Midday open thread

• The Rude One nails it:

  One last note: the Rude Pundit finds it sadly funny that, after a trillion plus dollars spent on the wars, after thousands of soldiers killed, that what it took to get Osama bin Laden was a criminal investigation and an intelligence operation followed by a quick strike. As we ponder our dead, all our dead, as we remember and make silly statements about "closure," let us wonder what might have been for the United States had that been our approach all along.

• Orrin Hatch says that if the Republicans get control of the Senate Finance Committee he intends to reform the tax code, to ensure that the middle class and the poor carry more of the burden. Seriously.
• In other breaking news, Rick Santorum is a hateful bigot.
• And in other breaking news...
• Oregon's largest health insurer wants a 22% rate increase.
• Digby on Bush's refusal to join President Obama at Ground Zero:

  I think it's understandable. The highest point of his presidency was the day he stood at Ground Zero and became the head cheerleader of America promising that "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon!" Going back nearly ten years later and watching a different president get credit for it would be a painful reminder of all of his epic presidential failures. It would take a much bigger man than George W. Bush to emerge from hiding for that particular ceremony.

• Digby on the reported coming rollout of a bipartisan plan to cut corporate taxes while closing some loopholes:

  Why hell, let's just pass it by acclamation and start collecting the checks. (Just write them out to cash, the politicians might need to borrow a few bucks for their campaigns before it comes back to the treasury.)

  Not to rain on this bipartisan love fest but it is probably a good idea to remind ourselves of this. If people don't smell the scam in "closing corporate loopholes" and then lowering the corporate tax rate to fix the deficit while lobbyists "ferociously litigate" the details then I can't help them.

  Not that such a plan would once again play right into the hands of Republicans, or anything.

• Paul Krugman ponders the tragic reality that economists don't have much say over economic policy:

  I?ve noted before that these days policy orthodoxy seems, all too often, to be derived from highly heterodox models ? or to put it more clearly, perhaps, the ?radicals? are people like me who basically want to apply texbook macro, while Very Serious People are seizing on all sort of odd ideas about expansionary austerity and such to justify their views.

• The problem within the problem within the problem:

  In 2009, the Washington Post printed a remarkable number of dreadful pieces on global warming ? including one by Bjorn Lomborg, two by Sarah Palin (!) and, most infamously, three by George Will that shockingly repeated global warming lies the Post knew were lies (see short list here).

  Gawker weighed in with, ?The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America,? explaining they ?openly allow George Will to lie, to straight-up lie, without fact-checking or corrections.? The Columbia Journalism Review called it The Will Affair.

  So who could possibly do a media analysis that concluded the Washington Post covered climate well in 2009? Hint: It?s the same person who utterly misanalyzed the spending data to conclude climate bill opponents were outspent by proponents.  The answer is after the jump, as if you didn?t already know?.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/xG2X4OdcqYo/-Midday-open-thread

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