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Digby flagged this segment from this Sunday's Fareed Zakaria GPS, and as she noted, Zakaria seems to be singing a very different tune now on whether austerity is popular with the masses in Europe than he was four years ago. And as she noted, being wrong never seems to get anyone kicked out of the club once you've gained entry as one of the Very Serious People by our corporate media.

Fareed Zakaria four years ago in a post called The Center Holds: In Britain even pain is popular":

Three weeks ago the new chancellor, 39-year-old Tory George Osborne, presented a budget that promised to get Britain’s fiscal house in order with sharp cuts in spending, coupled with tax increases. It landed in the midst of a heated debate across the industrialized world about how to best get the economy back on track. Osborne and his boss, Prime Minister David Cameron, have come down firmly on one side of this debate, hoping that a major effort to reduce the deficit will reassure bond markets and investors that Britain is a safe and compelling place to put their money.

Leaving aside the economics of this, what struck me as I spent time in Britain last week was the politics of deficit reduction. Having announced major cuts in popular programs, plus hefty tax increases, the Cameron government might be expected to be losing popularity by the day. But in fact the budget was well received by the public—though attacked ferociously from the left—and the governing coalition has actually inched up a bit in the polls.

There are several possible reasons for this. Cameron has played the public role of prime minister exceedingly well, making a pitch-perfect apology for the British Army’s wrongful use of force in Northern Ireland in 1972, and handling himself on the global stage with grace and ease. It’s also true, of course, that the effect of the cuts and taxes have not yet been felt, and when that happens, the government’s poll ratings might plunge. But clearly the honesty of the budget has resonated with voters.

It’s heartening to see a government do something that it must have thought would be deeply unpopular, and then be rewarded by the public...

I love this description of how he reacted to the commentary from his guests. Potted plant indeed:

Zakaria still rails against "entitlements" (which his earlier guest Stephen Haas described as a "cancer" to no objection from anyone) but he hasn't exactly come clean about the disastrous effects of the austerity measures in Europe that "heartened him" so strongly, has he? No, today he sits there like a potted plant while the bill of indictment rolls right over him.

But then he's a card-carrying Very Serious Person which means never having to say you're sorry.

Ain't that the truth? I don't always get a chance to watch all of his show every week, but I don't recall seeing him doing much to rebut that flawed economic study by Reinhart and Rogoff which the right has used to justify austerity as well. Most of our corporate media has done their best to ignore that, even as many of them, as Zakaria was here, have finally been forced to admit that maybe that whole push for austerity isn't working out so well.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Conservative radio host Glenn Beck responded to a shooting at Houston's largest airport on Thursday by suggesting that it had been a plot to "set up" gun owners like the the burning of German's parliament -- or Reichstag -- in 1933, which Nazis exploited as a pretext to suspend constitutional rights.

According to CBS News, a man named Carnell Moore fired a pistol into the ceiling of Terminal B at Bush International Airport and was shot by a federal agent. At the same time, Carnell also shot himself. A fully-loaded, black Smith & Wesson AR-15 was found in a suitcase next to where he was sitting.

Messages on social media indicated that Carnell had planned a mass shooting, but a suicide note found on the body suggested that he changed his mind.

But because the shooting happened as members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) were arriving in Houston for its annual convention, Beck saw a conspiracy behind Carnell's actions.

"The idea that this is happening at the airport with the NRA is too much to believe," Beck told a studio audience in Houston. "If I were a journalist -- let me correct that -- if I were an honest journalist, I would be looking for these connections. Look for the connections of who this man is and any connection he might have to the uber-Left."

"I believe this man could fall into the category of somebody who has lost his job, is depressed, etc., etc. Somebody comes in off to the side, winds him up, says, 'Oh, you should make a statement, you should make a statement.' I believe that's probably -- I shouldn't say that -- I believe it is a very good chance that is what happened."

But Beck speculated that the man realized that "that's not who I am" and decided not to go through with the mass killing.

"If I were an honest journalist, I'd find out where these guns came from -- were they purchased or were they illegal?" he continued. "If there were illegal, oh, I can guarantee you, this is a set up. Someone knows history. I do."

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From this Monday's Democracy Now, economist Richard Wolff is asked about Bill O'Reilly's remarks last week where he told his audience on Fox that Cyprus and other European countries are facing economic hardships because they’re so-called "nanny states." Wolff responded with a lesson in economics 101 for Bill-O:

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Wolff, before we end, I want to turn back to the crisis in Cyprus and relate it to what’s happening here. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News warned his audience last week that Cyprus and other European countries are facing economic hardships because they’re so-called "nanny states."

BILL O’REILLY: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, now Cyprus, all broke. And other European nations are close. Why? Because they’re nanny states, and there are not enough workers to support all the entitlements these progressive paradises are handing out.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Richard?

RICHARD WOLFF: You know, he gets away with saying things which no undergraduate in the United States with a responsible economic professor could ever get away with. If you want to refer to things as nanny states, then the place you go in Europe is not the southern tier—Portugal, Spain and Italy; the place you go are Germany and Scandinavia, because they provide more social services to their people than anybody else. And guess what: Not only are they not in trouble economically, they are the winners of the current situation. The unemployment rate in Germany is now below 5 percent. Ours is pushing between 7 and 8 percent. So, please, get your facts right, Mr. O’Reilly.

The nanny state, you call it, the program of countries like Germany and Scandinavia, who tax their people heavily, by all means, but who provide them with social services that would be the envy of the United States—a national health program that takes care of you, whether you’re employed or not, and gives you proper healthcare. In France, for example, the law says when you go to work, you get five weeks’ paid vacation. That’s not an option; that’s the law. You get support when you’re a new parent for your child care and so forth. They provide services. And they are successful in Germany and Scandinavia, much more than we are in the United States and much more than those countries in the south.

So they’re not broken, the south, because they’re nanny states, since the nanny states, par excellence, are doing better than everyone. The actual truth of Mr. O’Reilly is the opposite of what he says. The more you do nanny state, the better off you are during a crisis and to minimize the cost of the crisis. That’s what the European economic situation actually teaches. He’s just making it up as he goes along to conform to an ideological position that is harder and harder for folks like him to sustain, so he has to reach further and further into fantasy.

h/t Raw Story

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A conservative radio host on Wednesday warned Fox News that President Barack Obama was "becoming more like Hugo Chavez all the time" and that any effort to control guns in the wake of the Newtown massacre would be "like Nazi Germany."

Vice President Joe Biden, who is heading up a task force on gun violence, told reporters on Wednesday that the president was likely to take executive action in response to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, but he did not give specifics.

"There are executives orders, there's executive action that can be taken," the vice president said. "We haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required."

The onservative website Drudge Report soon was blaring the headline, "WHITE HOUSE THREATENS 'EXECUTIVE ORDERS' ON GUNS" -- accompanied by photos of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

And within hours, Larson was bringing the Nazi Germany reference to Fox News viewers.

"If he does executive orders, he's becoming more like Hugo Chavez all the time," Larson insisted. "Under [Sen. Diane] Feinstein's bill -- which has now been introduced -- if the president plans to go that way, everybody in America who owns one of the guns on the list will be required to go in and give up fingerprints, mug shot, be entered into a database."

"It will be, '[give us] your papers please,' like Nazi Germany," he continued. "We're going to register everybody then you won't be allowed to transfer that gun... So that the day that grandpa dies and you don't know that he's got an AR-15 locked up in his safe and the police come for whatever reason and discover it there, the family is guilty of possessing a gun and possession of which is a felony."

Larson also worried that any effort to strengthen mental health checks would mean that "any person in America who's on any kind of prescription pharmaceutical -- Xanax, Prozac, lithium -- loses his Second Amendment rights."

"If you go to see a doctor or marriage counselor and say, 'Our marriage isn't working out well, we yell at each other a lot.' And the marriage counselor says, 'Well, there go your Second Amendment rights.'"

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Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) has an A rating from the National Rifle Association but he says that Democrats are at fault for not passing more gun control legislation.

During a Tuesday interview on MSNBC, host Thomas Roberts asked Kingston if he looked at the recent massacre of 20 school children in Connecticut and felt "a sense of guilt" over his tough stance against gun control.

"Where I think we have the guilt is we see a huge problem like this -- and it's a problem that's happening in other countries as well -- and we look for something that, okay, what can prevent it?" Kingston explained. "And I think that's where we need to go with this discussion is, yes, put gun control -- more gun control -- on the table. But, also, don't forget the mental health element. Don't forget, is there a home situation that we need to learn more about? Was this young man addicted to violent video games? Was there a Hollywood influence? I think that we can't just stop at guns."

Roberts observed that many pro-gun Democrats had recently changed their tune and that the Republicans were in danger of being the party of "the people that defend Glocks" if they continued to oppose meaningful gun restrictions.

"What also is disturbing though is people would say, do the Republicans -- I mean, here we have a town, which was controlled in the House by Democrats, in the Senate by Democrats and the White House by Democrats for two years and nothing took place for stricter gun control laws," Kingston insisted. "So, for the partisans in our country to already start injecting politics in here, that saddens me further."

"Now, we have to remember that Connecticut has the the fifth toughest gun control laws in the country, including an assault weapon ban that bans 35 different weapons," he added. "The weapon that was used was not an assault weapon, therefore it wasn't banned."

The MSNBC host pointed out that Kingston had gotten an A rating from the NRA because he had voted against gun regulations for years -- including opposing the Brady Handgun Bill, supporting a partial repeal of the D.C. firearm ban, opposing restrictions on semi-automatic assault weapons and voting to decrease waiting periods.

"None of the policy issues which you just ticked off would have prevented [Connecticut shooter] Adam Lanza from doing this," the Georgia Republican opined. "And it's very sad that we want to cloud the issue by making NRA the policy as opposed to Adam Lanza and what triggers this off."

"We need to just be complacent in the fact that we can send our children to school to be assassinated?" Roberts wondered.

"I think if we want to have a reasonable discussion, we have to look at what happened in Germany with all the gun control laws, it didn't prevent anything," Kingston asserted. "What happened in Connecticut, the fifth toughest gun control law in the country? It did not prevent anything. So, what I'm saying, you can't just stop at guns. You have to look at mental health. What about having a toll-free number for people who have somebody like an Adam Lanza in the house, where there may be some red flags that they could say, 'I'm concerned that my son may have a tendency towards violence or insane acts. What do I do?'"

"I think at this point we need to come together as a nation instead of start pulling off in separate camps."

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During his speech at this years CPAC wingnut gathering this year, Newt Gingrich tries to blame the consequences of the last thirty years of trickle-down economics on the Obama administration. Got that everybody? Republicans had absolutely nothing to do with destroying the economy, it's all Obama's fault and everything that went wrong just happened in the last two years.

And he also decided to pretend that he or any other Republican has any use for the working class and unions. As I posted earlier this week, Robert Borosage explained Germany's economic model as did Robert Kuttner on CNN yesterday. If Newt Gingrich actually believes that's a model for good government he might want to inform his fellow Republicans and ask them to quit trashing unions at every turn and doing everything in their power to bust them.

He might also want to ask them to do something about our trade deficits, outsourcing and our tax codes which reward businesses for shipping jobs overseas. I'm not holding my breath.

Transcript via Clips and Comments below the fold.

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Campaign for America’s Future’s President Robert Borosage explains to MSNBC's Cenk Uygur the type of change in public policy that we need to see in the United States to create jobs here again in the wake of President Obama’s meeting with the Chamber of Commerce.

BOROSAGE: I do think we need though a policy for making things here in America and that’s where we’ve gone wrong. You know Germany is a very high-wage producer but it’s an export superpower. And the reason is it has an industrial policy that insures that the companies keep high quality jobs in Germany. And we’ve got to move to that and that will take a very different set of policies than begging the Chamber of Commerce to be patriotic.

UYGUR: Well Robert, that’s a great point, so let’s stay on that for a second; because a lot of people say “What can we do?” The jobs are going to go to China, India, etc., but Germany’s figured it out. They’ve figured out a way to keep the jobs. How are they doing it?

BOROSAGE: Well they do a combination of things. They have the unions, the workers have unions and they have a stake in the company leadership and so they make collective decisions. They have long term capital from their banks that’s not speculative. They make collective decisions about what kind of plants they move abroad and what technology they’ll keep at home.

They have a middle level of corporations that are funded by municipally located banks that are geographically located and very dynamic and the combination makes them a superpower and they also manage their trade with China and the like so that they don’t get overwhelmed by the Chinese mercantilist policy.

Now if we could just get our politicians in the United States to quit demonizing unions and embrace some of these same strategies instead of sucking up to multi-national corporations and Wall Street, maybe we'd see some jobs come back here. It was refreshing to hear some specific policies about what does protect jobs instead of endless blathering about how tax cuts create jobs from Republicans. They may well create some jobs, but that doesn't mean they're going to be in the United States of that they're going to pay well.

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Someone actually pays this man to write a column every week -- Cal Thomas On Obama Calling For Democracy In Egypt: "Germany Had Democracy And Voted In Hitler":

THOMAS: Social media’s great, but as President Obama talked about, he wants democracy, but when you talk about democracy… let’s look at democracy. Germany had democracy and voted in Hitler. Lenin came out of great turmoil in Russia and the Bolshevik revolution imposed a foreign ideology on Russia for seven decades. So a lot of these extremist movements rise the crest of a wave of legitimate objections to the leadership, but they wind up imposing something worse than what they have overthrown.

Maybe someone can ask Cal to go read this comment over at Media Matters.

And so much for Fox not invoking that Nazi imagery on Fox, huh Megyn?

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Well here's something we don't see enough of from our "mainstream media". The Nation's Chris Hayes filling in for Rachel Maddow talks to labor lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan about his book “Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?” and why European social democracy is something Americans should be embracing rather than falling for the fear mongering from the likes of Newt Gingrich, Jim DeMint, Bill O'Reilly, Mitch McConnell and a host of other right wing politicians and Fox "News" pundits. Hayes asks Geoghegan to give his pitch for why European Socialism is so bad and why was he born on the wrong continent.

Geoghegan: This is the time of year when we should be sitting around a lake drinking a few Beck Beers. If you like that kind of life and think your employer should pay for it, check out European Socialism.

Hayes: That would be a reference to the six or seven weeks paid vacation right? That is standard in the social democracies of Europe.

Geoghegan: Chris, in Germany and France the average work time per year is about 1500 hours. In the U.S. it’s closer to 2000. That leaves 500 hours of extra free time for Europeans. I mean you only have one life to live.

Hayes: You know an economics professor once said to me some very wise words which I’ve kept with me ever since which is that time is the one resource that’s never making any more of. But you know the response from the right when you bring up vacation like that is that well but look, they’re an economic basket case right? Yes, they get this vacation but you know, they don’t produce very much and they have high unemployment and they’re all indolent and the whole thing is going to go bankrupt soon.

Geoghegan: But Chris the reason I wrote the book is I wanted to explore, why is it that Germany is the most competitive country in the world? We’re the world’s biggest debtor. They’re the world’s, one of the world’s biggest creditors. Since 2003 Germany has either been tied with China or the leading exporter in the world and Germany and France together just wallop China in terms of exports sales.

So they do it through actually unions, high wages, worker control of, or more worker control than we ever dream of here of the corporations and a commitment to manufacturing that has completely disappeared in this country.

Hayes: Yeah, you talk a lot about the German model. There’s two elements I thought were interesting. One is there’s this focus on very capital intensive but very sort of high tech and expertise driven manufacturing and also that there is this union participation in corporate boards. How does that model work? It certainly sounds radical over here but you make a very convincing case for it in the book.

Geoghegan: What makes it work is the fact that the Germans have intense worker involvement, in fact it’s probably got the most worker control of any economy in the world and that includes China. It helps keep skills together. It’s a way… it encourages people to invest in themselves. It holds together if I may use a clunky economic term, human capital, high skills, in a way that flexible labor markets don’t. I don’t want to get into economics but I really am convinced that giving working people a kind of role in running the corporations that they work for, albeit it limited, putting them on corporate boards and putting high school graduates on the boards of big global corporations precisely because they are high school graduates, you know is one of the reasons that Germany has kept a commitment to manufacturing and being competitive while we’ve turned into a casino type capitalist society.

All I can say is amen brother.

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Jeremy Scahill talks to Thom Hartmann about his latest article at The Nation--Blackwater and the Khost Bombing: Is the CIA Deceiving Congress?:

A leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has told The Nation that she will launch an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. "The Intelligence Committees and the public were led to believe that the CIA was phasing out its contracts with Blackwater and now we find out that there is this ongoing presence," said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in an interview. "Is the CIA once again deceiving us about the relationship with Blackwater?"

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And Blackwater's problems in Germany--Germany Launches Probe Into Blackwater/CIA Assassination Plot:

German prosecutors have launched a preliminary investigation into allegations that a Blackwater-led CIA team conducted a clandestine operation in Hamburg, Germany after 9/11 ultimately aimed at assassinating a German citizen with suspected ties to al Qaeda. The alleged assassination operation was revealed last month in a Vanity Fair profile of Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince.

The magazine reported that after 9/11, the CIA used one of Prince’s homes in Virginia as a covert training facility for hit teams that would hunt al Qaeda suspects globally. Their job was find, fix, and finish: “Find the designated target, fix the person’s routine, and, if necessary, finish him off.”

According to Vanity Fair, one of the team’s targets was Mamoun Darkazanli, a naturalized German citizen originally from Syria. Darkazanli has been accused by Spain of being an al Qaeda supporter with close ties to the alleged 9/11 plotters who lived in Hamburg. The Blackwater/C.I.A. team “supposedly went in ‘dark,’ meaning they did not notify their own station—much less the German government—of their presence,” according to Vanity Fair. “[T]hey then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down.” Authorities in Washington, however, “chose not to pull the trigger.”

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