Via Steve Benen, I see that Paul Krugman's column today addresses a particular concern of this blog over the last few months, the long-term consequences of a GOP "taken over by the people it used to exploit":

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

That a radicalized GOP will degrade to permanent minority status but still retain enough power to obstruct constructive legislation is certainly a concern. But the bigger concern, as I've written a few times before, is that eventually the Democrats will have bad luck and the logic of the two party system will propel the Palinized Republicans back into power—at which time the lunatics really will be in charge of the asylum.

Saturday night, and I can't stop reloading the blogs to see how health care is doing. Image at the right via kate.

* The White House press corps does not believe you have not heard of V.

* Democratic congresswomen shouted down by Republicans. Matt has the video, and it's pretty astounding.

* Krugman: "There’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980."

* Kurt Vonnemutt.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Mars. Related: 1924, the year Navy radiographers were asked to listen for communication from Mars.

Friday!

* Can't-miss upcoming events at Duke: a Sun Ra talk and accompanying art exhibit.

* Glenn Beck, art critic. Olbermann critiques the critic.

* This morning John Hodgman accidentally tweeted his cell phone number to all 82,000 of his Twiter followers.

* Ten sci-fi ways to change the climate.

* Turns out the White House drafting its own health-care reform bill. Steve Benen speculates as to what might be in it.

* Krugman on the causes of the Great Recession. Discussion at MetaFilter.

* MetaFilter also has your police brutality outrage of the day.

Sunday night links.

* Is Twitter the Drudge Killer? We can only dare to hope.

* The Art of the Movie Poster. (Thanks, Ron!)



* Accusations from the left that Obama was behind Honduras's coup seem completely unfounded.

* Sanford says he won't resign. Okay, then, impeachment.

* Steve Benen against bipartisanship. Also at Washington Monthly: early movement towards fixing the Democratic primaries for 2012 and beyond.

* Krugman has had a very good series of posts this weekend trying to bash denialist talking points on climate change. Here's the chart that dismantles the "we've been cooling since 1998" canard:

Monday late night politics.

* Strange things are happening in South Carolina, where Governor Mark Sanford has been missing for four days. Reports are that the governor has made contact, but the governor's office won't confirm that's true. (UPDATE: The governor's office is now saying that Sanford is on the Appalachian Trail, a mere 2000 miles long.)

* Waxman-Markey Watch: In the comments Alex drops an A-bomb to describe one of the key antagonists on this bill, Colin Peterson. Apparently the bill is unlikely to be debated this week. Yale e360 had a roundup of opinions on Waxman-Markey that's worth reading, with Climate Progress providing a roundup of the roundup. Krugman (also via CP) had a recent column on the bill, too, coming out in favor of it.

* Mexico has decriminalized small amounts of drugs. Good.

* 'Eco-Friendly Meat Could Begin With Mini-Cows.' Gross.

* Dystopia is now: Bill Simmon takes a good, hard look at reports that Lancaster, PA, will soon be putting in so many security cameras that it will take a volunteer Stasi comprised of local busybodies to watch them all and determines that this may be the least worst alternative for our privacy-robbed future. Frankly I think Bill's got this one wrong: open-source surveillance is a police state, just one with slightly better branding. Call me Sisyphus Q. Luddite if you must but I don't think panoptic surveillance is some historical inevitability; it can and should be resisted, not embraced.

* And Ta-Nehisi Coates calls for a reality check regarding Martin Luther King. (NB: He's already walked the post back.)

Monday politics!

* Žižek's recent lectures on "Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture" are now online as MP3s. Some video here.

* How much will Waxman-Markey actually cost? Only about $175 per household. But does it really matter how much it "costs" when the alternative is worldwide disaster? The real problem with Waxman-Markey is that it costs too little, because it doesn't do nearly enough. (Or much of anything.) See the Breakthrough Institute's analysis for more. (UPDATE: Wound up doing another post about this up the page.)

* Emboldened by polls that show public backing for a government health insurance plan, Democrats are moving to make it a politically defining issue in the debate over the future of medical care. (Via Benen.) I've never seen the Democrats "emboldened." I wonder what it's like.

* Meanwhile, Krugman points Cassandra-like to our sudden but inevitable betrayal by "centrists" in the Democratic caucus.

Krugman: There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Monday links.

* Vernor Vinge guarantees the Singularity by 2030. Take it to the bank. Via Boing Boing.

* They'll get the stone wall around East Campus when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

* Today's most useful single-serving site: http://shouldibeworriedaboutswineflu.com/.

* The judgment against Eichmann speaks to Bybee: Far from absolving him of guilt, his remoteness from the actual torturers—his thoughtlessness—increases the degree of his responsibility. His is a special kind of evil—the evil of nonchalance where there should be outrage.

* Geoengineering and the New Climate Denialism.

* Meanwhile, Krugman seeks to tell the future by looking at programs Republicans have most recently tried to cut funding for.

Krugman says he found himself in the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, especially the Foundation series—"It was nerds saving civilization, quants who had a theory of society, people writing equations on a blackboard, saying, 'See, unless you follow this formula, the empire will fail and be followed by a thousand years of barbarism.'"

Krugman and I have something in common. (via io9)

Sunday linkdump #2, our ruined economy edition.

* Matt Taibi has today's must-read AIG article in Rolling Stone, "The Big Takeover." Discussion at MeFi with more links.

* The article in this month's Harper's ("Infinite Debt") is good too, but unfortunately it's not available to non-subscribers online yet.

* Rachel Maddow on how deregulation helped get us into this mess.

* John Gray reviews Margaret Atwood's new book on debt for The New York Review of Books.

* And Paul Krugman is very unhappy about the Geithner toxic assets plan. He's not the only one.

A few more.

* Wikipedia is doomed. Doomed!

* Storage closets of the American Museum of Natural History. With awesome slideshow, via MeFi.

* Tim Morton makes the simple but necessary point that as the only sentient agents in the area—the only beings with "response ability"—we are "responsible" for climate change whether we are "causing" it or not.

* Biggest solar deal ever announced. The article goes on to say "When fully operational, the companies say the facility will provide enough electricity to power 845,000 homes — more than exist in San Francisco — though estimates like that are notoriously squirrely."

* Washington Monthly tries to suss out Judd Gregg's erratic behavior.

* Legalize it? The real question is why haven't we yet.

* And Krugman (via Ezra Klein) says we may just be screwed.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.

Weekend Updates.

* Obama supports the sit-in in Chicago.

* Krugman says he was misquoted: Urk. I gather that there’s a report on the wires quoting me as saying that the US auto industry would disappear. What I actually said was that the concentration of the industry around Detroit would disappear. That proposition sounds significantly more reasonable than the original version, but still, I'm very skeptical. People are not going to just let (completely) Detroit die.

* The conspiracy goes all the way to the top: The Supreme Court has refused to hear the case on Barack Obama's citizenship.

Nobel economics prize winner Paul Krugman said Sunday that the beleaguered U.S. auto industry will likely disappear. Now, I'm no Nobel Prize winner, but this seems very unlikely to me, about as unlikely as it does to Paul Rosenberg.

Krugman in the New York Review of Books explains what we need to do.

Paul Krugman is the world's first Nobel Laureate blogger.

But it's not a *real* Nobel...

Before you throw this letter into the proverbial round file, let’s be clear: this is the first time I have ever asked for a bailout from the Federal Reserve. I know what you’re thinking. Why do I deserve your largesse, and I do mean largesse, since I’m asking for five million big ones? The answer is simple. Like many of our nation’s financial institutions, I am simply too big to fail. If investors were allowed to witness the collapse of Freddie, Fannie, and then Andy, I can’t begin to describe what havoc it would wreak on their already frayed nerves. Actually, I can describe it: global financial calamity. I think we can both agree that, to dodge this bullet, ten million dollars is a small price to pay. (I know that I originally asked for five, but since I started writing this letter my financial situation has deteriorated in grave and unexpected ways.)

Andy Borowitz is too big to fail. In the New Yorker, alongside John Cassiday's claim that the Lehman Brothers collapse gave the election to Obama (see also Krugman last night) and a fascinating article on the legal intricacies of trust funds for dogs.

Is it right to give so much money to a dog—or to dogs generally? And what is the limit of such dispensations to pets? Will there come a time when dogs can sue for a new guardian—or to avoid being put to sleep? One philosopher draws a distinction between the needs of Trouble and those of dogs as a whole. Helmsley “did a disservice to the people in the dog world and to dogs generally by leaving such an enormous amount of money for her own dog,” Jeff McMahan, who teaches philosophy at Rutgers University, said. “To give even two million dollars to a single little dog is like setting the money on fire in front of a group of poor people. To bestow that amount of money is contemptuous of the poor, and that may be one reason she did it.

...

Throughout her life, Leona Helmsley demonstrated not just a lack of affection for her fellow-humans but an absence of understanding as well. The irony is that, for all that her will purports to show her love for Trouble, Leona didn’t seem to understand dogs very well, either. “What is funny about giving all this money to one dog is that it doesn’t deal with the fact that the dog is going to be sad that Leona died,” Elizabeth Harman, who teaches philosophy at Princeton, said. “What would make this dog happy is for a loving family to take it in. The dog doesn’t want the money. The money will just make everyone who deals with the dog strange.”

Olbermann and Maddow on MSNBC are reporting that the Asian markets are tanking in response to the failure of the bailout. The Nikkei is already down 5%, and the Australian stock market dropped 4% in the first fifteen minutes of trading.

I had my quarrels with him during the primaries, but at a moment like this I find Paul Krugman really indispensable. Fun, too; here he is on today's political failures:

So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch.

As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes.

A tenatative deal has been reached on the bailout, with House Republicans still making noise that they may scuttle it. Krugman, for his part, says it's "good enough"—hardly a ringing endorsement, but perhaps as good as we're likely to get in the middle of an election season with Bush still president. McCain, for his part, suggests he might not bother to show up to vote, driving home once again the absurdity of last week's campaign-suspension spectacle.

(For which Saturday Night Live mocked him without mercy this weekend, I should add.)

The chaos in the markets, the transparent campaign-suspension nonsense, and a strong showing from Obama in the debate seem to have conspired to put the election even farther out of McCain's reach with just 36 days to go until Election Day (and early voting already open in many locations around the country). The tracking polls all have him up by five or more, with three of them showing Obama cracking 50%, and the state polls look very strong. The Senate races are going well too, though as Nate Silver projects it's probably still unlikely that the Democrats will get 60 in the Senate.

How will McCain recover? If you said "ridiculous stunt," you're right! The Times of London reports that Bristol Palin may get married before Nov. 4.

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

Boggles the mind. I don't even think the odds are especially good that a Palin-Johnston wedding would help their campaign—putting aside questions of Palin's rapidly diminishing credibility as a candidate, this is a 17-year-old girl who has already been nationally humiliated once. I look at this situation and what I see is a shotgun wedding whose timetable is being set less by love or lasting commitment than by the mother's electoral calculus. Let me be clear: I'm not speaking about the merits of the wedding itself, on which I have no perspective and no comment, but rather about the drive to make a spectacle out of his girl's life, which strikes me as deeply tragic on the one hand and as an ugly circus on the other. I really don't think I'm alone in this.

I (honestly) hate to even blog about this, and I'm pretty damn cutthroat when it comes to Republicans and electoral politics. These two kids should just be left alone.

So, to cut this discussion blessedly short, I think the odds are a wedding stunt would backfire badly. But then again I suppose bad odds never stopped a gambler.

Unexpectedly busy day today, but I do have a few links.

* Anti-Obama racism comes to Roxbury, just one town over from my beloved Randolph.

* The Paulon bailout continues to take pretty heavy fire; you can find details and good analysis at Krugman's blog, where he is taking a pretty hard line on the demand for a taxpayer equity stake in the companies we'll be bailing out.

* And Glenn Greenwald takes the Brooksian dream of the Wise Old Men of Washington back out to the woodshed.

* Given that he is the Scourge of Lobbyists, it's ironic that the person tapped to run McCain's transition team lobbied for Freddie Mac just a few months ago.

* And given his well-known penchant for Straight Talk it's odd that McCain hasn't given a press conference in 40 days.

* FiveThirtyEight has polling data showing that the debates may not move the polls very much after all. There's also a new poll out showing Obama with a two-point lead in Florida, which has got to be an outlier.

Although I have too-little understanding of the economics involved, something must be said on the historic $700B+ bailout of the banking sector, an event so significant that it may well be used in the future to date the debut of a new stage of capitalism in which government and multinational corporations are so entwined they are literally impossible to tell apart. But I'm pretty outclassed here: all I know is that I'd like to see a Second Great Depression avoided and I'm willing to make significant short-term sacrifices in order to see that happen. That said, most of what I'm reading from left and center-left economists suggests to me that this bailout won't see that goal accomplished and will in fact only make things worse:

* Krugman: "I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets."

* Sebastian Mallaby: "With truly extraordinary speed, opinion has swung behind the radical idea that the government should commit hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to purchasing dud loans from banks that aren't actually insolvent. As recently as a week ago, no public official had even mentioned this option. Now the Treasury, the Fed and congressional leaders are promising its enactment within days. The scheme has gone from invisibility to inevitability in the blink of an eye. This is extremely dangerous."

* Robert Reich: "The Bailout of All Bailouts is a Bad Idea."

* William Greider in The Nation: "If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims."

* Calculated Risk: "Think of a drunk gambler at a slot machine. He starts with $100 and slowly loses. Every now and then he wins some money, but he keeps putting the coins back into the slot until he has lost everything. That is how this plan will work."

* Brad DeLong: "There is no way in hell that anybody should give any extra power to any Treasury Secretary chosen by John McCain. I beg the Democrats in congress: write a bill that makes sense."

* Atrios: "Any member of Congress who looks at the plan to give Hank unchecked power to transfer $700 billion from the Treasury to his friends' companies and has any reaction other than 'You've got to be fucking kidding me' does not deserve to hold office."