News organizations have taken notice: suddenly, the takeover of the Republican Party by right-wing extremists has become a story (although many reporters seem determined to pretend that something equivalent is happening to the Democrats. It isn’t.) But why is this happening? And in particular, why is it happening now?

Here are the common ideas from the Tea Party platform:

1. Identify constitutionality of every new law:
2. Reject emissions trading:
3. Demand a balanced federal budget:
4. Simplify the tax system:
5. Audit federal government agencies for constitutionality:
6. Limit annual growth in federal spending:
7. Repeal the health care legislation passed on March 23,
8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above’ Energy Policy
9. Reduce Earmarks:
10. Reduce Taxes:

Which one of these represents an extreme political position?  Is the now stuff of political extremism?

Regarding a supposed “takeover” of mainstream republicanism by radical factions, Krugman is 100% correct it’s not happening on the Left.   Well, technically correct.  It’s just a matter of verb tense.   Since progressives love to think that ‘tomorrow begins today’,  they just need a little lesson in recent history.  It did happen in 2008, when the union-backed, social democrat left muscled its way past the Clintonites in the Democratic primaries.   Such a long time ago!

More:

The right’s answer, of course, is that it’s about outrage over President Obama’s “socialist” policies — like his health care plan, which is, um, more or less identical to the plan Mitt Romney enacted in Massachusetts. Many on the left argue, instead, that it’s about race, the shock of having a black man in the White House — and there’s surely something to that.

I’d like to hear more about Romney’s nationalization of the student lending, automotive, and financial industries but I’m late for lunch.  I do recall recoiling in horror when he designated CO2 as a toxin, threatened entire industries, and installed union bosses as his deputies.

And from the protection of his lofty perch, nobody will ever get to question Krugman’s assurances that, yes indeed, racism is behind all of this popular disgust.

More bleating:

True, that’s not how it was supposed to work. When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments — and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.

Refreshing that Krugman can man up and admit a mistake or two. He just needs to admit all of them, like his failure to understand the arguments of his critics. The right does have a undeniable ‘market-knows-best’ attitude.  But they do not have a ‘regulation-is-always-bad’ dogma.   Can you identify one influential right winger calling for no regulations on any given topic?

Observing the nature of the financial meltdown in 2008, and its myriad causes, reasonable conclusions can be made that indict the unintended effects of regulation as a primary input.   Acknowledging this does not mean that you’ve somehow crossed the logical point of no return!  Lack of regulatory control in the markets did not cause the crisis–derivatives and mortgage-backed securities are downstream products.   The problem was that these market were the only mechanism able to deal the ever increasing supply of bad housing debt produced and sanctioned by . . . .wait for it. . . . . . . . federal home lending regulations.  The government flooded more and more unfulfillable obligations into the markets and didn’t have any idea that something would eventually break.   What we needed in 2008 was a drastic revamp of our approach to lending and divesting the GSEs.  Instead, we got unions busing protestors to CEO’s homes to protest executive pay on live TV and more regulations against “predatory lenders”.   And the GSEs remain untouched and still asking for more money.

This despite the Treasury being run by Harvard MBAs – go figure!

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“We commend the pay czar and the administration for telling the people who crashed the economy that they need to make the same sacrifices main street and real America have been forced to take on as a result of the economic crisis,” said Dan Pedrotty, director of the AFL-CIO Office of Investment. “The American people are fed up with watching Wall Street play by a different set of rules and pretend like the economic crisis which they created is for everyone else to suffer through and not them.”

Could they have quoted a more obvious position?

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Here’s a fun, revealing fact:  The cities of Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Detroit, Toledo, Flint, Dayton, Canton have had a total of fifty-seven mayors since 1970*.

All but nine have been Democrats.

Here’s to your future, Rust Belt!

* based on wildy inaccurate and biased Wikipedia information.

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It’s like they just started cranking out the lemons.

Some recent examples:  Toyota’s Prius has crap headlights. Honda’s Insight sucks.   But Obama’s people’s car Chevy’s Volt?  It’s gonna kick both their asses.

Don’t think for a minute that the hard earned record of marketplace success enjoyed by Japanese automakers over the decades– witnessed by millions of objective consumers — is immune from the extraordinary influence of a political-media machine mostly concerned with propagating the worst kinds of marketplace manipulation in the name of “Change”.

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The Congress-critters are lining up right now to vote on this without reading it, just like TARP.

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But it was Bush who trampled the Constitution with “illegal” wiretaps and, in other matters, fired his own employees for political reasons.

What constituency did Bush reward with wiretapping?

Where are the consitutional critics who not only blasted Bush’s “overreach” on legal (and congressionally-approved) warrantless wiretaps but went as far to call for his impeachment over the matter?

The silence is strange.  After all, the wiretapping program had received congressional support, and although parts of the program were rebuked by the courts as unconstitutional, the current administration not only supports the concept but employs it as deemed necessary in the global fight against terror.

How possibly can we view the Chrysler takeover as a constituional action?

Cliff Asness couldn’t have described the Chrysler annexation more clearly:

“The President’s attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it to a labor union that delivers money and votes for him. Why is he not calling on his party to “sacrifice” some campaign contributions, and votes, for the greater good? Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and abuse of power.”

Of course, we’re told, it’s NOT socialism.  It’s NOT fascism.  So what the hell is happening here?

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In the end, it seems like there was more of an urge to save union jobs than to save a struggling company.

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