Category Archives: Wingnuts Being Wingnuts

Equivalence? In Your Dreams …

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According to most of the Right and also the perpetually clueless Stanley Fish (note to Protein Wisdom: If Fish is a “progressive,” I’m Pat Robertson. And Jesus.), this …

… is equivalent to this …

For those of you who are not able to watch the videos, in the first Bill Maher tells a joke about Sarah Palin — that when she heard about last year’s disaster in Japan, she demanded that we invade Tsunami. And then he introduced the next joke with “speaking of dumb tw*ts….” The second video shows highlights from Rush Limbaugh’s three-day rant against Sandra Fluke. (I realize that Maher has said other naughty things about Palin beside this, but again, the Rush video only shows some of what he said about Fluke.)

To say these are equivalent is a bit like saying an average-size rain puddle is equivalent to Lake Superior. And I’m not defending Maher. As I wrote a few days ago, using gender insults to ridicule a particular woman puts down all women in the same way that calling one black person a N—– puts down all African Americans.

But the fact is that if Rush had only said that Sandra Fluke was a “dumb tw*t it probably would have gone unnoticed. Instead, Rush went on, and on, and on, for three freaking days.

But beyond quantity of verbiage, we might also consider another measure of difference between these two “examples.”

What was the effect? Did Maher’s line have any measurable effect on public opinion or the quality of serious political discourse? Comedians make fun of politicians all the time, and the public is free to either be amused or offended. But I doubt that what Maher said changed anyone’s opinion about Palin one way or another.

On the other hand, Limbaugh flat-out lied about Fluke’s testimony for three days (and no doubt beyond), and judging by comments on rightie sites, in large part thanks to Limbaugh a big chunk of the American public actually believes that Sandra Fluke demanded that taxpayers pay for her contraceptives so she could have more sex. And no amount of linking to or explaining Fluke’s actual testimony can change their minds. In other words, Rush utterly poisoned any discussion we might have had on the issue of private insurance mandates and contraception.

Fish’s argument appears to be that we are supposed to see these two as equivalent because it’s the fair thing to do —

These questions come naturally to those who have been schooled in the political philosophy of enlightenment liberalism. The key move in that philosophy is to shift the emphasis from substantive judgment — is what has been said good and true? — to a requirement of procedural reciprocity — you must treat speakers equally even if you can’t abide what some of them stand for. Basically this is the transposition into the political realm of the Golden Rule: do unto others what you would have them do unto you. Don’t give your friends a pass you wouldn’t give to your enemies.

So if you come down hard on Limbaugh because he has crossed a line, you must come down hard on Schultz and Maher because they have crossed the same line; and you should do this despite the fact that in general — that is, on all the important issues — you think Schultz and Maher are right and Limbaugh is horribly and maliciously wrong.

However, I don’t think Schultz and Maher were “right.” But Ed Schultz was taken off the air for a week because of his use of a sexual insult, and I think that was appropriate. The price was paid. The scales were balanced in his case. He probably won’t do that ever again.

I don’t think Maher received any punishment for the “dumb tw*t” remark, but once again, if that is all Limbaugh had done, those of us who never listen to Limbaugh probably wouldn’t have noticed, or cared.

Fish continues,

The idea is that in the public sphere (as opposed to the private sphere in which you can have and vent your prejudices) you should not privilege your own views to the extent that they justify treating those with opposing views unequally and unfairly. (Fairness is the great liberal virtue.) This idea is concisely captured by the philosopher Thomas Nagel when he says that in political life we should regard our most cherished beliefs, “whether moral or religious … simply as someone’s beliefs rather than as truths.” In short, back away from or relax your strongest convictions about what is right and wrong and act in a manner that grants legitimacy, at least of a formal kind, to the convictions of others, even of others you despise.

The difference between Maher and Limbaugh is the difference between insult and slander. Maher insulted Sarah Palin; but all he communicated was that he doesn’t like her. He didn’t make any substantive claims about her that one could judge to be true or not. But Limbaugh spent three days telling outright lies about Sandra Fluke’s testimony.

So where’s the equivalence, Mr. Fish?

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?

I reject making moral judgments about behavior based on how I feel about the people acting out the behavior. The more useful measure is to consider the effects, actual and potential, of a particular act. And again, by that measure comparing Maher and Limbaugh is comparing a puddle to Lake Superior. They are both “wrong,” but wrong on an entirely different scale. And not equivalent.

See also Whiskey Fire.

Wingnutism as an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

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Along with not being able to control their fear/loathing of women, wingnuts also are decidedly knee-jerk when it comes to government social programs. So it is that some Republican Senators (Rand Paul, LIndsey Graham, Jim DeMint, and Mike Lee) have trotted out a new plan to “save” Medicare by destroying it.

Dana Milbank writes,

If you’re thinking of answering this in the affirmative, you might want to pause long enough to learn what transpired on the third floor of the Capitol on Thursday. There, four prominent Republican lawmakers announced their proposal to abolish Medicare — “sunset” was their pseudo-verb — even for those currently on the program or nearing retirement. …

… For years, Republicans have insisted that they would not end Medicare as we know it and that any changes to the program would not affect those in or near retirement. In the span of 20 minutes Thursday, they jettisoned both promises.

And in an election year, too, although I don’t know if any of these four is up for re-election this year. Rand Paul isn’t, of course.

DeMint and his colleagues think the time to end Medicare is now — with a cold-turkey conversion to a private program, effective in 2014. “I think if Americans actually find out the truth about what we’re doing, it will be a very big positive for Republicans in the fall,” DeMint forecast.

The plan is to scrap Medicare and enroll seniors in the health care plan for federal workers. Exactly how this would save money is a mystery to me, although Rand Paul says it would save Medicare $1 trillion over ten years, a figure I assume he pulled out of his ass. It’s possible he doesn’t appreciate that adding all those seniors to the federal group insurance plan would drive up the cost of the federal group insurance plan.

At Thursday’s news conference, Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times pointed out that the lawmakers were proposing to do with Medicare almost exactly what President Obama’s reforms do for non-retirees: Direct them into private insurance with a subsidy for those who need it most.

Paul was flummoxed. “Uh, anybody want to comment on that?” he asked, producing laughter in the Senate TV studio.

DeMint gave it a try. “Medicare’s already set up as a government program, so we’re beginning to privatize with this idea,” he said. He said his plan takes Medicare recipients “out from under that manipulative umbrella of the Democratic Party.”

I’ve seen primary exit polling that suggests many seniors vote for Republicans because they believe they will “save” Medicare from the evil President Obama, who wants to “cut” it. Of course, the opposite is actually true. The President is trying to keep the program as it is but keep it solvent by putting tighter controls on payments to providers. On the other hand, all of the GOP candidates, including Mittens, have endorsed some variation of the Paul Ryan Medicare-killing plan. But a big talking point with them is a promise to maintain the current program for people already on it.

Now Rand, DeMint et al. are challenging the candidates to go even further Right on Medicare than they were already, which would be a disaster for whichever one of them is in the general election. That they couldn’t contain themselves and wait until after the November election to make this proposal makes them all look even more like lemmings than they did already.

Related: “The Case for Crazy.” John Avlon argues that the best thing that could happen to the GOP is to nominate Rick Santorum and lose in a historic landslide in November.

If Mitt Romney does finally wrestle the nomination to the ground, and then loses to Obama, conservatives will blame the loss on his alleged moderation. The right wing take-away will be to try to nominate a true ideologue in 2016.

But if someone like Rick Santorum gets the nomination in an upset, the party faithful will get to experience the adrenaline rush of going off a cliff together, like Thelma and Louise—elation followed by an electoral thud.

Part of the delusion that is “movement conservatism” is the belief that a large majority of the American people agree with teabaggery, and that only a fringe of elitist liberals stand against them. A teabag candidate sinking like the Titanic might wake some of them up, and might also be a warning to the small group of gazillionaires underwriting this nonsense that there’s a limit to what their money can buy, even in the age of Citizens United.

And They Deny There’s a War on Women

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It just keeps coming — Senate Republicans are fighting to kill the Violence Against Women Act. It’s like they can’t help themselves.

VAW is up for renewal. Although some Senate Republicans supported VAW in the past, the Dems have added two measures to the bill that Republicans are calling poison pills. One, they want to make it easier for battered women who are illegal immigrants to get temporary visas. Two, they want to include same-sex couples in programs for domestic violence.

Some conservatives are feeling trapped.

“I favor the Violence Against Women Act and have supported it at various points over the years, but there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who opposed the latest version last month in the Judiciary Committee. “You think that’s possible? You think they might have put things in there we couldn’t support that maybe then they could accuse you of not being supportive of fighting violence against women?”

I don’t know if that was the plan. But considering all the creative ways Republicans in Congress have used “poison pills” so that they could bash Democrats for one thing or another (here’s just one example, from the maha archives), I say — choke on it, dude.

Meanwhile, some righties are still trying to trash Sandra Fluke. This time, they find she is dating a liberal Jew. Oh noes! Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money provides insightful commentary.

Sandra Fluke’s boyfriend is…wait…a JEW!!!!

And not the good kind of Jew that likes to kill Palestinians in order to further bizarre apocalyptic fantasies of right-wing Christians.

No, Fluke likes the kind of Jew who might know leading Democratic players like….oh my god….CASS SUNSTEIN!!!!!

What’s next? Black men hugging each other? Sorta kinda related — Tbogg.

And wading further into the murky world of guilt by association, Little Lulu has discovered that Soledad O’Brien knows somebody who knew Derrick Bell, and that she has read one of Derrick Bell’s books, twice. Obviously, this “pro-Bell bias” disqualified her from attempting to crack through the dense wall of stupid known as “Joel Pollack.”

Actually, it’s not a war on women. It’s a war on humanity.

They Don’t Learn, Do They?

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A Bloomberg poll says that 77 percent of Americans side with progressives on the question of contraception and women’s health.

Americans overwhelmingly regard the debate over President Barack Obama’s policy on employer-provided contraceptive coverage as a matter of women’s health, not religious freedom, rejecting Republicans’ rationale for opposing the rule. More than three-quarters say the topic shouldn’t even be a part of the U.S. political debate.

More than six in 10 respondents to a Bloomberg National Poll — including almost 70 percent of women — say the issue involves health care and access to birth control, according to the survey taken March 8-11.

Meanwhile, the yahoos in the Arizona legislature think that employers need to be informed about their employees’ contraception use.

A proposed new law in Arizona would give employers the power to request that women being prescribed birth control pills provide proof that they’re using it for non-sexual reasons. And because Arizona’s an at-will employment state, that means that bosses critical of their female employees’ sex lives could fire them as a result.

This is all about “freedom,” of course.

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.

“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”

Yeah, I’m sure the women of Arizona will be fine with having to get permission slips from their bosses to be on the pill.

Meanwhile, just weeks after the Komen for the Fail debacle, Mittens promises to get rid of Planned Parenthood:

“The test is pretty simple. Is the program so critical, it’s worth borrowing money from china to pay for it? And on that basis of course you get rid of Obamacare, that’s the easy one. Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that. The subsidy for Amtrak, I’d eliminate that. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities,” he said.

I’d borrow money from China to buy Mittens some integrity. Or maybe even a brain.

Rushbo-dammerung

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OK, so there are primaries in Alabama and Mississippi today. Nate says it’s very tight. I don’t care who wins.

Ed Schulz had a segment on Rush and the talk radio business, and there was a fellow from the radio business named Holland Cook who had a lot of illuminating things to say.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The problem for Rush isn’t just a loss of advertising revenue. As Cook explains, the way the business works is that syndicated shows usually offer free or low-cost content to radio stations, and the stations and the syndicator split the ad revenue. But Rush has been collecting high licensing fees from the stations for the privilege of running his program, and Cook says that stations are not going to put up with that for long if the advertising dries up. It’s actually less expensive for the stations to hire someone to create their own content than to air Rush.

Rush’s syndicate has told the stations it is “suspending” national ads for two weeks. I believe this means the stations run their own ads and keep all the revenue. This may be a measure to keep more stations from dropping Rush.

There is also talk that a lot of stations might drop Rush in favor of a new syndicated program by Mike Huckabee, which begins April 2. It’s to run in Rush’s noon-to-3 time. That program was in the works before the Fluke meltdown, which suggests that Huckabee’s syndicator, Cumulus Media, already thought Rush was vulnerable.

Getting back to this David Frum article — Frum says something I speculated about a few days ago. The speed at which so many advertisers suddenly dumped Rush suggests that many of them had been questioning their ad buys on Rush’s show before Fluke.

This background may explain why so many of Limbaugh’s advertisers bolted for the exits when the Fluke rampage went wrong for Limbaugh. It wasn’t social conscience: Limbaugh has said offensive things before. It wasn’t social media: Facebook and Twitter existed back in 2009, when Limbaugh explained how the Obama presidency had emboldened black schoolkids to beat up whites on schoolbuses.

The difference this time is that Limbaugh’s advertisers and his stations had already begun to feel ripped off.

On top of that, Rush’s audience is, um old.

And make no mistake: Limbaugh’s audience is very old. One station manager quipped to me, “The median age of Limbaugh’s audience? Deceased.”

This is not to say that Rush is going to disappear tomorrow. However, I think it’s unlikely that his business model is going to bounce back to what it had been before Fluke. It’s nearly certain that he will lose some stations and a lot of revenue; his syndicator might have to reduce or waive licensing fees to keep Rush’s show marketable, for example.

What I hope for, though, is that Rush’s position as the feared grand high exalted poo-bah and unelected leader of movement conservatism may be coming to an end. This would be a good thing.

Oh, and let’s get Rush booted from Armed Forces Radio.

Rightie Radio Lumbers Toward the Tar Pits

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Ninety-eight major advertisers are pulling all of their ads from “controversial” talk radio programs. John Avlon writes at Daily Beast:

Premiere Networks, which distributes Limbaugh as well as a host of other right-wing talkers, sent an email out to its affiliates early Friday listing 98 large corporations that have requested their ads appear only on “programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).”

This is big. According to the radio-industry website Radio-Info.com, which first posted excerpts of the Premiere memo, among the 98 companies that have decided to no longer sponsor these programs are “carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm), and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway).” Together, these talk-radio advertising staples represent millions of dollars in revenue.

Avlon suggests there’s a little more going on here than just disgust with what Rushbo said about Sandra Fluke. This is significant:

…this latest controversy comes at a particularly difficult time for right-wing talk radio. They are playing to a (sometimes literally) dying demographic. Rush & Co. rate best among old, white males. They have been steadily losing women and young listeners, who are alienated by the angry, negative, obsessive approach to political conservations. Add to that the fact that women ages 24–55 are the prize advertising demographic, and you have a perfect storm emerging after Limbaugh’s Sandra Fluke comments.

One suspects that if these advertisers believed they were getting a good bang for their advertising buck on talk radio, they’d ignore the controversy. The way this episode has played out makes me think at least some of these companies were already losing interest in advertising on talk radio before Rushbo went overboard slut-shaming Sandra Fluke.

Avlon goes on to say that in the end, market forces made rightie talk radio viable, and now it’s possible market forces will kill it. Rush’s recent antics just hurried the process along a bit.

Update: See also Digby.

Update: See also Clarence Page. Like Page, I am skeptical we’re seeing the Twilight of Rushbo. If nothing else, Wingnut Welfare will kick in somehow and see to it he stays on the air. However, I wouldn’t have anticipated that so many major advertisers would suddenly decide to pull out of rightie talk radio.

Also as Page says, Limbaugh’s antics are hurting the Republican Party more than helping it. So maybe it’s OK if he stays around awhile longer.

Pam Geller Doesn’t Know How Women’s Birth Control Works, Either

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I have to assume she’s never needed the pill — I pulled this off Geller’s site (to which I do not link)

A 30-year-old poses as a 23-year-old, chooses a Catholic University to attend at $65,000 per year, and cannot afford ALL the birth control pills she needs… so she wants the US taxpayers to pay for her rampant sexual activity. By all accounts she is banging it five times a day. She sounds more like a prostitute to me. She must have an gyno bill to choke a horse (pun intended). Calling this whore a slut was a softball.

Do these people have any brains at all? Do they think, ever? Or do they honestly believe that women who have frequent sex have to take more pills than those on a strict once-a-week schedule?

I’m starting to think the entire American Right needs to be sent to a Masters and Johnson therapy clinic, if there are any around any more.

Charles Johnson quotes some of the comments — apparently Ms. Fluke is also a Muslim-lover.

Anyhoo — do read Dennis G., “You could hear the fear.” He thinks the loss of advertisers could really be putting some fear into Rush. Apparently most of his ads are “multi-level marketing deals with referral kick-backs for anybody who mentions the show when placing an order. And others—most of them it seems—were straight up grifts to fluff up Rushbo’s wallet and fund this or that aspect of the wingnut money machine.” If enough legitimate businesses drop out … well, we can hope. And join the fight …

Check out this “boycott Rush” site and also this one. Still go to — AOL, Sears, eharmony, Oreck Vacuum Cleaners, LifeLock, Tax Resolution, and Lear Capital. And Get Rush off of Armed Forces radio.

[Update: AOL is out!]

Update: Cenk Uygur believes Rush’s ratings claims are a lie, and that he couldn’t possibly have 20 million listeners as he claims. Also —

But one thing is for sure — he’s hurt, dog! That’s why we see the unprecedented apology from him on Sandra Fluke. When this controversy first broke, I predicted on our show that more advertisers would drop him (at the time, only two had). Advertisers are much more likely to drop a controversial guy if his numbers are already down. They’ll ride it out if he’s still delivering the goods. This is the same thing that happened to Imus. His ratings were miserable already, so advertisers didn’t have enough incentive to stick with him when trouble arose.

So, Rush is in big trouble now as more and more advertisers peel off. He’s in a tail spin. Why else would you triple down on the “slut” comments from Wednesday to Friday and then issue an apology on Saturday? He has over-reached (in his offensive comments) and undelivered (in his ratings). That’s a lethal combo.

Conservative: A Person Whose Understanding of Sexuality Arrested in the Fifth Grade

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So Rushbo is stirring up trouble by equating contraception with prostitution. As Mistermix says, “slut” is the new “liberal.”

At Cafe Hayek, an economics professor at George Mason University named Donald J. Boudreaux defends Rush, thus:

Mr. Limbaugh reacted to Ms. Fluke’s own violation of standards of civility. A truly civilized person doesn’t demand that other people pick up the bill for her contraception. A truly civilized person – especially one who can afford to be a full-time student at a prestigious law school – would refuse any invitation to publicly play the role of a victim wronged by being told to pay for her own pills or condoms. A truly civilized person does not hold in contempt other people for their resistance to being forced to subsidize his or her ‘lifestyle choices’ (whatever those choices might be).

A truly civilized person doesn’t demand that other people pick up the bill for her contraception. But to be in an insurance risk pool means you do expect other people to pay for things, as provided in the policy. Likewise, you are paying for other peoples’ medical care. Is Professor Boudreaux opposed to the insurance industry?

By the professor’s logic, a truly civilized person doesn’t demand that other people pick up the bill for his appendectomy. Or his prostate exam. Or his chemotherapy. Or to have his broken bones set. We should pay for these things ourselves, or suffer in silence.

Of course, we know what’s going on here. The particular item being discussed is associated with women. In particular, women who are having sex. And every right wing man in the country, as well as a disturbing number of women, has reverted to being a nine-year-old who just found a stash of Hustler magazines in the attic.

Contraception isn’t health care to them. It’s about women! And sex! Booga booga booga!

Never mind that there are sober, practical, dollar-and-cent reasons why including no-copay coverage for contraception won’t cost us anything extra and might save us all money in the long run. Logically, insurance companies ought to charge more for policies that don’t cover contraception.

For a generally healthy woman in her fertile years, which is a big chunk of her adult life, fertility is her single biggest health care issue. Whether she is pregnant or not is a rather huge factor in her life, and the possibility of pregnancy follows her like a shadow, whether she is faithfully married or in a monogamous relationship or a sex worker. For most women, putting limits on how many children we have is necessary for living a standard middle-class life in the 21st century. Using contraception is a health issue.

I’ve observed for a long time that a lot of men really don’t “get” that; they don’t associate sex with pregnancy as much as women do. And as revealed by sick, twisted bleeper Craig Bannister, some of them don’t even know how contraception actually works. They seem to think the amount of money a woman must pay for contraception is an indicator of how much sex she is having. Craig Bannister may have to take a pill every time he has sex, but it doesn’t work that way for women.

Younger women these days are not accustomed to being shamed for being sexually active. I hope this is a wake-up call for them.

Update: Via Whiskey Fire,, another Troglodyte heard from:

If we remove “slut” from our discourse, we thereby discard half the reward of chastity, namely the superiority of prestige that the virtuous woman should rightly enjoy in comparison to those who are less virtuous.

I’ll pause a moment to let you stop sputtering, or laughing, whichever the case may be.

The Left has substituted the clinical-sounding term “sexually active” for more value-laden terms used to describe promiscuity, because the Left is actively seeking to destroy the system of traditional moral values that condemns sex outside marriage.

And which moral values, oddly, rarely were used to punish men, but only to keep women shamed and submissive and controlled. Funny how that worked.

When we hear about a woman in the Middle East somewhere condemned to death because she was raped, while her rapist is considered blameless, we are all horrified, shocked, outraged across the political spectrum. But what our native Taliban is trying to pull differs only in degree. And for some of them, it differs only in degree because they know they wouldn’t get away with taking it further.

We can laugh at the hysteria — “Republicans are coming to steal your ladyparts!” — but we cannot ignore the fact that the Left is engaged in a Culture War offensive with potentially serious consequences.

I think this guy just earned today’s Toolie Award.

Seriously

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I’ve decided to create a new award called the Do You Seriously Not See You Are Exhibiting Pathological Projection on Steroids, You Asshat? Award. And I’m going to give the first one to Power Tool John Hinderaker. And then I may retire the prize, because I don’t think anyone will ever top this.

See also the BooMan.

Tough Talk

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Frothy complains that Mittens is a wimp about taxes.

Our economy and American families are struggling, and the country needs bold reforms and major restructuring, not tinkering at the margins. …my opponent in the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney, had a last-minute conversion. Attempting to distract from his record of tax and fee increases as governor of Massachusetts, poor job creation, and aggressive pursuit of earmarks, he now says he wants to follow my lead and lower individual as well as corporate marginal tax rates.

It’s a good start. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough. He says his proposed tax cuts would be revenue neutral and, borrowing the language of Occupy Wall Street, promises the top 1% will pay for the cuts. No pro-growth tax policy there, just more Obama-style class warfare.

Mittens is tinkering at the margins? Ezra Klein says,

Mitt Romney is promising that taxes will go down, defense spending will go up, and old-people programs won’t change for this generation of retirees. So three of his four options for deficit reduction — taxes, old-people programs, and defense — are now either contributing to the deficit or are off-limits for the next decade.

Romney is also promising that he will pay for his tax cuts, pay for his defense spending, and reduce total federal spending by more than $6 trillion over the next 10 years. But the only big pot of money left to him is poor-people programs. So, by simple process of elimination, poor-people programs will have to be cut dramatically. There’s no other way to make those numbers work.

In fact, Mittens recently proposed a 20% across-the-board cut in income tax rates. This is much more drastic than what he has been proposing, but he has to keep moving Right to stay in the race.

Not to be outdone, Frothy is proposing a ten-point Economic Freedom Agenda, which he says will balance the budget in four years. Yes, and I’m Jean Dujardin. And the dog.

Here are his ten points, briefly:

  1. Drill, baby, drill; frack, baby, frack; and pipeline, baby, pipeline.
  2. Deregulate.
  3. Cut taxes.
  4. Cut taxes.
  5. Lay off public employees.
  6. Repeal “Obamacare” and replace it with the better plan Republicans keep promising but can’t seem to find anywhere.
  7. Pass a balanced budget amendment.
  8. Make lots of free trade agreements.
  9. Cut the hell out of “entitlement” programs.
  10. “Revive housing” by finally killing off Fannie and Freddie.

Seriously. I left out some details, but the whole plan is such a fantasy the details are kind of irrelevant. Obviously if the country goes this way in no time we’ll be in such a hole that Greece will look good.