So the President is making us all crazy again by negotiating with himself. I suspect this Politico assessment is pretty close to the truth —

Anxiety, not ideology prodded Obama to push for entitlement savings, people close to the president say. Obama has told people in his orbit that he feels “squeezed” by the rise of entitlement spending and sees it as a threat to getting anything else done, especially his plans for increased education and infrastructure spending.

For the past two years, Obama has championed what he calls “a balanced approach” to debt and deficit reduction, demanding $700 billion in high-earner tax hikes from Republicans earlier this year as a prerequisite to budget cuts and reform of runaway Social Security and Medicare costs.

The time to pay up is now, Obama’s aides say, and the White House needed to offer something to bring Republicans back to the bargaining table. They insist that he’s opposed to deeply cutting entitlements and is willing to do only the bare minimum needed to get a deal done.

However, the offer is doomed to fail, because ultimately Republicans aren’t interested in anything but obstruction. Paul Krugman:

Since the beginning, the Obama administration has seemed eager to gain the approval of the grownups — the sensible people who will reward efforts to be Serious, and eventually turn on those nasty, intransigent Republicans as long as Obama and co. don’t cater too much to the hippies.This is the latest, biggest version of that strategy. Unfortunately, it will almost surely fail. Why? Because there are no grownups — only people who try to sound like grownups, but are actually every bit as childish as anyone else.

This quote attributed to an anonymous White House staffer is revealing —

“We’re not going to have the White House forever, folks. If he doesn’t do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years,” said a longtime Obama aide, referring to the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate who proposed a sweeping overhaul of Medicare that would replace some benefits with vouchers.

This tells us that the Mighty Right is a major bugaboo in the White House collective mind; they will never be defeated; only temporarily contained. Charles Pierce —

Now, we have a Democratic administration, empowered by a solid re-election, that is proposing to its most loyal supporters that they support at least a partial sellout of the Democratic party’s greatest legacy because, some day, a Republican president might do something much worse. (As though said imaginary Republican president won’t go ahead and do much worse anyway, and claim a national mandate for it while he’s at it, and eventually find a way to blame “a Democratic president” for having launched the process in the first place.) I literally never have heard this argument made in any political context. I certainly never have heard it from anyone in an incumbent administration. If this is your rationale for making policy, what in the name of god is the point of running for office in the first place?

Yeah, that’s supposed to be how it works. Maybe the White House staffer believes democracy is already too far gone to be revived, though. In which case, perhaps the time for bargaining is over.

Margeret Thatcher is being remembered more fondly in the U.S. than in Britain, it seems, although not everyone on this side of the pond is being all that reverent, either. See, for example, Alex Pareene, “The Woman Who Wrecked Great Britain.”

The view from the American Right (example) is that she did what had to be done, for Britain’s own good, and while it’s a shame so many people suffered, by now everyone ought to agree it was for the best. Andy Sullivan saw in Thatcher “a final rebuke to the collectivist, egalitarian oppression of the individual produced by socialism and the stultifying privileges and caste identities of the class system.”

On the other hand, Paul Krugman points out —

Thatcher came to power in 1979, and imposed a radical change in policy almost immediately. But the big improvement in British performance doesn’t really show in the data until the mid-1990s. Does she get credit for a reward so long delayed?

And the answer is, from the Right, of course. Just like so many wingnuts wanted to credit Ronald Reagan for Bill Clinton’s economy, whereas (in their minds) President Obama owned George W. Bush’s economy as soon as he won the 2008 election.

In his column today, Paul Krugman asks, “How many Americans will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?”

Specifically, the time-honored practice of attacking beneficiaries of government programs as undeserving malingerers doesn’t play the way it used to. When Ronald Reagan spoke about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, it resonated with many voters. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape sneering at the 47 percent, not so much.

There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom.

And this begs the question, how does the U.S. right define freedom?

When I speak of freedom in the political sense, I’m thinking of self-determination and the exercise of free will. But there’s nothing terribly “free” about sickness, chronic pain, untreated disability, or death. The sick and disabled find their life options limited. They may have self-determination in theory, but not in fact. Where’s the “freedom”?

Prairie Weather has it nailed:

Krugman points to that shocking moment, back at a presidential debate in 2011, when Ron Paul was asked whether people without insurance should be left to die, and a tea party contingent yelled “yeah!” The tea party was still interesting, often titillating, back then. All along their idea of freedom has been nothing more noble than freedom from moral responsibility.

But now we know more about the arrogance, their authoritarianism, their self-indulgent cruelty and we have decided that the tea party’s definition of freedom should be, well, left to die.

Whatever. I’ll miss Roger Ebert.

Today’s news is that New York City Councilman Daniel J. Halloran III, who has made news for alleged election fraud and smearing unions, is a dedicated Pagan. I think I may have heard this before, but it’s coming out today and people are commenting.

I can’t say I understand Paganism, but I’m enough of a Celt to think that people who observe the old Druid holy days can’t be all bad. They are far less alarming to me than, say, Scientologists.

Two thumbs up.

The Center for American Progress has released a “50-State Analysis of Gun Violence and Its Link to Weak State Gun Laws.” See also Interactive: Measuring Gun Violence Across the 50 States. The report states,

Despite this complex web of factors that influence the rate of gun violence, this report finds a clear link between high levels of gun violence and weak state gun laws. Across the key indicators of gun violence that we analyzed, the 10 states with the weakest gun laws collectively have an aggregate level of gun violence that is more than twice as high–104 percent higher, in fact—-than the 10 states with the strongest gun laws.

The report measured these ten indicators of gun violence:

1. Overall firearm deaths in 2010
2. Overall firearm deaths from 2001 through 2010
3. Firearm homicides in 2010
4. Firearm suicides in 2010
5. Firearm homicides among women from 2001 through 2010
6. Firearm deaths among children ages 0 to 17, from 2001 through 2010
7. Law-enforcement agents feloniously killed with a firearm from 2002 through 2011
8. Aggravated assaults with a firearm in 2011
9. Crime-gun export rates in 2009
10. Percentage of crime guns with a short “time to crime” in 2009

Gun laws are not the only factor impacting gun violence, the press release says. I would add that there are outliers that don’t fit any correlation. New Hampshire, for example, has permissive gun laws but ranks low in gun violence. I suspect the correlation between rates of gun ownership and gun fatalities is stronger. Nevertheless, the data do seem to show a tendency toward more gun violence in states with loose gun laws.

Some on the Right still complains about including suicides as part of “gun violence.” I’ve already explained why it’s perfectly legitimate to include suicides, since the presence of guns is known to increase suicide rates. The Harvard School of Public Health considers access to firearms to be a major risk factor in suicides.

The headline at HuffPo is that North Carolina is considering creating a state religion, in clear violation of the 1st Amendment establishment clause and the 14th Amendment due process clause.

The bill, filed Monday by two GOP lawmakers from Rowan County and backed by nine other Republicans, says each state “is sovereign” and courts cannot block a state “from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.” The legislation was filed in response to a lawsuit to stop county commissioners in Rowan County from opening meetings with a Christian prayer, wral.com reported. …

… The bill says the First Amendment only applies to the federal government and does not stop state governments, local governments and school districts from adopting measures that defy the Constitution. The legislation also says that the Tenth Amendment, which says powers not reserved for the federal government belong to the states, prohibits court rulings that would seek to apply the First Amendment to state and local officials.

Originally the 1st Amendment did only apply to the federal government, but the 14th and subsequent case law changed that. But establishing a religion really isn’t the craziest part of this, as Charles Pierce points out —

Not only the clearest violation of the First Amendment possible, but backed up by the theory of nullification which, to borrow a phrase from my pal, Roy Blount, Jr., was a bad idea at the time and looks even worse in retrospect. Thus does North Carolina march boldly into the past, looking neither right nor left as it passes 1789 or 1776, until it arrives at 1640, and Quakers and Catholics are hiding under the bed.

“The Constitution of the United States does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional; therefore, by virtue of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the power to determine constitutionality and the proper interpretation and proper application of the Constitution is reserved to the states and to the people,” the bill states. “Each state in the union is sovereign and may independently determine how that state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion.”

Now, anyone smart enough to outwit a turnip ought to be able to realize that if states could just ignore the federal government whenever they liked, there wouldn’t be a United States today. Indeed, the nullification theory is built on a vision of America that was rejected when the Constitution was adopted — that every state retained all of its sovereignty. Some, yes. Not all.

Here’s a bipartisan election fraud scandal for you —

State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, a contractor and real estate developer who rose to become the first black president of the State Senate, and City Councilman Daniel J. Halloran III were arrested early Tuesday on charges of trying to illicitly get Mr. Smith on the ballot for this year’s mayoral race in New York City, according to federal prosecutors.

Mr. Smith, a Queens Democrat, and Mr. Halloran, a Queens Republican, were among a half-dozen people arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in the corruption case. Others included Republican County leaders in Queens and the Bronx, the mayor of the Rockland County village of Spring Valley, Noramie F. Jasmin, and her deputy, Joseph A. Desmaret, according to a criminal complaint. …

… Mr. Smith has said he was considering running for mayor of New York as a Republican, and the charges contend that he made payments to Mr. Halloran in exchange for the councilman’s assistance in setting up meetings with Republican leaders as part of an effort to get on the ballot, the complaint said.

Ed Kilgore writes that Smith “recently helped sell out his party to give Republicans partial control of the state legislature.”

Some of you might remember Halloran from the New York City snowstorm of December 2010. He was the guy who claimed “union thugs” were shaking down the city for more money to remove the snow. The claim was bogus, of course.