Nobody Asked Me, But...

 

1) That blessed silence you hear? No "Obamacare"? No "N___er In the White House!"? No "Low taxes = more jobs"? You can thank Brett Kimberlin. While I can't condone Kimberlin's actions, neither can I really sympathize with those who are up in arms about him. Nearly every one of them, including Michelle Malkin, has cyberstalked under the guise of investigating someone. I've been on the receiving end of that, and while I fought back in the only way I knew how-- fight hard, play dirty, and show them you aren't bullied by anybody, no matter how high up the food chain they are because there's always someone higher up than that, as in the publishers of the magazine they write for or the state they work for (altho I'm not sure what I would do if Barack Obama decided to troll me)-- I don't expect everyone on the planet to be a badass with a bad attitude like me.

 

2) Shorter John McCain: Facts are stupid things.

 

3) If you're worried about the LinkedIn-eHarmony-Last.fm password dump, here's a way to confirm if you should be.

 

4) Ben Bernanke is either not concerned with recent slow downs in the American (and world) economy, or he's hestitant to get involved in an election year. People are suffering, Ben. Do your fucking job.

 

5) Mitt Romney had more dicks up his ass than the President did in May.

 

6) Romney's next embarassment: Orrin Hatch. This is even more tepid support than either Romney or President Obama showed in Wisconsin.

 

7) 6.6 million more people are now insured, thanks to President Obama's healthcare reform package. And the good stuff is yet to come!

 

8) There is a cure. Granted, it's as rare as hen's teeth but it's a start.

 

9) Human cloning will happen in our time. Count on it.

 

10) What the hell....it's a beautiful day here in NYC, so let me ruin it for you.

I Dunno....Is It Just Me Or...

....are we declaring World War III one nation at a time?

The Death Of One Political Party (or The Other)

Contained in the transcript of this interview is an opportunity to make the Democrats (or the Republicans, if they had anyone with balls in their leadership) a permanent majority-- well, for a few decades, at any rate.

ANDREW KOHUT: By the middle of his first term, most Democrats strongly disapproved of George W. Bush. And almost from the get-go, most Republicans have strongly disapproved of Barack Obama. So part of it Is response to these presidencies and the political culture. Part of it, too, is the way the parties have changed. The parties have become smaller than they once were. We have a record number of political independents.

 

JUDY WOODRUFF: In fact, an unprecedented 38 percent of those surveyed identified as independents, the most to choose that description at any point in the last 75 years.

By comparison, just 32 percent said they were Democrats, and only 24 percent now call themselves Republicans.

There are three bits of information to process here:

1) Self-identified Democrats hold an 8 point edge over self-identified Republicans. This means the Democrats message to its membership has been more effective than the Republicans.

2) Of the 38% who self-identify as "independent," there's a strong diversity (not unexpected) of political views, but no consistency. They can be older and fiscally conservative and socially liberal (which, when you think about it, is an opportunity to make them choose either lower taxes or lower services, and message it that way), they can be younger and fiscally liberal and socially liberal, and then there are the suburban types who really only care about how to take care of the kids and will the trains run on time.

3) Most of the people in the middle, that 38%, aren't independent because they reject either party. They're independent because they believe *both* parties have rejected them. Both have stopped listening to their needs, they feel, and so will choose to vote on candidates.

The opportunity to pluck many of these votes back is waiting, and the work really isn't that hard. Indeed, Bill Clinton was a master at finding votes out of unlikely places, and he made it look easy. You just have to stop framing the world as "us versus them," and start framing it as "me and you."

Look, believe it or not, PBS, The News Hour and Judy Woodruff get it: go out and listen to these people. Speak with them, not to them, and stop using buzzwords and trying to find a Frank-Luntz-like euphemism that becomes a dog whistle for an agenda.

 

This is a winning strategy for any level of election, from school board to Congress to President. If you pay attention, your reward will be votes. Barack Obama is somewhat better at this than Mitt Romney, and no one seriously questions who will win in November (and that's before the inevitable debates and before the inevitable Romneybot flubs.)

 

But we need more: we need to find candidates who can set aside a personal agenda and talk with people. Let them know you take them seriously, and don't pop up snappy sound bites in response. That just sounds like you're making the voter a prop (sometimes that works, but not usually.) Really listen to what they are saying, reiterate it back to them, and then find a solution in your bag of bromides that you can tailor to their concerns.

 

Believe me, we're going to get a lot more votes from independents if we can actually have them saying the next day at church or the dinner table or the gym, "Y'know, so-and-so sat with me and really listened to my problems. I think (s)he cares about what's going on, and may not have the answers but at least understands the question."

 

Take healthcare reform as an issue: fully 61% of independent voters think it was a horrible idea, that there's already too much government intrusion into their lives. What does that tell you? If someone sat with you and said, "No, there's death panels and mandates and all that."

 

Here's what would be my response: "Y'know, maybe you have a point. There is a lot of government people running around, telling us what to do, but it's really important to remember something: those are people we elect to keep us safe from harm, to protect us for all threats, foreign and domestic. They are responsible to us, you and me, because we vote for them, or at least, we vote for their bosses. Right now, you have insurers who do the same thing government agents do-- death panels who decide whether you should live or die and how healthy you should be, and mandates that you can't be sick before you buy insurance-- and they aren't responsible to anyone except their profit margins. And they can raise prices for no other reason than they need to pay their CEO a million bucks more. Healthcare reform was an attempt to keep you in the private insurance market, so you can have choices, while keeping a firm hand on the out of control spending that health insurers are pursuing."

 

A progressive policy laid out in libertarian terms-- government's not the bad guys, they're trying to keep you from having to deal with the bad guys. With a dash of subtle class warfare tossed in for good measure.

 

It annoys me that something so simple seems so out of reach for so many politicians, and yet, there you have the problem with American politics in a nutshell. No one wants to do anything that hasn't been field tested and brainstormed and focus-grouped to death.

 

And I suppose I'd feel differently if I was spending tens of millions of dollars to serve for just two years.

 

All I know is I hate leaving "money" on the table and there's a giant jackpot out there.

A Remarkable Story

 

Oregon stopped an illegal immigrant yesterday.

 

It took fifteen months. It weighs tons. It's made of concrete and steel and it floated 5,500 miles.

The Ground Game

Michael Tomasky, with some back-up from alleged moderate David Frum, have it right on the reasons for the Walker recall vote. But he misses the point.

I never got very invested in the recall Walker movement. I was cheering for the other outcome, obviously, but I always figured recalling a governor after just two years in office when he's not accused of a crime is a pretty tall order. You see I didn't write that much about it. The margin of Walker's win is a little surprising, but then, he outspent the other side six or seven to one.

As Frum notes over on his blog, the outcome points to a bleak future for public-employee unions, where the next decade will likely see "its pay relentlessly ground down, as private sector pay has been ground down over the decade past." The scope of this loss ought to make these unions and the Democratic Party think twice about what their long-term strategy is going to be here. They're not going to win recall elections against governors who do things they don't like, and even Democratic governors are going after their benefits. It's a terrible thing that the pressure on all wages (except for the top 5 percent or so) is downward, and that private and public employees making, say, $45,000 a year are being pitted against each other, but that's the situation.

Both have begged the question (Tomasky admits that's not what interested him about the recall): why is this so?

How have conservatives so effectively purchased the heart and minds of the average Republican voter as to convince them to be angry at the nurse who takes home $50,000 but to worship the hospital CEO who takes home ten or even twenty times that, nevermind the HMO head who takes home a hundred times that who exploit them for profit?

In Tomasky's defense-- and I've followed his writings since his days at the Village Voice, so I know whereof I speak-- he's a stellar reporter who does amazing work uncovering facts and digging for truth. This kind of analysis is not in his wheelhouse.

But Frum, a political hack who's probably sat in on more "strategerey" sessions than I've had hot meal, ought to be a bit more candid about how this has happened.

After all, he sat in the same room as Karl Rove for years.

A telling stat in Tomasky's piece was the exit poll question where 17% of Obama supporters voted for Walker. Obama was particularly quiet on the vote, and my suspicion is his private polling put the results in less doubt than the public polling. No sense wasting precious political capital on a quixotic venture.

The theory is that recall elections without an actual criminal allegation hanging over the incumbent's head are hard to justify-- Gray Davis had his own issues with a then-popular celebrity leading the charge-- and that these 17% agreed that Walker should be given his legally-won term.

Fair's fair. And there's no guarantee they'll vote for him in 2014. They, like many in 1998, simply felt the complaints lodged didn't rise to a level commensurate with removal from office.

But move that 17% from the Republicans to the Democratic incumbent in November, and the election in Wisconsin becomes an Obama mandate. Too, Walker may have lost the state senate, which is a sign that the support for Walker personally is woefully weak.

 

The analysis you're going to hear all day is two-fold: Obama will lose Wisconsin (already shown that won't be the case) and unions in this country are dead.

 

That last may be a bit more true, but there's a problem with that analysis and it begs yet another question.

 

See, it ignores the fact that the recall took place in the first place. Yes, Walker won and yes, by a large margin, but that doesn't mean it's an endorsement of his first term as much as it's a "leave the guy alone, let him finish it out." There are two points to be made there: one, he won't be nearly as cocky and aggressive (especially if he loses the Senate) since the theme is out there that he's a brutal tin-pot dictator and second, he now knows he has a lot less time to set up his re-election effort and a lot less support.

 

And I'm not sure he's going to run again. He may have become so politically damaged in this recall that he confronts himself and decides to run for Senate, thus bowing gracefully out of a job he almost got kicked out of. Remember, he's only the third sitting Governor to be recalled. That's not a feather in his cap that he won: it's an albatross around his neck that he was even recalled. To allow himself to be defeated in re-election is a surefire way to shatter any potential future in politics.

 

I realize that I've begged the whole "why did this happen?" question as well. The short answer is, I haven't given it enough thought, but I do know one thing.

 

Every conservative that I come across who gloats about the "death of unions" will be asked the question I asked earlier.

 

How can you be so angry at the nurse who takes home $50,000 but worship the hospital CEO who takes home ten or even twenty times that, nevermind the HMO head who takes home a hundred times that, who exploits you for profit?

Scary, And Yet...

 

You're all familiar with the Hubble Telescope, that marvel of engineering and science that has created some of the most spectacular and iconic space images of the past decades.

 

It's about to die, not from some catastrophe, but merely from old age and lack of life support. Now that the shuttle program is terminated, no one much feels like flying up to it to do maintenance and repair.

 

We would be blind to beauty, except for something that has happened that is at once creepy and wondrous:

The National Science Foundation has just revealed the existence of not one, but two pristine, Hubble-class space telescopes, still in their original wrappings, in a warehouse in Rochester, N.Y. The pair was originally built for the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency in charge of spy satellites, to look down at Earth rather than up into space. But the NRO has moved on to bigger and better instruments, and decided to hand the telescopes over. "It just blew me a way when I heard about this," says Princeton astrophysicist David Spergel, a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee On Astrophysics and Astronomy. "I knew nothing about it."

Two points to notice here:

 

The Hubble makes your 50x military grade binoculars look like the magnifying glass they used to put in Cracker Jack boxes. Imagine one of those pointed down at you sunbathing nude in your backyard. Now imagine a telescope that puts the Hubble to shame. That's what the NRO had in a warehouse, waiting to be deployed.

 

Second, note that they never deployed them because they found an improved way of spying on us!

 

Let that sink in for a minute. Despite the obvious budget concerns-- why are we holding not one but two perfectly good telescopes in a warehouse in Rochester, NY never to be deployed because they became obsolete? How much were they and where in the budget do they show up, if at all?-- our government is handing down the best telescope we've ever invented, from a spy ring to our science division.

 

Why wasn't that working the other way around? I mean, I get that you can't be too public with your intelligence gathering, but on the other hand, science is important to our security, too, and particularly space. That's why NASA even exists in the first place! You could, for example, publicly misrepresent the level of technology on the telescope, and gift it from NASA to the NRO.

 

I know, the military gets the best candy, even if like a goose fatted for pate, it has to be rammed into its gullet, but come on, Congress. This is science. This is (mostly) good for us.

 

On Wisconsin!

 

Throw the bastard out of office. And while you're at it, turn your legislature completely blue.

A Sensible Proposal

 

Andrew Cuomo has not exactly had the worst term in office of any first term governor...he did get gay marriage passed, after all, which is both a progressive coup as well as a logistical one...but as a former state attorney general, he has shown a mean streak about crime and punishment.

 

Until yesterday.

Wading into the debate over stop-and-frisk police tactics, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo plans to ask legislators on Monday for a change in New York State law that would drastically reduce the number of people who could be arrested for marijuana possession as a result of police stops.

Here's the deal: during Mayor Giuliani's tenure, a political philosophy was applied to police tactics. Called "Broken Windows," it assumed that by cracking down and arresting people for minor crimes like turnstile jumping or possession of a joint, a message would be sent that crime would not be tolerated, thus discouraging larger crimes.

Did it work? It's a quaint notion to believe it did and it may have had some small positive impact on the level of crime in the 1990s in NYC.

During the first half of the '00s, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly applied this theory more broadly. Rather than spot a crime, he went out of his way to find them, insituting the "stop and frisk" practice where police would pull over a person for the crime of being Latino or black, and pat them down, then if they were carrying anything illegal or could be shown to be implicated in an unsolved crime, arrest them.

Nice, huh? The average percentage of people who were innocent of anything hovered around 87% over the past ten years. Some white people were stopped, of course, and ironically white people were arrested and/or issued summonses about twice as often as blacks and Latinos. Representing about 11% of the stops while representing two-thirds of the criminal outcomes, you'd think cops would focus on more whites as the years progressed, but not so.

Many of the crimes involved the possession of small amounts of marijuana which, despite its alleged "decriminalized" status in New York-- it merely means possession of pot has been bifurcated from drug possession laws-- is an offense, which results in a ticket.

If it's the only crime of which the offender is cited. Or, more relevant, his first arrest and conviction. After that, Katie bar the door.

Needless to say, possession of even a joint in those circumstances make you a repeat offender and even though it's considered a violation and dismissed the first time, the next time a possessor will face a judge. And then it becomes either a good lawyer or a conviction. A criminal record and all that implies.

Bleak prospects for a young minority youth in a city like New York. You can't get a job easily with a criminal record, you will always have a handicap in terms of income and housing and god knows what happens to you in jail.

It's not marijuana that's a gateway drug; it's being arrested for possession that is the gateway.

Cuomo's idea, to completely decriminalize possession of small amounts of pot, makes a lot of sense. This is legislation who's time has long come.

An Observation About George Zimmerman

 

A very good friend of mine is a former district attorney. One of his favorite sayings is, "The lie you catch them in is the lie they felt comfortable telling, but it is most certainly never the first lie they've told."

 

Gee, I can't imagine what Zimmerman *koffkoffMURDERERkoffkoff* would have wanted to lie about before this...

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Asheligh Banfield used to be hot. Now, she's a right-wing nutcase who somehow believes that pedophilia...pedophilia!...is sometimes a voluntary lifestyle choice. No doubt the *children* involved, like I was, were free to weigh the choices, you moronic cheap-suited newsslut.

 

Which, by the way, ARE all voluntary lifestyle choices.

 

2) Mitt Romney picks yet another idiotic target. Solyndra received $500 million in loan guarantees under a program that the *Bush* administration insituted. The application was made and the initial approvals given before Obama even had the chance to take office.

 

3) John Edwards walks. Zombie Elizabeth Edwards bides her time.

 

4) Spell it? I never even heard of it!

 

5) Good news! With bonus adorable picture. In a Clockwork Orange sort of way.

 

6) Forget the Mayans and 2012. Mark 4,000,002,012 on your calendars! That's when the shit hits the fan, literally.

 

7) Speaking of Armageddon, the last transit of Venus in our lifetimes occurs next Tuesday/Wednesday. This is one of the Mayan signal events for the ending of the current b'a'ktun. Here's how to watch the transit. Online. Safely. DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN!

 

8) I want to see the long form horn!

 

9) Selling yourself....for advertising? There's the capitalist system working, you betcha.

 

10) Everything I've told you today is a lie. OK, no, but that was, tho. Everyone does it.

One Of These Things Is Just Like The Others

 

Mitt Romney on foreign policy

The G Spot

By any account, Mitt Romney's tenure as governor of Massachussetts can be termed a period of moderate governance.

 

Which is great until you decide to run for President as a Republican:

"Mitt Romney claims his experience as a corporate buyout specialist will bring positive economic results for the nation," said an Obama campaign announcement.

"He made the same economic promises when he ran for governor of Massachusetts that he makes today -- more jobs, less debt and smaller government," added the statement. "Once in office, he broke all those promises and more."

I don't want to start to parse the Romney administration and weigh it on a scale of just how moderate it was. Suffice it to say that, by today's standards of homophobic legislation and anti-government rhetoric, it was pretty moderate.

So why would the Obama administration slam Mitt Romney as a moderate governor? After all, everyone-- except Mitt now, altho I suspect that will change by November-- acknowledges that Romneycare was the blueprint for Obamacare (clever, that, and part of Obama's vaunted eleven-dimensional chess), and that Romney was pro-family autonomy before he was pro-life.

("Family autonomy" meaning that medical decisions are left up to the individual family unit.)

You read that campaign tactic and view the four minute film and you begin to wonder if it makes sense: it's not going to persuade anyone on either side of the fence to switch allegiances. Republicans will still hold their noses and vote Romney and Democrats for Obama, albeit more enthusiastically. Anyone on the fence isn't really going to care about his social issue stances or his spotty record as governor.

Ah, but the devil is in the details...

The four-minute film notes that Romney raised state fees (i.e., taxes) and increased state debt during his single term in the statehouse; Massachusetts wound up 47th out of 50 states in job creation.

Those three items-- jobs, debt, and taxes-- are right at the top of the mind of every independent voter in every swing state. It shows that even Mitt Romney admits that he'll have to raise taxes and even then, there's no guarantee that he can cut the deficit. And, to boot, it thoroughly destroys the central rationale of his candidacy, that he's a job creator.

Remember, he was governor of Massachussetts, elected in 2002, and part of his constituency was the Route 128 corridor (Silicon Highway). A high tech hotbed that should have been creating jobs like crazy given the massive tax cuts that Congress passed under President....errr, what was his name again?

In other words, he stepped up to the plate with a runner on third and no outs and somehow managed to hit into a triple play. He could hardly have asked for more favorable economic conditions to take office in.

Mind you, in his first year in office, he received $500 million in Federal grants under the Homeland Security intiatives. He also got a windfall from increased capital gains tax increases passed under his predecessor of $1 billion. He still couldn't close the gap.

And he had strong bipartisan support from the Democratic legislature, mostly because he didn't set out to bash them as he has started to do in the general election campaign.

Yet, he still failed.

It's a powerful message, one that ought to resonate with voters across the country.

 

 

In Re: Chris Hayes

Conor Friedersdorf does the unthinkable: he defends the defensible

 

In case you missed it, MSNBC host Chris Hayes has been obligated to apologize for pretty inocuous comments he made with respect to death in wars and whether "hero" is a term bandied about too easily.

 

It's an emotionally charged subjec to be sure and kudos to Friedersdorf for taking the time to lay out not only the context but the rationale for the argument.

 

"UP with Chris Hayes" is one of my favorite punditry programs because Hayes is unafraid to tackle tough questions and to invite people (Buddy Roemer, for example) who will take opposing viewpoints. Arguments are intelligent and difficult topics are discussed fully, including the dark sides that those of us politely sipping our coffee would rather leave alone.

 

Hayes called into question whether anyone who dies fighting for his nation in a war, specifically this nation, is a hero. He walked a difficult tightrope, which he himself acknowledged by not only putting a hefty emphasis on the context in which he was speaking and "pre-apologizing" because he knew he would offend some people who suffered losses at war.

 

He also defended deaths in our recent wars as heroic, simply because these were kids who volunteered to put themselves in harm's way, the context of their demise irrelevant beyond that simple fact.

 

To those who took umbrage at Hayes' comments, let me ask this: did you wear a bandaid on your boo-boo during the 2004 campaign? Did you mock Max Cleland, who lost both his legs and one arm in a tragic accident in Viet Nam?

 

Did you Swift Boat?

 

Then shut up and let the man speak. At least he speaks from his heart.

And So It Begins

The past couple of weeks, ever since Rick Santorum dropped out, have been prologue. A time trial, if you will, the opening stage of silly season touring:

(CBS News) WASHINGTON - The Republican presidential race is over.

Mitt Romney won the Texas primary Tuesday, picking up enough delegates to clinch the nomination.

CBS News estimates Romney now has 1,198 GOP delegates.

Romney didn't go to Texas Tuesday night to celebrate.

He was raising big money with Donald Trump in Las Vegas.

OK, couple of points to make here before I move on:

1) Texans won't forget the insult. Texas is arguably a soft Republican state now, as the dramatic increase in Latinos bodes poorly for a state-wide electorate suddenly voting not only against their better interests but also against their own safety and security. Romney really needs to solidify his standing with the cowboys and oil men of Texas and generate enthusiasm. This fundraiser with Trump in Vegas not only puts him at odds with Texans who would have wanted to celebrate with Romney, but gives a clear signal that the yankee has more stroke than the largest state in the Republican column.

2) The more Trump speaks and the closer that Romney ties himself to Trump, the bigger the loss Romney faces. For Trump, it's a no-lose situation: he gets publicity, he gets to dupe the rubes out of even more cash in his casinos, and if Romney manages a miracle, he suddenly has stroke in the White House. This is Trump's MO, however: risk nothing and gamble with everyone else's money. After all, it's how he attempted to "steal" the Empire State Building for a mere $50,000. For Romney, he's blind to the danger he's put not only his campaign in, but the entire party.

3) Up until now, the Obama re-election campaign has kept their powder dry and not unleashed torrents of attacks. This is traditional and pro-forma: you don't launch a full-scale campaign until you're sure of who you are facing. Even now, Obama will smartly withhold the main thrusts of his attack at least until Romney names a Veep candidate. Why tip your hand and allow your opponent to shore up his weaknesses? By all accounts, Romney is not politically savvy enough to remain nimble. A lot of what he has said up to this point has been a mixture of memorized bromidizations and off-the-cuff gaffes-- "tells," if you will. Romney's weakness is his uncomfortable balance of entitlement with the appearance of caring for the poor (if indeed he actually does not.)

If Romney's staff is as disciplined as it should be, Romney will take this opportunity to lay out his attacks on Obama. It's free play time, and Obama will be busy being Presidential right up to the convention, if not beyond. A lot depends on the polls: specifically, polls in states like Ohio, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.

Right now, tho, Romney has a few weeks of free sailing, and that message seems to be taken up. So far this week, Romney's attacked foreign policy and the stimulus, two Obama strengths (and two really stupid attacks to make.) Job creation will likely be on the agenda, which for Romney is probably his strongest argument.

Which is saying a lot considering how few jobs he's actually created himself, a point the President's team has been quick to make early and often.

If Romney's staff is as undisciplined as I believe it is, they'll screw up this freebie.

But, as we hockey people like to say, "Game on!"

Mitt's Dilemma

 

Pity poor Mitt Romney: he has to beat an incumbent with favorability ratings hovering around 40-50%, with a flagging economy and some of the worst press ever, and yet can only manage to draw about even with him.

 

What's a billionaire to do to win an election? I guess, attack the successes of the President?

Mitt Romney’s campaign events and the firepower of American Crossroads will both focus this week on President Barack Obama’s jobs record as a way to fight off charges about the Republican candidate’s private-sector experience, with a Romney aide attacking the stimulus as “the mother of all earmarks.”

This week is a preview of coming attraction for the general election campaign, with American Crossroads, the outside Republican group poised to spend $300 million this cycle, pushing a message that amplifies the Romney campaign’s storyline.

A senior campaign aide said Romney will argue that Obama has actually subtracted jobs: “Were these investments the best return on tax dollars, or given for ideological reasons, to donors, for political reasons? He spent $800 billion of everybody’s money. How’d it work out?”

It seemed to work fine: most of it was paid back, GM and Chrysler are both making money again and the economy is slowly picking up steam while the unemployment rate has cooled off almost 1.5%

 

Sure beats the Hoover-style tax cuts of Bush and the GOP over the past ten years. Plus, Mitt might want to consider who he's really chiding in his silliness: his banking buddies, who begged for relief from the Obama administration. Remember TARP?

 

This comes on the heels of, well, perhaps the silliest thing Mitt Romney has said seriously this season:

But he ticked off a list of global threats and said: "I wish I could tell you that the world is a safe place today."

Romney said the country must not shrink its military to the point where the U.S. loses its status as the strongest power in the world.

"Were we to follow that kind of course, there would be no one that could stand to protect us," he said.

Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi would respectfully disagree. Actually, not so respectfully, which is why Obama killed them in his first term. And the US suddenly becoming a second-rate superpower over the next four years is unlikely to happen, but if it did, it would be a damnation of the American economy having been starved for tax revenues, and not an inclination on the part of Obama to dismantle the machine.

If anything, Obama has proven rather too quick to pull triggers.

This all points to one thing, and one thing only: Mitt's inability to stop lying about something, even when the facts are clearly against him.

Next up: race relations, no doubt.

 

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The high school freshman who was first suspended, then expelled, then unexpelled for a class project on bullying that involved creating a fake Facebook profile for the main character in a video has been reinstated and the suspension expunged. Cooler heads have prevailed, but there's an irony that she was institutionally bullied for making a video about being bullied by peers.

 

2) I'll be at the bar....until September!

 

3) This bar, specifically. McSorley's used to be the guidepost on the path to manhood in New York City, and while that's still partly true, if you can wend your way through the throngs of tourists and commuters that have turned it into a "destination," it's sad to see it become McSorley's Lite. Except for Geoff. And the cheese platter.

 

4) Now here's a clever way to protest.

 

5) Y'know, I'm OK with this, provided we aren't setting up the next Al Qaeda. Could we please vet this carefully?

 

6) I'm sure it will be "worldclass" and "classy"....right?

 

7) Romney got a taste of his particular brand of wolfsBain yesterday.

 

8) With regards to the S E Cupp/Hustler blow job picture controversy: I don't condone the use of violent imagery involved here, but let's be quick to point out that Sippy herself has said some equally emotionally and sexually violent things in an attempt to get attention to her pathos. Karma exists, dearie.

 

9) There was a time, in my lifetime no less, when a typical CEO made about 40 times what the average worker made. That means, if the line operator in the factory made $10,000, the CEO made about $500,000. That seems to have changed. I'm sure the average worker in America doesn't make $250,000.

 

10) Moooooooooooooooooooooove away from the bar!

Poor Facebook!

 

If it's not the stock that's creating an uproar, it's their idiotic standards and practices folks!

 

Worse, the idiots who got fleeced are suddenly shouting at anyone about how chilly it suddenly got.

Speaking Of Austerity

 

When you compare them head-to-head, the Obama and Romney tax plans are nearly identical:

Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, is offering a 20 percent tax cut for everyone. Given the mood of the conservatives in the United States today, that may not surprise you. But even President Barack Obama, who is routinely described as a socialist by his opponents, is peddling a plan under which 99 percent of Americans would pay less than they did under the last Democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton.

A one percent difference really is no difference, unless you're in the one percent. But they can afford it, to be sure. But here's the interesting thing:

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2011, among the world’s 30 leading countries economically, only in New Zealand and in Japan was government revenue a lower share of gross domestic product than in the United States. Countries like Australia, Estonia, Ireland and Switzerland, which tend to favor low taxes and a small state, have government revenue that accounts for more of G.D.P. than does the United States.

The Internal Revenue Service is relatively restrained, too, compared with recent history. In 1945, at the close of World War II, federal tax receipts were 20.4 percent of G.D.P. (expenditures, by the way, were 41.9 percent, putting the federal budget deficit at 21.5 percent, compared with 8.7 percent in 2011). In 1952, the year the Republican Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, federal government revenue was 19 percent of G.D.P. In 1988, the last year of Ronald Reagan’s transformational conservative presidency, the federal tax take was 18.2 percent of G.D.P.

Compare those figures with that of today, when a Democrat is in the White House, nearly half of Americans think their taxes are too high, and both parties are promising to keep taxes low for all, or, in the case of the Democrats, 99 percent of Americans: In 2011, government revenue was 15.4 percent of G.D.P., lower than it was at any time during the Eisenhower or Reagan eras. Like anorexics, who think they are grossly fat when they are very thin, the American body politic is suffering from a national version of body dysmorphia, with nearly half the country believing taxes are high, when they are comparatively and historically low.

So everyone agrees that taxes are too high, except history.

Obama's plan at least has the weight of recent history on his side: when Bill Clinton lowered taxes on the middle class and poor but raised them (a whole 4%!) on the rich, the economy skyrocketed from the doldrums of the first Bush recession to have the greatest growth in human history AND created budget surpluses, something even the so-called "Reagan boom"-- which only happened after he raised the taxes he had lowered far too much-- could not achieve.

Indeed, Clinton's economy was so great that we very nearly paid off the national debt. Had those policies continued in place, had the three Bush tax cuts not been passed, and two insignificant little gnats not been invaded for few rational reasons-- meaning Bush would have taken the dire warnings the Clinton policy experts levelled seriously and prevented September 11-- we might still be on the path to prosperity even now.

See, here's the thing: to look at the economy now and forget those eight years of mishandling is to exam why a bridge collapsed without looking at the corroded metal braces. You might come up with some logical explanation-- too much weight, unsafe drivers-- but in the end, you've missed the point entirely.

We were in the midst of a mild recession when George W Bush took office. After the dot-com bubble burst, we had growth of less than 2% and finally dipped into a contraction as Bush took office. But by that summer, we had nearly reversed that and started growing slowly.

And then we double-dipped in 2002. Despite the tax cuts. Despite the spending on ramping up for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite the private sector panicking that Al Qaeda was looking over our shoulders for an opportunity to strike again.

Indeed, it wasn't until the 3rd quarter of 2003 that the US began a recovery.

We were almost out in 2001! And you'd think that all the economic stimulus of three tax cuts AND two wars AND all the homeland security spending-- on the scale of billions when you include private and public sector spending-- would have pulled an already recovering economy straight back up.

And you'd be wrong. Indeed, and here's where we get to this current recession, it turns out that the prime motivator in ending the Bush recession was the move by the Federal Reserve to drop its discount rater (the federal funds rate) from 1.75% to 1%, in steps. This dropped the prime rate to about 4% or so (it generally runs three percent above the federal funds rate, which is the overnight rate that banks can borrow money from each other), and then came all those mortgage refinancings.

Which begat more refinancings. Which begat the "ownership society" of Bush's second term. Which begat subprime mortgages. Which begat derivates of CDOs and CMOs and all those lovely acronyms to represent meaningless valueless gambles disguised as "investments".

And so here we are, still talking about lowering taxes when what we need is a little fiscal discipline and a little fat over the meat on the bone. We need to raise government revenue and have that government spend it to benefit the greater good of all us, get rid of the rust and make the bridge stronger so that we don't grit our teeth and grip the wheel tightly each time we drive over it.

 

Austerity, Bitches!

Yea. It really works.

 

No, really!

Liberals Are Fapping

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Poorly Played

 

Well, I mean, you knew a lawsuit over the Facebook IPO was forthcoming. Unless the stock did gangbusters out of the chute (few do) then someone was going to feel screwed.

 

The claim that investors were misled is interesting, intriguing even, as is the fact that just a week before the formal offering, the asking price was tweaked up almost ten bucks a share. It certainly lends credence to the claim that the issuance was less than honest.

 

On the other hand, you'd have to be a fucking idiot to have bought Facebook on its opening trading.

Kewl B's! (Also A's C#'s and Dmin7's!)

Google's doodle today honors Robert Moog, the inventor of electronic synthesizers.

 

Not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's a thing. I suppose on balance, it's good.

It's Sad To See

 

Apparently, Megan McArdle's column is contagiously idiotic: meet guest-blogger Laura McKenna, who's thinly-disguised bigotry is given a patina of "We can't fix the problem so let's move on."

There's no way to go back to busing or 70s integration methods. Racism might be a factor, but the biggest problem is self-interest. People worry that integration will harm their kids and their property values. 

One has a hard time discerning whether McKenna is talking about society at large or her own mind.

 

Why Picturephones Never Took Off

 

The technology to broadcast video alongside a telephone call has existed for decades. Indeed, data transmission in the form of faxes actually predate telephones, and that's before you think about telegraphs. 

 

And yet, picturephones were always kind of a sideshow, trotted out at World's Fairs and expositions, never really taking off.

 

Maybe if they had turned the camera around... 

Is Not Aging Anti-Evolution?

That's the pretty interesting, if simplistic, question posed by The Atlantic:

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of radical life extension. As funding for anti-aging research has exploded, bioethicists have expressed alarm, reasoning that extreme longevity could have disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Others insist that the aging process is important because it gives death a kind of time release effect, which eases us into accepting it. These concerns are well founded. Life spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way or another; if we're headed in that direction, it's best to start teasing out the difficulties now.

But there is another, deeper argument against life extension---the argument from evolution. Its proponents suggest that we ought to avoid tinkering with any human trait borne of natural selection. Doing so, they argue, could have unforeseen consequences, especially given that natural selection has such a sterling engineering track record. If our bodies grow old and die, the thinking goes, then there must be a good reason, even if we don't understand it yet. Nonsense, says Bennett Foddy, a philosopher (and flash game developer!) from Oxford, who has written extensively about the ethics of life extension. "We think about aging as being a natural human trait, and it is natural, but it's not something that was selected for because it was beneficial to us." Foddy told me. "There is this misconception that everything evolution provides is beneficial to individuals and that's not correct."

The short answer to this silly conundrum is, evolution is designed for survival of the fittest, which implies adaptation not talent or ability. If our intelligence is the key to unlocking almost-permanent longevity-- I figure I have a 60% chance of living to 200, and a 10% chance of immortality-- then evolution is not going to make a value judgement on this. It's either going to encourage it or discourage it through the interplay of evolutionary factors.

For instance, if it's an inefficient strategy for the population as a whole, then we'll either not achieve it or we'll find the cons to achieving it more than outweigh the pros. Whether we pay attention to those signals is irrelevant: if another species finds a way to become the dominant one on this planet or we begin to die off, evolution will have had its say.

However, the argument of a value judgement as to whether extreme longevity is a good thing, a wholly human argument, is a good one to have.

 

One thing extreme longevity could bring about, which is implied but unstated in the article, is a radical shift in our attitudes towards money: with more and more people outliving their money-- something that is already happening-- society will be forced to make decisions about the structure of private wealth. Indeed, the backlash we see now against the strawman of the "welfare state" raised by conservatives is the expression of a desperate fear that they, too, will not have enough to live off indefinitely.

 

One thing evolution encourages is the preying of the strong upon the weak.

 

It's not that aging is a bad thing, but you have to take a long view to see it as a good thing: aging allows diversity in a slow-growing population and a more efficiant allocation of resources. If I'm 80, my gene-pool is draining, and I am less productive than a 30 year old (right now. I'll get to a non-aging scenario in a second.) Less productive from a conception orientation (I'm less attractive to women who would be breeding), less productive from a work perspective (I tire easily and lose focus), and less productive in a child-rearing scenario.

 

I'm old, to put the point bluntly. But notice the positives to the population as a whole. In removing my breeding capacity, a younger pool of breeding males can step up, males with genetic material significantly different from mine and this adds to the long-term survival of the species. I haven't been exposed to many of the challenges these men and their ancestors have, so my genes may not be the best defense against, say, a bird flu.

 

Not aging changes this dynamic substantially. Suddenly, I can be competitive with younger men, particularly if I keep my boyish good looks and athletic stamina.

 

Suddenly, my gene pool is replenished.

 

On a societal basis, this puts pressure on the next generations. From an evolutionary basis, pressure leads to adaptation as those younger men develop strategies to circumvent whatever competitive advantages I might have (experience, for one thing, confidence, there are any number I might accrue over time.) And while it's hard to prove that my not aging is a bad thing, we can infer from the evidence that aging is a good thing for the population that not aging may not be a good thing, too.

 

Since we're talking about time frames that span millenia if not eons, it would be hard to say. And that's assuming non-aging isn't ultimately fatal to the species first.

 

From my perspective, I'd prefer not to die: the world is too interesting and I want to see how some things play out. Uncertainty principle suggests that by seeing them play out, I immediately alter how they play out.

 

And THAT'S the interesting question from this silly scenario.

Interesting Reaction

 

Tyler Clementi committed suicide last year by jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson valley. While it has never been definitively established that Clementi's suicide attempt was directly tied to an ugly incident where one of his roomates, Dharun Ravi, broadcast a sexual encounter between Clementi and another student, it's seems to have been the straw that broke Clementi's back.

 

Ravi has been tried and convicted on multiple counts of bullying and hate crimes, and is scheduled to be sentenced today. He faces up to 10 years in prison and therein lies an interesting tale: many gay advocates and advocacy groups do not want him to be jailed.

 As a result, some gay advocates are calling on the court to give Ravi probation instead of prison time.

Among them is Aaron Hicklin, editor of Out magazine, who said in an article that Ravi was being made a scapegoat for Clementi's suicide.

Another, E.J. Graff, who writes about gay and lesbian issues, said in her column in The American Prospect, "I fear that Ravi is an easy scapegoat for a complicated problem."

Jim McGreevey, the gay former governor of New Jersey, and Dan Savage, a gay columnist, are others who say that Ravi's behavior, while wrong, is being dealt with too harshly.

At least one gay advocacy group, Garden State Equality, is pressing for prison time for Ravi, although less than the maximum 10 years.

"Justice is best served by his serving some jail time for the crime committed," Garden State CEO Steven Goldstein said. "The moderate position is not to throw the book at this young man, nor should he get off Scott free."

I fall onto the side of moderation here. I do not think that ten years in prison is justified...he doesn't seem to have had malicious intent in trying to hurt Clementi...on the other hand, he invaded an innocent person's privacy. We all worry about the government doing this, but governments are at least nominally responsible to the voters. A private citizen is not so to let him off with just a warning seems out of balance.

 

It would send the wrong message to let Ravi off without some strict punishment, and certainly this should include deportation (he is here on a student visa). But I think a year in prison would set an example that this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.

 

75 Years Ago Today

 

Lindy landed in Paris, thinking it was Ireland.

Careful Readers of This Blog

Saw this coming.