franklin 

Bye Ernie.  Don’t let the diversity hit you on the way out.   And…good riddance…

Kentucky Governor Loses to Democrat

Dogged by political scandal in his first term, Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, a Republican, lost his bid for re-election yesterday to Steve Beshear.

Looks like Teh Gay couldn’t drive the rubes to the poles this time.  Things are looking up in Virginia too, of all places.  I was reading an interesting view about how the current sub prime mortgage crisis may be a factor in the elections.  The McMansion suburbs have been a republican stomping ground for the past decade and now a lot of those people are loosing their houses or finding themselves suddenly under debt loads they cannot bear.  The problem for the republicans in all that is that those folks are educated enough to know that the republican greed reflex is largely responsible for the mortgage system collapse and they’re probably closely following its ripples through all their other investments too. It can’t be fun reading the financial news these days knowing that you voted for the idiots who are now running the economy like they’d been given a license to steal. 

And you thought republicans really meant all that stuff about small government and fiscal responsibility.  Never mind the price of oil…gold is now at an absolutely incredible eight-hundred and forty-one dollars an ounce as of last night.  When Bush took office it was selling for around two-hundred sixty.  The Canadian dollar is worth more then the U.S. dollar and the Australian dollar is inching close.  The national debt has skyrocketed.  So have foreclosure rates.  People in upscale neighborhoods in southern California are taking care of the lawns of homes that haven’t sold in months, so the neighborhood won’t look like a slum.  And now they’re finding squatters in some of those homes.  I’ll bet a lot of red neighborhoods in the McMansion suburbs turned blue this election.

"Greed is good", they said.  People should have paid more attention.  No, greed is not good.  Greed eats this year’s seed and doesn’t care if there’s any left to plant next year.  Greed squeezes what the market will bear out of it, and doesn’t care if what the market will bear keeps getting smaller and smaller every year.  Greed doesn’t favor the short term gain over the long run investment because it doesn’t admit there is any such thing as tomorrow.  There is only now.  Right now.  I want it Right Now.  "Greed is good", is the economic theology of seven year olds.

Paul Krugman had a good riff on the excuses we’re hearing now from the party faithful, that Bush and his cronies don’t so much perfectly represent modern movement conservative values in practice, as they are a betrayal of them.  Bullshit…

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”

People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.

But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”

People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”

Bush is not incompetent.  He’s been dead-on target every moment, every second he’s been in power, doing Exactly what the right has always promised America it would do once it got its hands on the levers of power.  Of course financial institutions all over the world are trembling now at the scale of the losses in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco.  They don’t matter.  Finance is predicated on a notion that both the secular and religious right categorically reject: that there’s such a thing as tomorrow.  Greed is good.  Or to put it succinctly:

SCHADENFREUDE ALERT….The New York Times reports today that a group of conservative authors, including Swift Boat nutball Jerome Corsi, is suing right-wing darling Regnery Publishing. The lead plaintiff is Richard Miniter, author of Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror, who apparently got his hands on a royalty statement he wasn’t supposed to see:

"It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"

….The authors, who say in the lawsuit that [Regnery’s parent company] has been "unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars," are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said, "We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice."

Well, we’re all looking for justice, aren’t we? But if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?

You got what you voted for.  The problem wasn’t that you didn’t read the fine print.  You didn’t read the bold print.

First, understand that there is no social security crisis.  That’s a right wing scarecrow of the same substance as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.  There is no crisis. 

Which is not to say it couldn’t be shored up a tad.  Fine.  But Joshua Marshall has it exactly right about even opening up a discussion on that at the moment…

When it comes to the policy and number-crunching nitty-gritty of Social Security I’m definitely an amateur. But I think I’ve got a decent sense of the political-economy of the question. We need to remember that now and for at least a decade into the future Social Security is actually subsidizing the rest of the federal budget. The program brings in much more than it pays out. As we all remember from the voluble debates two years ago, the surplus is being used to buy US government bonds which go into the Trust Fund. And that socked away money will keep the program solvent through the middle of this century as the baby boomers retire, and revenues in no longer cover promised payments out.

We’ve been doing that for about a quarter of a century.

The problem on the political side of the equation is that the enemies of Social Security have spent a couple decades arguing that the Trust Fund doesn’t exist or that it is simply a bookkeeping device with no true financial meaning. If that’s true, it means that American workers have spent the last twenty-five years using their payroll taxes to subsidize general revenues and make it easier to float big tax cuts for upper-income earners without getting anything in return.

If we start pumping a lot more money into Social Security coffers now it will by definition go into more government bonds, which is another way of saying that it will go toward funding our current deficit spending. In fact it will enable more deficit spending and probably more upper-income tax cuts because it will make the consequences of both easier to hide.

If we want to push the buffer of the Trust Fund further out onto the horizon, then fiddle with payroll taxes when Social Security would need to start dipping into Trust Fund. In other words, in a decade or so. I see no reason why this approach doesn’t work just as nicely then as it would now.

As Paul Krugman noted in the interview I did with him a few weeks ago, the window of time we had to seriously pare down the national debt to prepare for the retirement of the baby-boomers is close to over. Still, though, our best way of ensuring the future health of Social Security is to stop running up the national debt now. So I’m very reluctant to put more payroll taxes in the pot while we’re still running big deficits because of the Bush tax cuts. The money will just go to subsidizing that irresponsible fiscal policy.

If there is any sense in which the ‘Trust Fund’ is not ‘real’ it is that it must be paid back from general revenues. And that will only be harder the more other debt we’re running up. So rather than solving the problem, I think we’re actually enabling it.

You gotta love the republicans.  They’ve maneuvered the nation into a place now where any honest, good faith attempt to tweak improvements into the system can only make matters worse.  Until they’re out of power, the best course is to not only do nothing, but to not even discuss doing anything.