Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Henry Farrell: Happy Krauthammer Day:

  It's that time of the year again -- it's been five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months plus five months since Charles Krauthammer told us

  Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We've had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven't found any, we will have a credibility problem.

  I'll confess that I was a bit disappointed last week, when Charles Krauthammer didn't make the cut for Atrios' shortlist for Wanker of the Decade (he did get a nod-in-his-direction though; Fred Hiatt's nod was intended to honor the Washington Post's editorial page as a whole). But having reflected a bit, I think this was the right call. To be a really first rate wanker, you have to be at least partially oblivious to what you are. I've always had the sense that Krauthammer knows exactly what he is -- nasty and thoroughly mendacious. Not a wanker then, but rather worse than a wanker. He's whatever it is that Karl Rove is (when rugose and squamous entities drag out their tortured forms from under rocks, to caper and desport themselves beneath the gibbous moon, they console themselves at least they're not working for American Crossroads).

  By the way, next year will be the tenth anniversary. Still writing for the Washington Post, still syndicated, still on the talk shows.

• Ed Kilgore: Journey to the Center of Ted Nugent's Mind:

  In a nugget from last weekend's National Rifle Association annual meeting, Ted Nugent offered this warning:

  "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year," Nugent said, according to a video posted on YouTube by the NRA. "If you can't go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil America hated administration, I don't even know what you're made out of."

  Don't know if this means we need to put Ted on suicide watch come November 7 if things don't turn out his way, or just let the police know he's threatening to do a crime so he can get himself incarcerated. But it's a fine reflection of the wingnut mind at its deepest that he seems to think us godless socialists care enough about his ravings to persecute him.

  TPM reports that the NRA has scrubbed Nugent's video from its website, after Romney distanced himself from it. TPM also reports that Bishop of Peoria Compares Obama and Contraception Mandates to Hitler and Stalin. There are plenty of sane reasons one might be unhappy with Obama, but his opponents keep resorting to insane ones -- suggesting they may be insane themselves.

• Paul Krugman: The Drywall Chronicles:

  So Mitt Romney gave a speech at a closed Ohio drywall factory, which he tried to use as a symbol of Obama's economic failure. The symbolism was perfect -- not as an illustration of Obama's failure, but as an illustration of just how stupid Romney thinks we are.

  Even regular reporters noticed that the factory in question closed under, yes, George W. Bush -- a fact Romney failed to mention, although his campaign scrambled to cover for him afterwards.

  What I didn't see mentioned was the point that this was a drywall factory -- that is, a supplier of a product largely used in home construction. It's one thing to say that Obama should have revived the economy as a whole; it's another to say that he should have brought back the housing bubble!

  Krugman also provides a chart comparing job losses during the first 3 years + 3 months of the Bush and Obama administrations:

  

  If you bother doing the math, you'll also notice that Bush's job losses were cushioned by growth in public sector jobs, whereas Obama's total was made much worse by public sector job cuts. Bush started out with a much milder recession, and his main remedies were tax cuts for the superrich and the fiscal stimulus of big post-9/11 military deficits, which, uh, didn't work very well. (From 2004-07 the economy under Bush did grow, but almost exclusively from the unsustainable housing bubble.) Krugman brings this up because Romney's proposed solutions are pretty much the same as Bush's: tax cuts for the rich, and more wars.

  I'm beginning to think that Obama's big mistake wasn't that his stimulus package was too small (although it was) but that he didn't end the Bush tax cuts as soon as he entered office (perhaps keeping some of the bottom end cuts, but not necessarily the "middle class" ones he wanted to keep). Had he done so, he wouldn't have been nearly as vulnerable to complaints about his deficits -- they would pretty much vanish when the economy picked up -- which would have given him more leeway to spend in constructive fashion, or at least more resolve to fight back against debilitating cuts.

• John Quiggin: The Coming Boom in Inherited Wealth: Inequality is up, even more so -- 93% of additional income in the US in 2010 went to the top 1% -- but some argue that "those at the top were more likely to earn than inherit their riches." Depends on what you mean by "earn" but Quiggin adds:

  The fact that currently wealthy Americans have not, in general, inherited their wealth follows logically from the fact that, in their parents' generation, there weren't comparable accumulations of wealth to be bequeathed. More generally, starting from the position of relatively (to earlier periods and to the current one) equal income and wealth that prevailed between about 1950 and 1980, growing inequality of income must precede growing inequality of wealth, since wealth is simply the cumulative excess of income over consumption (and US high-income earners have not been notable for restraint as regards consumption).

  So, given highly unequal incomes, and social immobility, we can expect inheritance to play a much bigger role in explaining inequality for the generations now entering adulthood than for the current recipients of high incomes. That will include direct transfers of wealth as well as the effects of increasingly unequal access to education, early job opportunities and home ownership.

  One more thing to emphasize is that over the last few decades, the right-wing movement was almost exclusively financed by people who were born to wealth -- the Kochs, Olins, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Coors, and so forth. Same for major figures in the movement, from Bill Buckley to Bill Kristol, and for that matter G.W. Bush. Aside from the Kochs, most of these figures are far from the top of the list, but their politics starts from their aristocratic sense of entitlement. Back in the more equitable 1950s, before greed became something to brag about, it seemed more likely that at least some of the fortunates might redirect themselves to public service -- the Kennedys, even the occasional Rockefeller and Harriman. Less so now, as the concentration of wealth occurs alongside a diminished sense of social responsibility.

• Adele Stan: Koch Coughs Up Another $Mil for Pro-Walker Group: The group is called The Republican Governors Association, which has bought up $3 million worth of advertising to defend the recalled Wisconsin governor. One reason this caught my eye is that Koch Industries got a nice headline in the Wichita Eagle last week for their generous donation to help out with tornado recovery in south Wichita: they donated $100,000. Koch's headquarters are in Wichita, but they're on the north side of town and weren't affected by the tornado.