Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week (or two):

• Tim Dickinson: Right-Wing Billionaires Behind Mitt Romney: Profiles of: William Koch, Harold Simmons, Bob Perry, Jim Davis, Richard Marriott and Bill Marriott Jr., Edward Conard, Frank VanderSloot, Steven Lund, Julian Robertson Jr., John Paulson, Paul Singer, Robert Mercer, Kenneth Griffin, L. Francis Rooney III, Steven Webster.

  The undisputed master of Super PAC money is Mitt Romney. In the primary season alone, Romney's rich friends invested $52 million in his Super PAC, Restore Our Future -- a number that's expected to more than double in the coming months. This unprecedented infusion of money from America's monied elites underscores the radical transformation of the Republican Party, which has made defending the interests of 0.0001 percent the basis of its entire platform. "Money buys power," the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman observed recently, "and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties." In short, the political polarization and gridlock in Washington are a direct result of the GOP's capitulation to Big Money.

  That capitulation is evident in Romney's campaign. Most of the megadonors backing his candidacy are elderly billionaires: Their median age is 66, and their median wealth is $1 billion. Each is looking for a payoff that will benefit his business interests, and they will all profit from Romney's pledge to eliminate inheritance taxes, extend the Bush tax cuts for the superwealthy -- and then slash the top tax rate by another 20 percent. Romney has firmly joined the ranks of the economic nutcases who spout the lie of trickle-down economics. "Support from billionaires has always been the main thing keeping those charlatans and cranks in business," Krugman noted. "And now the same people effectively own a whole political party."

  Steve Coll's Private Empire has various numbers on how much and to whom ExxonMobil's PAC and managers have contributed. Looking at those numbers, my reaction was, "how quaint." The oil giant has never had problems getting access and getting people to do their bidding, and in the past that's come awfully cheap. In some ways the campaign finance limits worked for them: they could make token contributions, and their size would do all the rest. Now, the bidding to buy politicians is turning into an arms race, where the price of recognition -- and true insider status -- is going up and up.

• Ed Kilgore: The Big Dog Whistle:

  It's worth remembering in this connection that much as conservatives want to blame Obama and "socialism" for economic problems, they haven't displayed very convincing empathy for the actual sufferers. You may recall that in 2008, when complaining about unemployment wasn't a weapon that could be used against Democrats, Mike Huckabee became persona non grata among many on the Right for daring suggest the economy wasn't absolutely ideal. Even after Obama took office, many conservatives had trouble suppressing their grim satisfaction that the housing and financial collapse had punished all those irresponsible homebuyers, and many spoke of the recession as being one of those healthy "corrections" that would wring excessive borrowing out of the system. Even now, when Republicans aren't justifying austerity measures as necessary to economic growth, they're lauding them as a moral tonic for the poor. It's obvious they'd support exactly the same policies no matter what was happening to the economy; after all, they always have.

  Fortunately for Romney, a lot of non-economic itches can be scratched by incessantly claiming that Big Government caused the recession or is impeding the recovery. Maybe you support "entitlement reform" because you are furious at the looters who are living at the expense of the hard-earned tax dollars of the virtuously well-off. Mitt won't often "go there," but he's for "entitlement reform" on ostensibly economic grounds, so you're on his team. Maybe you hate "ObamaCare" because you think it's encouraging the Second Holocaust of legalized abortion, or enabling young women to have sex, or robbing seniors of the Medicare benefits they earned to give health care coverage to shiftless minorities. Mitt won't talk about that, but he's promised to kill ObamaCare as fast as he can, so that's enough. Maybe you are upset about environmentalism because you view it as a front for neo-pagan assaults on the God-given dominion over the earth you are supposed to enjoy. Mitt wouldn't put it that way. But he will argue for scrapping environmental regulations tout court to free up the Great American Job-Creating Machine and bring down gas prices. And maybe you hate public education because you view "government schools" as satanic indoctrination centers for secularism, and colleges as places where elitist professors mock traditional values and let young women have sex. Mitt won't come right out and talk about any of that, either, but he frowns on federal education programs because we just can't afford them. [ . . . ]

  But in a certain sense, the entire Romney campaign is one big dog whistle aimed at appealing to persuadable voters on the single issue of the economy, while letting the restive "base" hear all sorts of other things involving cultural resentments and the desire to return to the good old days before the New Deal and the 60s began to ruin the Founders' design and defy the Creator's moral code.

• Ed Kilgore: The New Mouth of the South: Herman Cain to replace Neal Boortz on the latter's long-running radio show:

  You'd probably have to be from the Atlanta area to understand the long reign of snarky error Boortz has conducted for 42 years on the local, regional and national air waves. He was doing political talk when Rush Limbaugh was still a music DJ and sportscaster, the very prototype of someone who read Ayn Rand as a teenager and never recovered. For decades, I tried to convince my father that listening to Boortz -- who invariably enraged him -- was bad for his health.

• Mike Konczal: A Visual Guide to the Confliting Theories About How to Fix the Economy: one quick comment (I'll probably return to this sometime), is that all three "demand-based solutions" are featured in Paul Krugman's End This Depression Now!, although Krugman favors fiscal policy because it's more direct and less encumbered (as monetary policy is by that pesky zero lower bound); he also all debunks all three "supply-based explanations" -- to put it mildly (they are all pretty ridiculous). Also note that the latter aren't called "solutions": they don't actually propose fixing anything, not that they would work anyway.

  Demand vs. Supply focus is roughly the same as left vs. right. Demand is about whether consumers have enough money (and confidence, which is to say money) to buy things. The most straightforward way to get more demand is to give people more money. Supply is about whether business have enough capacity, or lacking that access to capital to create more capacity. It should be pretty obvious that lack of capacity isn't the current problem, and isn't likely to be a problem for a long, long time. But the right likes supply-side support because it lavishes attention on the rich, and the right hates demand-side stimulus it helps the poor (i.e., the unemployed and everyone working for less than a living wage).

• Paul Krugman: Wisconsin:

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. Obviously I'm not happy with the result; not just out of political sympathies, but because all the recent political trends have been rewarding the side that caused the very crisis from which it is now benefiting, not to mention politicians who have been wrong about everything since the crisis hit.

  I'm even more unhappy with how it happened, with national Democrats basically sitting on their hands while conservatives poured resources into the race.

• Paul Krugman: The Urge to Punish:

  What does make sense, maybe, is a two-part explanation. First, the ECB is unwilling to admit that its past policy, especially its past rate hikes, were a mistake. Second -- and this goes deeper -- I suspect that we're seeing the old Schumpeter "work of depressions" mentality, the notion that all the suffering going on somehow serves a necessary purpose and that it would be wrong to mitigate that suffering even slightly.

  This doctrine has an undeniable emotional appeal to people who are themselves comfortable. It's also completely crazy given everything we've learned about economics these past 80 years. But these are times of madness, dressed in good suits.

• Andrew Leonard: GOP to Modernity: Stop:

  The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can't handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual information-gathering effort that's part of the U.S. Census. Every year, a randomized sample of 3 million Americans is surveyed for data on "demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics." In one form or another, the U.S. government has been carrying out similar surveys since 1850 -- the current version is the fourth major iteration.

  Most sensible people consider the ACS to be extremely useful, the kind of thing that government is really well equipped to carry out. That is not, or at least did not used to be, a partisan statement. [ . . . ]

  Even the Wall Street Journal is appalled -- although the lead sentence of its editorial criticizing the funding cuts required some remarkable calisthenics before reaching the point of disapproval.

  With the contempt of the Washington establishment raining down on House Republicans for voting on principle, every now and then the GOP does something that feeds the otherwise false narrative of political extremism.

  Marvelous! In one sentence, the Journal's editorial writer manages to deny, not once, but twice, the self-evident fact that the current crop of House Republicans occupies the nethermost regions of right-wing extremism, while at the same time admitting that, yeah, well, in this one case they are indeed bonkers. [ . . . ]

  The sponsor of the House measure, the freshman Florida Republican Daniel Webster, claims that ACS questions are too "intrusive" and "the very picture of what's wrong in D.C." He seems to be projecting. The very picture of what's wrong with D.C. is exquisitely captured by daily demonstration that one of our leading political parties is dedicated to the proposition that the less we know about what is going on in our economy or on our planet, the better. If science tells us that one of the consequences of human activity is an overheated planet, then the answer is to defund climate research. If data gathered by the ACS gives us a better understanding of where poverty may be growing as a result of economic policies put into place over the past few decades, best to just to close our eyes and ignore it.

• Bill McKibben: How You Subsidize the Energy Giants to Wreck the Planet: From Tom Engelhardt's introduction (since I've been talking about this sort of thing):

  Just in case you're running for national office, here are a few basic stats to orient you when you hit Washington (thanks to the invaluable Open Secrets website of the Center for Responsive Politics). In 2011, the oil and gas industries ponied up more than $148 million to lobby Congress and federal agencies of various sorts. The top four lobbying firms in the business were ConocoPhillips ($20.5 million), Royal Dutch Shell ($14.7 million), Exxon Mobil ($12.7 million), and Chevron ($9.5 million).

  And note that those figures don't include campaign contributions, although I can't imagine why corporate money flowing to candidates or their PACs isn't considered "lobbying." When it comes to such donations, the industry has given a total of $238.7 million to candidates and parties since 1990, 75% of it to Republicans. In 2011-2012, Exxon ($992,573) and -- I'm sure this won't shock you -- Koch Industries ($872,912) led the oil and gas list.

  This certainly understates what the Kochs do in their role as self-appointed concerned private citizens: through their various front groups, they reportedly spent over a million dollars just in Wisconsin's recall election.

• MJ Rosenberg: Israel's Worst Enemy:

  Minister of Defense Ehud Barak is now calling for unilateral withdrawal from those parts of the West Bank he doesn't feel like occupying forever and is making clear that he opposes negotiating with Iran in favor of unilateral Israeli action.

  By now it should be clear to the entire world: the Netanyahu-Barak government has no interest in what the United Nations rules, what international law says, what its only ally (and the source of billions of dollars of aid each year) wants. The Netanyahu-Barak government behaves like outlaws in the most literal sense of the word.

  It will keep the land it wants and bomb whoever it wants and to hell with everyone else.

  As David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister liked to say, "It doesn't matter what the goyim think. What matters is what the Jews do." It was a dangerous worldview in Ben Gurion's day and it is infinitely more dangerous now.

  The Israeli government's contempt for international opinion, for its only ally and for half of its own population is a recipe for suicide. Even the United States, the world's only superpower, does not live by the law of the jungle (well, not all the time). But for a country of six or seven million surrounded by tens of millions of people who are infuriatedby its behavior to begin with, it's insane.

  Barak tried his "unilateral withdrawal" scheme once before, in 2000, from Lebanon. It was a recipe for another war, which happened in 2006, to everyone's chagrin (although Hezbollah tried their best to put on a happy face). Sharon, who may have been the architect behind Barak, tried it again in Gaza, where the results (so far) have been two more wars, plus near-continual skirmishes.

  Also, you have to wonder why when Israel withdraws from an area, they remain opposed to allow people in that area to get on with their lives. Israel has no settlements in Gaza. Israel is never going to annex Gaza and give its residents Israeli citizenship. So why not allow the UN to organize an independent Palestinian state in Gaza? The usual excuse is that Gaza is one part of a bigger problem that should be negotiated definitively, but there are other parts Israel is nowhere near facing, especially Jerusalem. So why not do Gaza first, and let that start to normalize? At least that would allow Gazans to travel and trade with the rest of the world, to start to build a real economy. It would give them something to do besides blaming Israel for their inability to do anything. And why not do the same for the parts of the West Bank Barak is willing to write off? We should be skeptical that Israel would only let go of tiny isolated parcels that would not be viable economically, but why not take what you can get and try to make that work? Start working like this and even if the conflict is never be properly resolved, it may just fade into insignificance.

• Thomas Schaller: Can Liberals Cure Stupidity? Read the piece for examples of such stupidity, but you can probably think of all those and more yourself.

  Even if misinformation does not uniformly advantage the right, ignorance has a clear ideological tilt. As the American Prospect's Paul Waldman has argued, conservatives not only have a vested interest in creating or at least perpetuating falsehoods about government, but they doubly benefit from the fact that many Americans who at some point in their lives relied upon government programs believe they never did.

  Given that the public believes they are less dependent on a government that is actually less wasteful than they believe it to be, and that what the public doesn't know may or may not hurt them, this much is clear: Their ignorance surely makes political life much harder for liberals.

  Although liberals have lately taken to flattering themselves as being "reality-based," as appreciating science and reason, they have their own blind spots. They also don't communicate well, often on purpose: Obama in particular seems fascinated with the Thaler-Sunstein "nudge" theories, like the one where you lower people's taxes but don't tell them about it, so they'll think they're doing better and spend more money. They don't seem capable of taking credit when they make things work normally, but also they don't get screaming mad when they don't. You get the sense that Obama would like to get reelected, because he rather likes the job, but if he loses he has no sense that it will mean the end of the republic, even though everything the Republicans have proposed, not to mention their actual track records under Reagan and the Bushes, promise just that.

  Maybe the answer has less to do with figuring out how to make Americans smarter, and more to do with dramatically demonstrating who are the enemies of the people are, who their friends are, and how tenaciously the latter intend to fight off the former. Those who do want to understand the wonkish details, of course, should be welcomed. But you don't have to understand macroeconomics to get that the current depression was caused by greedy bankers and their bought political allies, and that at least part of a proper response to what they did is to take back the money they stole and help restore the people they screwed. How hard does this have to be?

Further study: some interesting links I'll just note for future reference:

• Larry Bartels: More on the Politics of the Super-Rich.
• Ellen Cantarow: The New Eco-Devastation in Rural America: or, How Rural America Got Fracked.
• Barbara Ehrenreich: Looting the Lives of the Poor.
• Tom Engelhardt: The Smog of War: or, The Afghan Syndrome, or, A Titleholder for Pure, Long-Term Futility.
• Tom Engelhardt: The Road to Amnesia: or, How to Forget on Memorial Day.
• Tom Engelhardt: Assassin-in-Chief.
• Glenn Greenwald: Federal Court Enjoins NDAA.
• Christopher Hayes: Why Elites Fail.
• Chris Hellman/Mattea Kramer: How Much Does Washington Spend on "Defense"? $931 billion, but defense against what?
• Andrew Leonard: Romney Trashes His Dad: you know, the former HUD Secretary.
• Andrew Leonard: Obama's GI Bill Fight.
• Andrew Leonard: Tuition Is Too Damn High.
• Andrew Leonard: How Bain Capital Made Us Fat: investing in fast food chains, much to chew on here, even if you're likely to spit it out in the end.
• Jill Lepore: The Lost Amendment, and Battleground America: on guns.
• Bill McKibben: Climate-Change Deniers Have Done Their Job Well.
• Paul Pillar: What's Good for Exxon Is Not So Good for America.
• Jacqueline Rose: A Rumbling of Things Unknown: on Marilyn Monroe.
• David Sirota: America's True Tax Rate.
• Matt Taibbi: How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform.
• Jeffrey Toobin: Money Unlimited: How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision. Also see Andrew Leonard.

One thing you will note in the above is that I've started looking at Salon again. That had been impossible since their redesign, which meant nearly instant death for my browser. I've started running a Firefox add-on called NoScript, which grabs each website's Javascript by the throat and keeps it from running, until I say so. Salon, in particular, is much more civil without any at all. Other websites are unusable without Javascript enabled, and I'm slowly going through the adjustments of whitelisting some of them -- only real problem so far has been with Facebook, which got out of hand once I let it run. (So I'm both less likely to post there, and less likely to see other posts.) Haven't tried MSN yet -- been tempted to comment on occasion, but can't and have thus far let that go.