Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week:

• Jonathan Bernstein: Paul Ryan Fails -- The Truth: Much one can say about Ryan's mendacity, but this is a pretty good example. Ryan attacked Obama for not doing anything about the Simpson-Bowles commission report:

  He created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.

  From this quote, you'd never suspect that Ryan was himself a member of that commission ("they . . . them . . . them"), and that he and the other House Republicans had voted against the report. There was, in short, no bipartisan agreement for Obama to walk away from. More examples follow, but Bernstein is only scratching the surface.

  While you're at it, take a gander at Brad DeLong: Paul Ryan Calls for Fewer Jobs and Higher Unemployment in America. That's not literally what he said. His phrase was, "We want honest money." Which is to say he's against the Fed expanding the monetary base. Whether that means he wants to dispose of the $8 trillion of "fiat currency" the Fed has created since 1950 isn't clear, but at least looking forward he wants an economy that cannot grow, which certainly adds up to DeLong's title. (I am saddened, though, that Paul Sweezy takes a fall in the end.)

• Lawrence Downes: The Man in the Empty Chair: Applauds Clint Eastwood at the GOP Convention ("the perfect distillation of the Republican campaign"):

  The last four years have been an extended exercise in Republican denialism: This cannot be. This isn't happening. If you're really the president, show us your papers.

  Imaginary Barack was invented in Hawaii, sneaked into the Oval Office, and has no legitimate claim on the presidency. As for the real tall black guy posing in Washington, go ahead and treat him any way you want. You can jab your finger in his face, shout him down, call him a Muslim, a Kenyan, an illegal alien, you can invent all kinds of lies about him and then you can tell him -- get out of that chair.

  In reality, the president is a more-or-less mainstream, smarter-than-average pol, left-of-center on some things, to the right on others, like guns, disturbingly hawkish on ordering the killing of American citizens suspected of terrorism, on national security, executive secrecy and immigration. He is, too, an inveterate compromiser who used to bend over backward to make deals -- sometimes in advance! -- with Republicans.

  But that guy is not as scary as Imaginary Barack.

• Matt Stoller: Clinton's No Liberal Hero:

  A few years ago, Clinton said, "I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I've done reasonably well since then." That's $2.9 million, just in 2011, for 15 speeches. Indeed. So while Romney and Clinton are ostensible political opponents, they share more than you'd know just from press reports. The primary difference between them is not a question of fealty to finance, but that Romney made his fortune with Bain Capital before he sought office, whereas Clinton made his afterward. [ . . . ]

  This split is why the 2012 election is so empty of substance, because the concerns of the elites are addressed, and the voices of millions are simply unacknowledged. Bill Clinton offers essentially the same belief system as both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, one in which private industry runs the government through payoffs to ex-officials, and government returns the favor through bailouts. If Americans are ever going to grapple with the power of banks over their lives, they are going to have to come to grips with the real track record of their leaders, including Bill Clinton. And it isn't pretty. And until people like Bill Clinton can be compensated in ways that aren't obviously corrupting, and their track records honestly assessed, elections will continue to be unimportant, simple popular ratification of an increasingly authoritarian creditor state.

• Stephen M Walt: Why Do People Keep Predicting War With Iran?: Cites a number of examples starting with Jeffrey Goldberg's 2010 cover story in The Atlantic -- one could go back further; as Juan Cole notes, back in 1992 Netanyahu predicted that Iran was "3 to 5 years" from having a nuclear weapon -- up to yesterday:

  Last but not least, yesterday's New York Times featured a one-sided story on the "shadow war" between Israel and Iran that placed virtually all the blame for the trouble on Tehran. On the front page, it described a "continuing offensive" by Iran, without mentioning that there has been a long cycle of tit-for-tat between these two countries. Only after the jump came any mention of the assassination of Iranian civilian scientists (almost certainly by the Mossad), or any acknowledgement that Iran might be acting defensively rather than conducting a totally unprovoked campaign of aggression. [ . . . ]

  As I noted a few months back, it's virtually impossible to know how much credence to place in the repeated predictions that Israel is about to attack. It does prove that there is no shortage of journalists or pundits who are willing to serve as sympathetic stenographers for government officials, but it doesn't tell you very much about what is going to happen or what these officials really believe. Why? Because the various officials whose alarming testimony forms the basis for these articles have lots of different reasons for stirring the pot in this fashion.

  It's worth reminding ourselves that there is considerable opposition within Israel's own security illuminati to attacking Iran, which as far as I can tell has more to do with how unlikely an affective attack would be than with any repercussions (which, most likely, would redound on the US far worse than on Israel). One outspoken opponent of a strike is ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who unfortunately has an even worse idea in mind for a solution: subvert and overthrow the Iranian regime.

  Walt also has a piece titled Why Americans Don't Understand the Middle East, which starts with a photo of NBC correspondent Richard Engel.

Links for further study:

• James K Galbraith: No Return to Normal: Written in 2009, subhed: "Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think." Main thing wrong with the piece is the assumption that there would be a solution: in fact, the Republicans have managed to kick the legs out from under nearly everything Obama pushed, and have intimidated Obama to the point that he didn't push much. Then there's important stuff that never occurred to Obama or his team, like:

  Second, we should offset the violent drop in the wealth of the elderly population as a whole. The squeeze on the elderly has been little noted so far, but it hits in three separate ways: through the fall in the stock market; through the collapse of home values; and through the drop in interest rates, which reduces interest income on accumulated cash. For an increasing number of the elderly, Social Security and Medicare wealth are all they have.

  That means that the entitlement reformers have it backward: instead of cutting Social Security benefits, we should increase them, especially for those at the bottom of the benefit scale. Indeed, in this crisis, precisely because it is universal and efficient, Social Security is an economic recovery ace in the hole. Increasing benefits is a simple, direct, progressive, and highly efficient way to prevent poverty and sustain purchasing power for this vulnerable population. I would also argue for lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to (say) fifty-five, to permit workers to retire earlier and to free firms from the burden of managing health plans for older workers.

  Plug at the end of the piece for Galbraith's book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best political book written in the last decade.

• Jeremiah Goulka: Why I Left the GOP: Better late than never, but still.

• John B Judis: Mitt Romney, Latter-Day Neoncon

• Ed Kilgore: World Without Labor Day: Looks like it's become a Republican meme that the people we should celebrate on Labor Day are the entrepreneurs (you know, the "job creators") instead of the people who actually did the work. TPM quotes Eric Cantor: "Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success."

• Andrew Leonard: Apple's Enormous Insult: I've been an Apple-hater since c. 1980, but more evidence why should too:

  Apple shrugs. Instead of joining this one-world utopia of interoperability, Apple is replacing its own unique, incompatible-with-everyone-else dock connector with a new dock connector that is incompatible with itself. [ . . . ] That's the true genius of Steve Jobs. He resurrected a model of old-school tech monopoly that everyone else thought was broken.

• Stephen M Walt: What Terrorist Threat?: Includes a link to an article (PDF only) by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, The Terrorism Delusion: America's Overwrought Response to September 11. Mueller wrote a book in 2006 called Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, in 2009 wrote Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (has a couple pages on Israel and Iran, not nearly enough), and co-wrote with Stewart the 2011 book, Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security.